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“Oh, my dear girl, there’s no reason to suppose that you have to marry Pedr Byrne.” Lady Sigrun handed Penny the plate of krumkaker.
Penny took one and passed the plate to her second cousin Odmund, who took four. He poured some more tea, slopping a bit on the table, like he always did.
“My mother begs to differ.” Penny picked up the most recent letter from home and wiped tea off it.
“There are always more options,” said Sir Tollak.
The Norrensens were relations on her mother’s side of the family. They were very nice and very proper and very dull. She had been with them all winter, including a trip to Sydensby in January. Now they were back at their rather modest estate outside Hovedby.
Penny’s mother had ostensibly sent her to Annenstruk in order to keep her out of trouble while her marriage to Pedr Byrne was arranged. So Penny had expected them to pressure her, to lecture her, to act as her mother’s surrogates in promoting the match. But they frankly didn’t seem all that concerned with what Duchess Carrine wanted. And in fact, they seemed to be going out of their way to introduce her to as much of Annenstruker society as they possibly could.
Now that they were at Hovedby, they were particularly keen on taking her to the royal palace. The first grand feast there was on the Equinox, which the Norrensens missed. Penny got the feeling they hadn’t been invited, but they insisted they were too busy. Then the next week, there was another feast, and their invitations arrived by special royal courier.
“This will be on your account, Penny, dear,” said Lady Sigrun. “Your cousin, Prince Galt, must have heard you were in town.”
Since coming to Annenstruk, Penny had spent considerable time pondering this curious fact of her own ancestry. Though she had Annenstruker relatives on both sides of her family, the ones on her father’s side were royalty and the highest nobility, while those on her mother’s side were mere landed gentry. This made for a curiously bifurcated experience—the two halves of her family moved in entirely different social spheres.
Penny wasn’t sure that she felt at home in either sphere. No one ever had interesting conversations about anything, and women who knew calculus or foreign languages were expected to keep their strange hobbies to themselves. The first time she was seated at the high table with her cousin, Crown Prince Galt, he turned to her and said, “Do you know I’ve got a new set of armor?”
“No, I didn’t,” said Penny. She tried desperately to show some interest. “Is it better than your old armor?”
He gave her a confused look. “Well, yes. I mean, otherwise why would one buy it?” Then he turned to his other side and spent the meal talking with some Odelandic countess.
Lady Sigrun started taking Penny riding up the Odda River every morning, because she had heard Galt liked to go there, too. When he saw them, the prince didn’t seem terribly surprised, but he didn’t seem terribly interested, either.
“Lovely day,” he said, looking around and yawning. There was an awkward pause before he said, “Care to ride with me, Cousin Penelope?”
She spent the whole ride listening to him talk about hunting, and it was blatantly obvious he’d only asked her along out of politeness. But later, back at the Norrensens’ estate, Lady Sigrun was giddy at the thought that Penny had “made a conquest.”
“Oh, my dear girl, you two make such a pretty couple.”
It quickly occurred to Penny that her mother’s family saw her as their ticket to fame and fortune and an exciting life at the inner circle of court. For Penny, who didn’t think being at the center of court was any kind of life at all, this was exasperating. And, increasingly, obnoxious.
In mid-April, her mother wrote to say that Penny would be expected in Keneburg “on or before June 1,” so that “final arrangements for the wedding” could be made.
By then, your father will have put an end to all resistance in the east, and it will be time to think of more peaceful matters, like the future of our family.
“Ending the war by June 1?” thought Penny. “That seems a bit optimistic.” People had been saying things like that for almost as long as she could remember, but the stupid war always kept going on and on.
Penny also couldn’t help but notice that she hadn’t had a single word from the Byrnes, particularly from Pedr. She was fairly certain it was customary for the prospective bridegroom to send at least a polite letter to his intended, giving some particulars about his interests and hobbies, and inviting her to do the same. And if this wedding was really so close to being decided, wouldn’t Duchess Flora have sent the invitation herself? The fact that only Penny’s mother had so far written seemed to indicate that things weren’t very settled at all.
When Penny told her hostess she was leaving, Lady Sigrun seemed very put out, and accused Penny of having “no consideration at all for my nerves.” She insisted that Penny simply had to stay, particularly as Prince Galt was “so very interested in seeing you at the May Day party.” Sigrun threatened to go to the palace and get the royal chamberlain to issue a writ forbidding Penny to leave the country. She also told the servants to keep an eye on Penny and make sure she didn’t slip away without permission.
The news that Penny might have to leave prompted a different, but no less desperate, reaction from her cousin Odmund. He was a burly, rather stupid boy two years older than her, and he had spent most of the winter leading her around various dance floors with the bare minimum of grace. She had occasionally caught him staring at her. And now and again she fancied she heard someone trying to peek in the door while she was in her bath. She had started shifting one of her trunks in front of the door in response, but whoever it was kept trying, and Penny had the feeling it was Odmund.
Two days after the letter from her mother announcing the June deadline to come to Keneburg, the Norrensens had a party for some of their lower-gentry friends, and Odmund made a transparent attempt to get Penny drunk. He kept bringing her wine, and she could tell by the taste that he’d put whiskey in it. She would send him off to get her pastries, and then dump the wine into a potted plant.
He didn’t show the same restraint, and by midnight, he was red in the face and sweating heavily. When they danced, he kept “accidentally” brushing his hands across her chest and backside, and then, when the music stopped, he leaned heavily on her and whispered, “I love you. Let me show you how much I love you.”
She struggled not to show her utter revulsion. “Is that what I looked like when I got drunk and pawed at Edwin back at Atherton?” she wondered. “Earstien, it’s a good thing that never worked out.”
Odmund tried to lead her over to a couch in a shadowy corner, but she managed to disentangle herself from him. “I don’t want him,” she thought. “I don’t want anyone.” She never wanted to get married. She wanted to get away from that sort of thing forever.
“Come meet me by the river,” Odmund whispered, his breath stinking of alcohol.
In a flash, Penny knew what she had to do. This was probably her one chance, and she had to take it. She hated to lie, but surely in this instance, it was her only option.
“I’d love to,” she said, “but your mother has the servants watching me all the time. I can never seem to get alone by myself.” She batted her eyelashes and heaved a sigh.
Poor, stupid Odmund fell for it. “I’ll unlock the garden gate for you,” he said. “You can get to it through the old grape arbor. No one will be looking there.”
He was as good as his word, and Penny almost felt guilty when she slipped out the garden gate and ran straight to the stables, where she took a horse and set off for the city docks. She had enough money for passage on a boat going north. But she wasn’t going to Keneburg. She was going to see the one person who could put a stop to all this and tell her mother to leave her alone.
She was going to see her Aunt Muriel.