The Book Eaters(19)
The adults of Fairweather Manor came to see her off. Even the aunts, ever reclusive, always so withdrawn from her as she grew, made an appearance. A girl leaving home for her first wedding was a big event and worth marking. Little Chester, the son whom Faerdre had left behind, gave a happy wave. He was nearly five now.
Devon squeezed each member of her Family in tight hugs, too overwhelmed to be tearful. She would not be coming home for four years if the wedding went well and a child was conceived. Everyone shook hands and hugged. Some kissed her and wished her luck.
Aunt Beulah was the oldest of the aunts, pushing into her seventies, and the last to say good-bye. She tugged Devon down to her own stooped level and whispered in a heavy Yorkshire accent, “Be strong, love, and don’t let ’em see y’ cry. It’ll be all reet in the end.”
“Y—yes, I’m sure,” Devon said, a little startled, and gave her an awkward hug before turning to go. An odd comment. She had no plans to cry, let alone allow others to watch her shed tears.
The limo waited in the driveway, flanked by knights and their dragons on idle motorbikes. Knights not only arranged the marriages, as a neutral non-Family faction, but enforced the agreements and provided a secure escort.
She didn’t even have to pack. Her bags were already in the trunk and Uncle Aike was already sitting inside, waiting with a patient smile. Devon glanced back, unnerved to find the old aunt still staring at her.
“Don’t worry about a thing, princess,” he said as she scooted inside. “Your dear aunt Beulah is rather a killjoy, these days. Eats a bit too much women’s fiction, you know how it is.”
“I’m not worried,” she told him, rallying a smile and giving him a peck on the cheek. “I’m very lucky.”
She was indeed lucky. Other people, like her brother Ramsey, had to labor and strive to stand out among his peers, had to endure training and hardship among the knights. Still others—most humans, in fact—lived lives without purpose or direction. Many were crushed by poverty and circumstance. Their women were volatile, disorderly, disadvantaged.
But book eater women were rare and special, having a secure place in society that they were comfortable in. Therefore, she too was rare and special without having to do anything other than exist, and the role she took was one that suited her station.
In short, she had lived a charmed life in a beautiful home, kept safe and happy from a twisted world beyond the manor boundaries. That much she could verify not only from her uncles and the things her brothers said but from the books she’d stolen to read: full of drama, heartbreak, hideous crime, darkness, stress. All of that she had been spared. Jane Eyre living in poverty, embroiled in her tempestuous affairs? That would never be Devon.
And here, now, wearing a net of sapphires in her hair and a green debut dress that laced tight across the bodice, Devon clicked on the expensive seat belt in her expensive limousine. She was clothed in wealth and radiant with luck. Though not royalty in a strictly technical sense, she was certainly a princess in all the ways that counted.
Live quietly. Obey the rules. Please the Family. Do all that, and life would be good. Life was good.
“Have you heard from Ramsey?” she said, rubbing a thumb along the edge of her seat belt strap. “During his last call, he said he hoped he could come and see me off.”
Poor Ramsey, who’d borne the brunt of Devon’s last foolish mistake.
“As far as I know, your brother is well, but too busy with his studies for a visit,” Uncle Aike said with his usual absentmindedness. “Perhaps for your next wedding, my dear.”
Don’t be disappointed, Devon told herself. Her brother was a knight and had responsibilities now. She was lucky he still called her at all, after the trouble she’d gotten him into.
It’d taken four years, in fact, before Ramsey had been willing to answer her calls—four hard years of him being miserable under the knights, while she sat at home cooking in a soup of her own shame.
The worst of Ramsey’s training had tapered off, and he had settled into a role of his own now. Things would never be the same, but at least something existed between them. She was grateful for the communication, however guarded and irregular it might be.
They drove mostly on the motorway or through small country roads. As was custom, the driver took a path that involved as few towns as possible. She found herself wishing vainly that they could go through a city. Obviously, human society was inferior to what the book eaters conducted among themselves, but she was a little tiny bit curious about it, nonetheless. It was hard not to be.
At one small village, a young couple walked side by side. The lady wore jeans, she noted. Many of the women out here wore men’s clothing; very few wore the kind of long dresses that Devon had grown accustomed to throughout her life.
As they paused on a street corner, the woman said something that made the man laugh; he took her hand. Devon remembered holding hands with her brothers when she was a child, but that was entirely different to the couple outside.
“What’s he like?” She hadn’t voiced that question in the six months since being told of the engagement.
“Your husband, you mean?” Uncle Aike was discreetly eating a volume of Shelley’s poetry. “Competent, wealthy, intelligent. You will be quite happy in that house, I am sure.”
Was my mother happy? Living with you, in Fairweather Manor? Devon folded her hands into a small knot and imagined saying those words aloud. And Uncle Aike, who was not really her uncle at all and should have been called her father, would say Absolutely, my dear! with complete earnestness.