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muffled sounds of a murky ocean, addressing her with news that she must follow and never deny. Crystal was not necessarily afraid of her father, but she feared his actions, and she feared the things he would make her do for the sake of his legacy.
    She glanced at the roguish man beside her, his attentions on the bronco, his soft brown eyes still amused even when her father's tone of voice rose to startling levels of authority. The maid mothers who had tried to stop him backed away, and some of the guards even shifted in their armor, uncomfortable with the slightest sound of royal outrage. They knew that heads could fly and men could be ruined by the whims of her father's bad moods.
    What followed was a further extension of the indecipherable, and Crystal did not grasp what had transpired until she was reflecting upon it later in her bedroom, surrounded by guards and being instructed on a very particular set of principles by the head house servant. Her father simply pointed to the rogue and then he was surrounded by guards, as if the orchestrations of her family's power was sorcery, and the lord need only lift a finger to summon men to any corner of the globe he deemed unfit for his view. Crystal did not see the rogue arrested or beaten, only surrounded, and then she too was gathered up by her father's men and dragged away into lonelier places than the morning sunrise across the farmlands outside the vast kingdom of mortar, stone, and towers.
    She might have called out the wild man's name, if she had known it.
    As such, she called to no one, and heard nothing except what her father ordered. She left with the impression of the man’s strange and endlessly amused smile flashing its white charm against the morning light.
    ****
    The words came to her with time, as if some proclamations were so powerful that they could not be processed immediately, requiring time to sit and soak, their latent meanings dripping down their sides like flavorings down the cooked breast of a festival gander.
    ‘ This man you have chosen is not one of your official suitors. He filled out no papers. He signed nothing. He has no worth to his name, and this is a marriage that has been explicitly arranged in order to ensure worth.’
    The words did not come to her directly in her father's voice, but through the servant who echoed him as he lectured Crystal in her bedroom exactly the way he had lectured her throughout her adolescence. Her mother had handed mothering off to the most trusted and educated maids, while her father had handed his fathering off to a plethora of faces who became the voices that lectured, instructed, taught and listened.
    ‘You must choose one of the suitors who made offerings to you,’ the servant insisted. ‘The man we hired for the horses broke the law by trespassing into the ceremony, and your father, our lord, does not reward trespasses against the laws of this kingdom.’
    ‘ I will do what is asked of me,’ Crystal murmured dully, albeit respectfully, and the servant regarded her for several moments to make sure that his wishes, and by extension the wishes of his lord, were not being made light of.
    ‘ Good,’ he said. ‘You will.’
    ****
    The lord of the kingdom had reasoned that his daughter had been distracted during the ceremony by the criminal entrance of an unworthy man who did not belong there, and so he summoned several of his preferred suitors to make their presentations to Crystal once again. ‘You must excuse her distraction,’ he said through the mouths of his many speakers employed variously in servants, helpers, and guard hands. ‘She is young. You must remember her lineage, because that will be your prize for making this engagement.’
    Crystal was not told their names, nor their faces, as if being promised that these special suitors could make their impression upon her regardless of her own expectations. They needed no announcement to make their mark. They needed no arrangements to draw her eyes.