Capítulo 4: Settling In And Setting Off
Grimwald and Henrika spent their honeymoon in a luxury bungalow, on a resort planet named Keone V, a former desert world that was terraformed into something more survivable and enjoyable.
Their honeymoon was an entire month in length which was slightly long, compared to the average, but was apparently just the right length for the slower-paced peoples of Red-Jericho.
During the first week, their families were there too.
Many of the members of either side being invited to come to the Sayaka Resort and Hotel to soak up sun rays while the older generation quietly keep tabs on the new couple, and see that things were going as they should.
To the surprise of a few people on the Amihan family's side, it seemed that the young couple was getting along. They hadn't really bothered to gauge how the pair had been doing pre-wedding six-month period of acquaintanceship(for the couple) and negotiations(for the families).
From what they knew of Henrika they'd half expected the newlywed couple to have either come to blows, or have entered a state of wintery estrangement.The one thing they hadn't expected was for the girl to come meet them with a subdued smile and a look of contentment, as if she'd actually accepted the arrangement the family had set up for her.
As for the Cerveny side of the family, there were less of the groom's family present on the resort. Only a few elders had come, simply going for the sake of confirming that nothing untoward had happened, and the marriage had been properly consummated.
Besides this the family wasn't all that concerned with young Grimwald marriage because besides serving as a linchpin for the coming contract between the two clans the boy wasn't all that important to his clan.
He was last ranked of the older children, and middle of the lane for all the Cerveny younger generation as a whole. He was mediocre to a point that he might have ended up being more worth watching if he were a little more of a failure, and thus very little attention was ever paid to him.
After that first week their family's left the resort, and the couple were left on their own. For the next twenty-one days the resort staff would see the young man and woman, sitting next to each other either on their patio, or on their stretch of the beach, ignoring each other.
The man would usually be accompanied by a laptop, the woman would usually have either a tablet computer or handheld game console.
They'd rarely if ever, acknowledge each other's presence, and when they did it was almost as if they were strangers meeting for the first time. Their interactions overly polite and stilted.
The lack of interaction would reach such a level, that a few of the resort staff would start to get confused about weather or not they were actually supposed to be a couple on their honeymoon.
Of course this, confusion would generally disappear in the evenings when the couple retreated to their bungalow. In which case the sounds that issued out from within would be even more raucous and long lasting than those of other honeymooners and vacationing couples on the resort.
For Walder, the progression from strangers, to acquaintances, to fake spouse, to real friends with benefits was roughly as convoluted and emotionally confusing as most of the relationships in his former life.
He didn't think about it too much, and just tried to be as attentive and accommodating to the new Mrs. Amihan-Cerveny as he could be. After all, regardless of whatever twists had been added to their relationship since their honeymoon it had always been part of the plan for the two of them to become life partners in the literal sense.
On Henri's side of things, she too was doing her best not to think about how things were going. Her approach to married life was more or less identical to her approach to successfully riding a bike for the first time. She was basically trying to keep her balance and forward momentum and doing her best not to screw things up by thinking about how exactly she'd managed to do it.
It helped that the man didn't make things weird during their daytime hours together. Henrika was sure that they were on the same side, and could in fact be considered friends, otherwise she might have had more reservations about figuratively and literally jumping into bed with the man.
She was pretty sure she didn't love him though.
From what she heard about her parents and grandparents relationships those kinds of feelings were supposed to grow with time, but Henri's wasn't sure if that was still the case if both parties enter into the relationship with the intent of just doing so to keep up appearances.
Henri wasn't sure where things would go between the two of them, or where she wanted them to go, and she had no intent of talking about this uncertainty aloud for the time being.
For now, she was content to enjoy things as they were. Sex was apparently every inch as enjoyable as the heroines in her dating sims, and her friends in school had always seemed to make it sound, and for the first time in two years Henri had been able to go sleep without keeping a pistol under her pillow just in case he stepmother decided to tie up loose ends.
In other words, life was going pretty well. As for what would come after the honeymoon was over. Henri and Walder had already discussed that at length, and while they spent their time on the beach sipping mai-tais, the last steps of their plans were already falling into place.
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The month long honeymoon came to its end, and it came time for the young couple to return to society.
Henri and Walder got on a shuttle and flew back to Bellerose, the planet that the Cerveny family used as the seat of their power.
Instead of moving into a manor, or mansion, like most wealthy elite couples their age, they ended up moving into the Walder's mother's estate. Taking residence in a guest house on her property.
Florence Marigold Cerveny was an... intense... woman. She stood 6, 7'' tall, and had hawk-like, golden-brown eyes that seemed to catch every small movement beneath their gaze. Looking at her, the impression Walder gave began to make a little more sense, even if there was still a little something extra in Walder's aura that left a feeling of incongruity.
Florence was a former-military office turned stateswoman and was a member of the Red-Jericho System Interplanetary Senate. Meaning she was part of the group of people whose job it was to make sure that half of Red Jericho Solar System remained solidly under the Cerveny family's political and economic dominion.
She was only home one day out of every week, but despite her forbidding demeanor she was actually a very lovely woman. Both friendly and kind to those who knew her well enough to get close to her.
She had five children, the three eldest children being Grimwald elder brother Author who was part of the Red Jericho System Hero League, Grimwald himself, and Grimwald's little sister, Catherine, who'd been adopted into the family.
Catherine's real parents were two very close friends of Florence, who fell during an attack by a planet destroying behemoth.
There were two younger children who were in boarding school in Bellerose's largest moon, Rubrum III.
Most of Henri's time in Florence's manor was spent getting to know its mistress, and the young Miss Catherine. After six months of putting together a fairly solid plan of "escape" with the man, Henrika had gotten the sense that the only reason the young man hadn't just pulled a disappearing act on his own years ago, were these two people, his little sister and his mother, and after having met them she could understand.
Florence was scary from a distance and a sweet heart up close, and Catherine was unlike many noble young misses in that she was intelligent, humble, and could keep up a five minute conversation without a glinting look of calculation flashing through her eye.
That last trait being something that even Henri herself sometimes failed, having been raised in a cutthroat culture where you and everyone around you were expected to have a definite and tangible worth. With so called "worthless" people, those lacking in either talent, personal wealth, or useful connections, being avoided and/or discarded lest they drag down the people around them, and become a burden.
Beyond getting to know her in-laws, Henri spent most of her time playing hostess to a slew of folk who came by as part of the settling-in rituals that most newlywed elite clan couples had to deal with.
They were basically a number of folk who were all either part of the family or friends of the family. They'd come by to either give their regard, or simply say hi, essentially just give the new couple some face time. So that both sides of this societal introduction could grow familiar with each other and maybe foster a friendship.
The whole thing was supposed to be a sort of network building activity to give the fledgling household some roots, but Henri felt it was kind of pointless since she knew that within the next month, she and Walder would be heading off to an entirely different system where it was likely that no one would have ever heard of the names Cerveny or Amihan.
The month came and went while both Henri and Walder finalized their plans, and before anyone knew it, the time had already come for the two youths to move out of Walder's mother's house to set off and find a place for themselves within the galaxy.
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