Demesne Snippets 12: Fatherly Thoughts

Lying in bed next to his wife and children, Orris started feeling for the water bowl out of a lifetime of habit before he recalled where he was and he didn’t need to wash the colors from his eyes before he opened them. He still gently patted at his eyes before he opened them. The ceiling far above him came into view, made of solid beams and planks instead of bowed branches and wooden scraps he’d managed to begged from his betters.

His body no longer plagued by an itching he’d long ago learned not to scratch, the cobbler lay in bed, enjoying the feeling of having a thin sheet between him and the thin bedroll, straw and clothes that was cushioning the bed instead of lying on bare dirt covered with a fine dusting of the colors. Once, he would have needed to wake up immediately so he could get started on gathering wood and wild vegetables from the forests outside of the demesne so he’d have something to his family could eat that day, but here he didn’t need to do that. Orris actually thought he was starting to get fat.

The blanket he and his family would have once have shared was discarded at the foot of the bed, the inside of the house simply to warm for it. It was still a little strange to see his children sleeping nextto each other without their arms around one another to keep warm, and even stranger to see only two instead of three.

As always, conflicted feelings rose inside him at the thought of his eldest, fatherly anger at her circumstances meeting her insistence that she was where she wanted to be, and she would take care of things herself. It was a shame, really. Lord or not, Rian had seemed a good young man when they had first met him. A little thick and not all that bright, but kind and hard-working, the sort of young man he wouldn’t have minded courting one of his daughters. And perhaps he was still those things, but…

He shook his head, banking his anger. As much as he felt his daughter deserved a better man—she had no interest in women, at least that he knew of—being the woman of a lord—even if she wasn’t his wife—was still a better life than simply the daughter of a cobbler.

Besides, perhaps her luck was turning. Everyone knew that Riz and the pink bellringer were all but walking around together. Soon Rian would realize they no longer had eyes for him and kick them out, and he’ll finally make an honest woman of Umu. It would happen any day now.

Any day now…