Ethan's P.O.V.
I ran as fast as my feet could carry me after the brown-haired girl, but due to her incredible speed, in addition to a head-start, she was out of sight and reach.
Disappeared like a snowflake in the ice.
The mysterious girl was gone, leaving me with an aching back and without a name in hand.
"How the. . ." My breathing was unruly, forcing me to stop and drink the fresh air to calm my running heart down.
Such a sarcastic and sly genius, I looked around one last time, hoping to find a clue about her disappearance - unsuccessfully. My breaths were the only sounds that stirred in the quiet forest
What is she, a ninja?
A heavy sigh left my lips, and I had to force my sore feet to walk back again. Great, all that running for nothing. Oh, look at that, I even ruined my shoes.
Upon reaching the pile of the cluttered rocks, I took a long look at the scene, wondering how one can manage to fall that badly and be captured by lifeless elements.
I shook my head, carrying my walk to where my white stallion was standing, happily eating the fresh grass he towered over.
"Hey, boy," I patted his soft, white mane before I pulled myself up on the black saddle. He didn't say anything, only obeyed as I gave him a faint push to his side, making him walk in the direction I was leading him to. "Bryce, I made a fool out of myself," the horse responded with a loud neigh. "Yeah, you're probably right," I looked at the huge animal. "I am a fool."
And that was the last thing I said before I softly whipped the black rein around his head, consequently making him run like a flying arrow.
Although I'm supposed to concentrate on where I'm riding - especially in a speed like this, - I could not help but wander into the depth of the sea of unanswered questions this girl had so mercilessly pushed me into.
Is it really that difficult to believe my name? That I'm the Prince of Areadan? Most people recognize royals when they see one, and not to mention, who doesn't know the rulers of the biggest, richest and most powerful kingdom of all times?
Especially when you're living in that very own kingdom.
Our people love my family because of the justice and kindness my parents - the Queen and King of Areadan - controls the enormous land with.
Not only is it a peaceful kingdom, but we're out of danger to have a war thrown our way. After all, no one is stupid enough to pick a fight with a kingdom and their greatest army of all times. It would be a suicide mission to be in a battle against Areadan.
Everyone knows that.
Everyone except for her.
This mysterious girl, she's, I don't know, strange? Never have I met a girl that has actually insulted me, or been that stubborn.
Okay, scratch the last one, I have met a lot of stubborn girls - however, this maiden is one of a kind.
A headstrong, sarcastic and nameless girl with no intention to hold back anything or mute her rude comments.
One of the many things I could not fathom about her was how she did not believe my words. If this had been anyone else, they would surely not have continued with the namecalling, that I am certain about.
But what if she pretended she didn't know me? Perhaps behind that blank and confused look of hers, there was a skilled acting?
That would've been a great explanation if it hadn't been for the other questions sneaking up behind me.
Why would she pretend to be unconscious of my identity? What did she win on that?
Maybe she thought I would have her imprisoned for the insults? But that's not the case, because why else would she continue with her rude comments?
"Ugh," I groaned in pain and frustration, feeling exhausted from the war this girl had created inside my head.
The other option is that she really didn't know who I am, and thus, did not believe any word coming out of my mouth.
Or maybe she just didn't care. You know, that does seem like a reasonable explanation in this case.
It would actually be a good thing for a change, it's quite tiring to meet people who only befriend you because of your title and riches.
Gold diggers. . . Should've dug up their own dignity instead.
But not her, she did not give a single care about me nor what I was saying.
Is that even a good thing?
Not only did she leave a war of questions that were fighting for answers, but she left me with utter confusion and curiosity. And I have to admit; I do like mysteries.
As a child, I have always fascinated and loved how mysterious and unknown riddles are. I absolutely love how there is a puzzle to be solved, but no one can seem to put the pieces together.
And this is exactly how I feel about this girl, but the difference, however, is that it makes me frustrated to the point where I just want to throw my brain into horse trash.
Is this how philosophers feel about their own questions?
