Zenora
17. The Gift

Emily’s point of view:

No, I didn’t get myself a cold shower, although that would’ve been better because now I had a hard time sleeping. I just kept thinking about what Brock did and how I am going to get him back for it.

In the morning, Natalya had brought me breakfast and I was almost choking at the speed I was eating it. Of course, I shared my meal with her. She had brought along plenty of food knowing I threw up last night and thought I might be hungry. Indeed, famished I was! I ate two buns with bacon; drank two glasses of pressed juice; had a whole bunch of grapes and finally a bowl of delicious yoghurt.

Natalya had informed me that the tailor would come by later this day and that I had to wear a dress because they had no other clean clothes for me now. During last night’s episodes, I got my clothes dirty from throwing up so she brought them to the laundry room this morning.

She picked out two dresses for me to wear and I frowned. Natalya giggled at my reaction but encouraged me to try the blue one on. Luckily, these weren’t gowns with corsets underneath them or with too many ruffles or anything like the woman wore in the movie ‘Elizabeth’. The blue one was just a plain, form-fitting silk dress with little silver embroidered flowers along my waist and down following the curves of the skirt. It had a v-shaped neckline which was a quite low cut and showed just a slight part of the rounding of my breasts. It also had short sleeves, made of a different, thinner fabric which loosely hung around my shoulders and upper arms. The dress ended right above my feet and Natalya picked out small matching blue slippers that were exactly my size. She braided my hair and tied it up in a cute bun at the back of my head.

I almost forgot that I wore a ring until Natalya mentioned it. I got it for my twenty-first birthday from Anna and when I looked at it again, I noticed it was almost the same colour as the dress. Natalya then started to comb my hair while I sat in front of the mirror. I actually felt really pretty looking like this and I felt as if I was about to go to a party.

Before leaving the room, I told Natalya that she could arrange some clothes for me with the tailor herself. One pair of comfortable pants and a pair of extra shirts would be enough to train. Because I was hoping that Dennis and Anna were here soon with my bags also, as in them my other clothes were.

Then a servant knocked on the door to invite me into the war room where my father supposedly needed my attendance. I was confused as to why he would need me in a war room, but the servant left before I could ask about it. I guess I will know when I got there.

Natalya showed me the way as we had to walk to the other side of the castle through various hallways, took two stairs up and went down another hallway. If Natalya wasn’t with me, I would certainly get lost in here. Eventually, we reached a set of big wooden doors with guards in front of it. They opened the doors and announced me coming in.

Inside, there were three men in the room and they all looked at me with their mouths open. The one on the right, which I hadn’t met yet, closed his mouth right after he realized I was looking at him and turned his head the other way. The other two men were my father and Brock and I smiled at their faces. My father was the first to talk and walked up to me, grabbed one of my hands and twirled me around. He had the biggest smile ever to be seen.

“My gorgeous daughter! You look so beautiful in this dress. I can understand why my fierce General can’t keep his hands off of you.” He said and I blushed.

“I’m sorry for yesterday dad, I think I got a bit drunk and my behaviour wasn’t at all what I …” I tried to apologize properly for what I did yesterday but he wouldn’t let me.

“It’s alright honey, in fact, I even got you a present.” My father said with a smile. S~ᴇaʀᴄh the Find ɴøᴠel.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

Brock came up to me, looked at my décolleté and put his arm around my waist and kissed me on the forehead. “Good morning beautiful.” He said and walked me up to the table, where the men stood around it.

The war room had two tables with three-dimensional maps displayed on them and several other maps were hanging on the walls. In the middle was a big desk with chairs around it, I guess for war meetings. The table where Brock took me, stood on the left, with a large map of the castle and its surroundings.

“Dad, before you start and before I forget, could you please show me pictures of mom later this day? I want to know what she looked like.” I didn’t have the chance to see her yet and I really wanted to. My father told me he wanted to show me pictures yesterday after lunch. But since I never got any lunch and he had sudden tasks to do, we never came around to that before dinner. So, he agreed that we would try again today after lunch.

