§
My physique allows me to go far longer periods with no food than a mortal, but I still become hungry, and I was quite grateful when the maids appeared with my breakfast.
However, because Aunt Elianora insisted that I be allowed to eat it first, this delayed my receiving any more answers to my many questions. I could only take my miso soup and eat my rice and fish in silence while attended by maids who seemed reluctant to disturb me.
They looked concerned about me. It seemed my memory loss was now well-known to all of them and clearly worried them.
Well, that would make sense, right? Because it was a rush job, the efforts of the castle staff and the priests at the ducal shrine in Narses Upper Town were focused and intense at the moment, preparing for a royal wedding that was supposed to take place in mere hours, and the bride just woke up completely unaware she was getting married! Of course they were worried!
The weight of that problem was bearing down on my shoulders, and the guilt over the trouble I was causing everyone was only making it worse. The anxious eyes tracking my every motion as I ate were no help either, and my sulking was only feeding back to them and making things worse.
I braved my way through the remainder of my breakfast, or at least as much as I felt my nervous stomach would accept, then took a sip of tea before telling the senior girl, “Take this away. I want to see the prince now.”
“Yes, My Lady!” she immediately agreed, and the staff briskly whipped everything away while she led me to an overstuffed chair to the side. A sofa nearby was positioned perfectly for private chats… an unusually intimate preparation that I had never seen inside a bedroom before. Had I arranged for this during the time I had forgotten?
As I waited, a cat appeared and jumped onto my lap, which surprised me. Cats and dogs tend to fear vampires, and I’m no exception to that rule. I froze for a bit, afraid to scare her away, but this one was turning out to be completely the opposite of normal pets.
Then I noticed in [Fairy Sight] that this was no mortal cat. She seemed to be half-mana, just like a fairy. She stepped into my lap, stretched luxuriantly, then curled into a circle as she laid down, making herself at home. Perplexed and uncertain of what to do, I ended up petting her while wondering what exactly she was.
Genette led Big Brother Rod and the healer, Mireia, into my room and seated them across the low table from me, served tea, then retreated and left us alone. During all of it, the cat just purred without moving.
“You two… sit next to each other quite naturally,” I noticed. It matched well with how familiarly she had spoken of him earlier.
Mireia immediately bit her lower lip and drooped slightly, confirming my suspicion.
“You already have a mistress lined up, before we’re even married?” I asked Big Brother Rod.
I was trying to tease him. I didn’t make it sound accusing, but he looked so self-conscious, I slightly regretted saying it.
The prince sighed and shook his head. “It’s an agreement that the three of us made, Ti. So, yes, Mir and I are lovers. You already knew about it, and you encouraged me to make Mir my official concubine after our marriage. You were fine with it, because you and Mir are…”
Mireia grabbed his hand and he chopped off. He frowned, but she shook her head when he turned to her.
“Please let me explain to her, Rod,” she told him softly.
He nodded, and the girl stood. Circling the table between us, she came up beside me, wearing a gentle smile.
Tipping her head, she said, “I can feel the bond between us, My Lady. Are you unable to feel it?”
The ‘bond between us’? What kind of theatrical line was that? Although she was honestly looking at me with the same tenderness she gave her boyfriend over there.
After biting her lip again, she said, “My Lady, we have a special relationship, you know?”
It was a little odd, hearing this from a fellow girl, and I was quite puzzled.
She stated carefully, “One where I’m your Servant and you are my Mistress.”
A feeling of horror filled me as I understood what she was saying. “I… no, I didn’t do that to you, did I?”
The gentle smile came back. “You did nothing wrong, My Lady. It was my fault. You were seriously wounded, and to help you, I forced you to feed on me. You were barely conscious at the time. Apparently that was a very dangerous thing to do. I’ve learned since then that healers are especially susceptible to the Blood Bond, and that a badly-wounded vampire doesn’t have any control.”
She dimpled and summarized, “I had no hope of avoiding it, the moment I had you feed on me. So please don’t feel guilty.”
How could I not feel guilty?! I had planned to never make any blood slaves at all!
Ignoring the raging emotions inside me, my victim simply smiled and hugged my head to her chest. Which was really unfair. No, it was positively cheating!
“If.. if I… told you to become Rod’s mistress…” I worried, but she didn’t let me finish.
“You did not!” she declared firmly, while continuing to hold me. “To be perfectly frank, Rod and I had already become close before I even met you, My Lady. Or at least, it was just beginning around the time I met you.”
Her face clouded and she admitted, “Which I’m actually pretty sorry about. You keep telling me not to apologize, but…”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’ve never felt that way about him, after all. I don’t even understand how… I mean, it’s quite mystifying to find myself pregnant when I don’t…”
She began giggling.
I pulled away from her. “How mean?!”
She gave me a sympathetic smile, tipping her head again. “We both know you aren’t interested in men that way, My Lady.”
“That isn’t…! I mean… well yes, I’ve never felt that way about a man, but…!”
Her lips landed on my forehead as I was stammering, and my mind went blank.
“We know,” she said softly as I gaped at her. “And you’ve actually never been with a man that way, My Lady. Those babies in your womb are a miracle given to you by a goddess. They belong to you and Rod, but he laid with me to make them. And I was very happy to be able to help you, I promise.”
