One day, you wake up and you get crowned as the Queen.
One night, quite possibly the same night, you take a walk in your new castle and out of nowhere, you get turned into a swan.
What would you do? Would you blame the Fates? Or, would you blame the...
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Odile was incensed beyond reason by the time she left Orynea with the books. Even though she avoided explaining the matter to her Queen, she could not stop pondering over it.
Leaving aside whatever and however events had proceeded in the past six months (of which she had no fond memories as such, except for some that circled around Orynea), the coronation from the morning was enough to trigger the wrath and discomfort once more, and increase the two manifold.
Inside her own chambers on a level right below the top floor of the West Wing, she let out a long breath through gritted teeth. Her eyes were narrowed and they stared at the opposite wall as if they wished to carve a hole through it. They shifted to the right and landed on her set of arrows propped up carelessly against the headboard of her cot.
Perfect, she thought, for channeling the overpowering frustration lining her insides.
She roughly pulled at the quiver and dropped to the floor, her armour making a strange screeching noise. She pulled out one of the arrows and placed it on the floor in front of her.
It began when she went down to the kitchen to fetch Orynea's breakfast. The kitchen girls were due to arrive halfway through the next hour. However, Orynea was famished. It was simply her nerves at work, Odile knew. She did not eat more as such when she got nervous, but she did mix up the timing of her meals at random. It was a habit she had yet to break out of, clearly, and one which had been exercised excessively over the past few months.
If not for the obvious signs of something odd with the kingdom and its royal heritage, Odile would have been surprised at the frequency of her nerves acting up. As it was, some part of the newly acquired roles, relations, duties and environment must be at work too. Those were hard to escape, no matter how much one got prepared for it over the lifelong Etiquette classes a princess had to go through.
"To react is to reveal your undoing," Odile had often heard Orynea's teacher repeat over and over again. "When you are with company, your outer skin and expression needs to be as placid as an untouched surface of water. The moment your eyes flicker, reports emerge and they vary person to person, interpretation to interpretation. Have you ever seen Her Majesty Berlya exhibit any shred of emotion while in Court or while attending functions with the dignitaries present?"
The answer was always 'no'. Orynea's mother was a perfect example for a perfect pure-bred royal lineage. Orynea, on the other hand, had rough edges that were harder to hide. Well, at least at that young age.
Now - now, she was exceptionally gifted in reading habitual discrepancies. That was her secret to developing the "placid" expression she was trained for all her young life. If she had to keep from expressing her thoughts through her eyes, she needed to focus on something else. To be more precise, to observe something. In a Throne Room or Ball Room chockfull of people, what better targets would there be for it?