She's a big mystery to be figured out, a puzzle I'm determined to solve, no matter what. However, that's the function of a mystery; its purpose is to be unknown at the same time it's supposed to be solved.
Mysteries are like a shell. You can either break it and figure out what's hiding there, or you can let it live in isolation and never find out what lives there.
"Prince Ethan?" A sudden, shrill voice screeched, pulling me out of my sea of thoughts. "You're Prince Ethan!"
My eyes widened as I looked down at the young, brown-haired girl. Her blue orbs were as big as the sun, almost popping out of their sockets.
I shook my head in a rushing and exaggerated action, "No, no, no. You must confuse me with somebody else - farewell!"
Before she could use her animal screeching voice to cry out again, I whipped the reins that consequently made Bryce run.
The quicker I got to the castle, the sooner I could find out about the mysterious girl.
***
"Where have you been?"
"Don't tell me you hid a body without us."
There are two types of people.
I rolled my eyes as I hung my red cloak on the nearest chair. My attention landed on the ball my friends were throwing between each other, both of them laying on each of they own couch like the lazy sloths they are.
"Why do you always assume that I have killed someone whenever I go out?" I raised my eyebrow at the moron I call a best-friend, Lorenzò.
"The question, cabrón, isn't why I would, but why wouldn't I?" The curly-haired boy replied, giving me a goofy smile that made his golden and sandy skin glow.
"He has a point." Conner pointed at the smirking Lorenzò, something I replied to with an eye roll.
These two morons may be annoying, but they're my only friends that I actually trust. We go way back to the diapers days, so you could say that I have known them my entire life.
Without them, I don't even know how I would've survived the loneliness and boredom in the castle. We always find something to do - whether it's just some sword practice, horse racing, soccer, or plainly messing with our teacher, Mr. W, there's always fun involved.
"For your information - to the both of you, - I have not killed anyone." I glared knives. "Yet. . ."
Lorenzò smirked. "Aw, Ethan has grown so much. It feels like it was only five minutes ago that he asked us to meet him in the library."
"Because it was five minutes ago, you idiot."
"Can I ask why you have requested us to meet you in the library? Are we going to prank Mr. W again?" Conner's blue eyes sparkled with excitement at the idea.
"Actually, we can do that later," I replied when a new prank found its way into my head. "But that's not the reason why I asked you to come here."
Conner nodded, pushing his blond hair out of his eyes and waiting for me to continue. But Lorenzò, on the other hand, was being his Lorenzò-self.
"You want a good hiding place to bury a body? Okay, I know about a-"
"I haven't killed anyone!" I exclaimed loudly, which was followed by an echoing sound of a plate shattering to the ground.
The three of us turned our heads to see a maid with a shocked expression on her old features. Without another word, she hurriedly picked up the broken pieces and scurried her way out of the room.
Great. Now a maid thinks I've killed someone.
"You should probably run before they catch you, Ethan. Don't worry, I will hold them back as long as I can." Lorenzò laughed along with Conner, feeding my annoyance.
"Guys," I groaned, pinching the bridge of my nose. "You know what? Forget it, I will just figure it out on my own."
"Alright, we will stop!" Conner's fragile promise stagnated my steps, his eyes narrowing at our curly-haired friend, "Right, Lorenzò?"
"Ay, ay, Captain." He replied, but not without a mock salute aimed at the blond-haired boy who ignored his silliness.
"Now, what did you want to talk about?" His glass-blue orbs went back to me as I now had locked their attention.
I took a deep breath, "I met a girl."
"Oh, shocking! This is too much information - I can't handle it! Prince Ethan of Areadan met a girl! Arrest him for his horrendous crimes-" Lorenzò shouted with his hands flying in the air, and only stopped when I hit his shoulder. "Ow! Okay, okay!"
He held his hands in surrender, rubbing his sore shoulder. "So, what's the big deal? You meet girls every day."
"Well, this girl is a bit more. . . different from people," I explained, trying not to think of her cat-like eyes that were filled with mischief and annoyance.
Conner arched an eyebrow. "Different how?"
