They made it to the mouth of the third floor when they were stopped by a pale woman of incredible height. Slender, her blue dress wrapped snugly up her body like a writhing snake which ended at her neck, where an emerald jewel sat glimmering like a green eye. Peering down at Lord Gildynaepple, the woman smiled pleasantly.

“Dearest Bertred,” she said, her eyes locked with the Baron’s. Then they flashed up–rather, they flashed to the side, where they expected to meet another set of eyes, found none, then flashed up–and her pleasant mood became one of surprise.

“My lady wife,” Lord Bertred Gildynaepple said, all smiles. He was lost in his gazing for another moment, until his wife gave him a look. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Introductions. This here is Baron Lyonpool, come to discuss some military matters. Ah, and this lovely woman here is none other than the Lady Adney Gildynaepple, my wife.”

“It is a pleasure,” she said.

“Very nice to meet you,” Alden replied. He felt awkwardly out of place; he was an intruder here, when these two were together, and neither appreciated his presence.

“If I may ask, my dearest husband, what military matters have brought you to the third floor?”

Lord Gildynaepple fidgeted with the neck of his shirt. “W-well, there has been a partial agreement…”

“A conditional agreement. Potentially,” Alden said.

“Yes, a conditional agreement, which has been offered. But the terms…”

“Our daughter?” Adney Gildynaepple guessed.

“Y-yes, our daughter. I felt…I feel that Edith…that the time has come for her to, perhaps…”

Adney shifted her head to Alden. “You would marry her?” she asked coldly.

A disagreement? Bemused as he might have been as a fly on the wall, the attentions of a Lord and his Lady stabbed at his composure.

“That has been the question posed to me,” Alden replied. “However, I have asked to meet with her, so that I may understand who it is that I might be binding myself to.”

Adney managed to maintain her smile, despite her visible ire. “If that is how it is to be.”

Lord Bertred stammered out an apology as he led Alden down the hall, his legs working furiously to keep a step ahead. Coming upon a door, he knocked his hand thrice upon it. “Edith?” he called. “Edith, Lord Lyonpool has come to greet you.”

The door opened to reveal a young woman in a dress of greens and blues. The woman, whom Alden presumed to be Edith, was the striking image of her mother, minus a few decades and, somehow, an inch or two taller.

Unlike her mother, however, Edith looked up at him plainly and without interest, as if he might as well have been an ordinary fixture on the wall. “It is an honor,” she said.

“The honor is mine,” Alden replied.

“Yes, an honor indeed,” said Lord Bertred. “If you would allow us, Edith, we might all take a seat inside?”

“Certainly.”

The room, in diametric fashion to the manor at large, possessed a great many items in a great many locations and in a great many orientations. In a word, cluttered. Several paintings lay upon scattered tables, and upon the floor there was an assortment of lamps of various metals, such as brass and steel and silver, half of which were bright with magical light. Oddest of all, however, were the thick, white curtains hung upon the left wall, which had been pulled open as if to let in the light of some great window that was, curiously, nonexistent.

“Forgive my daughter’s peculiar sense of decor,” Lord Bertred said under his breath. “Her…condition predisposes her to eccentricities.”

Edith paused at the center of the room, a hand lightly touching the edge of a painting. The painting was not of a style Alden recognized; dark, the image was muddy and half-way sensible, like a dream. And from the line of red drawn across it, Alden thought that dream might have been a nightmare.

“He locked the truth away behind quiet teeth and a loud tongue,” Edith said. Alden looked to Bertred, who in turn looked at the walls. The right walls, Alden noted, not the left.

Peculiar, indeed, Alden thought. “I think I understand your meaning.”

“Comprehend, yes, but understand, no. I see and hear with eyes and ears not my own, in places I’ve never been and never will be, and in times before and after my bones. An abnormality of the pawns, and the pawns abhor abnormalities.”

“Her condition,” Bertred said in a cutting voice, “is this, as you can see. But she poses little complications, otherwise. She’d make a suitable wife for you in all aspects other than conversation.”

The pawns do so abhor. As Alden looked upon the young woman he felt the beginnings of anger. Their eyes met, and he saw a glimmer of something like an understanding between them.

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“Might I try speaking with her? Alone, I mean.”

Lord Bertred itched the side of his face, throwing his attention from the walls to the paintings to the curtains, anything that wasn’t his daughter or Alden. “I suppose that’d be alright,” he said with an uneasy, worried smile. As if he was taking a chance and didn’t like the odds at all. “But after we have much to discuss, my lord, much to discuss indeed. These brigands of yours, for one, and certain plans I have for them.”

“That will be fine, my lord,” Alden said.

Bertred gave a stiff half-bow, turned, and left down the hall, his footsteps becoming increasingly faint as he went.

Gone to drink. The voice was half a whisper, and not his own. Not his, nor his second self’s, but the Oracle’s. The brother’s, Alden thought, but it was so quiet it was hard to tell. Quiet and almost unfamiliar. It had been so long since he’d heard them last.

Gone to worry, said the other of the Oracle. The sister, Alden thought.

