Obscure headcanon game. Lady Sybil.
She was appropriately grave when her mother and father died, since that was what was expected of her. (Sybil was good at nothing so much as knowing what was expected of her.) It was not as though she didn’t love them; she just hadn’t really known them—there was a moment where she stood in the Temple of Blind Io and looked down at those waxen faces, eaten up by fever in a way the undertakers could not hide, and thought, we are strangers, you and I.
She wept, graveside: that was expected of her too.
After the funeral, she went to the kitchens and sat down at the roughly-hewn table. Sybil had given the staff leave for the day but there was a Boy sitting there nonetheless, brushing a pair of boots. Sybil assumed he worked for—her, now—in some capacity because he just barely looked up before saying, “Your Grace.”
Sybil had only ever been ‘my lady’ or ‘madam’, but she supposed that was the difference between being a duke’s daughter and the Duchess of Ankh in her own right. Still, the title made her snort in a decidedly unfeminine way and—well, she was delighted when the Boy twitched all over, an almost-smile fighting onto his lips.
“Yes,” Sybil Ramkin, Duchess of Ankh, said with amusement once the Boy got a hold of himself and resumed his brushing. “I suppose so.”
“We are all very sorry for your loss, Ma’am,” he said.
Sybil splayed her hands over the grain of the wood. It was a very ugly table, she mused; someone had clearly fashioned it out of a lesser cut of wood, with too many knots and a whorls to make a smooth top. The result was a surface that that buckled and waved like the sea—marked by knives, stains, and smears. It was fearsomely ugly, and almost a relief from watching her mother and father buried, which had been beautiful, and about as useful to her grief as a windsock in a galestorm.
Sybil hummed a noncommittal note. “Thank you for your kind words. I wish—I could be sorry of it too,” she said with an honesty that surprised even her. She pretended as though she could not feel herself coloring, forcing herself to look imperious and gaze into the fire.
(In order to be sorry, she would have had to have lose something—Sybil was not sure she had. She was very good at knowing what was expected of her; it did not mean she meant it.)
When she looked up, the Boy was watching her. He had dark eyes, and a crooked tilt to his smile. “Then I am twice sorry, ma’am,” he said, his accent tilting towards Morpork. On the fine footman’s boot, his fingers were scarred; Sybil wondered suddenly where he had got such marks. “There are many tragedies in this world, ma’am, but I am twice-sorry for your twice-over loss.”
Sybil exhaled raggedly. “Thank you,” Sybil said. “Forgive me,” she said after a moment of stilted silence, wherein she forced back her tears, and maybe an awful howl or two. “I do not know your name.”
“Willikins,” the Boy said. “It’s Willikins, ma’am.”
(When Forsythe retired to Bes Pelargic to enjoy his remaining years, Sybil went to Willikins first. “I’m sorry,” she said, after describing his prospective duties to him. Willikins—who had gained a little salt in his hair but nothing more—snorted. “Your Grace, you are not sorry about anything,” he said, and Sybil laughed.)
