Keladry of Mindelan closed her eyes tightly and massaged her temples. Why, why had she brought up her past feelings for Neal? And they aren't so much in the past, are they? She asked herself dryly. Seeing him had stirred up emotions she couldn't afford to let herself feel now.
She sighed. In a little over an hour, she would supervise the older pages as they selected newcomers to sponsor. Then, it would be her duty to repeat once again the instructions that she had been giving at the start of each academic year. They were fairly basic, the same rules she'd had to abide by when she'd started her training: pages were not to become physically involved with one another. There could be no flirtations. A girl and a boy would not be permitted to be alone together in an enclosed room without a chaperon…
Kel shook her head. When she'd been in training, she hadn't thought about that sort of thing. She'd had one eye on her classwork and the other on her shield. Where boys were concerned, her romantic inclinations—at least during her page years—had been one-sided.
The time for love, or at least infatuation, had been later—after she'd become a squire.
The current crop of youngsters, though… Kel grimaced. She'd welcomed the presence of more girls in the page ranks. She still thought it was a wonderful thing. But she wasn't used to the older pages trying to catch each other's attentions. She thought back. Neal had written secret love poems to virtually every noble girl his age. Cleon had called her foolish nicknames. But she didn't recall any of them being so… silly with one another.
The conservative elements of the court were only too eager to herald this development as the end result of allowing girls to train as knights. It was just as they'd always claimed: the presence of females was too distracting. Kel didn't want to believe it. But then she'd heard the court ladies saying that sending their dowerless girls for page training was one way to ensure that they'd be able to make their own way in the world. While she had no objection to that sentiment, what the woman had said next had been more bothersome...
"And perhaps, once those boys get to know my Dassia, one of them may yet approach us for her hand. I tell you, it's a mercy she won't need to enter temple orders after all!"
They hadn't seen her as they'd moved on. Thankfully. Kel wasn't at all sure what she would have said to them, but it would have taken all her Yamani calm to avoid screaming. Page training was not a marriage market!
Maybe... maybe she wasn't the right person to train these youths, after all.