The House of Oldenrock

Yindün

            She finally blinked, and her eyelashes fluttered like leaves in the wind, but she did not step away. “No,” she replied.  “I was looking for Asher Oldenrock, for my father, the Kúroch, once wanted me to marry him, but alas, he died fourteen years ago, when I was just a wee babe.”

            “Why would you be looking for a dead person?” Hal softly asked.  She completely entranced him, and he wanted her to stay and keep a conversation going for as long as possible.  He hardly registered that because her father was the Kúroch, the ruler of Léthan, she had the equivalent of a regular Lord’s daughter.

            “Because not everyone who is pronounced dead actually is dead,” she purred.  She reached her hand up and touched his face, and his eyes followed her hand as she stroked down from his forehead to his jaw.

            “Is this the customary greeting in Léthan?”

            “You know that it is not.”

            She stepped even closer to him, and he felt his eyes closing.  Her hand remained on his face, and he clasped it.  He could feel her face approaching his, and her lips began to almost brush his.  Suddenly the sounds of the rest of the stable hands approaching interrupted them, and they quickly drew away from each other.  “I should go,” she said.

            Hal nodded and watched her leave through the other entrance.  Suddenly the whole absurdity of the situation hit him, he jumped, and the lanterns in the stable returned to their normal shade.  He had almost kissed a girl of high birth, having just barely met her and not even knowing her name.  It reminded him of what he had seen Selene do to men, but he knew that that was not it.  There was a power in what Selene did, and there was none of it in what had just happened.  He stood there looking bewildered as the rest of the stable hands entered.

            “What happened, Hal?” his friend Orren asked.  “You look like you have just seen a ghost.”

            “Maybe I have,” Hal replied. “A ghost of myself.”

            Margot stood at her window leaning out with her elbows on the sill.  Her mouth was curved downwards, and the base of her nose had seemed grow wider and flatter.  This expression looked completely ridiculous, but when the residents of Rock Hall saw the expression, they knew that the wisest course of action would be to avoid her.  Margot would often make the face after youths of the lower Houses of the Oldenrock Clan purposely mispronounced her name and called her Margott (That T was silent!), when the Hall boys would make fun of her for being a girl, or any other instance that seriously annoyed her. Right now, it was because of her mother.

            Why did she have to be so strict? Why couldn’t she just accept her for who she was?  Margot could not be a lady. She had tried, time and time again, and she had always failed.  Even Good Sister Amerán had forfeited the attempt to make her a lady saying that the Spirit had created everyone for a specific purpose, and Margot would have to find hers for herself.

            At least now she was out of her suffocating gown and in more comfortable clothes, men’s clothes.  She had put on pants and a belted tunic.  The only piece of clothing that could only be a woman’s was the leather band around her breasts that she had laced tightly.  There was only one comfort that gowns provided, and that was support.

            Suddenly a sharp birdcall interrupted Margot’s state of annoyance, and she quickly leaped away from the window answered with a birdcall of similar sort.  No sooner had she answered, the forms of her older brothers Rodder and Joar came leaping through the open window, and they tumbled right on the floor.  They were out of their dress clothes, and were now in regular plain clothes that they used when they were outside running around.