Chapter 1705: Sweets and Snow (Part Three)
"Why do you care?" Adala snapped as she pulled back for a second time, only to find that she still couldn’t escape Ashlynn’s grasp. "Why is who I love so important that you won’t just... let it go," she said, hating how petulant her voice sounded.
This wasn’t the conversation she expected to have with a Great Witch at all, and she wished that Lady Ashlynn would let the topic go. She’d rather talk about her family and their lands or ways she might be able to help Lady Ashlynn rule the march or... or anything else at all. Anything but this.
"I’ll tell you why," Ashlynn promised solemnly. "But only after you give me a name. If you can’t do that much, then talking about anything else is going to be far too difficult."
"Fine," Adala said. "It, it’s Charlotte," she said, turning her gaze out into the snow and watching the dancing flakes fall inexorably toward the ground. She couldn’t bear the thought of watching Lady Ashlynn, the brave and bold woman who had crawled out of her own grave and fought her way free of her gilded cage, as she recognized the kind of deviant, twisted desire she’d allowed to take root in her heart.
Adala had seen the look of disgust that came from revealing her secret on too many faces before. During her years in the Iron Kingdom, she’d broached the topic as obliquely as she could in the dorms of the academy when her classmates fell to discussions of the types of people they hoped their fathers would marry them to.
She’d never exposed herself, but she’d heard the taunts and jeers leveled at the rare individual who did. Worse, she’d seen a couple of young noblewomen who found comfort in each other’s arms when the Head Mistress of the dorms caught them in a moment of indecency...
The flagstones of the courtyard ran red before the Head Mistress put down her lash. Both women were expelled, sent home to their families in disgrace. There had been rumors, afterward, that one of them had even been sold into bondage so she could no longer tarnish her family’s good name with her deviancy.
She’d never seen anyone executed for confessing to loving another woman the way a witch would be burned at the stake for using their powers... But to Adala, the consequences of sharing her secret were almost as dire.
But now that she’d told Ashlynn, now that she’d spoken the name she’d held in the depths of her heart, she felt like she was frozen in place, waiting for the lash to fall.
"I’m glad that you can speak her name," Ashlynn said as she gave Adala a light, reassuring squeeze. "Now I don’t have to tell Charlotte that the person she loves is too afraid to love her back."
"What?" Adala exclaimed. Her head spun back to face Ashlynn so quickly that her intricately braided hair whistled through the air like a whip and her heart thundered in her chest like the hoofbeats of a galloping horse as she stared at the witch who held her in her grasp.
"Charlotte... you... how? How could you..." Adala stammered as she searched Ashlynn’s face for confirmation that the thing she’d said was true even as her mind screamed at her that it couldn’t possibly be.
"Because Charlotte is my friend," Ashlynn said with a gentle, reassuring smile. "Even if we didn’t know each other well. She never gave me your name, but I can see the way she looks at you, and when I saw the way you looked at her when Serle suggested that she marry Ollie... I know that look too well," she said as her smile grew.
"It’s the same one I saw on my Nyrielle’s face when she thought I might marry back into the nobility of Gaal in the name of securing peace," Ashlynn said. "The terrified look of someone who is about to lose the person they cherish most. But I would never leave my Nyri," Ashlynn said lightly. "And you don’t have to leave your Charlotte either."
"But... but... how?" Adala asked, her mind reeling as she found that there was still something Lady Ashlynn could say that would shake the foundations of her world as much as everything else she’d revealed in the Great Hall. "How can you know?"
"The last time I passed through Otker, on my way to marry Owain, we stayed up late talking about books and love," Ashlynn explained as her mind drifted back to a night that felt like it belonged to a different life. "I think that the reason Charlotte is willing to accept whoever her family picked for her is that she couldn’t think of a way to ever be with the person she loved," Ashlynn said.
"She told me that the person she liked had been sent far away and she thought she’d never see them again," Ashlynn explained. "She was happy she was wrong and excited that you were coming home, and she was sad because you hadn’t found anyone who made you happy even though you went so far away. She never told me your name, but she told me enough to put it together when I saw the two of you together," Ashlynn said.
"I’m sorry for forcing you," Ashlynn added. "But I owe you a debt for speaking out against your father last night, and I thought... If I could do anything for you, anything at all, I would try to give you and Charlotte the chance to grab hold of the love that’s there before anything else can get in the way."
"Do you, do you really think that if I went to her," Adala said as the shock began to recede from her mind like the outgoing tide. "Do you think she’d welcome me? If I confessed..."
"I think she’d more than welcome you," Ashlynn said. "And if it helps, I’ll talk to her too. The two of you will have plenty to talk about in the next few days, and you should spend them deciding what you want when the rest of the realm arrives."
"What do you mean?" Adala asked, caught off guard by the shift in subject.
"The first, and most important thing I brought you out here to discuss is your future with Charlotte," Ashlynn said. "Before anything else happened, I wanted to do that. But there are decisions we have to make about what comes next for your family and their lands. Your father cannot continue on as Baron in Leufroy," Ashlynn said firmly.
"But whether you become the next baroness or pursue something else entirely," Ashlynn said. "That’s up to you."
