Page 102 of Sweetling
Molly blushed as she took the seat he motioned her toward. He shuffled behind a desk, much too big for the cramped room.
“You absolutely don’t need to,” she insisted, then hurried to help retrieve papers he knocked over with his rounded middle as he scooted around the edge of the desk.
“Forgive the cramped quarters,” said the mayor as Molly did her best to restack the papers and parchments. “These knees weren’t what they used to be, and Margaret wanted me to stop climbing the stairs so much.”
“They didn’t have a bigger office for you?”
“I didn’t want to displace anyone here. You’d be surprised what a bureaucratic nightmare it’d be to shuffle spaces about.”
Molly joined the mayor in a laugh, but soon it was time to get to business. Trying not to chew her lip, she pulled Lady Aislinn’s letter from her pocket and laid it on the table.
“Well well, this does look serious,” said Doherty as he picked up the letter. “What’s going on, my dear?”
“It’s my cousins—the Dunne girls.”
The mayor looked up from tearing open the seal, his eyes suddenly sharper. The steel glinting there was why Thom Dohertywas so beloved—jolly and benevolent as he usually was, the picture of grandfatherly good nature, all of it was over a spine of steel. In his tenure, Doherty had improved sanitation in the poorest communities, campaigned for the rebuilding of tenement houses, established fire brigades, and got the guilds to pay into a fund to cleanse the Shanago River.
While Molly didn’t like having to air out Dunne family laundry, she understood that she couldn’t do this on her own. She needed an ally like Lady Aislinn herself, and hoped she could trust the mayor to see it through. Given that the girls were all of an age to Doherty’s own grandchildren, she suspected her trust would be well placed.
“I’ve come to give evidence against my uncle. With Lady Aislinn’s approval and your own, I want the girls taken out of Brom’s care.”
The words fell from her lips like stones into the river, splashing her before sinking down down down. She held her breath, fingers threaded together into one big clenched fist, as the mayor stared back at her. Although wizened, his hair a poof of white fluff, Doherty’s eyes were still as sharply blue as ever, and they seemed to take her measure.
Finally, a grin cracked his face.
“Thank fates,” he said. “I’ve been waiting a long while for you to say that to me, Miss Molly. Tell me what you need.”
With Molly out on her mission, Allarion took it upon himself to stroll the grounds of the castle. It was an excellent meditative exercise, helping him order his thoughts, and if he just so happened to run into Princess Isolde, well then, all the better.
Strolling past Lady Aislinn’s prize rose garden, he discovered the princess and her guards taking a turn about the larger castle gardens, near where the kitchen gardens grew food for the inhabitants. If the princess paled when she saw him coming, he pretended not to notice.
“Good day, Your Grace.” Allarion bowed at the waist before folding his hands behind his back.
He thought the casual stance would put her guards at ease, but if anything, they twitched and stiffened to have his hands out of sight.
“Good day,” the princess replied by rote. It wasn’t just the sunshine in her eyes that made her face pinch, he suspected.
“I have thought on our conversation yesterday and come bearing my answer.”
The girl nodded gravely, as if he meant to pass sentence on her.
“First, though, I would hear your honest opinion.”
Princess Isolde’s eyes went wide, but she quickly snapped them shut with the midday sun above them. Offering his arm, Allarion led them to a nice, shady alcove below a leafy maple tree. It had yet to shed all of its autumnal colors and offered a cool place to stand and talk politics, no doubt the alcove’s precise purpose when it was designed.
Though out of the sun, the princess’s color was still high as she peered up at him.
“You want to know my opinion? Why?”
Allarion shrugged artfully. “I haven’t met your father—nor your mother. You are my only representative of your family, and you have proven yourself wise beyond your years. It is also you who will lead this kingdom one day. If anyone’s opinion should matter, it should be yours.”
Her eyes rounded with his speech. “That’s not a sentiment shared by everyone even in my mother’s court.”
“Then it’s fortuitous that you are here and not there. I understand that your father has brought some…new traditions with him, as well as several Pyrrossi cousins. However, the kingdom is not just Gleanná. There is much love for you and your mother within the Darrowlands.”
A reluctant smile curled the princess’s mouth. “I’ve noticed that. It’s been wonderful visiting more of the land that will one day be mine, and the Darrows are gracious for hosting me all winter.”
If Gleanná was anything like the fae capital of Fallorian, Allarion didn’t doubt that a season away from it would do the princess immense good. Subterfuge and intrigue had a way of making its own little world, one that warped perspective and diluted priorities.