"Was she crazy different, creepy different, stalker different, fan-girl different or all of the above?" Lorenzò listed on his fingers, looking at me with his light shade of brown eyes.
"Isn't all of that the same thing?" The blond-haired boy questioned, which cornered us in a moment of reevaluation.
I quickly shook my head before we switched topics. "Either way, she was neither of them."
A dead silence followed my words like a shadow.
"What?"
"You're telling me that you met a girl, who didn't fawn all over you, fainting at the sight of Prince Ethan-" Lorenzò made a high-pitched voice before continuing. "-And tried to make you marry them? Now, that is interesting," he pointed his finger at me.
"Where did you meet her?" Conner carried on with the query.
And then I explained everything. Summoning snickers when I told them about her snarky comments, and catching them in a loud gleam about the girl's successful plan.
But when I came to the conflicted part of her, the part of how she did not know my identity, the laughter died momentarily.
"So, you're telling me that you met a girl - a young female - who had no idea of who you are?" Lorenzò asked, which I replied with a nod.
"Maybe she just didn't recognize you?" The blond-haired boy shrugged his shoulders, pouring himself a cup of water.
"She didn't believe me when I told her that I was a prince."
My statement was enough for Lorenzò to fall off the couch and to the hard, concentrated floor. Conner, on the other hand, choked on the water he was drinking, spitting every drop of it all over the place.
Unfortunately for our Hispanic friend, he should've fallen on the other side of the couch.
"She what?" They questioned.
"Are you sure she wasn't just pretending to not know you?" The blue-eyed boy coughed, trying to come up with a logical explanation as he always does.
"No, let me reformulate Conner's question; are you sure she didn't sleep under those rocks for the past century?" Lorenzò wiped his soaked face, looking at me with knitted eyebrows.
"Even if she wasn't familiar with your name, shouldn't she at least believe that you're royal or somehow important?" Conner continued to throw his questions at me, which I caught without a proper answer.
I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head. "Obviously not."
"Who is she?" His eyebrows furrowed in curiosity, making me sigh.
"That's the thing," I sat down on the nearest chair, altering my gaze between my friends. "I don't know."
Lorenzò raised his eyebrow. "Well, surely she isn't a ghost. What's her name?"
I let out another heavy breath, "I don't know."
Now both of them raised their eyebrows, giving me the 'are you stupid'-look. Lorenzò even slapped me in the back of my head, cursing me out in Spanish. "El burro sabe mas que tu."
"Didn't you ask for her name?" Conner gave me his famous look that questioned my intelligence.
I rolled my eyes and rubbed the spot behind my head. "Of course, I did, but she refused to tell me."
"Estúpido idiota." Lorenzò shook his head before speaking English again. "Let me get this straight, you met a girl - who sounds more awesome than any of us could ever be, - and you didn't even get her name?" His rhetorical question dripped with satire. "Great, let's do Cinderella style then. Did she lose her shoe?"
"She didn't leave anything behind. Nothing. Not a name nor a shoe." I gave him a hard glare.
Conner spoke before Lorenzò could throw another affront. "We don't need a shoe to find her because we're smarter than Prince Charming."
Both Lorenzò and I gave him a look of confusion, something that made the blond-haired boy roll his eyes at.
He sighed, almost as if the answer was too obvious. "Do you remember how she looked like?"
A painting of her surfaced. "Yeah, I do remember her face and what she was wearing - well, at least most of it."
The curly-haired boy suddenly smirked, something I narrowed my eyes at.
"Did the girl catch our little prince's eye?" He teased, pinching my cheek with his hand that I swatted away as fast as it came.
"I swear to God, Lorenzò, I will throw you out of the window." My threat only made my friend's smile grow wider.
A sheepish grin crawled up on Conner's face as well, and I knew this was only one of the many teases that I would hear.
"Come on, Ethan. We're your friends, we won't tell anyone," he spoke with a straight face, yet, I saw his hidden smile.
I rolled my eyes, knowing this would go down either way. "Yeah, sure," was my sarcastic response, which had them snickering. "But even if I know how she looks like, how's that going to help if we don't know where to look for or whom to ask?"
