5 Chapter One: Her Betrothed

THE ENORMOUS THRONE room is silent. Queen Olivia Avington treads carefully along the red aisle that would lead her to her husband, her heels knocking gently against the smooth white tiles. King Charles Avington II sits comfortably on his throne, with no expectation of seeing his wife.

Queen Olivia composes herself, standing, sighing most silently, clasping her hands together and resting them just below her waistline in the most proper way. She bows. “Your Majesty.”

After picking the filth from under his nails, King Charles finally takes his attention to his wife. He glances around at the room, observing the emptiness; even a room full of court members wouldn’t stop him from doing anything he would usually feel obliged to do. He rolls his eyes and scoffs, thinking of how pathetic the Queen looks bowing to him like that –Pathetic, but his ego is only groomed by the gesture. With a bored sigh, he speaks. “It has taken you far too long to get here, Olivia, and now you stand as though I’m to speak the breath of life into you.”

She would rather grimace, but in the face of this man she knows that even the slightest move out of character would land her in another pit of pain and shame. “There is news from Lystotia on the subject of our daughter. I... We have received a letter from Prince Rowan.”

“Prince Rowan?” asks the King, sitting up attentively. He stares at the queen, intrigued and almost smirking. “Do elaborate.”

Olivia gets the uncomfortable feeling that something is clogging her throat –she gets the strong belief within her that this is not a topic she wants to inform him of. What will he think? Why do I fear it? What will he do when he knows? “As you may be aware, Your Majesty, the Prince has come of age. He would like to properly court the Princess. Stephen and Carol had offered their permission for him to write to us directly –so, he stated in the letter. It appears that soon you will receive a letter from a messenger of theirs, written by them, but Prince Rowan, well, he wanted to be the first to share his intentions with us.”

“Marriage,” King Charles says, feeling the word on his tongue. It was a word that stung.

“You must keep in mind that Rowan is the Betrothed we had chosen for Ericia. We ordained it, set it in word, made it official with the royal seals of Vynier and Lystotia on her fourth birthday.”

“It’s really a shame,” Charles says, deep in thought, “Ericia and Rowan have barely had enough encounters to call each other ‘friends’.” He laughs, but it is humourless, pitiful. “How many times have they met?”

Olivia thinks for a moment, though the answer is too obvious. “Three times, Your Majesty.”

“Th-three?” King Charles bursts out into a barrel of laughs on his throne, the sound of his voice echoing. “What else did the boy say?”

“He wrote that, with our permission, he would like to stay here at our palace for a while –with the intention of forming a proper relationship with our daughter. He made it very clear that he would like to form a special relationship not only with her, but with us as well. With bitter vagueness, Rowan claimed that the letter to be received from his parents will explain to you the plan in more detail, but he simply wanted the honour of informing us first.”

“Prince Rowan,” King Charles says, his tone eccentric, “What a brave, brave boy.” He looks at his wife, standing before him, and allows a tense moment of silence to fill the room before he speaks again. “I will await the letter from his parents. Until then, there will be no further discussion on the matter of a marriage involving Ericia. You may leave.”

Queen Olivia bows gracefully, turning and exiting the room.

Charles watches as she disappears, the doors to the throne room shutting behind her. In the empty room, all alone with his thoughts, he begins to laugh. He laughs as though this Betrothal was never imaginable in his head. He laughs as though the request of the Prince is funny –and to him, it is.

***

Ericia tosses and turns in her bed. Cold sweat is trickling down her face and neck, the feeling of stickiness is all over her skin. She twitches. She’s asleep, but her body and mind is wide awake.

She recalls the vivid memory of her six year old self, walking quietly through the corridors of the palace to get to her parents’ room, her creamy nightgown trailing behind her, her bare feet warming the cold ground. There is the sound of bare tapping whenever she takes a step and, soon enough, she is at the bedroom door of the King and the Queen. There are no guards posted out here –no one at this particular moment. Little Ericia doesn’t wonder why. She grabs the handle of the door and pushes it. There is no sound to accompany it –the door opens slightly. She only opens it wide enough to allow one of her eyes to peek through. She spots the large king-sized bed on which her parents are laying.

Charles rests his hand on Olivia’s thigh, moving his index finger higher and higher up her leg, pulling against the material of her nightgown. Olivia turns towards him, stopping his hand before it could reach higher. She stares into his eyes –his silhouetted eyes waiting for something more spectacular to occur next.

“No, Charles,” she whispers. “Please. Not now.”

As briefly as the flick of a switch, his expression changes entirely. He continues to slide his hand upward, under her nightgown, Olivia being unable to fight him off due to his strength. At first, the Queen’s undecipherable utterances sound like playful struggle to the on-looking princess peeking in at the action, but eventually Olivia begins to sound plainly uncomfortable –the occasional struggle leaving her tone.

