Gabrielle was woken up the next morning by a servant knocking cautiously at her door and informing her that it was almost time for breakfast. With Mista not yet back, the princess had overslept. She hastily washed, dressed up and prepped up by herself. Useless castle with useless servants, she thought, tying back her hair.
Over her entire stay her breakfast arrangements were such that she had to walk all the way to the chapel in the outer courtyard and eat with Father Pelagius and his sullen monks. She'd then have to spend several hours in that same chapel as the good learned servants of the gods supervised her moral improvement, with a special focus on the virtues of modesty and chastity.
Pelagius wasn't that bad, she supposed. Like all people of note in Behem he had acquired his position by relentlessly yes-manning Paula over a great many years, but he wasn't half as devoted to her Opinions On How Things Should Be as Clement was. In fact, when out of her sight, he gave himself fully to a carefree and harmless life of a functionary supervised only by the gods and never bothered anyone much except for the cooks. Despite the vast amounts of partridges, lambs, geese, eels, grapes, pies, tarts and miscellaneous pastries which he consumed every week, the body that supported his enormous bald head remained lank and healthy, which he took as an obvious sign of divine favour and a direction to proceed exactly as he has.
The three younger monks were much worse, and inclined at the slightest provocation to indulge in lengthy discussions about the decaying morals of the youth and especially the evils of loose women tempting the men away from the Path of Righteousness, which Path they conceived of as mostly paved with taking up your sword and skewering anyone who looks at you funny. The Gods, Honour, and Devotion to the King and the Country was all that mattered.
Although the three were themselves steadfast minds whose moral and intellectual superiority shielded them from vulgar carnal temptations, the continued and regular presence of an attractive young lady with a somewhat questionable reputation produced some odd effects in them -- manifestly a redoubled fervour in scorning and condemning the easily tempted youth, a sudden fondness of long cold baths, and a curious propensity at odd times of day and night to visit the privy and emerge from there calmer but avoidant of eye contact.
Their names were Vulmar, Adhemar and Valdemar. They were in their twenties, and their clean-shaven faces were almost perpetually shaded by the hoods of their vestments. For all conceivable intents and purposes, they seemed perfectly interchangeable in every possible way.
When the thing happened and Gabrielle's parents, with the King's counsel, decided that an extended stay in Behem would be the next step for her, Paula charged Pelagius with overseeing the Princess's education. This was much to the priest's consternation, as education of young women lay way beyond the borders of all his areas of expertise. He quickly decided that the best course of action was to leave her alone to read an instructive text from the scriptures or from the commentaries to the scriptures or from the commentaries to the commentaries, and then have her discuss it with the young monks (he seemed largely unaware of their internal struggle (which was not taking place)), while he himself could doze off somewhere. This arrangement was also mostly fine with Gabrielle, who upon realizing that the discussions consisted entirely of each of the three furiously attempting to show himself the smartest while she just sat there looking on, abandoned reading the assigned texts entirely and started sneaking in her own literature. Each week Pelagius would report to Paula on the wonderful progress that Gabrielle was making.
And so that day after breakfast she followed the three monks to a small and shady chamber at the back of the chapel where they settled around a simple table of dark wood. The topic of discussion was an ancient text on charity but the discussion had quickly outgrown it as the interlocutors started to veer from subject to subject in order to one-up themselves on purity and radicalism. They were in a great mood -- the fresh offensives into Kontaria and Redona meant to them that good was prevailing over evil.
Gabrielle played with a strap of her dress. About the only thing she liked about this dress was its stiff collar, which she could pop so that it covered her neck. She enjoyed this sensation, the fabric guarding her like walls of her own tiny castle, isolating her slightly, resisting the overbearing Behem outside.
Okay, there was one other thing she liked about the dress. It did have pockets. Maybe when she rises in prominence enough to raze this fucking castle and execute everyone in it, Gabrielle will spare the dress maker.
As the monks went from charity to the advantages of corporal punishment to how soft the youth of today has grown and how the wars will do them good, Gabrielle's eyes wandered around the stout carved stone columns which supported the room's vaulted ceiling and the richly embroidered tapestries that hung among them. On one of them a woman was pictured whose dress below the waist was made of bricks, like a castle tower, guarded by a pair of lions. Domalba, the goddess of chastity. Gabrielle closed her eyes. The thick chapel walls muffled all sound from the courtyard, and the place seemed well insulated from all of humanity and all signs of life. The conversation slid from the softness of the youth to its terrible potential consequences, as illustrated by the decline and fall of the Gebra Empire.
