She shrugged. “I’ll give it some thought. Maybe after I’ve heard you tell The Frog he can hop on back to his lily pad, I might go. But not before then and not while I’m feeling like this!”
Ben stood up. Enough was enough. “You are fifteen years old and you don’t have the right yet to determine what you will and won’t do! Your mother and I still make certain decisions for you, and this is one. Your education begins anew at Libiris. You can have today and tomorrow to pack your things and make ready to travel. Then you are going. Is that clear?”
She gave him a look. “What’s clear is that you would do anything to get me out from underfoot. You might even marry me off to someone despicable. That’s what’s clear to me!” She sneered.
The door opened suddenly, and Willow stepped through. She glanced purposefully from one to the other. “Why are you both shouting?” she asked. “You can be heard all the way to Elderew. Can you please conduct this conversation in a quieter fashion?”
“This conversation is over!” Mistaya snapped.
“Will you please be reasonable—” Ben started to say, but she stomped out of the room without waiting for him to finish and slammed the door behind her. Ben stared after her in dismay, slowly sinking back into his chair.
Willow crossed the room and sat down on the other side of the writing table, her gaze settling on him like a weight.
“Don’t say it,” he said at once.
“I think you could have handled that better,” she said anyway.
“You weren’t here. You didn’t hear what she said.”
“I did not have to be here, and I did not have to hear what she said. It is enough to know that you both kept talking long after you should have stopped. But you, especially. You are the parent, the elder of the two. You know better. Pushing her to do things—worse, telling her she must—is always a mistake.”
“She’s fifteen.”
“She is fifteen in some ways, but she is much older in others. You cannot think of her in the ways you are used to thinking of fifteen-year-old girls. She is much more complicated than that.”
She was right, of course, although he didn’t much like admitting it. He had been drawn into an argument that he was destined to lose from the outset. But that didn’t change what he knew was right or necessary.
“I know I can do better with her,” he conceded. “I know I lose my temper with her when I shouldn’t. She knows how to push all the right buttons and I let her do it.” He paused. “But that doesn’t change things. She is still going to Libiris with Questor the day after tomorrow. I have my mind set on this, Willow.”
She nodded. “I know you do, and I know that it would be good for her to go. But I am not certain she sees it that way.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter how she sees it. She’s going whether she wants to or not.”
He was bothered by how that pronouncement sounded the moment he was finished making it. In the days ahead, he would have cause to remember so.
FLIGHT
Mistaya marched back through the castle to her sleeping chamber without speaking to anyone—not even to a bewildered Questor Thews, who tried to ask her a question—closed and locked the chamber door, and sat down to contemplate her undeserved misery. The day was bright and clear and sunny outside her window, but in her heart there was only gloom and despair.
How could her father be so unfeeling?
It was bad enough that she had returned home under a dark cloud, suspended from the prestigious boarding school to which he had sent her with such high hopes, her future a big, fat blank slate on which she had no idea what she would write. It was worse still that she was almost immediately confronted with a marriage proposal she didn’t need from a man she didn’t like, a proposal so outrageous that it should have been rejected out of hand and yet somehow wasn’t. But to top it all off, she was now looking at months of exile to a place that no one in their right mind would visit under any circumstances, a gloomy and empty set of buildings that were crumbling and breaking apart, that were filled with dust and debris, and that housed moldering old books no one had opened in decades.
At least, that was the way she envisioned it in her mind as she sat before her mirror and looked at her stricken face and thought to herself that no one should have to endure this.