§
I turned to Rhea and accused, “That’s you talking, not Mir.”
The goddess chuckled. “It’s not, but I’m coaching her. She didn’t want me to handle that part, so she really is doing the talking. But I’m taking over now, to take care of the hard part.”
“The hard part?”
“Obviously, telling you about your mother and the king. They considered not telling the child until later, but that’s not possible. The absence of the parents will become too glaring, once they are missing at the ceremony. Even an inferiority complex as bad as Tiana’s isn’t strong enough to explain away her own parental figures skipping out on her wedding.”
We watched through some very heartrending moments, as they brought Tiana up to date, not only about her parents but also the civil war. Frankly I don’t want to go through the details again, because it was as hard to watch her as it had been to experience it the first time.
But in the end, she was a proud noble daughter and a duty-bound aristocrat, and could not cause the trouble that delaying the wedding would become. So we also ended up watching her dressed in that traditional gown and brought to the shrine.
In the old days, they would carry the bride in a palanquin the entire distance from her home to the local lord’s shrine, even if she lived in the countryside and the shrine was in a market town miles away. Thankfully, Pendor has made some progress since then. Longer trips are done via horse-drawn coach now. But they still carried her in a red palanquin from the street, accompanied by a parade of dancers and firecrackers, through the rather expansive grounds of the Ducal Shrine, to the temple gate.
There, the Chinese New Year-like atmosphere abruptly stopped, shifting to a solemn one. An entourage of priests, shrine maidens, monks and nuns surrounded her for the walk through the inner grounds to the wedding hall, stopping along the way at the open doors to the inner sanctum to wash her hands, then bow and pray to the enshrined spirits (meaning Mother and Grandmother!)
Rod met her at the door of the wedding hall and accompanied her from there, down an aisle between all the kneeling guests, up to the pillows where they knelt.
A Dorian priest waved a fan over both of them many times while reciting prayers and rituals in Ancient Dorian language. He had them alternately drink from a dish of sake, the one element in the ceremony that I could confidently say was Japanese, but he did it three times, which I’m not sure is the same or not. And he splashed them both with water strewn using a green sprig of leaves, an act that looked weirdly familiar to me as a former Catholic boy.
Rhea glanced over at me at one point, and noted with an arched eyebrow,”You need to stop thinking that you’re glad to be able to skip this experience. You’re experiencing it right now. You’ll remember the entire event in first person when your awarenesses merge later.”
When the ritual at last ended, the new husband and wife went from there to the banquet hall, to sit with around three hundred noble guests through a formal kaiseki-style wedding meal laced with many more elaborate rituals.
Glancing at the others, I asked Rhea, “Why are we just sitting here watching this? Isn’t the situation with our spiritual vessels sort of an emergency? Shouldn’t we be doing something about it?”
Rhea contemplated me for a bit before saying, “I am accomplishing several critical steps right now. Your turn will come shortly.”
Which reminded me that, as an immortal, she could in fact have avatars and proxies, and just spiritual presences, in all kinds of places. Of course, she was apparently only just barely into the First Harmonic realm, still regarded as a celestial maiden rather than a true Higher Immortal, so her multi-tasking would be limited to perhaps a dozen places at a time, but she might still be working all kinds of jobs right now.
She smiled and told me, “A dozen would be a real stretch for me. I’m no Great Senior. I normally don’t do more than a half-dozen at once. And I am handling one of those tasks right here.”
After a short glance to the side, at the Greek girl sipping her wine and still performing an excellent scared rabbit impersonation, she explained in spiritual voice, [Lydia is here to become accustomed to the fact that what she is seeing is not a dream but a reality. Right now, her awareness in Tiana’s spiritual vessel on Huade remains under the impression she is watching a dream. It makes perfect sense for her to think that, of course. A mortal’s dreams tend to proceed without much agency. The actions they take are taken at best with a fleeting thought, and when they try something it rarely goes as intended. Being in a body, with no control over what you are doing or saying, is indeed a dreamlike condition, and it is happening in a world where she recognizes nothing.]
The girl noticed us looking at her and shrank slightly. For her peace of mind, I turned back to the ‘screen’ instead
[Thus, I am teaching the Lydia here privately while you watch, about what she was seeing, and about how you and Fan Li are the lives she lived after her own. Your presence here is for her benefit right now, not the other way around. Later, I will connect her with her awareness on Huade, and the version of her there will better understand what is going on.]
“I still don’t understand what the point is,” I complained.
“She is the key to you, Fan Li, Sirth and others returning to Huade,” the goddess stated. “Even if that child can do nothing, she keeps the vessel active so that the rest of you can act via your [Blood Effigy] technique.”
She then smiled with a glint of cruel intent. “But of course, before we can allow you to return, you must learn to avoid triggering the barrier collapse before Tiana can handle it.”
“You mean the stuff that Fan Li has been teaching me?”
“Mm,” she nodded, and took a sip of wine. When did she switch her own tea out with Lydia’s wine? “But I think I shall take over as the instructor. Fan Li’s methods are too gentle.”
I felt a twinge of dread, remembering the scholar’s insane training methods.
“You consider that gentle?”
