Until The Rivers Run Red

Prologue

"You're going to be my wife some day, you know." 

Gwendolyn of Eastmore, the eldest girl child of the Duke of Eastmore, regarded her companion with a look of haughtiness that did not seem to match her youthful ten summers. Lying amongst the flowers of the field with her dark hair and bright dress spread out around her, she looked almost the picture of the beautiful summer day that surrounded them--a clear contrast to Harry, who sat propped up against the large oak tree, wheezing slightly despite the good weather. At his words, she rose up on her arms, discarding the flowers that she had been twisting into a summer crown.

  "I've never heard you say something so silly before Harry." She sniffed.

Harry looked up from where he had been whittling the bark off of a stick with his dagger. Though they had been playing outside every day from dawn until dusk since the black and harsh winter had melted into spring and then into summer, it had done little to improve his pale and sickly coloring.

Known more formally as Prince Henry of Alleria, Harry was the third and youngest son of King Richard, who was referred to as the runt of the litter, whenever certain ears were not present. The royal nurses and midwives still talked of the night he came out of his mother's womb, screaming and crying as hard as his poor little lungs could, as though he were already in pain and suffering from some ailment. He had been a weak babe, a sharp contrast to his elder brothers who had been proclaimed to be the strongest and healthiest babes to ever be born. At six and eight, respectively, they already showed great promise of the leaders and warriors they were to be. It appeared, they had said, that all of the strength and courage that had been placed in them had been used up between the two. There had been none left for 'Little Harry', as he was to be known both affectionately and satirically around the castle and throughout the kingdom.

 When he had passed five summers and had shown little sign of improvement of his health, the king had had his weakling son bundled up in a carriage and brought to the far North of the country, where the Duke of Eastmore's household was kept. The Royal physicians had thought that the fresh country air might do the young prince some good and that being raised around the duke's two young sons might toughen him up. And so, the little boy was taken out of the care of his weeping mother and shipped all the way to the north of the kingdom.

As her brothers had denounced her girlhood as a reason for leaving her out of their games, Gwendolyn had grown up as lonely a child as Harry had, and much in want of a proper playmate. Though she would gaze out of the nursery windows at the young servant children playing, her mother and nurses never allowed her to play with them.

"You are not common." Her mother had sniffed, when Gwendolyn had pressed the issue.

Later, she would learn that her father had fathered many of the children who had played below. Whether on not this was the sole reason that her mother did not allow her to play with them, Gwendolyn would never know.

So, when Harry had arrived at Belvin Castle, she had been much excited at the potential of a new playmate. What she had received instead had greatly disappointed her. She had never meet more of a sissy in her entire life. Harry was so dreadfully quiet and all he seemed to do was stare at the books and manuscripts and maps in her father's library as though he actually understood them. Gwendolyn would often watch him silently from behind a shelf or wall, peeking out occasionally as she tried to work out what in the world he was doing. How any child could be content to sit inside all day was beyond her.

It had taken Gwendolyn defending Harry from her brother's taunts for the pair to finally warm up to the other, and ever since, the pair had been inseparable. Gwendolyn was never annoyed that she sometimes had to slow down so that Harry could catch up or that she could never challenge him to race and expect any real sort of challenge from him. She had even begun to enjoy sitting with him in the library and listening to him read to her from the little used books in her father's collections. They were tutored together, though Gwendolyn was not always allowed the same lessons as Harry, being a girl. When Master Theodore began to take out his books on the subject of politics, she was ushered away to go and spin and weave with the women, but Harry always retrieved her as soon as his lessons were over, and the two resumed whatever mischief they desired to get in for the day.