“A light in the north has dimmed and brightened again,” Edith said. She looked towards the space between the curtains on the walls, as if there really was a window there and something beyond it. “A man walks toward the never living.”

“What does that mean, if I may ask?”

“I see, I hear, but only little.”

She is like us, said the brother.

But different, said the sister.

“Can you focus it?” Alden asked. “This sight and hearing of yours? Pay attention to…specific things. Me, perhaps?”

Edith peered into his eyes and saw passed them, looking at something that lay beyond himself. She blinked. A tear fell down her face. She turned away.

More tears came after the first, becoming shining streams down her cheeks. Then she was sobbing hard, her chest heaving as she gasped for air and her hands clutching at her throat. Alden took an uncertain step toward her, not knowing what to do or how to comfort her, but instead of calming down she flinched, and he backed away.

Taking up a handkerchief, Edith wiped away the trickle of snot that ran down over her mouth. She took a purposeful breath, now in control of herself, then threw herself into the nearest chair. Pulling up her legs into her arms, she curled herself into a ball of anguish.

“What happened?” Alden asked.

“An ethereal puzzle I am too dimwitted to solve.”

“What does that mean?”

Edith sobbed again, a fresh stream of tears glistening her cheeks. “What can be known already is,” she said.

What can be known. There would be no more answers.

“Then there is only to decide.” Then, perking his ears toward the door, “Your father is coming.”

Edith nodded, wiping away her tears. By the time Lord Bertred Gildynaepple opened the door she was, barring the redness of her eyes, returned to her original state. Lord Bertred cast a curious gaze in her direction, then one with a more sinister intent towards Alden.

“What’s happened here?” Lord Bertred asked.

“We spoke,” Alden replied. “And then she had a vision. A bad one, it seems.”

Bertred turned to his daughter. “Is this true?”

Edith nodded, choking back more tears. “I–it is true,” she said.

Bertred stomped towards his daughter in a rush. Kneeling beside her, he gently caressed her shoulder, whispering “It’ll be fine, Edith, it’ll be okay.” Edith did not look at her father. She couldn’t, no more than she could look at Alden, or anything else in particular except the wall between the curtains.

“A white bride marries the multicolored enigma,” she said.

“What does that mean, darling?” Bertred asked. But Edith said nothing, only stared at the wall, and a flash of annoyance passed over the Lord of Gildynaepple.

When he approached Alden his annoyance had turned to true anger, and when he looked up Alden could see the straining bulge of a vein on his ever reddening forehead.

“Poems, always, with her. But I know the meaning of this puzzle. You will marry her.”

“Have I agreed to such?” Alden asked.

“So you say you won’t? You come to me begging for aid and I offer it, and now you won’t accept?”

He supposed he wouldn’t. He didn’t want to marry at all, and even if he did it wasn’t Edith’s face, pretty as it was, that came to mind. But I didn’t come here for nothing.

“I have a counter offer, if you’ll hear it,” he said.

Bertred waved dismissively. “Yes, yes, what is your offer?”

“I will take Lady Edith. Not as a bride, but as a ward.”

“A ward? You want me to allow my unmarried daughter to live at the estate of an unmarried lord, and all of this over a hundred miles away from her family? That she might have things…untoward done to her, and no one to put a stop to it?”

He didn’t see. That wasn’t so difficult to understand. Alden hardly saw it, himself. Edith had a gift, one that might be honed. Improved. And if her father was unwilling to do it, Alden would do it in his place.

“Do you question my honor, Lord Gildynaepple?”

“It is not a question of honor!” Bertred spat. “No father in the Empire would allow such a thing, no matter how much honor you have. And even if I believed you’d do the honorable thing, and that word of this never got out, what would that even make my daughter? A hostage?”

“Harm would never come to her, I promise you, my lord.”

“But you wouldn’t marry her,” Bertred said. “Marriage comes with certain assurances, prime among them the inability to use her as a threat.”

“Aye, I wouldn’t marry her, or likely any other. But she need not be alone, if that helps soothe your misgivings.”

“Pah! I never intended on sending her alone, my lord. But a household guard is little relief in circumstances such as these.”

“Then a family member,” Alden offered. “A male one. Perhaps an uncle of hers, or a cousin.”

Bertred’s eyes glimmered as he thought. “That might do,” he said, calm. “I have a nephew–an aspiring knight, and not too much younger than Edith herself–he might do. Yes, he’ll do well, I think. I’ll regale him with a tale of war or two, about your own deeds of course. That’ll tempt him. Yes, that would do nicely.”

“So you agree? Edith is to be my ward?”

Bertred grimaced. “A visitor. Not a ward. Not in name, anyways. Her reputation would be tarnished, and I do still intend to marry her to some willing lord or another someday. But understand, my lord. These brigands of yours. I don’t expect them to attack Lyonpool directly, else I’d never allow my family to journey there, but I have no intent on helping you with them. Not without a marriage. Or, barring that, perhaps you might…convince one or two of the other Lake Lords. I’d be more than willing to join a pact, then.”