*The Smiling Stallion Inn is currently available at these and other online retailers with ebook editions at just $0.99:
Barnes and Noble
Amazon
Smashwords
The Smiling
Stallion Inn
The Legends of Arria: Volume 1
Copyright © 2014 by
Courtney Bowen
Arria, a land of rocky shores, myths and legends, mist and magic,
mystery and music.
Arria, a song that is both familiar and unfamiliar to you. It bears you
to the surface, and moves you to the depths of your being as the woman stands
alone at the center of the stage, singing her heart out to you for one brief,
yet long moment in the middle of the chaos that is the opera of life.
Marry me, my dear,
and I will give you
A bed of roses to
sleep on. Marry me, my dear,
And I will give you
the dreams we have to share.
Marry me, my dear,
and you will know only happiness.
--Love song from
Mirandor
“You could wait, you know,” Oaka
said to Basha a month after Basha’s birthday. When stretched out on his back,
Oaka was a tall, thin young man. Half-dressed in a linen shirt and breeches
with his hands tucked underneath his tousled black head, he didn’t seem to want
to move out of bed, a little lazy this morning.
“Wait for what?” Basha snapped,
feeling nervous. He was already up, getting dressed in his freshest, finest
clothes. A small bouquet of flowers lay on top of the armoire, just waiting for
his hands to hold and carry them to Jawen. Mila be praised that there were
flowers already blooming this season, although they were weak. New blossoms did
not have the full strength and beauty that later flowers did.
Yet he already knew what his older
brother was going to say even before Oaka brought it up. “To propose to Jawen.
A few more years, you both might be ready.”
“I’m not going to wait a few more
years,” Basha said, fixing up the tie around his neck and checking his
reflection in the small mirror hanging inside on the door of the armoire. He
sighed to himself. “And Jawen will be ready tomorrow, I know it.”
“You don’t know that for sure,”
Oaka remarked.
“If I wait, I might lose the
chance to marry Jawen.” He turned around to face Oaka, a little fed up with his
brother’s criticisms. But to save on time, so that he wouldn’t be delayed with
another long argument with Oaka over Jawen, he explained, “If I wait, she might
marry somebody else. What is the matter with you?”
“What?” Oaka asked. Right now his
eyes seemed to be glazed over with fear and happiness, an odd combination.
“Are you nervous?” Basha asked.
“Why should I be?” Oaka asked as
he stared up at the ceiling’s wood beams with a half smile, half grimace frozen
on his face. “Apart from the big day tomorrow.” He fidgeted a little bit.
Besides the tightness in his voice and the look in his big green eyes, he
otherwise had an easy demeanor visible in his body. Oaka was always at ease,
like a cat after a kill.
“You’re going to ask for Sisila
tomorrow?” Basha asked, wondering if something else was amiss with Oaka.
“Yes, yes, of course I will, who
else would I ask for?” Oaka asked and then inhaled sharply, sitting up in bed.
“You don’t know that she will marry somebody else.”
“She is one of the most desirable
girls in town.” Basha sighed and turned back to the armoire, picking out the
waistcoat and slipping his arms into the armholes. “As the merchant’s oldest
daughter, she’s going to have a whole slew of beaus wanting to marry her for
her father’s wealth and position, most notably Hastin.”
“Who would want to marry Jawen and
get Lapo for their
father-in-law?” Oaka cringed. “Not even Hastin would be so desperate, I think.
The man is a cheat, no matter how much wealth or power he possesses; Father
said so. So who would want that?”
“Careful what you say, Oaka,”
Basha said, raising a finger to his older brother as he pulled the waistcoat
across his chest and started buttoning it up. “That man, who is a cheat, is
also Jawen’s father, and he might be my
future father-in-law if she likes me well enough to want to marry me.”
“Which is a big ‘if’ in my
opinion,” Oaka muttered.
“Shut up!” Basha cried and then
sighed as he realized that he wasn’t at all surprised by Oaka’s response.
“Don’t you care enough about me, Oaka, to at least stop criticizing me all the
time?”
“What are you talking about,
Basha? I don’t criticize you all of the time,” Oaka said, grimacing and smiling
at the same time.
