Basorexia

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"The troops are all resettled now, thank goodness, but has no one heard anything about General Bronwen?"

That simple, seemingly well-intentioned inquiry had been the start of it all. Little things, he thought listlessly. Why did the landslide that could take the face off an entire mountain always start with little things?

If he could go back right now, he just might thank his stepmother for this peaceful repose away from the stifling demands of home. Maybe politely shake her hand in gratitude for getting him sent away from so monastic a family as the one they were a part of. But in the moment when the question had been asked, he'd been unable to suppress a pinched expression of irritation as the ingratiating words had floated up to the top of the stairs.

The woman had a musical sort of stage voice. It was clear and pleasant and did wonders at hiding when she was being particularly nasty to you. She could make herself heard from anywhere and at any volume without distortion too. He could not help thinking that she had only spoken as clearly as she had, because she knew he was up there; hiding in the nook beside the paintings. She was like a theater master that way. Always knew where her actors were.

He'd come to realize that his father's third wife liked these kinds of sly, sporadic dramas. But it was surprise. The had always had a thing for theatrical women. 'Gives a home character.' is what the man would often say of them. He'd agreed for a while too, thought them delightful. But this was only because the second Duchess, the one before this sharp taloned harpy, had been kind to him. She had been genteel and accepting of his bright, thoughtful ways; even when she had started to have children of her own. She had encouraged no squabbling or infighting for possessions or placements. And because of that he had come to love the brothers and sisters she'd given him.

This was a far cry from the newly minted wife that now stood where others had. Duchess Cecilia Von Laurence did not like her husband's eldest son, Earl Lydo Von Laurence, one bit. Even more so now since the... incident.

"I'd heard he was wounded, and what with the General being unmarried..." he'd heard her continue laying the trap. "He lives in a remote place with no one to tend to him, no wife. Someone should go to if he is alright. Yes, someone should be sent."

That last bit of grammatical alchemy was always a favorite. It was a tidy trick for changing the immediate ownership of any problem from the suggester to someone else.

"Ah, but sending and that wouldn't be proper, or anyone's daughter for that matter. A lady alone in the forests? Living, unsupervised, with an unmarried man of war?" There had been a pause here as though her aristocratic audience were seriously considering the horrors, or hidden delights, of such an arrangement. "Oh, it simply wouldn't be Has anyone got a spare boy abouts? A son that needs a strict shaping up perhaps? They could go."

Lydo had rolled his eyes and exchanged a somber look with the painted woman that occupied the wall across from him in the narrow, seldom used corridor. The first Duchess, his mother, Lydia (after whom he had been named), had gazed back at him with bright lively eyes. Twin chips of amber, frozen in youthful splendor, that silently urging him to persevere. It was the only face he knew her to have and the meaning behind her smile always changed when he needed it to. At its gentle coaching he'd sighed, gotten up from in front of the painting and taken the servant's stairs up to his room and begun to pack. As he had even pretended to be surprised and slightly hurt the next day when his father had handed him a sealed letter and explained stiffly what .

Three months. He was to spend three months tending to and learning from Lieutenant General Caym Bronwen, in the hopes that any man as stern and militant as that would iron out all the deficiencies in his character. He was to come back with the bearing befitting a man first in line to be Duke or, and this was the subtext, not come back at all.