Droit: The Right of the Lord

It has been raining over Mornay for three days, and nothing has happened.

I stand at the tower window and watch the water run down the thick glass, pool in the courtyard, a stable boy darting across with a blanket over his head. That is the whole of it. That is the day. A man runs through the rain, and I watch him from above, from a room that is warm and dry, and I feel nothing except the sense that this day is exactly like the one before it.

I am the Duke of Mornay. The land from the river to the northern hills is mine. The forests, the villages, the road the salt travels on, the bridge no one crosses without paying me. Men take off their caps when I pass. Women lower their eyes. I have everything a man could want, and that is precisely the problem. “When you have everything, there is nothing left to want.”

I am counting the days until this week bleeds out — until Friday, when the hunt is held. Already the lower halls have begun to stir. After the hunt comes a dinner, and every vassal of mine is invited. Since my father died I have held these hunts with regularity, hunt and feast together, and my standing has only grown for it. Nothing pleases the lowborn more than to be noticed. And for me — those moments, when the music rings out and the voices blur into one steady hum across the great hall — those are the moments I am alive. The rest of the time I simply wait for the next thing worth doing.

My mother keeps telling me I must marry. At twenty nine, she says, I should already have children, and then I would not be so bored. It is not attention I lack from women — quite the opposite. But they are tedious, to put it politely.

Rena, from the house of pleasure down in the village — she, at least, is not tedious, though she is no one suited to my station. And the truth is she is not tedious precisely because she does not talk much; she only knows what she is doing. God, she knows. A smile crosses my face and I catch it in the glass, thinking of the last time I met her.

The wellborn daughters are another matter. Every family brings them to the dinners I hold, presented to me in one long line, varied only by some new girl come of age. Some beautiful, some less so, but all cut from the same cloth. They know how to speak of the weather, of embroidery. They all play a musical instrument, or if not, by voce. They all smile shyly when they see me and grow flustered. All the same.

I used to believe it would pass. I thought it was part of inheriting the title, something I would eventually get used to, that I would grow used to the weight of it. It never happened. I am twenty-nine years old, and I am bored the way an old man is bored, one who has already seen everything twice.

Someone knocks.

“Come.”

It is Hagen. A solid, grey-haired man, his face cut deep by a life spent outdoors — he was my father’s before he was mine, and sometimes I think it is the only thread I have left to the man who raised me. He holds a paper, damp at the edges.

“A messenger has come, Your Grace. From the House of Montere.”

The name pulls a frown across my face.

“And?”

“Their daughter is to be wed. Aldous Montere’s girl.”

I turn from the window.

It is the first thing in three days of rain to make my heart beat differently. Not faster — only differently. I straighten without realizing it.

A Montere.

I had heard the name all my life.

When I was a boy, I used to ask questions about the names I heard in my father’s hall. Some belonged to allies, some to rivals, some to men who had done something worth remembering.

When I asked about Montere, my father gave me only one answer.

“A Montere cannot be trusted.”

He said it often enough that I never forgot it.

He did not explain. He did not need to. Everyone in the country knew the story, even if no one said it aloud. When the two brothers fought over the crown — Edmund and his half-brother Sigmund, brothers by half and enemies entire — every house had to choose. My father called all his vassals beneath Edmund’s banner, and all of them came. All but one.

Aldous Montere turned his arms the night before the battle. He crossed to the other side, men and all, and left my father’s flank open like a wound. Men died for it. Many. My father survived, won even, but he won with fewer than he should have, and some of those he lost had been friends since boyhood.

After, when it was over and the bastard’s head had dried on the battlefield, Aldous came to beg forgiveness. He knelt. He wept, they say. My father let him live — not from mercy, but because a man who crawls is more useful than one who is buried. But he never forgave him. Never.

“When is the wedding?” I ask.

“A week from now. At the Montere court.”

I look out the window again. The stable boy is gone. The rain falls the same as it did an hour ago, the same as it will tomorrow. And for the first time in days I find myself interested in something.

Because there is a right. An old one, from the time of my grandfathers’ grandfathers, written in laws no one reads anymore but no one has ever struck out. *The right of the lord.* When a woman beneath a lord’s dominion marries, the lord may claim her before her husband does. It is a barbarous law, a relic, something no man with a grain of sense would invoke these days.

But I am bored, and the Montere land by the marshes is mine. It was given to my father after the betrayal, as punishment, and Aldous has lived on it for years now like a tenant on his own ruin. Which means his daughter — the girl about to be wed — marries from beneath my dominion.

Which means I can.

And I understand, slowly, that to invoke the right is not only to take a wedding night. It is to stop the wedding entirely. Nothing can proceed until I have had my due — the groom cannot touch her until I come, and I am under no obligation to hurry.

I could make Aldous wait. The thought arrives and I turn it over. I could let him sit at his own table with the bride dressed and the priest idle and the guests growing restless, and simply be late. I could let the whole arrangement hang there, suspended, at my pleasure, for as long as I chose to draw it out.

A precise image forms in my mind: Aldous at his table, the bride and groom waiting for me, everyone rising when I finally walk in. Everyone bending to what I want.

I smile for the first time in three days of rain — because this is an image interesting enough that I feel it is almost my duty to make it real.

I do not want her. I do not even know her name, nor what she looks like, and I do not care. Some girl from some house. Perhaps she is beautiful, perhaps she is plain, perhaps stupid or clever — it does not matter, because it is not her I am hunting. It is Aldous. I want to see the man who knelt before my father kneel again, this time before the son, while I take everything from him at the slowest pace I can manage. I want him to feel, just once, something of what the men he sold felt.

It is a cruelty. I know. But cruelty, at least, is a sensation. And for three days I have felt nothing.

“Hagen.”

“Your Grace.”

“Send word to the Montere court. Tell them the Duke of Mornay invokes his right over the bride. And tell them the wedding waits until I come.”

Hagen does not move. I know him well enough to read what lies behind his stone face — disapproval, old and tired, the disapproval of a man who watched me grow and would have been glad to see me grow into something other than this.

“Your Grace, if I may—”

“You may not.”

He is silent. Then: “And the girl? What’s to be done with her, after?”

A good question. One I have not considered, because the girl never interested me. I shrug.

“I don’t care. Set her loose, throw her in the marsh — do as you please. I want only the night.”

Hagen leaves without a word. I hear the door close, his heavy steps going down the stair, and I am left alone with the rain and my fresh resolve, which warms me better than the fire in the hearth.

“A Montere cannot be trusted,” I tell myself, and for the first time my father’s words no longer sound like a warning. They sound like permission.