The World Walkers: Unknown World: Sophie: Listening to an Argument

[k_a_webb]

“The only way you’re going is if you take her with you.” The shake of Oscar’s head told me what his answer was and I felt the same way, but I knew there was no negotiation. “It’s a time to put your feelings aside and use logic. You simply don’t have the skills to survive if you go alone and as you’re my only son…”

I’m my father’s third daughter, which makes me expendable, and that was why I was sitting there listening to the argument between father and son. For the last thirty minutes it had been going round in circles, so I was beginning to get a little fed up. There were better things I could be doing with my time but I knew my duties. Eventually Oscar would accept. Otherwise he’d be trapped in a place he was beginning to hate and that to him was worse than being stuck with me for a year or more. Wonder how I know all this? Well, this all happened nearly six years ago, and the relationship between us, as relationships are prone to, changed.

At the time, sitting there in that study, I was, at best, indifferent to the man I was meant to be travelling with. Occasionally Oscar managed to irritate me so much I began to think it was possible to hate him, but in a strange way I couldn’t help understanding him. I’d been brought in to guide him, because I’d been travelling the worlds for over a decade, and he didn’t like feeling as though he couldn’t cope with what might happen. Fortunately I knew that I hadn’t been asked to guide him because he was incapable of going alone. No, I was sitting there due to my experience with the doors, with the way they worked and how suddenly things could change on you.

The last thing anyone wanted was for their travelling child to find themselves on one of the lost worlds with no way back. I remember staring at Oscar, wondering if he realised exactly why they were having an argument about his decision to travel the worlds, and wishing he would accept that his father was simply worried about him. Unlike some people, no names mentioned, he actually cared about all of his children equally, even if they were just sons. For other fathers it was easier to accept the truth – sons were as expendable as third daughters. He could hope for a good marriage, someone who would give him important daughters, but on our world he was only good for selling to the highest bidder, and travelling would make him a better catch.

Unfortunately I knew why my father had been so happy for me to guide the only son of the Baroness of the West March. He was hoping for a good marriage for me, one that would mean I’d be in line to inherit from both my mother and mother-in-law, even though I was just the expendable third daughter who’d been left on a different world when I was six to see if I’d manage to make myself useful. It took me eight years to return, but by then I’d seen a lot of the Web and I knew that as soon as I’d earned enough I was gone. The man who professed to be my father wasn’t going to be able to use me for anything.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.

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