𝚂𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚍 ✔

Chapter Eight

The next morning the inner courtyard was humming with people. I watched from my balcony as more and more lords and ladies appeared while the day continued on. Many faces I did not know, but there were a few who had looked familiar.

Countess Fairefax and her husband strolled through the courtyard observing the servants, who were hard at work, as they started decorating for the night's festivities.

It was clear, after observing these folks for quite some time, that the guests who had been invited consisted of some very important and prestigious families, and some notable religious figures. I was sure many of them were the parents of some of the girls that remained, and many of those who had not.

There was no telling how upset some of them were. Their precious daughters being turned down on the very first day, embarrassing them and making them the laughingstock of the towns they lived in and social circles they had frequented. If I had been them, I would have been brimming with questions, in fact I was despite that. But they must have come, despite their embarrassment, or maybe because of it, to ask the royal family indirect questions in passive aggressive tones in hopes of finding out why their child was denied, and perhaps also to see which girls had been so great as to have been chosen instead of their own.

Not only were it us girls competing with one another, but our families as well. We were just pawns in securing the greatest boost in status that a family could acquire. Yes, it was a normal thing in our society for our parents to make us marry up, to force us to climb up that social ladder with them all, including our younger siblings, on our backs. We were the future of our families, we secured marriages for our siblings and if we did not marry well, we could ruin everything.

However, this particular ladder had not, like all the others before it, stopped on the floor just before the top, it was glittering in gold and went all the way up to the highest point in our political tree. Because, for the first time in a very long time, every noble family had a chance to not just marry up, but to marry the highest one possibly could.

Anyone who held a title lower than a duke or duchess did not even get considered as an option for the royals, usually. But, since the rest of the world was no longer available, and there were no other princes or princesses, they had to marry down. Though, if one looked at it in a more strategic light it was a very smart move on the royal's part.

Not only would this Courting please the nobles by boosting their egos, but it would bring entertainment for then entire kingdom as well. And, if it were needed, a very large distraction. Though, no matter what the nobles might convince themselves of with such a reassuring move on the crowns part,

The lucky girl would never become queen and the nobles would not have any additional power within the kingdom. The royal family would continue to retain complete power since it is a patriarchy and Thomas is the second born. Though, the only way I see that they could have ever possibly attained power would have been in the slim chance that the current king, heir and all his children and Thomas were to die while Thomas's wife was pregnant with child. That would leave her as the temporary ruler until her child, if a boy, was born and come of age. So again, it was a fool's hope to think anything more than one singular family becoming slightly more important would happen.

Though, perhaps that was the reason they had not married off Prince Henry and Princess Corinna yet. The King must have been holding out hope for the illness, the plague, that ravaged the world outside our borders to one pass one day soon and in turn allowing him to marry them off to someone more worthy, more beneficial to the kingdom.

Though many of the families still left in the Courting were most likely also a part of the royal court and lived in the palace most of the year. Countess Fairefax was one of those people. Mother occasionally attended court, but never had the honor of staying in the palace. Though, she had been working diligently on securing herself a more permanent spot and becoming a lady of the court. Something I had hoped would never come to fruition.