Deirdre raged in her private room. ‘Die?! Die?! Who could ever speak of my Faust dying?! How dare she?! How dare she?! How dare she?!’ The Princess raged and pulled at her hair, she tugged at the roots hard enough that it hurt, but the pain felt good because it was a distraction, however slight from imagining her Faust’s corpse lying on the ground.
Old man. Young man. Dead Faust was Dead Faust and her heart ran wild in her chest. ‘If I weren’t cursed with this weak body, I would have ripped her heart out of her chest then and there for saying something like that! How dare she?!’ Her eyes ached as they throbbed and she turned to face her mirror.
Her jaw was clenched, her eyes wild, her hair had already been reduced to a tangled mess. If she could have screamed, she would have. She wanted to, she ached to howl like a banshee.
“No… no… no… calm down. You have to be calm.” The last twenty minutes at least had been spent pacing, stomping, digging her fingers into her palms so hard that they bled and gouged out tiny bits of the soft flesh of her unworked, virgin hands.
“Bitch. Cunt. Scum. To make a joke like that… no… no… she was joking, yes, that’s right, it was only a joke, really just making fun of the fact that my Faust hasn’t slept with anyone yet. You have to get ahold of yourself, Deirdre, you know you do. You have no idea how long it will take for them to find the tunnel you had built down there, they could come back any minute now, even if they start on the right floor… of course you did tell them to explore it… but regardless? What if they come back and find you like this. If they saw you in tears or distressed, yes, that you could explain, even hold onto Faust, hug him, touch him, smell his sweetness and see those beautiful eyes looking at you so adoringly… as only he does, as only he can, as only he is allowed to do.”
“But if they found you raging, with fury in your eyes and a twisted face, he might see you differently after that… you must never… ever let that happen.” She admonished herself and recalled the workers who built her tunnel, if the adventurers did what she said, and found it… ‘Yes, they’ll take care of the last of the workers… that loose end will be tied up nicely and I can keep them busy outside of the city in a way that keeps them relatively safe. Most adventurers will refuse to defend the city, they may just harbor some citizens in their fort. But those four, or at least Freydis, will get sentimental and want to start defending peasants. And if she does, the others will too. I can’t have that.’
Too much was invested in that one, too much to let her throw herself away when she still had a use.
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‘Even so… I wouldn’t mind if Brunwaeld were punished a little for her joke… besides… Faust is mine. All mine. I’ll have him… feel him… hold him in my arms and in my body and no one else. And he will have no one else either… no. Nobody. Nobody…’ Deirdre reflexively went to her little chest at the foot of her bed. Within, a necklace sat that had three pearls. Each one commemorating the ‘removal’ of a maid who showed interest in her Faust. ‘I won’t let his first time be with anyone but me… he’s my love, he’ll be my husband!’ She started to laugh gleefully as she contemplated their eventual honeymoon.
Exactly where to go was still an open question. Qadish was the suggestion Freydis gave, but that was off the table. Deirdre’s own information showed that a war was tearing apart that country or rather…another war. So that was out. Agamidan was being destroyed by beastmen. The mountains wouldn’t be comfortable and both were occupied by dwarves who were as likely to trade her away for gold as anything else.
The Aosian elves hated humans for the slave taking practices of the Divine Kingdom, the dark elves in the Auxkos Empire lost their independence two hundred years earlier.
The demihumans would eat them. The sea to the west might well go on forever for all she knew, and the lands to the east were either too far to reach, or overtly hostile to humans.
‘The Divine Kingdom might be the only choice, that or hiding in the Eternal Forest.’ She pondered, the former would involve a lot of running, hiding, and probably getting caught. But the latter had its own dangers. Those who went too deep, never came out. Nobody who lived near it would venture into it for more than five days at a time, none would go farther than two days could take them in any direction. ‘How many scouts who knew no better, were lost? And the others who did live there… how many refused?’ Eventually attempting to determine the cause of the disappearances was something she had to call a failure.
‘Then again… I’ve been saving the Thorns for a special occasion, perhaps having them explore the forest and neutralize all threats would be exactly what I’ve been holding them in reserve for.’
Brunwaeld’s joke came back to mind. ‘If they survive, I forgive her, if they die, I can still forgive her, after all, death is the ultimate atonement.’ The Princess thought, and having settled on both the punishment and the redemption for the party, she went back to her mirror, reached for her brush, and began to fix her hair.
Most of the time she didn’t mind or even preferred having a maid do it, but not while she was like this, not while her heart was still raging and she could barely hold her fingers still. In times like this it was better to take her time about the task and do it herself.
She focused on her face while her white wooden brush tugged gently through her long, silky, golden strands. “Now, what face should I wear?” She wondered and batted her eyes while she made her mouth appear to form a worried circle. “Innocent worry?” She asked herself, or put on a bright, wide smile, “Or maybe hopeful optimism? What would make Faust happiest…I wonder?”