--Zel by Donna Jo Napoli
“I blanch. Zel will not be wed within the year. No. She must not leave me. This dress-to-be is perfect. Why has the cleark tainted my gift with her mundane talk of marriage? I am filled with elation at the thought of Zel’s beauty in this dress and dread at the thought that anyone other than me should appreciate that beauty. The contradictory emotions merge hatefully, indiscreetly, so that I cannot pick them apart.”
--Zel by Donna Jo Napoli
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“I have been considering my fate, and the way it appears to me is this: if I agree to marry the Prince, who is young and handsome and somewhat less intelligent than a clod of dirt, he may perchance let me out of this tower before the wedding takes place. ‘Twould not occur to him that I might run away when once I had given my word. Which I would do, I assure you, in the winking of an eye. On the other hand, if I do agree to marry the Prince, the King will simply have the Prince quietly assassinated, and I will end up marrying the King anyway. He would never risk losing anything he wanted through foolish trust in a woman’s word. No indeed; I shall be treated like the wife of Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater, who kept his poor lady in a pumpkin shell, and most uncomfortable that must have been. I daresay I’ll be walled up in some tower or another until the day I die, which could turn out to be a great deal sooner than I might otherwise have expected. If I agree to marry the King from the first, why then, the Prince is less likely to find a knife between his ribs, which I recognize is a much happier outcome for the Prince. Yet look at what I am left with: the old sinner with the concealed weapons and a smile that makes you wonder how, precisely, his first two wives died.”
--Goose Girl by Patrice Kindl “When I heard that at last a husband had been found for me, I almost ran away. How could I spend the rest of my days with someone I had never met?"
--Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan “While I stitched, I wondered what my husband would be like. Stories were told of girls having to marry old men, but I did not think Maa and Baap would let that happen to me. In my daydreams I hoped for someone who was handsome and who would be kind to me.”
--Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan “Relatives and friends began to search for a bridegroom. A part of me hoped that they would be successful and that someone wanted me. A part of me hoped that no one in the world would want me enough to take me away from my home and my maa and baap and brothers. I knew that after my marriage, I would have to make my home with the family of my husband. For my dowry I began to embroider a quilt,making all my worries stitiches, and all the things I would have to leave behind pictures to take with me.”
--Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan |