The Crazy Daughter of the Duke's Family - Book One: Pandora

Chapter 17: Sugar, Silver and Salt

Not a sound could be heard as she looked up at the man she was supposed to marry in order for the political climate on the continent to remain peaceful. There was something odd about the situation, but she couldn't put her finger on it.

At the same time, reality hit her. It wasn't just his looks or his age. She didn't want to leave the country she was just getting used to to marry someone she didn't know. Not that she knew anyone in Arlen better than she knew Norina, but marriage was something else.

Mere weeks ago she had been a teenager - no, a child. People used to say she was mature for her age, didn't fit in very well, but looking at others in her profession, maybe it was something that came with the job.

Maybe she was peculiar on top of that, but she hadn't even shared a kiss with anyone, hadn't even had a sip of alcohol before, and now she was going to get married? She read a lot of books when she wasn't watching TV. All that stuff her parents would probably not approve of.

Her head, trying to get rid of the thought of what was going to happen on her wedding night, something she didn't even want to put into words, with a man three times her age, even in this body, started to spin.

'You need to calm down.' Pan didn't sound particularly worried, but his voice had that soothing tone that fell like a blanket over her busy mind. 'Do you not have to answer this person?'

He was right, she needed to calm down. Nothing had happened at this point. How many minutes had passed since she stood there staring at the Emperor's face like a broken doll?

She swiftly looked around the throne room, which was imposing in itself, but not heavily decorated at the moment. The throne sat three steps above the floor they all walked on, and a few servants stood along the two walls to the left and right, between eight tall windows.

The members of the envoy weren't completely scattered around the room, but rather lined up in a sort of hemispherical fashion around the iron throne that towered against the wall opposite the large double doors. On either side of the doors stood a knight, fully clad in iron armor from head to toe.

Rowena was at the center of them all, suddenly aware and feeling their questioning gazes.

Outside those windows, the reddened sky, darkening by the minute, shimmered on the waterways between the white buildings that reflected the color just as well, but differently.

Then she thought of the conversation she had had earlier. "It is indeed beautiful," she finally replied, as if to confirm what she had already pointed out during the carriage ride.

The Emperor, a little taken aback by her behavior, laughed out loud to clear the air in the room. "Indeed," he said, "the Moon of the Empire used to say that at this hour of the day as well. You would have gotten along splendidly, I'm sure."

There was a wistfulness in his words as he also turned his eyes to the scenery outside the window. "The Moon of the Empire," in other words, the late Empress. If the Emperor was the Sun, the Empress was his opposite, bathed in his light, the Moon.

Obviously, it didn't sit well with her to hear a potential spouse she didn't want say that she was close to the woman he had married before. But there was something else that struck her.

"You must have loved her very much," she said, following his gaze back out as the night sky swallowed the light left behind, casting a silvery light on the previously reddened city, with the moon reflecting on the water surface in front of the palace.

Well, she realized her mistake a minute too late when she heard muffled gasps around her and remembered that she couldn't just make wild assumptions like that in a foreign country, let alone in the presence of and fully directed at the Emperor himself.