Conner smiled, "We're going to find her by searching the village, of course."
My brow arched in the air, heck, even Lorenzò looked at him like he was an idiot.
"Oh, yeah sure." The dark, curly-haired boy started with sarcasm dripping from the tip of his words. "We're just going to waltz through the busy streets of Areadan because no villagers are going to recognize this idiot," he pointed at me.
"Hey!"
"Fine then. Tell the whole kingdom that you're looking for a girl - a person you know nothing about, not even a name, - and in no time there will be thousands of people claiming to be the mysterious girl you're looking for." Conner shut the both of us up.
Why must he always be right?
"Dammit. . . Blondie has a point." Lorenzò muttered loud enough to make the tall boy glare at him.
Conner's statement was valid. If people found out that I'm looking for an unknown girl, the chances of finding her will vanish.
"So, what am I supposed to do? I can't just walk into the village without being recognized." I knew Lorenzò was, despite his foolish way to put out an answer, right about this matter. I can't waltz in the streets and not be noticed.
"Unless. . ." Lorenzò started, catching our attention. "We use disguises. In that way, we can look for the girl without being recognized."
How come we did not think of that earlier? The sun-haired boy and I shared the thought, looking back at our friend with surprise splashed on our faces.
"He does have a brain," Conner spoke after a pregnant silence, which did not fall into good hands as it made Lorenzò mutter something in Spanish.
"Okay, now we have a plan, but we still have one problem left." I stopped the mini-fight before it had the chance to grow. "Mr. W."
"Oh, yeah, I almost forgot about that old man," Lorenzò waved his hand, almost as if our teacher was a fly to swat away. "If we managed to hide from him for a week, I'm sure sneaking away from him will be a piece of cake."
"As long as he doesn't tell your parents about what we're doing," Conner added, "Then I'm certain it will all be fine."
"Unless. . ." The curly-haired boy's smirk returned. "You did tell your parents about her, because they will undoubtedly help you. Though I'm pretty sure they will send wedding invitations before you can even figure out her name."
"But hey, at least you'll get the name from the officiant," I didn't even bother to roll my eyes at the high-five they gave each other.
I sighed, rubbing my eye tiredly, "For Christ sake, you're going to annoy me to death."
"Don't you need a life first?" A yelp from the Hispanic boy indicated that Conner had hit him before I could.
When I looked up, I was met by Lorenzò rubbing his back while mumbling something in Spanish, and Conner's blue eyes settled on me.
"We're going to find her, Ethan, don't worry. She can't have gotten that far." He tried to comfort me with words that had no effect.
"Yeah, we can look for her tomorrow after we've found some disguises. But until then. . ." Lorenzò's face slowly thrived into a grin of mischief.
Before any of us could say anything, he suddenly pulled out a pie behind the couch, something that summoned bewilderment on Conner's face.
"Wait, how long have you been hiding that-"
"Let's prank Mr. W!" He held the apple pie over his head, successfully catching a smile on my lips.
But before the evil plan of pranking our teacher was exposed, the library door was swung open with a loud slam, revealing a brown-haired boy racing out of it.
"Ethan! Ethan, I have to tell you something!" My little brother shouted excitedly, running towards us at full speed.
"Whoa, slow down, Jordan," Lorenzò threw the pie to Conner who barely caught it. "You're going to catch fire with that speed, kiddo," he said after successfully stopping the twelve-year-old boy from crashing into a vase.
"I met this really, really, really awesome girl! She was so good at kicking the ball, and everyone was 'wow', and then we played and then-" The little boy spoke so fast that I had to stop him to understand his racing words.
"What girl?" I cut him off, catching his brown, sparkling eyes.
Jordan gave me a huge smile. "I don't remember her name, but she was really awesome and-"
"Different?" I finished his sentence, which caused him to nod repeatedly. "Jordan was this girl about this tall-" I held my hand below my head. "-Green eyes, light brown hair, bandaged arm and was wearing a blue dress with a matching hood?"
Jordan rubbed his naked chin for a couple of seconds, nodding after thinking through my description. "Oh, and she was really pretty." He sighed with a dreamy look.
