Mother Ocean, Daughter Sea by Diana Marcellas
Author:Diana Marcellas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Brierley looked up from her small table and watched a gull wheel past the barred window of her cell. Although surely Duke Tejar had a dungeon, she had been confined in a tower room near the eastern battlements, a pleasant enough room with a breeze through the window, a faded tapestry on the wall, a comfortable enough bed. She had light and air, the shadowed pattern of sunlight that shifted as the suns moved across the sky, and the occasional seabird flying the heights to a nest under an eave, perhaps mistaking the dukeâs palace for a cliffside rookery.
She had spent the last two-days largely alone, visited briefly three times a day by a silent guard with food. Clara and Harmon had not been permitted to see her: this was not an indulgent earlâs castle or ship. Here the duke ruled, and Melfallanâs prudence deepened under the dukeâs direct eye. Melfallan even brought a witness or two to his few short visits to her cell, always a dukeâs man, a steward or a castle soldier, once a minor lord distantly related to the duchess. Brierley met Sir James, Melfallanâs justiciar, and had liked him: he would supervise the formal courtâs inquiry, and she sensed Sir James would insist on rationality and firmly ignore all nonsense. It is a matter of definition, Melfallan had said lightly, and had shared a confident glance with the older man.
She stood and walked restlessly up and down her small room, then leaned on the window casement for a time, craning her neck to see her limited view from her high tower. The fields surrounding Darnel stretched for miles across the valley. She could not see the peaks from this angle, but could see the river descending toward the sea, busy with boat traffic and the tiny white-sailed shape of another ship being towed upriver to Tejarâs capital. Had her mother lived here in this wide valley, this white-stoned city? Had she known Jonalyn in Airlie to the south? Was Jonalyn her cousin, as Thora had said? Or had Jocater traveled from over mountains from Mionnâs Flinders Lakes or the Eastern Bayâs shoreside? From where had she come? And if from another place, were there shariâa still there in hiding? Were shariâa here in Darhel?
She smiled ruefully and leaned her chin on her hand, a little bored after the hours of nothing to do but think. Well, one shariâa in Darhel, surely, she thought, though I am not admitting that aloud anymore. Prudence becomes me; though it seems as useful now as a farmer closing the barn after his flock has fled over field and road in every direction, baaing and jumping and pushing as they tumbled. A farmer could regather his sheep, if he was quick, but some matters were not as easily rebottled.
She heard heavy footsteps outside her door, then the clanking of a key in the lock. She turned as the door opened and saw a heavyset guard, his eyes shadowed by his visor, one burly hand on the hilt of his sword.
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