The Duchess Cannot Sleep || ONC 2021

2 | The King

Andreya had a sister named Kasarya and a brother named Eneder. Together, on the last day of every other week when they visited their home from the academy, the Radenbutans would be waiting in the backyard.

There were two Radenbutan brothers to two Marivatan sisters and an odd girl and boy to finish off each trio, respectively. Andreya was the youngest of the Marivatan household and Teline the youngest of the Radenbutans, so naturally, they had flocked to one another as if there were no other adolescent noble girls in the country and became but one sect of their larger six-person group. This way it stayed all through their academy days and until Kasarya and Kaudwik were to be wed on the eve of Kasarya's twenty-fifth birthday.

The incident had happened slightly before that, however. Two weeks and four days, to be exact, before the wedding, in the middle of the night.

Something had happened, and that was all Andreya remembered. Something, incidentally, that had led to the next morning in which she woke with dark bloodstains on her sheets and every other member of the Marivatan House dead. Andreya had seen blood before, having not neglected her childhood escapades, but she had never seen so horribly much of it. Neither had she ever seen a body of the dead, the experience being especially upsetting for the fact that the dead were the mother and father she had hugged goodnight and the brother she had played cards with, the sister whose wedding she had been so passionately anticipating.

After that, the relationship between the Marivatan and Radenbutan Houses was drastically altered. The eldest son was heartsick, the other son withdrawing from shock, and though the daughter reached out in consolation to Andreya, it was Andreya who did not respond. And that relationship alone was enough to end the families' ties, for everyone else who could have mended it was buried the following week on a mockingly bright afternoon.

"I demand you release me." Andreya pounded her fists, tied together with a ribbon so as not to chaff, on the lap of her dress. Kaudwik and Teline sat across from her with a regal posture and Hedemit occupied the box seat of their much-too-small jade coach.

Teline straightened her shawl with a small but deft hand, showing no reaction to Andreya's outburst. "Frankly, Andreya, I would say I don't know what's come over you, but I do. It has been eighteen years and you are still distraught over your family's passing."

"That is not my reasoning—"

"But for as much grief as it brings," Teline interrupted, "there is a point at which your life must continue, both for the peace of your soul and for those of the deceased. Eighteen years, dear friend, is long enough to have become an offense to them, especially given what your isolation has driven you to do."

Andreya scowled at the woman's accusatory words. "And how should you know? Your family still lives, your life still continues—"

"My husband and two of my sons died five years ago in a train accident," Teline clipped, "which you would know if you'd bothered to leave the house instead of wallowing in self-pity."

"Be quiet, the both of you." Kaudwik broke his gaze from the glass to cast both women a narrow-eyed frown. With the abrupt pause, the only sound prevailing was that of the horses on the stone street. City noises Andreya hadn't heard in years slipped through the carriage walls.

"Instead of rejoicing over your reunion," Kaudwik continued, "you bicker. Here I was afraid I'd be reminded of the old days."