hadn’t expected anything like this when he was led into the room. She was vulnerable, strengthless, unable to defend herself. He found himself becoming disgusted with her. Where was the woman he’d loved, or even the woman he’d hated? This desperation was pitiable.
Why had he left her? The memories seemed distant now: it was hard to summon up the feelings he’d felt then. They’d been tinted by ten years of scorn. Yet he did remember some things. Thoughts rather than emotions. The internal dialogues he had with himself during the long hours alone, flying haulage for her father’s company.
In the early months, he’d believed they’d be together for ever. He told himself he’d found a woman for the rest of his life. He couldn’t conceive of meeting someone more wonderful than she was, and he wasn’t tempted to try.
But it was one thing to daydream such notions and quite another to be faced with putting them into practice. When she began to talk of engagement, with a straightforwardness that he’d previously found charming, he began to idolise her a little less. His patience became short. No longer could he endlessly indulge her flights of fancy. His smile became fixed as she played her girlish games with him. Her jokes all seemed to go on too long. He found himself wishing she’d just be sensible.
At nineteen, he was still young. He didn’t make the connection between his sudden moodiness and irritability and the impending threat of marriage. He told himself he wanted to marry her. It would be stupid not to, after all. Hadn’t he decided she was the one for him?
But the more he snapped at her, the more demanding she became. Tired of waiting - or perhaps afraid to wait too long - she asked him to marry her. He agreed, and secretly resented her for a long time afterwards. How could she put him in that position? To choose between marrying her, which he didn’t want, or destroying her, which he wanted even less? He had no option but to agree at the time and hope to find a way out of it later.
And yet Trinica seemed blissfully unaware of any of this. Though his bad moods were ever more frequent, they didn’t seem to trouble her any more. She was assured that he was hers, and he seethed that she would celebrate her victory so prematurely.
By the time the date of the wedding was announced, Frey’s thoughts were mainly of escape. He slept little and badly. Her father’s obvious disapproval encouraged him to think that the wedding was a bad idea. A barely educated boy of low means, raised in an orphanage, Frey wasn’t a good match for the highly intelligent and beautiful daughter of an eminent aristocrat. Those social barriers, that had seemed laughable in the first flush of love, suddenly rose high in Frey’s mind.
He wanted to be a pilot for the Coalition Navy, steering vast frigates to the north to do battle with the Manes, or south to crush the Sammies. He wanted to be among the first to land on New Vardia or Jagos after the Great Storm Belt calmed. He wanted to fly free across the boundless skies.
When he looked at Trinica, and she smiled her perfect smile, he saw the death of his dreams.
That was when she fell pregnant. The wedding was hastily brought forward, and her father’s opposition to it transformed into whole-hearted support of their enterprise, backed up by veiled threats if Frey should waver. Frey began to suffer panic attacks in the night.
He remembered the sensation of a vice around his ribs, squeezing a little harder with every day that brought him closer to the wedding. He never seemed to have quite enough breath in his body. The laughter of his friends as they congratulated him became a distressing cacophony, like an enraged brace of ducks. He felt harried and harassed wherever he went. The smallest request was enough to send him into a fluster.
He remembered wondering what it would be like to feel like that for ever.
By this point he was absolutely certain he didn’t want to marry her. But it didn’t mean he didn’t want to be with her. Even with all the irritation and buried anger, he still adored this woman. She was his first love, and the one who had teased him from his rather cold, uninspiring childhood into a wild world where