“I don’t want your opinion if
you’re not going to be helpful. Why are you so against me and Jawen?”
“Because she’s not right for you,
Basha,” Oaka insisted.
“Then who is right for me?” Basha
asked. “Because I don’t see a whole lot of girls lining up to pound on the door
of the inn so that I can woo them and offer them…Well, what can I offer them?”
“Yourself,” Oaka said
begrudgingly.
“So how much is that worth in the
great big scheme of things?” He sighed and continued, “Lapo’s wealth and power
don’t matter much to me, yet I can’t compete with what Lapo offers his daughter
in terms of financial security. And I certainly can’t compete with what those
other boys are going to offer her in terms of looks and prospects.”
He turned and solemnly appraised
himself in the mirror with the waistcoat on, making a rather unimpressive
figure in his own mind when compared to some of the other boys in town, like
Hastin and even Oaka. He could hardly be called homely, yet he wasn’t exactly
handsome. His body was of a medium build, not athletic, not fat, not too tall
and not too short, but just average with some muscles in his arms and legs from
working out in the fields and training to fight with a sword. He couldn’t be
said to be the striking model of a hero, not like one of the ancient Knights of
Arria, who had faced the evil of Doomba. He was just his self, and that was all
he had, which frightened him most of all. What was he worth to Jawen? Was he
enough?
Oaka hemmed and hawed a bit, as if
he wanted to say something else just before Basha left to see Jawen, but Basha
said, “You know it’s true, Oaka. You’re going to inherit the inn; there’s
nothing else for me. You’re the oldest, and the trueborn son of our parents,
and it all passes down to you by rights, whereas I, on the other hand, have no
real parents, or family, to call my own. Just my mother, Kala, who died giving
birth to me.” He sighed. “She left me with nothing of my own, nothing to
inherit from her. I have food, family, and shelter, but that’s all because of
your parents, not mine.”
“Basha, it’s not that bad!” Oaka
said.
“I’m sorry, Oaka, I am, but it’s
the truth, the truth as Lapo sees it, the truth as everybody else in town sees
it. But we are a family, I know; we are a family by choice, not by rights,”
Basha said, repeating a phrase that his adoptive mother had uttered to cheer
him up the first time she had told him and many times after. “You might support
me if I stay on at the inn, to work for you in the years to come, like Uncle
Smidge does, but I still would not have enough money to support Jawen.”
Oaka stared at him. “I’m not going
to argue with that,” he said in a half-joking way, although he didn’t really
mean it.
“It wouldn’t be fair to her, I
suppose, if I were to depend on charity for the rest of my life,” Basha said.
“I might have a chance to support her by earning enough with other endeavors,
like getting into the militia and the Border Guards, but still, it’s not like I
can get an immediate response. What am I doing?” he asked, turning away from
Oaka.
People walked by him every day
without more than a casual glance. They knew him, though, these townspeople of
Coe Baba, his friends and family; they knew him and everything about him here,
or so they thought, except for what was unknown. Basha had no proof that he was
not a balnor. He had only his birth mother’s word, and she was not alive to
tell others of his birth father. If only she had lived and told them. If only
she had not died. If only he had not been born at all. Basha felt that way
sometimes.
No one knew who his real family
was, whether his birth parents were rich or poor, and so his social status was
unknown. He was unquantifiable in the legal sense, as no one could prove
whether or not he was an orphan or a balnor. He had doubts about himself that
even he could not stand, and sometimes it overwhelmed him to be faced with such
predicaments. He wondered sometimes if he was missing something, if he was
forgetting something. He wondered if he was lost, and if other people knew the
way. Where was he going, and where were all of these other people going as
well?
Basha sometimes thought that other
people treated him differently, that his mother was too kind, his father too
harsh, and his brother too overbearing with him because of who he was, or who
they thought he was, and what had happened to him. And people outside his
family treated him as a stranger to be regarded suspiciously. They just did not
trust him completely.
Perhaps his birth mother had done
something wrong? He did not know this for certain, but he had heard rumors.
Were they true?
If only he could find an easier
way of going through life, he might take it. Gods, he almost missed Monika.
No comments:
Post a Comment