"Their problem was, they'd grown effeminate and weak, and this is what exposed them to their enemies!" said Valdemar. The other two nodded in assent and watched him as if the thought was fresh and original, rather than the flotsam of acquired and tediously repeated folk wisdom which it actually was. "It could happen to us, too. Thank the gods we have such good leadership. There are yet a few people with true grit like in the old days."
"There are yet, but few. The King is great, may he live long. But who beside him? Not the Crown Prince, to be sure"
"No. But there's the Count of Biriat."
"And Duke Oren."
"And then there's Titulus."
"Aye."
"Aye."
"Titulus is all that a true man should be. We all saw that ourselves."
"His victories will surely inspire our people and show them the true way."
Gabrielle, safe in her tiny castle, did not even flinch. Just last week for three long days she had to sit next to Titulus at elaborate feasts that Paula threw in his honour as he passed with his army, and the man never neglected to make offhand comments to her about the duty of the men to be bold and fierce and the duty of the women to be chaste and obedient, and who was he to lecture her anyway, that annoying upstart dipshit with not even a drop of royal blood in him?!
"I think that his victory over Kontaria would be especially precious and instructive, considering the Kontarian ways."
"What are the Kontarian ways?" Gabrielle butted in.
There was a collective intake of air.
"The Kontarian ways?"
"The Kontarian ways?!"
"They are a degraded, depraved people! They couple in the open and they take many partners at once!"
"They enter unnatural unions! Men lie with men and women with women!"
"They sacrifice their children to their gods!"
"They drink the blood of virgins to preserve their youth!"
"They kidnap Harmeni peasants and inflict all sorts of debauched practices upon them!"
The litany and description of Kontarian customs went on for a while. The monks seemed to have extensive knowledge of all Kontarian sexual transgressions in minute detail, and they seemed to be on their minds quite a lot; no doubt this was a commendable devotion to the principle of knowing one's enemy. Gabrielle listened to the tales of the horrid, impure, blood (blood among other things) sucking people at the Kingdom's borders with way more interest than usual.
She squinted in sunshine when she left the chapel shortly after noon. She usually would have most of the rest of the day left to herself. With the absence of any sort of entertainment, companionship, or anything productive to do, Gabrielle supposed that the point of these hours was to have her bore herself to death.
As she crossed the outer courtyard, wondering how many more weeks could she endure here before jumping off her third-floor window, her eyes caught the massive tower on the other side of the chapel's garden. The Kontarian boy would be kept in the dungeon underneath. She stopped as a thought occurred to her. Some of the dungeon's grated low windows opened to the garden, at ground level, hidden in niches large enough to sit in. They were sheltered from the rest of the courtyard by some shrubs and several yew trees belonging to the garden. If he was held in those particular cells, she could probably take a look at him or even talk to him without anyone noticing.
She shook her head and continued on her way. She still had enough dignity left not to chat up low-born dross while on a constant look-out like an idiot. Besides, the guy was probably pretty dim. Why ruin the fantasy by meeting the real thing?
Back at the Great Hall she found out that Paula was not in the castle, having gone off to a pleasure ride with Clement and some entourage. As glad as she was not to be threatened with her Ladyship's company, yesterday's anger rose in her again. Too dangerous for rides, my ass.
She found Mista sleeping in her little room. Not waking her up, she went to her own chamber, threw herself on the bed, and watched the canopy above.
She could write to her parents, she supposed, promising to change her ways and begging them to let her out of here. She clenched her fist over the duvet. No, they could fuck right off. They will send for her sooner or later, and then they'll see if this moronic thing worked. Until then, she'll find her some ways to survive here. Maybe she'll take up weaving tapestries, or gardening.
She sat up. The boy in the dungeon would not leave her mind. He was the only thing in this shit castle that was even remotely interesting right now. But to talk to him through the window would make her look ridiculous -- he'd immediately figure out that she didn't have permission to do that, and by extension that she needed permission in the first place, and therefore that she was just some unimportant girl who did not command respect. Yet to talk to him normally, in the dungeon, she would have to get past Dodo. Dodo would not let anyone see him. Gabrielle remembered Paula's word. Nobody could overrule the orders Dodo had been given, except maybe the King himself, should he visit.
A small voice piped up in her head. And are you still not, despite your present situation, of royal stock?
Paula and Clement were away, after all. This day invited experiments.
*
Dodo was leaning back in his chair, seeing how far he can go before he loses his balance, when the door opened with no prior knocking and the young noble lady walked in. The start that it gave him tipped him over, and for an incredibly long moment his enormous body was caught in a state of weightlessness, him pushing it forward but gravity commanding it back. The impasse was only broken when he planted his feet on the floor and let the chair fall with a bang between them, as he himself remained more or less vertical in an elaborate squat.