Brock lowered his hand from my back to my butt, but I wasn’t going to let him get to me that easily. I thought of several ways to annoy him today because of what he did last night. I pushed his hand back upwards, with my right hand and didn’t look at him at all. Let’s see how long I can keep up with denying his touches.

“This is our Financial Counsellor Tom, and we three have been talking about something yesterday evening after you had your little outburst.” My father said with a smile. I felt a bit ashamed but I shook Tom’s hand and he greeted me with a nice smile. “Good morning Princess.” He said decently.

“As far as your gift, you didn’t think I would forget your birthday, right? I know it has been a few days ago but I couldn’t come up with a proper gift until what happened yesterday.” My father said sincerely.

I looked rather surprised at him because like I said before, Dennis never gave me any presents for my birthday and ever since we left six days ago, I forgot about my birthday as my thoughts were occupied with everything else that happened.

Brock came to stand behind me and put his hands on my waist, pinching me a bit. Again, I pushed away his hands and continued to listen to my father.

“I know that you don’t care for jewellery much and thus I made a big decision to do something else entirely in your name.” He smiled, practically jumping to what he wanted to tell me. “Look at the map on the table, honey, this contains the castle, the ocean, the training fields and all the houses where all our citizens live.” He pointed at all the places he just mentioned and the big lands filled with the small houses. I bend forward a bit to see the map from close by and pushed my butt backwards against Brock.

“Now as you can see, all the houses are quite far away from the castle. As it shows, in between the houses and the castle are the farmer’s fields and the lands with the farm animals. Now as you can imagine, the servants have to travel by foot early in the morning and only get home late at night. So, I thought I would do something for them.” Dad spoke slowly, keeping the tension way up high that I almost burst out yelling at him to continue the story faster. Because so far, I like what he is saying and I guess he noticed that too as my eyes just grew bigger by the second.

“See this piece of land just between the castle and the ocean?” He asked me while pointing at an area of at least two acres large, and I nodded. “That’s where we are going to build a three-level house with plenty of rooms for the servants and also a nice garden for them to grow their own foods or keep their own farm animals. Also, I have arranged to join in a few more servants so they can rotate their shifts and won’t be in the castle all day.” Then he sighed. “And I know you asked me to pay them for their…”

But before he could complete his sentence I already ran around the table and jumped in his arms to hug him dearly. Never would I ever have thought this was something my dad would do for me. I was so happy that he had listened to me, even though I was in a drunk and angry mood yesterday. It was just two days ago that I got here through the portal and already he gave me such a wonderful gift. Tears ran over my face with happiness.

I hated that the servants were so accustomed to the commands they got thrown at them and I hated that my father, Brock and every other man and woman of the court were so ungrateful to them. They never said thanks for anything that they did.

“It will take several weeks if not months to complete the building and its surroundings though. So, the servants will have to be patient until then. And don’t expect us to immediately change our way of how we are communicating with them. I know you hate what we do, but it will take some time for us to adjust and I don’t think every one of the royal court is willing to change at all. So, you have to accept that, because I’m not going to demand that from them.” My father said with a firm tone and I just nodded at everything he said.

I’m already so happy about what he was willing to do for me and the servants, and I know that this project is already one hell of a big gesture and change in their way of life. So, I didn’t even argue about the fact that several people in the court would be stubborn to change.

So, after, we spoke some more about what the building is going to look like and how this idea came to be. It seems, my father had called Tom yesterday to talk about all the finances and figured out if there was a way to come up with a budget for the building. They had to shift some other budgets to get money for this plan and the bank had to be plundered a bit as well, but Tom had managed to find sufficient funds to start this project.

“Dad, can I ask you for one more favour?” I asked softly, not trying to push my luck, at which he frowned.

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