[Askoga]: 89.Novels.Kode.Prologue.Lot

A young child awoke in the night to the sounds of fighting below her window. As she was only a year old, the sounds frightened her, and she cried out, her bright blue eyes searching for her mother and father in the dark. But they were nowhere to be found. Not even the maids stirred within the castle, and all was dark.
Below the princess’s window, and indeed all about the castle, there was a great fight. The rebels had come together and were even then endeavoring to take over the castle, and the kingdom, by force. The knights were fighting them, but were losing. Many were wounded, many were dead.
After what seemed like an eternity to the toddler, the queen, her mother, finally appeared, and held her in her arms. Hastily, the queen dressed her little daughter in a set of clothes filched from one of the servants' babies, and carried her out of the castle. It was a long trek, and the little princess fell asleep soon after they were in the passageway below the castle.
In the safety of a farmhouse just outside of Pal, the queen deposited her sleeping child on the only bed, then joined her husband in searching the building. They had purchased it a year ago, but had never done much with it, except to live in for short periods of time, when one or the other needed to escape from castle life. Always, it was only one living there at a time, so the princess had no peasant garb waiting there for her, as her parents did. The queen found some cloth, left over from making her own and her husband's clothes, and began to sew. The king, eventually, went back into the bedroom, to sleep beside his daughter.
Several years had passed since the royalty had fled the castle, and a child, about eleven or twelve years old now, raced out to meet her papa as he returned from the fields for lunch, before he headed back out to oversee the work in a different one.
“Papa, Papa, Mama says I can go out with ya after lunch!” The girl whooped, leaping up to mount the horse in front of her father. Her hair was cut boyishly short, and she wore trousers like a man, looking for all the world like a young boy.
The farmer caught his daughter around her waist, helping her get settled on the horse's back. “Did she? Well, then I guess I can't refuse.” He grinned at her and ruffled her hair. “But it's hard work, and you won't be able to just come on home when you get tired,” he warned her, knowing that she'd still want to come anyway.
Still a few more years later, when the girl was fifteen, she was riding her own horse beside her papa's, returning from the fields in the evening. When she caught sight of the farmhouse, she kicked her horse into a gallop, and called back, “Better hurry, papa, or I'll eat all your supper!”
At this threat, the man, who had once been king, nudged his own horse into a gallop, calling out, “Watch out, or I'll get there first, you impertinent little whelp!” He passed by her just before they reached the stables. Once they got inside, they sat down to supper, chattering away happily about the day's work. The woman, once queen, listened, happy to hear that the day had been so good. She could see that they were both tired, but they hid it well, bolstering each other up, lending each other strength.
The next day, the queen convinced her husband to ride out to town with her, to buy supplies. She'd need the wagon, and still wasn't very good at handling it, even after these many years of practice. They never came home, though it was past nightfall when the princess realized that they weren't going to return that night. That was a Sunday, and on Monday morning, before dawn, Lotina was halfway to town, on her bay mare. Frantically she searched all over town for her parents, before she found one useful scrap of news. Yes, her parents had come into town, and they'd left soon after. The person who saw them leave said that they looked scared, that Lot's mum looked like she'd seen a ghost.
After searching the countryside for the rest of the day, Lotina finally found the wagon and the horses. Her parents were in the wagon, killed by poisoned darts. She brought them home, and buried them herself, shedding not a single tear. For a little over a year after her parents died, Lot tried to run the farm herself, but she was not the businessman that her father was, and when she was sixteen she sold the place and headed out on her own, hiring herself out as a farmhand, or doing whatever other odd job she could to keep herself fed.