AUDREY FLAMESWORTH

The to and fro journey between King’s City and Ironhold was always so daunting to Audrey, the latest of little to no difference to the first. She had only done such a journey twice, spending two days and two nights on the road for each forth and back trip, but it felt as though her body embraced the despicable aftermath of the endless travels of an adventurer, scouring the vast sandy seas of the desert for the length of his lifetime. Not that she ever knew the actual feel for that though. In truth, what she felt would compare little to that.

She had never been to the desert before, but she had heard it to be the opposite of the northern lands which had singly secluded themselves from the rest of the world. Renly had told her once, when they were kids, of the stories his father used to tell him of the four kingdoms, “My father thought of them as iron and steel, alike but at the same, so greatly different,” he had said with a bit of a sullen look, hidden beneath the brightened mien he always had when he began to do what he did the best: talk. “One, he said, was of the north, a vast of white wrought in cold icy bites, while the other of the east, a vast of red-and-yellow, harsh and burning to anyone who ventured into its mouth.” He would roar when he talked about the latter, outstretching his hands into a claw to make his horse-face even more unappealing than it already was, in an attempt to scare her; it didn't work though, it never did.

His father was long dead now, taken when he was taken, but not by the biting white or harsh red, but by black wings; his father had been taken by the ravens through some sort of illness that had rid him of all his flesh and sense, and he by her mother from a boy-trader who was about to cart him off to the merchants at Whispers Reach. Until he grew the old he was now and a sense tired, he always mentioned to Audrey how much he blessed her mother for that. Whispers Reach, with all its whips and stenches and crosses, was not for him. Slavery was not for him. Ravens be good, it was not for anyone from what he had heard.

Her tiredness grew hellishly worse when she had seen the Redflower castle, its red bricks knitted in the shape of a blooming rose flower, and at its soaring head, the phoenix that symbolised her house swirling on a metallic pole coated in red. The castle would have looked beautiful to any other, but not to her, she had seen it alot, but that was not what took the beauty from her eyes, it was another, it was who was within the castle.

Her body slumped into more tiredness as soon as she had seen it, and now it was even worse than then as she listened to the words of her silver-haired father, Lord Winston Flamesworth.

“Is that all, Father?” Audrey interrupted her father’s speech, her eyes hinting at him that she did not care for his little talks, only he did not gaze upon her to see that, he was focused on the parchment laid before him, while he scribbled something on it with the quill cuddled between his rough palm. “If it is, then I will very much like to take my leave to my bedchamber. The ravens have blessed you with what you wanted, I would like to rest now. I have little doubt that any of your further commands can wait until later, can they not?”

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“This will be the last you interrupt me while I speak,” he continued scribbling, “and the last you will speak to me in such manner.” He no doubt looked a man to fancy his respects, even from someone like his daughter. He sat behind a square table, donning a deep-red velvet coat, the red-coated shutters of the window at his rear, opened up to allow the light of the sun to brighten the solar in all its grace and warmth, and to give the parchments which were opened and piled on each other to his right, and rolled and sealed to his left on the table, the light they needed to be visible to his eyes.

The only thing that took his sight now was the parchment laid flat before him, the one he constantly dipped his quill into its inkwell for, his oiled and perfumed silver hair tied pleasantly into a ponytail, while his hawkish face plastered with cleanly shaven beards the same colour as his hair, fell to nothing else but that parchment. This angered Audrey the most, he never paid any attention if it was not to the parchments that never seemed to go entirely, never.

“If you would take the time to notice, then you might glimpse that I already did, Lord Winston,” Audrey spat with a smirk. She wanted to irritate him as much as he irritated her, and no doubt did she get what she wanted.

Winston Flamesworth stopped his scribbling as his hand slammed the table with a sharp bang, shivering Audrey to an excited startle, a slight one. She always got most of what she wanted, ever since she was a kid, unless it came to her father, the man never really bothered with her and gave her very few, and since she could never seem to get his attention, she took it upon herself to get his anger instead, and that she got now, but she did not get his eyes to leave the parchment though, that one remained there.

“Calm down, Winston.” Embroidered wavy hair deepened with the red of the phoenix, as she had always seen in the picture-books of her house, strolled past her and towards the table where her father still sat with his scribbles paused, and his eyes planted on the parchment. There was no one else with that colour in the realm as a whole, at least no one she had seen, and no one smelled nearly as good too. It was her mother, Theodora, the high lady of House Flamesworth, dressed in a blue gown of flowers befitting the aurora of her beautiful freckled face. She stood beside the man she called her own, turning to gaze at Audrey with a smile as she gently touched his shoulder. “She did not mean it,” she added.

Yes, I did… Audrey insisted, but only to herself.

“You may leave, my child. You’re tired, I can see that. Go have your rest,” Theodora dismissed Audrey with no heed from Winston, not that Audrey thought him to object, he was always like that, stern-faced and stern-hearted to all, but not to his wife. She would speak before he would speak. Maybe she should have been the lord not him, Audrey thought as she turned around to leave, taking a glimpse of her mother’s smile once more after she had taken one at her father’s unseen gaze. She liked her mother better, and she was the one with the red hair of the phoenix of their house, she should have been the lord not him, she thought again, angrily. The door opened when she called, and out she went, past the two guards in pot helm stationed just outside, and down the hallway to her room.