This story takes place in between the Next and Try seasons.
It was raining that morning.
Not a light, refreshing drizzle, nor yet a fierce and swift cloudburst; it was dull, plodding, steady rain, that had come on at some point during the night, pounded the road into mud, and showed every sign of doing the same thing to the health and good humor of anyone stupid enough to set out in it.
Lina Inverse's first reaction, on hearing it on
the roof, was to roll over, pull the covers over her head, and go
back to sleep.
The rain was still there when her stomach finally prodded her into getting up, getting dressed, and wandering down into the inn's common room to see if there was anything there suitable for eating.
Despite the fact that both Gourry and Amelia were up and downstairs ahead of her, there was, and plenty of it. For a while there was no sound at that table save for the noises of eating to the soft accompaniment of Zelgadis (who had undoubtedly been awake before all of them) drinking his coffee.
Sylphiel didn't show up until Amelia had finished her breakfast and the two others were down to the last few plates. She looked at the table a little incredulously before tentatively saying "Gourry-sama?"
"Here," Amelia said, moving a little closer to Lina. "Scootch over next to me, Zelgadis-san, and make room for Sylphiel-san."
Zel obediently scootched, and the black-haired cleric seated herself between him and the blond swordsman. "Um... am I holding you up?"
"Mno, s'fine," Lina said around a mouthful of smoked salmon on the regional specialty roll -- a strange torus-shaped thing called 'bagel.' She swallowed. "Order breakfast."
"You'll probably finish right after we do," Gourry agreed. "Or would it be right before?" His brow furrowed.
"Around the same time," Zelgadis told him, finishing the dregs of that particular cup of coffee. "Waiter!"
The chimera had been quite right: Sylphiel nels Lahda pushed her plate away at almost the exact moment that the blond and redhead declared themselves full.
"I'm stuffed," Lina yawned, stretching. "Well, there doesn't seem to be much sense in starting out this morning."
"It's kind of wet, isn't it?" Gourry agreed.
"Very wet," Amelia confirmed. "This is the kind of day when, when I was little, Oneechan and I would stay in the big nursery room and Nanny or Mother would come and tell us stories."
"My grandma used to do that, too," Gourry said. "What a coernkydink."
"Well, there's not much else to do in this kind of weather," Zelgadis pointed out. "My stepgrandmother always knew the best indoor stories, just the way Granny Jada in the house next door knew the best outdoor ones."
"Does it rain like this a lot in this part of the world?" Sylphiel asked.
"This is the season for it," Lina informed her. "A nasty surprise the first time I ran into it; I wasn't used to it any more than you are."
"It's worse by the coast," Amelia said. "I think the weather comes in south of Sairaag and starts dropping rain as soon as it can, so there's not as much left when you're as inland as we are."
"That's right," Zelgadis agreed.
"It can't get over the mountains," Lina added.
"My grandfather, and then my father would tell me stories when it was snowing outside," Sylphiel offered. "About all kinds of things."
"Mother's stories were always the best," Amelia said. "They were much more interesting than Nanny's or Aunt Opabinia's."
"I don't think I've heard that much about your mother," Lina said.
"I know a little," Zelgadis said. "That she came out of Ceiphied-knows-where and married your father, and that she was involved in a lot of public works before she died."
"Your mother's dead, Amelia?" Gourry said, looking distressed. "That's too bad."
This was not exactly answerable.
"I think I have heard of her, then," Sylphiel said. "Didn't most of your father's family oppose his marrying her, and he did it anyway?"
"That's right," Amelia said. "She'd told them that she was the Warden of the Marches of the West, but she never said exactly where that was and nobody else knew, either. They wanted Daddy to marry someone from an important noble family or from another country or from a really rich family like Clan Inverse -- "
Lina swallowed wrong and started a paroxysm of coughing.
"Are you all right?" Gourry asked.
"Any relation?" Zel asked.
"We're... sort of a branch way out on the edge," Lina answered the second question. "Yeah, Gourry, I'm fine."
" -- but Daddy said he would marry Mother or no one, even if she came to the wedding in rags and barefoot."
"It was one of the most romantic stories I'd ever heard," Sylphiel sighed.
"And then she became universally beloved among the common people?" Zelgadis offered, in a tone that suggested that he found it very pat.
"Not just like that," Amelia said. "She was about as tall as I am now -- she used to ride on Daddy's shoulder -- "
The other two girls at the table had the same sort of stunned look on their faces that they had had when they first saw the reality of the Prince Regent of Sailoon for themselves.
" -- and she had a terrible temper, even worse than Lina-san's -- "
"Hey! What's that supposed to mean?"
" -- and she wasn't really fond of dealing with a lot of people at once. But she was very fair, and she built the first sickhall in Sailoon -- "
"What's a sickhall?" Sylphiel asked.
"It's like a large hostel with lots of individual bedrooms and a whole bunch of healers and physicians and chirurgeons and apothecaries and nurses in it all day. So when you get really sick or badly injured, instead of staying at home and trying to get a healer or a nurse or a physician there, you go to the sickhall and they're right there to take care of you, and you don't have to pay the sickhall that much because the Royal Treasury helps pay all the people working there and for supplies. It's a great in-no-vation, and we've been putting some up in other cities too."
"Wasn't that expensive?" Lina asked.
"Well, before Mother built the sickhall, she and Daddy changed the tax system so tax gatherers got paid a steady fee instead of just whatever was left over from what they collected after they got the amount the Treasury wanted. I don't quite see why, but somehow when they did that they made taxes lower and even more money went into the treasury than was going in before."
"Yes, that would have made them very popular," Zelgadis agreed. "Except with the people who used to gather taxes."
"I think some of them were mad," Amelia acknowledged. "But I still don't see why. And Mother enlarged the sewer system so it went under all of Sailoon City because she hated the way it smelled, and she paved the city streets because she didn't like walking in the mud."
"I don't like walking in the mud," Gourry said. "Cobblestones are nice when it's wet, except when they're slippery. Then it's not as much fun."
"Uh... yeah, Gourry-san. Right."
"All that paving and digging must have been very expensive," Zel remarked.
"Well, she used a lot of magic with that too."
"Your mother was good at magic?" Sylphiel asked.
"She was really good. Mother knew lots and lots of spells, and she was very powerful. She could even see glimpses of the future now and then," Amelia finished up. "Like in the story she told where Rezo was the bad guy."
"What story was this?" Zelgadis asked, curious.
"Oh, it was a really good story," Amelia said happily. "She put Oneechan and me in it, and one of the heroines' names was Lina."
"What was the other heroine's name?" Lina asked.
"Lala."
"Oh, no wonder you -- "
"Hey!" Gourry protested.
"I don't think I know that story," Sylphiel commented, breaking the tension.
"Mother made it up when Uncle Randy complained that she shouldn't be telling us so many stories about guys falling in love with other guys," Amelia explained. "I don't see why, because they were good stories, but anyway, she made up a story about a princess bride instead."
Her four listeners had blinked a couple of times during this.
"I know a story about a princess bride," Sylphiel whispered to Lina, leaning across Gourry. "But it doesn't sound much like this one."
"Why don't you tell us the story?" Lina suggested. "It's not as if we have anything else to do while it's so rainy."
"Okay!" Amelia said brightly. "The
Princess Bride. Chapter One: The Bride... "