“How... dare you... tell me what I can and cannot do?” Charles says to her.

“Charles,” she begs, breathless, she almost chokes on the word, “Charles, please, no!”

He covers her mouth with his free hand, pushing his body over hers and proceeding to strip the top of her nightgown off.

Ericia stands, staring through the open crease in silence. Her blue eyes are bright and full of life and innocence, but what she is witnessing is dark and begins to irritate her. She finds herself asking questions.

Why is mother screaming? Why is father fondling that place between her legs? Is she crying? Father’s expression is strange and uninviting. Is he choking her? Why isn’t she saying anything?

It’s the echoes; it’s the echoes of her mother, desperate to escape. It haunts her; the voice of pain rather than pleasure, crying out for him to stop –stop –please, please stop, until she can’t bring herself to speak anymore.

The next thing Ericia knows is that she’s being pulled from her little peeking spot by Marie, her Guardian in place of her often too-preoccupied parents.

The young woman pulls her away from the door and shuts it, leading her through the corridor at a startling pace.

“Marie,” Ericia asks, looking up at her, “what are they doing?”

“If I tell you that, my darling girl,” Marie says, frowning and almost frightful, “You won’t be able to sleep for a long time.”

“But I want to be able to sleep,” Ericia says to her, “but I’m still curious.”

The gentle servant stops her in a quiet spot nearer to her own room. She stoops and pushes the hair covering Ericia’s eyes to the creases behind her ears. Marie sighs. “When you are older, little one, perhaps you will understand for yourself. Now, please, let’s get you to bed. You have to promise me you won’t speak a word of what you saw to anyone. Keep it a secret until you figure it out, alright?”

Ericia doesn’t understand, but Marie had suddenly brought her little finger out, and Ericia takes it, swearing never to speak a word of it to anyone until she has figured it all out for herself.

Then, Marie fades from before the young princess’ eyes. The next thing Ericia sees is her guardian at the execution, her head inside of a noose, and her body dropping as the wooden floor falls beneath her.

Ericia wakes up, cold-sweating and breathless. She drags her hand through her moist, blonde hair, her clear blue eyes full of tears as she weeps. She hugs her pillow tightly, fighting the urge to scream her lungs out.

It’s all true. It all happened. She had witnessed her mother being abused, and Marie was executed when the King learnt that she had known such secrets.

It was after Marie’s death that Ericia had become a thorn to King Charles. She would be punished harshly for making the smallest mistakes.

Ericia drags herself more to the corner of the bed where she could rest her back against the wall. Even now, the more recent cuts on her back are throbbing because of her anxious body. Every wound hurts.

The Princess stares ahead at the candle standing on her dresser. She stares into the flickering light of the flame. It’s almost as if she can hear the sizzling of the iron meeting her skin again as she gets lost in the visual of the fire. Her pores rise. A chill runs through her body and shakes her from the core, out.

Ericia knows that it will be a long time before she can fall asleep again. When she was younger, after she had found out the truth about that first time she had seen her father dig into her mother like she was some sort of ripe fruit, ever since Marie had been executed and the abuse towards her by her father began, Ericia had been having the nightmares. There were only enough panic attacks wild enough to cause the servants to run to her in the middle of the night to calm her –only enough to be able to count on the fingers of one hand. When word of those panic attacks reached her father, the abuse that followed was often worse than the horror of the night terrors and the recollection of the memories themselves.

So Ericia had learnt to suffer in silence. She lies flat on her bed, staring at the ceiling, counting the stones jotting out from the concrete above her individually, allowing herself to breathe in and breathe out slowly with each count and, soon enough, she drifts off.

***

Princess Ericia Charlotte Avington walks into the throne room in a brilliant blue gown, a small silver crown decorating her flowing, wavy blonde hair. She approaches her parents and gracefully bows.

There are other members of the court in the room, and she is subject of the matter.

“I have received an interesting letter from the Royals of Lystotia, Ericia,” King Charles says, in a tone that is obviously rehearsed to once again groom his ego. “Prince Rowan, as you know, is your Betrothed. I understand and I am very much aware that you two have not had many interactions, but that is about to change.”

Ericia swallows something that isn’t even in her throat. She almost collapses from nervousness. Her Betrothed. The last time she had interacted with Rowan was when they were fifteen. That was the last time Lystotia had ever hosted such a grand ball, inviting the neighbouring kingdoms and guests from outside of the continent as well. Ericia, thinking about Rowan in the way she remembers him, pictures his thick blonde hair which he had insisted then that he refused to have cut, regardless of how messy and undesirable it made him appear to be as a prince. It covered his eyes for most of the night, and when they were dancing, he had stepped on her toe so many times because he couldn’t see clearly. He wasn’t very tall back then, either, but at least he was trying to be charming and polite towards her. She had kept the impression that he was amiable for all these years in her heart of diminishing hope.

