Lady Delia of Eldorne huddled on the decaying wooden bench in her cell on the lowest level of the Royal Dungeon, wondering if her dead lover was as far underground as she was. No, she decided, graves were usually about six feet deep, maybe seven or eight at the most. And the tenth level of the dungeon was certainly much farther underground than that, even if it was rather low-ceilinged. However, her cell was probably about as silent as his grave. For the thousandth time, Delia wondered irritably what had possessed the Contes to build ten levels of dungeons. Had they intended to imprison the entire population of the Eastern Lands, if need be? In the fifteen years that had passed since her own incarceration, she had never so much as glimpsed another prisoner. Perhaps it was another manifestation of the guards' desire to demoralize her, perhaps they feared that she might somehow convert others to her cause of fifteen years ago and escape to wreak more havoc upon the country, or perhaps Jonathan had grown less stingy with death warrants in his decade and a half of kingship. In any case, Delia remained solitary, with plenty of time to think.
Thinking, however, had lost much of its appeal after fifteen years with few stimuli. She had not been able to come up with new insights on the stone walls, the guards, the thin gruel, or the rats for years now. That left her twenty-two years' worth of memories of the outside world to explore. As for those, well, she had been over them so often that she was surprised that it had actually taken her so long to live through them the first time. Still, those memories were all she had, and her mind returned to them continually. Especially to him...
Questions of silence and depth settled, she turned her reflections to her lover himself. Time had faded her memory of the exact contours of his face, leaving her with a faded, hazy image. The elapsed years had similarly faded the intensity of the guilt that accompanied the memory. If she had only been more intelligent, more cautious, had she done even one thing differently, he would still be alive, Delia knew that. But the dreadful nightmares in which she heard the news again as if for the first time, or those in which he reviled her for her part in his death, had become more and more infrequent over the years, and the guilt and sorrow which had nearly paralyzed her during her first year inside the prison had faded to a subtle, dull ache. It was all manageable enough, now, a mere shadow of what it had been, which disturbed her a little. If everything continued to fade, what would she have left to think about in another fifteen years? Oh well. Delia supposed she would figure that out once it actually became relevant. In the meantime, she thought wryly, she might as well look through her store of memories yet again, while she still had them.
Delia thought back to the first time she had ever laid eyes on him. This was...how many years ago? Twenty? No, more like twenty-two. She had been fifteen then, midway through her last year at the convent school. Delia snorted a little at the memory of that silly, naive schoolgirl. How horrified that girl would have been had she known what fate had in store for her...and how horrified her lover would have been had he known. Not for the first time, Delia wondered darkly whether he would have chosen to stay away from her, knowing how she would fail him.
With a slight shudder, the woman steered her thoughts firmly away from that profitless avenue. She had already spent years flagellating herself with thoughts of her lover's probable reaction to her failure, time enough to realize what a useless pursuit it was. She forced her brain to return to that fifteen-year-old Delia. If she were going to lose herself in reflections of the past once more, better the schoolgirl and what had actually befallen her than the imaginary accusations her lover had never gotten the chance to utter...
Enough, she ordered her mind imperiously, as she had once ordered her servants. Think about the convent. The beginning of it all.