Lamenta’s beloved and kind-hearted mother, Lady Dulcetta had died at just thirty-three years of age. As cruel fate would have it, precisely the same age as Lord Urdurel had been when they’d first met and fallen in love. Since her death though, everything had changed dramatically for the worse.
Life in a cage, no matter how gilded, is mere existence. Since her Mother’s premature death, her Father,
Lord Urdurel had cut her off from everything and everyone she’d known, except for her Mother’s now, long-in-the-fang, deer-hound;
Belvedere.
Her Father treated her as if she were suddenly too delicate to face the world, as if she were made of the fragilest crystal. A situation that had only grown more wretched since her Father suddenly remarried a woman with obvious evil intent, even though he seemed completely incapable of seeing it. He was infatuated with his dark-locked and voluptuous new bride, to the point that he hadn’t even seemed that interested in her newborn half-brother;
Briefadel.
Lord Urdurel, under the thrall of Hetzabah, had returned to his warring ways, blind to the objections of his advisors or the suffering of his own people.
Lady Lamenta’s life had been reduced down to that of little more than a prisoner, kept hidden away in her dead Mother’s tower under lock and key. She was sixteen now but there was nothing sweet about her situation.
The Commander of the guard; Captain Aglet had recently halved her protection detail, on the instructions of her step-mother but then immediately reinstated it, on the orders of her suspicious Father, with twice the number of men as before. He’d even stationed an armed guard immediately outside her bedroom chamber door.
This was the second week and there was a change in soldiers. Her new door guard; Padrik, was fair-haired, fresh-faced and handsome, perhaps only a year or two older than herself. Even though she knew he was instructed to keep his eyes to himself, she couldn’t help teasing him with glimpses of a bare ankle or an, accidentally revealed, shoulder.
That night though, something was wrong. She’d changed into her nightgown and stepped over the multiple, concentric, magical protection circles etched around her Mother’s old bed and wriggled under the silk sheets. With her big, old dog lying at her feet, her dreams were no longer haunted by evil witches or giant, shadowy horses, but Lamenta still felt a cold wave of anxiety in her stomach as Belvedere abruptly twitched awake and started to growl.
Slipping quietly out of bed and heading to the iron caged balcony, she thought of the young man standing guard just outside her door. She knew he wasn’t allowed to leave his post but she needed someone close. Then, in the darkness of the walled garden below, she saw a flash of a steel blade and could hear someone beginning to scale the wall. The balcony was protected and her windows were barred but certain magics could easily overcome mundane iron, no matter how thick.
Paralysed with fear, she tightly clutches her loyal hound in fear and calls out.
“Guard! Guard!”
Almost immediately, Lamenta sees the shadow of her young protector fall across the frosted glass panels of her bedchamber door and she hears him whisper…
“My Lady?”
Then, before she can reply, another shadow looms up behind him on the other side of her bedroom door, followed immediately by the splatter of Padrik’s dark arterial blood across the glass.
This is when the sixteen-year-old Lady Lamenta screams,
Despite his advanced age, the boney but still pony-sized Belvedere stands bravely, fangs bared and hackles raised, between his young Mistress and the door, but when the two black-clad Assassins pass like smoke through the, still locked, barrier, there’s nothing the dog can do beyond dying by their wickedly curved blades.
Lasting barely a few moments longer than her slaughtered dog, despite her pleading, Lamenta‘s pitiful screams are quickly silenced by the merciless killers.
The kind-hearted and innocent young woman’s last words are…
“Father!”
