Author's Note: Another Sean Circle Challenge fic, the number is evading me right now. Also my first Emelan fic…
Disclaimer: Not mine, really!
Duchess
by Seereth
Her blue eyes were hard now, her mouth not so pretty, nor eager to pout, to smile, to laugh.
When she did laugh, it was neither merry nor amused. It was cheap and bitter.
Her face was not lined, and her hair was not grey – not entirely – but she was old now. Her hands were thinner and her fingers longer. And her nose looked even more out of place on her old, worldly, face than it had when she was young.
She was dissatisfied. She was calculating, she could be cruel when she needed to and sometimes when she did not.
Yet for all that, she was a good Duchess.
"Do you know," she had said to a mage once, mere months after becoming Duchess, when she was not so defeated, "no one calls me Sandry anymore. It is Sandrilene now, my full name. Duchess Sandrilene."
"Duchesses don't have nicknames," the mage told her. "It would embarrass their subjects to know of them."
She had been quiet then, but not for long. "You will call me Sandry still, Tris? Just in our letters? And you will…will not forget that I was once silly and frightened of the dark?"
"I promise," Tris had said.
But then she went away, and Sandry had not been able to find her. And so she was Duchess Sandrilene again because Daja would not use the nickname and Briar had left first.
They had not even returned upon Lark's death, Briar had left upon Rosethorn's. And then Daja had gone somewhere.
She found herself to be very tired, though she was still…not old.
It might have been better if her husband had survived, but he had not and so it wasn't.
It might have been…
She was tired of those might-have-beens. There were so many now.
Once, for a few moments, she thought she had found Briar. But she was wrong, and more importantly she was alone.
Her uncle would have told her that a ruler was always alone – perhaps he had once but she had forgotten it. Perhaps she had merely refused to believe it.
Perhaps she had had no reason to believe it.
Had had no reason to believe it.
It seemed she had one now.
