Page 47 of Princess Bride Swap

She had slapped him across the face. He had cried. Which had earned him a night in his room without dinner. He hadn’t thought of that in years. He’d blocked it out of his mind.

Lyon didn’t care for old, ugly memories. He preferred to think of her as a strong leader. The woman who’d shaped him. But if she’d shaped Lyon... “Did she never give you a choice either?”

“What are you talking about?”

“What pressure did she put on you?”

“Who?”

“Your mother.”

“Your grandmother...” Mother’s brow furrowed and she shook her head. “This is ridiculous. Your wife created a scene and now you want to discuss your grandmother with me?”

“Yes. Because it all goes back to her, doesn’t it? Why we’re here. Worried about...scenes. Afraid of love and soft spots. Things that normal people think aregood.”

“That poor woman watched her family destroy every tradition, every positive relationship, every bit of honor her father and grandfather had built. And instead of letting it destroy her, she focused on us. How we could save it. It could never be me, Lyon. That’s hardly her fault or some pressure she put upon me. But she taught me just the same, for when I would give her a son.”

A payment to a debt. He’d always accepted that as a perfectly acceptable thing to put on a child. But there was something about soft spots, and the possibility of love. The idea of making his own child with Beaugonia, and the way she’d looked at him when he’d tried to explain. It all added up into a sick feeling in his stomach.

His child would never be a payment to anything. They would be aperson. An heir, yes, but achildfirst.

“Givehera son?” he asked his mother gently.

She whirled away, frustration and temper in every harsh move. “You sound so much like your father right now. And he waswrongabout her. Hedied, and she and you remained.”

“Wrong about her? I thought Grandmother approved of him?”

“Shedid. Because he was a good man from a good family. Upstanding and honest. Your father found your grandmother...difficult. But he simply didn’t understand. He wasn’t royal.”

This was the first Lyon had ever heard of it. The first he’d ever asked. Because...his grandmother had discouraged any talk of those already gone. Or so she said, though she spoke of her own father plenty. “Did you think he didn’t understand. Or did Grandmother think that?”

Mother looked up at him like he’d just stabbed her clean through. “Why are we talking about this, Lyon?”

He didn’t know. Only that it was crystallizing things for him. Things he’d been trying to push away ever since the chalet. All the ways Beau had, without meaning to, flipped the truths he’d believed from his grandmother on their head.

And he looked at his mother now and saw himself. She had believed his grandmother’s hard, cold truths. But someone had loved her, and she had loved someone. Father had been her soft spot, and then he’d died. Too soon, too young.

“Losing him must have been very hard.”

“People die,” she said, but he heard the grief in her voice all the same.

“Yes, that was Grandmother’s line, wasn’t it?”

Mother straightened, lifted her chin. “She was right. Everyone must deal with death. There is no point in grieving, in letting it mark you.”

“I don’t think all emotions have to have a point, Mother. They’re just there.” Anxiety. Grief.

Love.

Such a false equivalency they’d passed down. That one love might blot out another. That responsibility to his wife would mean disaster for his country.

But wasn’t that the false equivalency he’d employed back at the chalet? Desire would lead to forgoing all...sense, responsibility.

“Have you ever wondered, Madre?” he said gently. “If Grandmother put an unreasonable weight upon our shoulders?”

“She only wanted what was best for Divio. And you should as well. Letting that wife of yourspoisonyou is beneath you.”

But he saw something desperate in his mother’s eyes. Like he had gotten at least a little through to her, even if she wouldn’t admit it.

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