Chapter 188: The Marquess’s Poem
Chapter 187: The Marquess’s Poem
Lyria’s POV
I turned toward Duke Valenridge after I was done speaking, and he had a smile on his face.
It was small and brief, and he did not hold it long, but it was there — and it was the most unguarded expression I had seen on his face since he had laughed at the lake.
Then he turned toward the Queen and bowed.
"Princess Lyria," he said, "has explained it perfectly well."
He did not wait to hear a reply or wait to be dismissed.
He simply turned and walked back to where he had been standing among the candidates, with the same unhurried ease he brought to everything, as though the concept of waiting for permission had simply never occurred to him as a requirement.
The Queen watched him go. She did not say anything, but it was obvious to me she was annoyed.
The competition continued.
More names were called. More candidates stepped forward, more parchments were exchanged, more poems read and explained in the careful, measured rhythm the hall had settled into.
I listened, though hardly any poems were as good as what Lucian, Duke Thorncrest, and Duke Valenridge had produced.
Then the footman stepped forward once more.
"His Grace," he announced, "Marquess Corvin Hale of Westreach."
The dread arrived before I had fully processed the name.
It settled in the pit of my stomach. I pressed my hands together in my lap and kept my expression exactly where it was.
I watched him walk.
His bearing was correct. Everything about his presentation was without flaw.
And his face, as he crossed the floor toward me, wore a smirk, and I knew just from that expression that I was going to regret what was to come.
He stopped in front of me and extended his parchment.
I looked at it.
Then I looked at Jacinta. She had a small smirk on her face.
And in that moment, with the Marquess’s parchment extended toward me and Jacinta’s smile fixed upon me from across the space between our seats, I understood.
This was why.
This was the reason the Queen had announced, so pleasantly and so early, that the Moon candidates would be reading the poems aloud.
It was for this moment.
Marquess Corvin Hale, standing before me with his smirk and his parchment, knowing as they all knew that I could not read.
I took the parchment from his hand, and he stepped back.
I looked down at it.
The first word was home.
I knew that word.
The royal family did not know about Patricia’s lessons. And even if I could read some words, there was a limit to it — and that was their aim. To see me fall.
I held the parchment in both hands and looked at it, telling myself to breathe.
There was no way I would be able to read this freely without stumbling, but I could not back down now. I had to do this.
And so I took a deep breath and then began.
---
Home.
A term of considerable architectural and domiciliary designation,
most frequently employed in reference to a structurally constituted habitation,
wherein an individual’s c-c-corporeal presence is recurrently and habitually s-situated.
It may be construed as a materially in-s-stantiated e-edifice,
composed of i-interdependent structural components,
deliberately arranged for the facilitation of sustained human occupancy,
and the regulated continuity of q-quotidian existence.
In conventional and j-jurisprudential usage alike,
it denotes a spatially demarcated l-locus of residence,
rendered familiar through persistent habitation,
and reinforced by successive cycles of i-ingress and e-egress.
I hated this. The more I read, the more my voice sounded less steady.
And I knew the King and Queen were enjoying this. I was not certain I pronounced the words correctly; I only tried to do as Patricia had taught me.
My eyes stung with tears, but I held them back. I should have known this would be more serious than I had initially thought. I should have known the royal family would make sure I made a fool of myself in the presence of the court and the full kingdom, but I could not stop now. I had to go on.
Walls, p-passageways, thresholds, and interior partitions
acquire their significance not through i-i-intrinsic a-abstraction,
but through c-cumulative familiarity and experiential repetition,
whereby the cognitive recognition of space is gradually con-consolidated.
A home, therefore, may b-be defined as that constructed environment
which, through p-prolonged and uninterrupted o-occupancy,
becomes e-epistemologically familiar to its inhabitant,
its spatial logic internalised through repeated n-navigation.
It is not to be construed as a m-metaphysical abstraction,
nor as an affective or sentimental construct,
but rather as a tangible, physically extant structure,
whose meaning is derived from habitual c-corporeal engagement.
Thus, home constitutes a building or d-domicile
to which one returns with sufficient r-regularity
that its internal c-configuration becomes entirely known,
its a-architecture memorised through continuous lived e-experience.
I took a breath when I was done, schooling my features because I knew I had just made a spectacle of myself, exactly as the royal family had intended.
"Your Highness," Marquess Hale said to me.
I turned and plastered on a fake smile. "Yes?"
"Perhaps that was difficult for you to read?" he asked me.
My eyes twitched and I clenched my fist. I could have hit him directly on his too-large nose, or perhaps placed my fingers in his eyes... I could have. But I also knew there was no way I was going to do that. After all, what would that say about my character?
"Thank you for your concern, my lord, but it was not difficult," I said with a fake smile.
He tilted his head in thought. "Some words were mispronounced, though."
I swallowed, my fingers burrowing into my palm.
"My lord," Jacinta said pleasantly, "my sister is just now getting accustomed to most things. And besides, your intellect was well written, so she stumbled in several places."
I smiled.
"Yes," I said calmly. "The Marquess’s intellect was well written, hence why I stumbled in various places. Perhaps if he had written it like the others, I would not have."
