Chapter Forty-Six: Star-like Dreams
1111 Words
Fuscia Greene
“I was beginning to think that you had stood me up?” Fuscia said to the sauntering man, slowly approaching her position by the fountains that lay in the depths of the Maze.
“I am late..” the man responded, sounding a little weary, “I apologise.”
“You have nothing to apologise for, Aleu. All I had to do was dress up and wait. You had Counts and Barons to impress.” She replied.
Her feet were dipped in the cool fountain water, and her makeup sat a little smudged.
“You certainly must be furious if you are using sarcasm!”
“It is not sarcasm. My words are true. All I had to do was dress up.”
“Sarcasm need not necessarily boast a sense of falsehood, neither does it have to exhibit a sense of exaggeration.” He proceeded pointlessly.
“We have not seen each other in how long...? How is it that the first thing we do is argue over semantics?”
“You have a point. However, I did expect you to hug me. So I have no qualms in seeking out an argument until I receive my embrace.”
The nights' festivities were almost over. If anything clarified that, it was the symphonies of dwindling laughter in the air performed by drunk nobles as they made their way to their carriages.
In a sense greater than her own, she felt foolish.
Attending a ball, a royal one, was all she had dreamed of since she was little. Therefore dressing up to dance with Aleu in the gardens, however minuscule it was to him, was dream-like to her. So she got to the rendezvous a little earlier than anticipated and waited, then waited some more …waited a little longer…until finally, the excitement had escaped her.
Perhaps it was that she had anticipated leaping into his strong arms so many times that it had exhausted her. That had to be why she felt dejected enough to not embrace him despite his pointing it out. So rather than excuse her non-embracive mood, Fuscia began to toy with the fountain water's flow using her feet.
She could not be upset because she had expected Aleu to drop everything and just run to her, as though she were his air…surely, it could not be that. She was a maid. She was not permitted to fraternise with nobility because no matter the illegitimate title, he was still the Duke’s son and thereby more missable than she. So she should not feel this way, rather she could not.
“Fuscia, what happened to your hand?”
“My hand?” her focus left the magnified reflection of her feet in the shallow water to focus on her bandaged wrist, “Nothing.”
“What do you mean nothing?” he asked as he sat next to her, however, faced away from the fountains waters.
He smelled of the sun’s warm embrace on a cold morning, or perhaps that is what he felt like.
An ounce of warmth in an otherwise bitter, shiver-inducing time. Without Aleu, her survival, no, her life would have lost all it's colour decades ago.
“What I mean…? Truly, nothing.” She repeated.
“May I see this ‘nothing’?”
“Fine, it is not, ‘nothing’,” she tossed her leg up from the surface of the water, adding to its splash. “It is that…a person I really adore did this accidentally, she was trying to protect me; however, what she was trying to protect me from affected her emotionally, so she lost her grip.”
Was that answer acceptable?
Everyone she had explained the accident to had been startled by the mention of its cause being a Knight.
Well, other than Vincrest, the beautiful arch mage’s vice from the tower. He had hastened the healing process of her wound as divine healing was a special kind of healing trait only offered in the temple and by referral. So the stimulation of her cells was the best that he could offer, thus cutting down the healing process by half.
Vincrest had believed her explanation on the occurrence. However, despite both their convincing, hers and Vincrest’s, Jelly had been adamant about her self dismissal. At the memory of last night’s shenanigans, Fuscia released a deep sigh.
“What? You seem like you’ve had a longer day than I.” Aleu asked, bumping his shoulder warmly against hers.
“The one who inflicted the wound was a knight.”
“WHAT!?”
“No, no! before you go all protective about it,” she said, “She was not herself when she did it.”
“Fuscia, rumours are the Empress kills her men when she is not ‘herself’. So, does that make it right? No! it does not, in just the same way, knights are not-,”
“Aleu, forget the knight. Do you trust me?”
“Well..yes, of course, I do.”
“Do you believe I am one to put up with abuse?”
“N-no.”
“Then believe me when I say she did not intend to harm me.”
It had to be a good sign that he overreacted, she reasoned. It means that he cares.
However, the swell of disappointment was evident in her core. Always, since the day they had met, she had wanted to be the one to make him lose his sense of reason, the worn-out mask he wore on so many occasions to appease those who deemed themselves better than he. As it was, she was nothing but accustomed to his generous concern.
She did not want to be his sense of worry, like so many in his life, but his sense of release.
“Okay, I believe you.” He uttered.
“Are you…are you okay?” she asked, wishing to start another topic, “Music from the orchestra has grown rather dulled by the intoxicated chatter, so as much as I wish, we cannot jump into the night’s dance.”
“I am so sorry F-,”
“No, again, do not apologise, Aleu. Rather, tell me of your day?”
“You mean night?”
“No day. Do you have any idea how much I have missed you?”
A crimson patch warmed his tanned ears as his gaze averted hers.
“I have missed you, Aleu,” she said again.
- Writer
