Just what had been running through her mind when she came to see me? I knew her family must have seen her off, so had her father helped with the frankincense? Modesty permitting, my name had become somewhat well-known, and I still intended to become more famous. I’d said many times before that I was a sucker for positive publicity, even if the opposite scared the hell out of me.
I could see that there were boons in forging a strong connection with an adventurer like me. The discounted rates were an obvious point of appeal, but perhaps more relevant was that fundamental urge in any good parent to protect their children. Anyone that took on the burden of raising a hero’s child while they were out working the adventuring grind had a hell of a lot of strings to pull for the foreseeable future. What’s more, everyone in a small community welcomed fresh blood; the gene pool risked getting a wee bit stale after a while without new faces.
I bet that Mister Giesebrecht’s inner monologue had gone something like I want children blessed with strength to carry on this canton. He’d followed that motive to a hell of a conclusion through some impressive leaps of logic, but I couldn’t laugh at him. Since ancient times, people have pursued marriages as a means of “recruiting talent” into the family line. It was a practice as old as domestication, from the breeding of the first dogs to the cultivation of livestock.
The effects were evident if you looked at the nobles of Rhine. Generations of exacting standards for talent and aesthetics among the aristocracy’s choice of lovers had produced an abundance of frightfully competent and gorgeous extended family. This meritocratic, far-ranging, relatively freewheeling approach to romance, marriage, and procreation had rescued the noble bloodlines of Rhine from the ignominy that had plagued Earth’s House of Habsburg and many other blue-blooded lineages besides.
Folks in this world seemed a lot more leery of the self-defeating cultural hangups around “purity of the bloodline” that plagued their historical parallels back on Earth, preferring instead to treat the talents of relative strangers and outsiders like promising new grafts to the old family tree. It was awkward contemplating the extent to which this whole situation probably owed as much to Mister Giesebrecht seeing me as an alluring and valuable asset as it did to any genuine romantic feeling on his daughter’s part, but I was also very much aware that wasn’t the topic at hand right now.
A quivering hand, tear-filled eyes, racing breath—those mattered more in the moment.
“Master Erich,” Miss Firene said. “I’m...so scared... Too scared...to sleep on my own...”
She was telling the truth. She wasn’t just scared because of the attack—she was in the grip of a deeper dread, the realization that a peace she’d assumed would last all her days had been broken. Peace was the most precious thing to anyone, but it could also be lost in the blink of an eye, and restoring it was a long, brutal uphill battle. It seemed easy on paper—build a house, collect food, shore up defenses, earn money—but it took a mountain of effort. It was something you attained after scaling an endless staircase right up to the cloud-covered peak. But once there, it was easy to take it for granted. That went extra for those born into peace, raised with a promised future.
Human misunderstanding was inevitable. They believed that the stage they stood upon was built on top of steel pillars and a concrete foundation, when all that ever held it up was an unstable marsh. When that stage shook—which it indeed was wont to do—it felt an omen that the world itself was about to end. As someone who’d leaped down into the mud to try and keep that wobbling structure stable, I wouldn’t laugh at her. I knew well enough how it felt for her from my own past life.
I could see why she had a fear that couldn’t be staved off unless she was safe in the arms of the man she thought she could rely on. Margit had known as much before I did. That was why she’d decided to suggest the bet in the first place and shared her sexual quirks with me in spite of her own embarrassment. I always knew she was tough, but I also knew that she was a gentle person who could sense when another woman was struggling. I could never hold out long against her (or anyone like her). I was sure no one could.
I pulled in her shivering body, coat and all. Internally I continued to question myself, wondering if what I was doing was the right thing. At the same time, I couldn’t leave someone struggling when they were right in front of me.
I felt the tension in her slender, almost fragile body release. Her breath was warm; her body finally stopped shaking. The strength in her fingers grew and she looked me in the eye. Her lips, faintly open, called my name—like how a child calls for their parent; like how a worshipper asks for their god. Then those lips gradually opened.
I still didn’t know if this was the right move. It was a question I’d probably never find an answer to for as long as I lived.
[Tips] Rural society doesn’t place the same stock in chastity that noble circles often do.
It was a nigh-impossible task to grow up without learning something about the birds and the bees.
In a daze, the girl thought back on the time she had just spent. It had been like a dream. As she ruminated on the passion and redrew the images in her brain, she felt her chest and the pit of her stomach grow hot.
She was barely able to stand and too lethargic to even move her fingers, so what could explain the strange sensation that she wouldn’t mind going at it again? She was certain she would jump on the dozing boy next to her if only the energy for it still lingered in her body.
It had been so wonderful that she began to wonder if the women who gathered on canton festivals and slandered their men were in fact lying. The older women of the canton gave constant warnings to the young girls, telling them that their first time would be so painful that you would spend it praying for it to end, and that they would have to steel themselves for handling the bloodied sheets in the aftermath. And if you got really unlucky, the man might force his thing into you again to sate his lustful urges. The sex education available in the canton scarcely counted as education; it might have been more accurate to say that it constituted a list of sex threats. Sex warnings, perhaps. Bleak sex prophecies, certainly. Firene remembered that she could barely sleep that night from the horror of it all.