Ladies, Lords, & Liars

Chapter Eighteen: The Princess, Finally

   No matter what happened, though, the princess seemed to find some way to avoid him. He would see her from a distance, the flash of her golden curls or the twinkling of a green eye, but then when he went to introduce himself, she vanished.

   By the time a couple weeks passed, he actually wanted to meet her, if only to end the suspense. She was the only new thing in sight, the only unknown he actually wanted to confront. She was the last golden threat keeping him from sinking into the endless cycle of things, losing himself completely to what he could only assume was the same insanity that plagued his mother.

   Sometimes, either the king or the queen, or even both, would be missing from the activities he was dragged into. More often than not, it was the king who failed to show up. The nobles also seemed to rotate out between attending and staying back to do something they thought was more important. He wanted to think it was a sort of day-off system, and that he would get his own sometime soon, and it would certainly fit with what he'd seen so far, but he was almost certain that it had to do with the court, and meetings and things he knew nothing about.

   He hardly ever found time to get into the garden, but he went whenever he had free time. Sometimes he would encounter Ryall, and sometimes he wouldn't. He got the impression that she was avoiding him or hiding something. But either way, there was something almost dark in her eyes whenever she spoke to him.

   Despite that odd, hidden place in her gaze that he was unable to crack, he couldn't help but come back to find her whenever he had even a second of free time. She was as untamed as the free-fall from the cliff that paralyzed him so completely. Her hair sat in a frizzy, tangled mess atop her head, and it was stubbornly never styled properly. It was the same murky brown as her eyes, and consequently, the same color as the thick coating of dust that often found residence on her bare hands and feet. But her rare smile was nearly perfect, almost too perfect for her lowly position. She was beautiful in the same way that a lion about to make a kill was beautiful; fearsome and dangerously quiet. Every time he saw that dark look in her eyes, he felt as if he was being stalked by that same lion.

   After every jammed-packed day of stuff, he had way too many things to think about as he drifted off. It got to a point where he hardly got to sleep at night before the knock resounded through his room, signaling the arrival of the servant that was sent to fetch him to breakfast.

   He lost track of how long he'd been at the palace, but as he returned to his room after a long, long ride through the foothills, he couldn't help but feel that he'd been there for years. Everything felt sore, and no matter how he sat or laid down, he couldn't seem to get comfortable on the overly plush furniture.

  Thoughts haunted his mind. The strange, almost childish behavior of almost everyone he'd met, the fact that he and the princess seemed to deflect each other like parrying swords, and the looming threat over his head that anything and everything he did might end in his death... that inexplicable longing to see Ryall the gardener again, if only for his last few seconds of free time before the next thing. A similar longing to finally capture the songbird that was the princess, flitting through the branches just one step ahead of his outstretched hand for an impossible eternity.

   He blinked heavily a few times as he sank into a chair. The fire had long since died and stayed dead in the hearth. It was warm enough now to go without it—hot, actually. He could feel sweat pooling between his shoulder blades and beneath the stuffy collar of his shirt.

   He was sitting there, doing nothing more than staring at the blackened stone of the inside of the fireplace when he finally noticed that there was a letter waiting for him on the table. It was a yellowish paper with fine gold lining and a wax seal of a deep crimson.