“Who is it?” the Princess snapped.
“It’s only Brin!” Brinstan shouted through the door of her bedchamber.
“Oh! Brin! Come in!”
Brinstan opened the door and stepped inside to find a very unhappy-looking Princess.
“Close the door,” she said, still sniffling and wiping her eyes.
“Ah… all right,” he agreed with some uneasiness.
Brinstan sometimes wondered whether Britamund had yet noticed that he was a boy. In times past he would have thought it rather more likely that she hadn’t yet noticed that she was a girl, but tears and sniffles were not ordinarily associated with the boyish princess he used to know.
“Now, Brit,” he said, “I was coming to say goodbye, but if you’re already crying it must mean you thought I was already gone.”
She laughed, but it was a strangled, wounded laugh such as he did not like to hear from her. He knew she was not crying because he was leaving; but because he was leaving he would not have the time to comfort her, either.
“Listen here, Your Highness,” he said. “Be a good fellow and tell me what’s wrong at once, because I haven’t much time, and if I waste it all trying to pry it out of you, I shan’t have a chance to fix everything before I go.”
“You think it’s not simply because you’re going?” she smiled.
“I know it is not,” he smiled back at her.
“Not even a little bit because?”
“Perhaps a little bit,” he allowed her.
Dunstan was not even at the castle on this morning, and her father was not in a sour mood. In truth he could not imagine what could have made her cry.
“I was just saying goodbye to Ana,” she sniffed.
“Oh! Is she your new best friend?”
“No, you’re still my best friend. I’m crying because she was crying. And – it made me so sad!”
“That’s girls!” he groaned. “Tears are like yawns to them: one of them starts crying, and all the rest go off.”
“Don’t laugh at us.”
“I’m not laughing at you, Brit. I’m trying to make you laugh. And failing.”
“But it’s so sad!”
“Now, Brit,” he sighed. “She’s not dying. She is merely going home. You will see her again.”
“That isn’t why,” she sniffed.
“Why, then? Listen, Brit, this is precisely what I was trying to avoid. Be a man and tell me directly.”
“I can’t. It is a secret.”
“I always keep your secrets!” he protested.
“But it isn’t my secret!”
“Whose? Ana’s?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the matter with Ana? She’s practically my sister, you know.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Is it Eadwyn?”
Britamund gasped. “How did you know?”
“You think I’m stupid because I’m a boy?”
“Yes,” she giggled.
“I shall grant you that. But Ana’s practically my sister. Even stupid I could tell she was sighing in Eadwyn’s general direction.”
“Yes! And she has to marry stupid Lord Windhlith’s stupid brother, and she – ”
“Now, he’s not stupid,” Brinstan protested.
“He’s a boy, isn’t he?”
“Well – a man,” Brinstan smiled.
“Therefore he is stupid.”
“Quod erat demonstrandum.”
“Quod ego dico,” she laughed.
“Whereby you prove how clever girls are,” he grinned.
“Too clever for you.”
“I shall grant you that, too.”
“But, Brin!” she cried, suddenly mournful. “She thinks she loves him!”
“Oh, yes,” he sighed. “Eadwyn.”
“And your father will never let her marry him.”
“Why not? Windhlith’s brother is only a third son, and Eadwyn a second.”
“I know, but of a lord.”
Brinstan shrugged. “Neither of them will ever be any more than knights in some lord’s train. The Duke is a greater lord than Windhlith. The only difference is that he and Eadwyn aren’t brothers.”
“Do you think so?”
“I don’t know, Brit. The entire thing was Osfrey’s idea, anyway. He keeps trying to turn my father against yours. He wants us to build alliances with the south, so that when the Normans come we can go groveling to them and complain that we never liked that Sigefrith fellow all that much anyway.”
“But you aren’t like that.”
“No! I never liked that Osfrey fellow, myself.”
“Do you suppose you could talk to your father?”
“If my Princess asks it of me. I can’t promise you anything, though. That Osfrey fellow never liked me all that much, either. I think he would be just as pleased if Ethelmer and Fenric and I were to die so that his grandson could be baron someday.”
“Hateful man! But I’m certain your father loves you more.”
“I think he does, Brit, but that doesn’t mean he will let Ana marry whom she likes merely because I ask him to.”
“No, but you will try, won’t you? To please me?”
“I would do it merely for Ana’s sake, if I thought that was what she wanted. I shall ask her.”
“Please do.” Britamund turned suddenly and pressed her hands against the glass of the window. “I think it would be dreadful for her to be married to a man she doesn’t love. All her life! How could your father do that to her, when he himself loved your mother as he did?”
Brinstan might have attempted to answer the question, but he was not certain that she was truly thinking of Ana or of his father just then. What he might have said about Ana and his father would not have been what he would have said about Britamund and hers, or about Dunstan and his – not that he had ever figured out what to say about that.
“I shall speak to him,” he said, “though I don’t think I shall phrase it quite so bluntly.”
“It is the one thing that might make him understand.”
“I shall try to make him understand, Brit.”
“I hope you will hurry,” she said. “Before it is too late for them.”
Chapters
I'm glad that someone is looking out for Ana & Eadwyn. Now if we could only get the Brit & Dunstan situation straightened out...