Each morning she would wake before the rest of the company, just to see the world around her. Until this journey, her father’s tower confined and defined her whole world.
Once they arrived at their destination, the walls of her husband’s tower would confine and define her life. Her whole world would end at the thick stone wall, rising on the high ground above her new Lord and Master’s lands.
No doubt, she would have a window to look through. As wife of the Lord she would – Hella presumed – have a window of her own she could look through. She would no longer have to share everything with her sisters. She would have servants too and guards of her own.
These early mornings, though, on the journey, her servants and her guards were sleeping. Several – she assumed from the noises in the darkness around her carriage in the night – with one another.
It made Hella wonder what her own wedding night would be like. She wondered too, what her husband would be like. She had not met him since the formal betrothal ten years before on his tenth birthday. She had been four at the time and more interested in her new kitten, Bojo, than in the strange boy in his formal clothing watching her from the other side of her father’s great hall.
Now she wished she’d paid more attention. She wished she’d realised at the time that the boy in the rich clothes was to be her Lord and Master for the rest of her days.
She sighed as she looked out at the strange world outside her carriage – the strange lands that lay between her father’s lands and those of her new husband. Her husband’s family had paid enough for her; she hoped they would all treat her as the expensive prize she was.
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