Breaking Out by Pearce Jack

Author:Pearce, Jack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublishNation
Published: 2022-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Ermentrude walked precariously down the gangplank at Abdiel’s side. It was high tide and their lightly laden ship stood several paces above the quay and she was wearing a long, formal robe, carefully tailored to her figure and dyed to match her coloration, very handsome but not practical on steep slopes. They were on display, leaders of the land and they could not be seen to delay or show the slightest trepidation.

A line of guards held back a massive crowd, thousands of them, cheering and hooting and bellowing their welcome. She was used to the thin population of the north, had not expected to see more people than lived in the whole of her father’s duchy lined up just to inspect her.

“A good crowd, lady – wave to them, smile!”

She followed his example, had sense enough to let her hood slip over her shoulders and shake her hair free, blazing in the bright sun. A thousand hands pointed as one, a great ‘Ooh!’ rose from the crowd.

“Well done, lady! They will talk about that for months, ‘the lady with fire in her hair’. Everybody who wasn’t here will want to see you.”

She watched everything, thinking, making sense of it all, realising that where the people were many they were inevitably distant from their rulers. She suspected that every man of her father’s duchy would speak to his lord at least once in his life, many of them meeting him frequently, simply because there were so few of them. Here, the common folk were held separate, the bulk of them hardly even seeing their lords at a distance. So, she must make a show, must be on display, must break down the additional barrier of being foreign and from the Old Kingdom which many must see as a bullying usurper. She waved again, smiled her best and stood close to her lord, making clear that theirs was a love match as well as a political ploy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.