Flashback: Earlier days in Avalon
FOUR YEARS AGO
For a brief moment the castle staff was merely confused, which quickly gave way to a more focused concern as it became clear that Princess Branwen was not in the castle, possibly had not been in the castle for half a day or more, and nobody seemed to know where she was. The last anyone reported seeing her had been at breakfast, where she’d been silent and sullen, a state generally attributed to the aftermath of a truly epic screaming match the evening before between herself and Corwin, or as Branwen had taken to calling him lately, “God-Emperor Daddy.” He had either forbidden her to do something she wanted to do or required her to do something she didn’t; nobody really remembered which, or probably even cared – over the past two or three years, most of the family had likely stopped keeping track of the individual proximate causes of these events and only bothered to differentiate among them by their intensity and duration. Like measuring earthquakes.
Just past the moment when the castle’s staff is just beginning to edge past concern and into the initial stages of actual alarm, the mild brain freeze of an incoming Trump contact nudges Marian’s mind.