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I think Rod could tell that I was feeling cornered. I was being all but ordered to get married, and as he had pointed out in the past, an arranged marriage was a normal situation for a person of my station to be in. But the concept in the indefinite future is a whole different animal than an imminent marriage.
So he did not press me on the subject. We ended lunch and he excused himself, having a meeting with the military staff to attend, to discuss the handover. And I took a tour of my suite. It had been waiting here for me for years, but this was the first time for me to visit it.
My suite was as lavishly excessive as I expected. I sat on the rim of the massive oval bath, a pace wide and half again as long, and shook my head as I trailed my hand through the water. I could sense a complex Water- and Fire-based magic tool at work in a box at one end of the bath, pulling water out for filtration and returning it clean and warm.
“Does the Young Mistress require a bath?” Sala, the maid showing me the room, inquired. “I can summon the staff.”
“It’s already sufficient like this,” I replied, and began trying to squirm out of the fancy dress they’d put me in for lunch. “I’ll bathe myself.”
“Young Mistress!” she protested. “Please let me assist you!”
I was having trouble with the clasps behind my neck, so I gave up and let her help me. While she worked, she called over her shoulder to a maid outside the door to gather the crew, nimbly thwarting my plan to just get naked and bathe myself.
Sasuga, Mother’s maid brigade.
After they finished stripping me, except for the pendants I did not let them remove, I was properly soaped and scrubbed outside the bath, Dorian-style, with one maid attending to my hair, another cleansing my face and two others attending to the left and right sides of my body respectively. Their high degree of competence led me to guess…
“This is the team that bathes Mother?”
Sala, who was standing by and supervising the younger maids, bowed while nodding. “Indeed, Young Mistress. They are one of two shifts employed by Her Grace. They all work as chambermaids in the Castle, and attend her in the bath as required.”
On the average, Dorians have darker skin tones than Atians, which is probably for the same reason that Mediterranean Europeans are darker on average than Northern Europeans. There’s a lot of variation though, since the Dorian lands are only partially separated from the North by the Arbolian Mountains and the Oserian and Suldorian Highlands, allowing a lot of intermarriage between the two cultures. Unlike the somewhat more uniform North, the people of this land come in a range of hues more varied than the Indian Subcontinent and almost as varied as the Americas.
Tiana learned in history that the forerunners of the Dorian culture were wandering tribes from the far west. Historians suspected that they originated in the part of the Baris continent that lays on the other side of the equator. They became the masters of the southern half of the Eastern Baris and imposed their own ways, religion and language on those that lived in the lands that would later become the Dorian Empire.
The conquered indigenous population were relatives of those who live today to the east of modern Orestania in the Southeastern Peninsula. Thus, the culture and the people of modern Pendor are a fusion of the populations from the far East and West extremes of a continent as broad as Eurasia.
I was experiencing the result at the moment, surrounded by beautiful girls in their late teens of every shade. Almost ebony-toned Octa, coffee-milk-brown Limel, olive-toned Tino and honey-colored Seshi formed not only an almost perfect color chart for the humans of Doria, they also magnificently demonstrated Mother’s talent for finding attractive young maids.
Their hands were all over me, scrubbing, caressing, brushing and generally stimulating me. For a bit, I had the impression they carried the same playful, flirty motives as my maids in the Fairy King’s Castle, and frankly, with their level of beauty, the attention was having the same effect on me. But I was noticing an edge to their smiles and their voices that didn’t square with that.
I could feel it. These women were frightened of me.
I’ve learned how to do a lot of things since becoming Tiana, but calming scared mortals without using [Vampire Command] is not included. And I’ve become exceedingly cautious about using that skill. I never did use it much, but I’ve sharply decreased my use of it since my bad experience with Sidis, the Tabadan birdkin girl. Outside of feeding, I may not have used it at all.
So I couldn’t do anything to ease their anxieties except relax and ignore them.
Once they finished pouring buckets of water over me to rinse me, they helped me into the enormous tub. But when they began stripping off their yukatas to join me, Genette came into the bath room to stop them.
She had arrived immediately after the bath attendants and busied herself with my wardrobe in the dressing room. While the girls washed me, I was able to overhear her discussion with a staff seamstress about reworking some of Mother’s old dresses into outfits for me. I am almost as short as Mother, so one would think dresses for her would be suited for me, but frankly Mother’s bosom and derriere were in a different league than mine. Enough so to require serious alteration.
So Genette’s appearance in the bathroom did not surprise me, but she surprised the bath crew when she clapped her hands and announced, “That will be enough, girls. You don’t need to accompany My Lady today. I will finish with her hair while she soaks.”
Her words confused me though, because Genette is normally perfectly on board with turning me over to the bath crew and even joining in. Had she finally realized I don’t care for it?
Or, of course, Genette was among those aware that Mother’s death was confirmed. Perhaps Mother’s instructions on how to care for the “Young Mistress” no longer held weight for her?
The girls gave her perplexed looks, then one of them asked, “Why?”
“It’s not a matter for you to worry about. Please just cooperate, Limil,” she told her, and glanced at Sala for support.
“Miss Genette is Lady’s Maid to the Young Mistress,” Sala told the girl. “We must respect her decision. Go dry yourselves and get back to your duties.”
After they had departed and Genette asked Sala to leave as well, she pumped conditioner onto her hands and began working it into my hair.
“I hope you do not feel I was interfering, Young Mistress,” she commented. “Please pardon me if I was.”
“I’m just curious why you stopped them,” I replied. “Normally you would have joined in.”
The wolfkin maid giggled slightly, then picked up a comb and began combing.
“You know that my nose is quite sensitive, Young Mistress. What I was smelling was of concern. I knew you would not like it.”
I tipped my head back to see her and frowned. “What were you smelling?”
“Fear,” she stated. “A lot of it. And arousal, from a couple of the girls, which I was guessing meant that despite being terribly frightened of you, they were mentally preparing themselves to serve you the way they occasionally served Her Grace. The Duchess would never force a maid to serve her that way, but she always allowed it when we took the initiative. But those girls were forcing themselves to serve you out of fear.”
I jolted and tipped my head back again, staring at her.
“What?” she asked, quite innocently.
“You just said when ‘we’ took the initiative.”
She giggled. “Before I became your lady’s maid, I worked here in Narses Castle. When I was a young thing like those girls, I was one of the bath attendants. Her Grace’s charms can bewitch anyone of either gender, Young Mistress. Naturally, I was not immune.”
I raised an eyebrow. “And even you… ‘took the initiative’ with her at some point?”
My lady’s maid chuckled, then bent down and whispered into my ear, “At quite a few points, Young Mistress. Once wasn’t enough, after I enjoyed Her Grace’s skills the first time.”
My eyes bugged and I looked away from her. This was the first time Genette had ever broached any subject related to sex with me, and I had not been prepared for how lusty her voice had just turned.
She let out a playful laugh worthy of a fairy as she stood up and went back to work, turning back into my prim lady’s maid.
“Anyhow, when I smelled what I smelled from those girls, I knew you didn’t want them forcing themselves to get into the tub with you when they were feeling like that. Did I misjudge, Young Mistress?”
“Absolutely not,” I replied. “Thank you.”
She squeezed the excess conditioner out with a towel, then left it to air dry while she went about straightening up the bathroom.
I sighed and leaned back, thinking while I let my body soak in the mana. Not only could I detect their fear with my nonmortal senses, a mortal like Genette could smell it. Yes, it was her beastkin nose at work, but she’s a mortal with mortal limits. For her to become concerned, and to do so from the next room, meant it must have been quite terrifying for those girls.
The staff in Atianus knew me, or at least knew about me. But here in Pendor, they still must remember the master of Narses Castle prior to Mother. Although those girls had been toddlers when he died, they grew up hearing about the terrifying Lord Egon, the Vampire Duke. And they knew I was his daughter.
Genette had certainly made the right decision. And she was a native of this town, specifically, of the waterfront district in the Lower Town that this castle overlooked. She had grown up during a time when Lord Egon still ruled over this place. As a pretty girl, she had been a potential victim.
But was he the terrifying Lord Egon, or my mother’s friend? I still had that confusion to deal with, that I still couldn’t process.
There was just barely enough room in this tub, so I considered growing my tail. My flukes would be left out of the water, hanging out the end, but the rest would fit… I awakened my spiritual vessel and expanded my mind, planning to do so, then hesitated, with the thought that I might frighten Genette.
So I simply used my expanded mind to step back and take a hard look at my situation. And look inward at the anxieties of the normal, unexpanded me, examining them with the critical eye of a wiser Tiana–
— it was, it would seem, a mutual agreement between the anxious young knight and this humble one. It should not be understood as her running away from her fears. She simply had the thought that an older, wiser woman could handle her troubles in a calmer, more logical fashion, and then this humble one simply found herself aware and in control.
Within the recesses of the spiritual vessel, the frustrated and weary mind of the younger incarnation rested, wishing to leave matters in these hands for the moment.
It was not a situation that this humble one had the best skills to deal with. This body is unfamiliar, and outside the simulation environment of Sky Ocean, it is not possible to reconstruct the body of Fan Li.
But a humble scholar can be an actor if she puts her mind to it. And one who chases two rabbits catches neither. Casting an eye through the forest of Tiana’s concerns, this humble one brushed aside all the rabbits her mind had begun chasing and focused on the one upon which everything hinged.
Standing and stepping out of the tub, using Will to remain steady in the process, in lieu of the maids that would ordinarily offer their hand to steady their Young Mistress, this humble one summoned the rich elements that this world offered, so dense compared to the world of Huajie, pulling them into a wind and warming them to temperature similar to the effect that Robert Stewart’s memory described as a ‘hair dryer’, only on a larger scale.
“Young Mistress?” Genette yipped, surprised by the sudden motion. Indeed, the young Tiana had the habit of submitting to her maids when they tended to her, politely allowing them to do their work without interference from her. Suddenly taking off on her own was not normal behavior.
It couldn’t be helped. The tiny cyclone wrapped and buffeted this humble one’s form, quickly drying skin and hair, then vanished. The Young Mistress strode out of the bath room with her lady’s maid hurrying to follow her.
Doing my best to sound like Tiana, this humble one directed, “Genette, fetch me a chemise and a hair tie. Quickly. I’m in a hurry.”
“What’s the matter, Young Mistress?” she fretted while rushing to find the items I requested. Tiana’s sword harness hung nearby, with her companion Durandal waiting within the scabbard and her other items all tucked in their places.
“I have somewhere to go. Tell His Royal Highness that I will likely miss dinner, but I will be back before breakfast.”
“You’re leaving?” she gasped, but this one didn’t see the need to answer and let the statement stand.
Genette pulled the garment onto her Young Mistress, as well as the unmentioned panties, and applied the hair tie.
“You’re going out like that?” the appalled beastkin woman protested as her mistress strapped on the sword harness and strode to the french doors out to the balcony, but this humble one ignored her. Growing Tiana’s wings, this humble one launched into the sky.