My friends and I shared a look, all three of us thinking the same thing: Damn.
"We might not have her name yet, but we know where to start." Conner's words were enough for a smile to be spilled. "Can you tell us how you meet this girl?"
The twelve-year-old giggled, jumping up and down. "I just followed some kids to a house and played soccer with them when suddenly, a boy kicked the ball through the window - hitting her."
"What?"
"Yeah, but she was so cool with it - she wasn't even mad!" He laughed, "She even played with us." Jordan finished his hyper-filled words before giving another dreamy sigh. "I have never met a girl that awesome before."
Not weird she was so grumpy when her luck is this bad, I thought back to the pile of rocks she had fallen into.
"Do you remember where the house was or the street's name?" I snapped my brother out of his day-dream, making our eyes meet.
He shook his head, "No."
"Do you remember the name of the boy who kicked the ball? Or perhaps the girl's?" Conner tried, hoping for any information that could lead somewhere.
"I think it started with an A, wait no, that was the other girl's name - oh, wait, it was- no, that's our mother's name. . ." He rubbed his small chin as if it was going to help him remember. "But I know that the boy's name starts with the same letter as mine; J!"
I give up.
"Hey," Lorenzò spoke, making me look at him. "At least we know that this girl plays soccer, which I have to admit, is pretty cool." Jordan smiled and high-fived my friend.
Conner saw the bitter look on my face, which was soon followed by him patting my shoulder. "Remember our plan, Ethan."
Yeah, walking around the village and looking for a specific girl isn't going to be hard.
Not at all.
"Look at the bright side!" Lorenzò's enthusiastic voice filled the room again as he held the pie over his head. "We still have a teacher to prank."
As a cue, the door suddenly swung open again, revealing an old man with short, brown beard and round glasses.
Speak of the devil, and he shall appear, I thought when Mr. W looked like he was about to murder every living soul in the room.
"I have been looking for you three! Where have you been all day?" His icy blue eyes glared at us through his thick glasses. "Don't you know it is school today?"
Oh, I forgot about that.
He pointed his ancient finger at us. "You are eighteen years of age, for God's sake! You should take school more seriously at this age!"
While he was busy ranting his head off, I looked at my friends who all shared the same idea.
"I'm seventeen, not eighteen - learn your facts," Lorenzò muttered quietly to the mad teacher, and then leaned down to my brother's height. "Jordan, when I say run, you run, okay?"
Although he nodded in response, the look of confusion did not leave his face as he gulped in fear.
Hell, who wouldn't be afraid?
"I expect you to take classes more seriously! Especially you, Prince Ethan!" Of course, he hates me the most. "How are you supposed to lead this kingdom if you do not know algebra or the Order of the Golden Fleece?"
Though I can understand why some elements are essential to know, I can't seem to fathom how subjects such as algebra are going to help me lead the realm. It's not like I will settle down a conflict by showing how x equals y.
"One. . ." I said as Mr. W continued with his rambles about some English literature and history.
"Two. . ." Conner continued when we all prepared ourselves to run, which Jordan hesitantly copied.
"Three!" Lorenzò shouted, cutting off Mr. W's rant about the 'in my time'-talk.
God, am I tired of old people's talk about the 15th century and how 'hard' it was in their time. Stop living in the past, this is the 16th century, basically the future.
Before our teacher could say anything, the curly-haired boy threw the pie in the old man's face that exploded all over his clothes.
I wish I had brought a sketcher who could've captured this hilarious event - it was priceless!
"Run!"
And then we all ran for our lives, hearing Mr. W shout at how 'inappropriate' and 'childish' we were.
Despite him being an old man in his fifties, he can run. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he has chased us around the castle, garden, and the village a couple of hundred times before.
Well, we're helping him to keep his health intact - but I can't say the same thing about his sanity.
Mr. W could chain me to my desk, build a wall around me, tell my parents about every unknown prank, and it still wouldn't stop me from running away.
What can I say, algebra isn't the puzzle I want to solve.