The answer was simple, short...and sat heavily in the silence of Simanel. Or maybe the silence belonged only to her. Vera left many conversations with two words, one word or if she had to, a string of them that amounted to no more than cold fact. As they walked, Vera found herself counting seconds. There were a certain number that would allow her a topic change or an end.
How were the red roof tops of Eistocene so vivid in her memory when she was surrounded with white stone? Vera looked away from him. The majority of the Castel was attending the Solstice Ball, giving her and Eragos empty corridors and streets to pass through. Vera felt they were walking through frozen patches of time.
Vera thought on what he said about being a knight, about training with his father. She heard love in those words. Maybe that, and not his knowing, was the reason for the green thorn so close to her heart. Duty was strange. How did one grow love for duty when the sunlight was so strictly timed, the falling water so measured? Vera still couldn't explain it, after finding those emotions in the Castel. She only wished she had known duty as a child like Eragos had known duty.
The seconds were long past her.
"Beit-Orane is a family of lords and generals," she began. "As a daughter of the High Lord, I was trained to become a woman worthy of leading one of our famed armies. The method used was called Itamesazen - the great suffering. We all endured it as children."
Vera ran her thumb along the cloak's embroidery. The scars that lived in her skin seemed to crawl beneath her white uniform. For all his tattoos and secrets, there were times she wondered if Eragos would look upon her the same way, if he saw the marks her past had drawn.
"But I was stripped of the right to an army or inherited land at birth, for the good of Beit-Orane. I was not to rise above my siblings, or with them. My existence was and is still considered..." Vera thought of the cleanest term she had ever heard for it and chose that, not wanting to garner pity. "Unfated."