Moonmount Castle - LGBT, manXman

26

Coda

"Are you alright, Dare?" I slipped into his room later that night, and immediately noticed his black mood.

He shrugged half-heartedly.

I went over to the bed and slid in beside him; I wrapped my arm around his waist, rested my chin on his chest, and waited for him to speak.

He stroked my fringe back from my vivid eyes, and traced the long line of my scar for a moment before he sighed.

I kissed his fingertips and smiled at him.

"If I tell you, you have to tell me something in return."

"Alright," I said after a moment. "You first."

"No, you," he said firmly. "You didn't tell me when I last asked, so-"

"My scar," I said quietly. "You want to know how I got it."

"Yes."

I stroked the scar for a moment, feeling the memories return sharply. "My parents died, two years ago last week."

He squeezed my shoulder sympathetically, but let me keep talking.

"They were killed in the market square of the town where I used to live. Father was taking one of the horses to have a new shoe fitted, and mother was buying supplies for the kitchens. Before my mother and father met, my mother was courting a man called Azem. When she broke it off with him and married my father instead, he was... He promised he'd get her back one day, for betraying him.

"We moved to a new town, close to where my grandmother lived, to escape him. For a while, we did. He was in the square that day and he saw us together. He killed my father before we knew what was happening, stabbed him in the back, and when my mother refused to run off with him, he killed her too. When I tried to stop him hurting her, he did this...

"The blacksmith and his apprentice caught him before he managed to flee. He was hanged by the town guard. I lived with my grandmother for a while, but she died a few months later. After that, I just travelled. I worked where I could, earning just enough to buy food to eat, before I met Alianor and she brought me here."

Dare leant down and kissed me gently when I finished speaking, his eyes sympathetic.

"What about you?" I asked him quietly. It felt good to talk to him, to tell him. "Why do you look so depressed?"

"My father's arranged the birthday ball for tomorrow. He's also arranged for Princess Isolde to stay on after the other guests, for another week or so." Dare paused. "He wants me to ask her to marry me."

I stared at him for a moment. "Oh... Will you?"

He looked at me sharply. "I don't know," he said after a long silence. "Not this week. I can put it off that long. But Father insists I marry soon, and he wants it to be her."

"Why her? I mean, it's not as if you'll be king when Benedict dies. Isolde's not his eldest daughter."

"I don't think Father wants me to be king, particularly. He just wants status."

"But a Lord has to marry a Lady," I said. "Surely, you'll have status, whoever you marry."

"Yes, but marrying Isolde will give me more status than marrying, say, Lady Zeata," he said, with the air of explained two plus two equals four to a small child.

I felt nettled at his tone. "I thought your family already had a lot of status," I said coolly.

"Not as much as the King's family," he replied. He lay in silence for a while, his fingers lightly trailing up and down my bare arm. "I don't want to marry her, you know that."

I made a noise in my throat. "So don't."

"I wish it were that simple," he murmured. He looked at me and smiled. "Don't worry about it now." He rolled over so that he was on top of me, and kissed me tenderly. "I'll talk to my father again after Isolde leaves."

"Leave it a while. Perhaps he'll... not forget, but perhaps he'll have other things on his mind."

"The longer I leave it, the closer we are to my twenty first birthday. The closer we get to that, the more he'll think about it." He sighed, before he grinned at me. "Speaking of birthdays, thank you for my present."

"Do you like it?" I asked, smiling shyly.

He nodded. "I didn't know you could carve like that." He looked over at the wooden likeness of Jamocha. "I love it." He leant down and kissed me again.