WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Malfoid

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◈ Fragments of Thorns and a Cradle ◈

Volume 1, Part 1

Chapter 1

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Content Warning: bereavement; pregnancy loss; sexual exploitation and slavery.

Marie's mother, Agnes Ronin, had been the concubine of Randolph von Gwendel, Endymion's father. Concubinage was a peculiar custom found only in this country, this kingdom, Kailak, and had endured since the kingdom's founding.

Only knights among royalty and nobility could keep concubines. Such women were also called female slaves or maidservants.

An old royal decree stated that a knight required a squire to attend him, a knight-attendant to support him in battle, and a female slave to warm his bed and serve him at night. The decree clearly set out the selection, treatment, duties, and purpose of these concubines.

Though slaves, they were wives. Though servants, they were the knight's women. Before formally marrying their knight, they were called bedchamber maids. Afterward, they were called concubines and fulfilled that role.

Usually, a woman became the knight's concubine the moment she was chosen, so marriage might seem meaningless. Yet a rite gained meaning by being observed.

Marriage to a slave was a practice unknown elsewhere. Even in unequal marriages, men and women separated by such a vast difference in rank seldom wed. No other nation made such marriages customary.

Yet when knights were invested, they received female slaves as naturally as they received squires and knight-attendants.

Originally, bedchamber maids had been gifts bestowed on knights by the king in wartime. In time, only knights' parents selected them, as carefully as they chose a bride who would inherit property alongside their son's title and castle.

The custom endured because Kailak scorned and feared widows. The kingdom had inherited this sentiment from the ancient nation of Glensium, whose foundations it adopted.

There was an unpleasant superstition that death clung to a wife and passed to her husband, causing his death. It grew stronger as frequent wars changed the state's shape, and prejudice did not fade easily.

But death did not happen as people wished. To avoid widowhood, either one's husband had to survive, or the marriage had to be annulled. Ridiculous, but true. How else could a woman escape being blamed for her husband's death?

Children complicated matters. If there were children between the couple, annulment did not return the dowry. And what meaning was annulment without the dowry? Such women generally ended their lives shut away in monasteries.

Older women with grown children had little reason to annul a marriage or remarry. But noblewomen with sons too young to inherit their fathers' titles were often stripped of land and property by collateral relatives, then driven into monasteries alongside their children.

Thus, female slaves became a lasting custom rather than a temporary policy.

Noblewomen did not need to risk widowhood while their husbands were still building their reputations in battle. Knights needed direct descendants who carried their blood, regardless of the mother's womb. Especially if death in war was expected. The need belonged less to the knight himself than to his house.

So having children by female slaves became natural, separate from having legitimate heirs.

Knights kept concubines to manage their military households and accompany them when they left their estates for the front before their investiture. Children born from a concubine's womb were as natural as children born to the lawful wife. Yet so long as the marriage remained intact, all illegitimate children were counted as the lawful wife's children.

If a woman could claim the rights of a household mistress without straining herself, that was an advantage. Marriage should not disadvantage either party.

Knights therefore had heirs with their lawful wives only after receiving their investiture, completing their first war, and earning medals befitting their title. Things would become troublesome if the father died immediately after she conceived.

Knights experienced enough to avoid being dispatched to suppress private uprisings and disturbances were usually around thirty. Two to four years after marriage, they cautiously conceived legitimate heirs at the proper time. It was the greatest consideration offered to noblewomen in order to spare them a widow's path.

Even if a husband truly died, a childless widow could annul the marriage, recover her dowry, and remarry. In that case, the knight's succession passed to children by his concubine, and the female slaves who bore them ended their lives in monasteries, like noble widows of old.

A custom that harmed no one. Thus the system of maintaining a knight's line through female slaves developed into a lasting convention for everyone's benefit.

Fortunately, compared with its contempt for widows, Kailak was relatively tolerant of illegitimate children. Knights therefore received female slaves around the time they were invested, much as they received young wives.

Marie's mother Agnes had been Randolph, the previous marquess of Gwendel's, concubine.

Randolph acquired Agnes when he was twenty-two and she was five years younger. In the spring of her twentieth year, she conceived the marquess's son, but the child was stillborn. They tried repeatedly to have another child. Agnes conceived again, but that son survived only a few years before dying of fever.

The marquess had little reason to regret it. His lawful wife had already borne him a healthy son. He had no particular need for a child by his concubine.

Unlike Agnes's sons, including the stillborn child, the marquess's lawful son was healthy. Even when fever struck, he recovered within three days. It was simply his constitution.

The heir resembled his father, with a warrior's frame and no noticeable flaws. He was unlike Agnes's son. Fortunately so. It would not have looked well for the concubine's son to surpass the lawful wife's son.

No one knew exactly what happened between Agnes and the marquess in the year her son died. Their feelings must have run deep, and no one had reached their depths. Perhaps they had been Agnes's feelings alone.

In any case, the dead child belonged to Agnes. The marquess had a fine son already, so it was a death he would no longer mourn. Agnes alone must have stood at the edge of a precipice, perhaps trapped in a swamp she could not escape and suffering through a long loneliness.

According to Lucrezia, Endymion's birth mother and the Marchioness of Gwendel, Gregory had been the only person to take Agnes's hand in that swamp.

"So of course you were born."

Lucrezia, the Marchioness of Gwendel, had said it without concern. Of course Marie had been born.

"Of course Agnes ran away."

Marie looked at Lucrezia's thin lips. Perhaps Lucrezia alone understood Agnes's swamp. If Gregory had been the one who took Agnes's hand within it, then the only person in this castle who understood what that swamp was, who understood Agnes, had been Lucrezia.

Lucrezia merely watched the insolence of her son's young slave.

"But you mustn't run away."

"Why not?"

"My son is more vicious than Randolph ever was."

Lucrezia closed her lips. Marie stared at her, then turned away. Spring was quiet. Marie was replaying Agnes's death.

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