Ericia wonders what he must look like now at the age of twenty –surely he must be twenty by now. She has forgotten his birthday, but she’s always remembered that he was at least eight months older than her.

“The Prince wrote an interesting letter,” King Charles continues, “which was put into further detail by his parents and, now that we have gathered the full story, we are ready to let you all in on it.” Charles pauses, and Ericia’s heartbeat quickens.

Ericia hopes that what she is about to hear is not the planning of her wedding. It has always been her dream to fall in love before that –even if it means having to fall in love with Rowan himself. As long as she could do that, she would be happy with the marriage.

She knows, however, that even with that burning desire to marry for love, her father would never allow her to have her way. If she so much as decided to absentmindedly poke her food with a finger or sigh too loudly, he would be off with her again –and being off with her is far too ugly of an understatement at which to put it.

“Prince Rowan William Wright III has announced his intention to marry our Princess Ericia Charlotte Avington after he has had the honour of staying here, at Vynier, in this very palace. He intends to bond with not only the Princess, but with the entire family, and form general and personal relationships with as many people as he can. I can assure you all that he is a brilliant, charming, and honourable young man. If the unfortunate occurrence that we had predicted wrongly of his future spirit had happened when they were both four, we would not have decided to make him our beloved daughter’s betrothed, wouldn’t you agree?” Charles claims, grinning at the nobles in the room.

A general wave of laugher crosses the risen thrones at the front of the room and Charles feels satisfied with the response.

“Prince Rowan is yet to send word of when he intends to arrive. Until then, we will prepare everything so that only the finest of Vynier will be his experience.”

Ericia stands, listening to her father speak of this ‘bond’ that Prince Rowan intends to develop with her. Can she really, truly fall in love with him? Will she? And if she does, will she be able to escape the darkness of her life as she knows it?

Ericia decides to have hope. When the meeting is adjourned she disappears up to her room, filling her bathtub herself, dropping rose petals and lighting lavender candles around the tub slowly as she tries to calm down in order to prepare for her bath. Her maids are outside, setting a garment for her to wear and cleaning up her room. Ericia learnt from a young age to stop relying on the maids to bathe her. When wounds started to show and scars remained risen or obvious, Ericia became insecure and was determined to be the only one to see her bare skin in this palace. She bathes and dresses herself. She has decided that she would be the only one to touch her body –that is the power she has been able to exhaust; the only power she can exhaust, but even with such power, her limit ends where her father’s abuse begins. If marriage to a prince is the escape from the pain, she prays she will find a way to keep the scars from him –or she would beg God that her husband would embrace them.

***

Prince Rowan arrives with as grand an entrance as the Royals of Lystotia usually adore demonstrating. There are three carriages –one with the Prince’s clothes, another with dwindling food supplies that were used on the journey to Vynier, and of course, the best carriage hosting Prince Rowan and his personal servants.

Princess Ericia stands beside her parents, clothed in a magnificent red ball gown and a golden crown. She steps forward, welcoming the Prince into the palace.

Her heart is beating so fast as the servants step out of the carriage –and when Rowan appears, she entirely forgets how to breathe. He has gotten taller, and he’s still as fair as he has always been. His blonde hair his neatly groomed but she could still see the Rowan she once knew in him –the hair was still a mess, a thick blonde bit on his head with a side part. The wind must have gotten to it on the way here. He shakes his head forward a bit and the hair falls into place almost perfectly. His moss green eyes lift and meet hers. She steps forward, catching a breath and straightening her posture with every move towards him.

“Your Highness,” she shyly greets, bowing.

“Well, it’s clear to me that you have aged in both grace and beauty. It’s been years, Princess,” he says, smiling brightly.

Ericia is startled by his smile. Something about his smile shakes the child within her. She hadn’t seen such a bright smile in so long. She hadn’t smiled that brightly in so long. Happiness seemed to fade so quickly for her –so tragically at a young age. All she knew now was how to falsify the idea of her own joy to others.

“Please,” she says, smiling back, “to you, I’m just Ericia.”

“Well, Ericia, then I’m just Rowan.” He warmly and openly extends his arms. “May I?”

Ericia laughs, taking barely one step forward before extending her arms and falling into him for a tight hug. She feels awkward. She hasn’t seen Rowan in so long, and hugging him feels like hugging someone entirely new. It isn’t a horrible hug. She has to admit that his build is comfortable and his sweet-smelling cologne is breathtaking. She is almost sure she would collapse from the strange and inviting feeling of being engulfed by his warmth. The Prince and Princess stay like this for just moments before breaking apart.

It takes Ericia seconds to realise it could be so easy for her to escape the terror of her father. If only she could be the perfect princess –the perfect bride. If only she could be all that Rowan would want her to be... she could be free.