It was decided that splitting up was the best idea, and that we would each try to canvas as much ground as possible.
Finding the stepmother in a crowd of this size was daunting, but we had a couple of things in our favor. For one, most of the women attending the ball were young, under thirty. The number of woman old enough to be Cindy's stepmother was limited; though actually finding them in such a large crowd in the first place wouldn't be easy. Still, we wouldn't have to interrogate every single person we saw, just the ones over about forty-five.
And it was likely that she would be doing her best to keep near the prince, in order to ensure that her daughters were able to vie for his attention. What we would do once we actually found her... well, one step at a time.
Erik, Jack and I split up, all heading in the general direction of where the Prince was dancing in turns with an endless line of jostling women, each of us approaching from a different side.The crowd surrounding the prince was thick, and the women making it up were unyielding. There were the ones who were prepared to tight tooth and nail for a chance at catching the prince's eye, and I received more than one elbow to the ribs as I tried to force my way closer to where he danced with some moony-eyed girl.
Ah—there was someone: an older woman, in her fifties maybe, with hair caught somewhere between ash-blonde and grey, wearing a fine dress of dove gray silk. She was lingering near the edge of that crowd surrounding the dancing prince, watching with a blissful smile on her face.I sidled up next to her, and pretended to be watching the two dancers as well.
"That young lady dances beautifully," I said to her in a casual tone after a moment. I knew jack all about dancing, so I had no idea if that was an accurate statement or not, but thankfully the woman nodded and her smile grew wider.
"She does, does she not? I taught her everything I know."
"Oh—are you her mother?" I asked, a little too eagerly.
She only beamed with pride. "Yes, that's my daughter, Celeste. And she's dancing with the prince!" She gave a giggle that was surprisingly girlish for her age.
"That's very exciting," I said, though I couldn't help thinking that the prince was looking at Celeste as if she was about as interesting as a flatworm. "How fortunate for her! Do you think it's going well?"
"Of course!" the woman crooned. "My Celeste is a darling—her needlework is exquisite, her lute playing is divine, her dancing is extraordinary, she speaks three different languages—"I hastily interrupted before she could go on listing Celeste's many accomplishments. "Oh my, she certainly is a treasure, isn't she? Do you have any other daughters? Are they as accomplished as Celeste?"
"Other daughters? No, only a son," the woman replied, shaking her head. She glanced over towards the far wall, where a young man barely out of his teens was leaning against the wall, looking nearly as bored at the prince.
I felt the hope drain out of me. "Ah. Well, that's nice too," I said vaguely, and I detached myself from the conversation by letting a pushy girl come between me and the older woman as she fought for a closer place to view the prince. I started circling the crowd again, passing by Erik as I went.
"It's not the older lady in the gray silk," I told him as I passed.
"Not the redhead in purple either," he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder as a woman in her late forties. A moment later he disappeared from view, vanishing back into the crowd.
Two down, a hundred to go.
I found a plump woman with piles of glossy black hair piled atop her head in an extremely low cut green gown, who looked to be somewhere in her mid-forties. She was sitting in one of the chairs that lined the wall for weary dancers to rest their feet, talking animatedly to a tall, skeletally thin woman with iron grey hair in a conservative black dress that even I could tell was about twenty years out of date. Two for one. I edged close enough to listen in on their conversation under the pretext of grabbing a glass of wine from a passing servant, and sipped it while pretending to stare off vaguely at a spot just a little to their right.
"An' then I says to 'er, I says: [i]'You can't be wearing that to ball, Alice, the prince will think you're no more than a common milkmaid!'[/i] O' course, she [i]is[/i] no more than a common milkmaid, mind you, but we can't 'ave the prince knowing that, now can we?" the plump woman in green chattered on. I noticed her cheeks were rather flushed, and she held an empty wine glass on each hand.
"Hm," said the severe looking woman, gazing down her long nose disapprovingly at the other woman.
"Now, we can't be affording such lordly clothes as all these courtly ladies 'ave got," continued the woman in green, waving around one of her wine glasses at the finely dressed women surrounding us, "But I'm a fine hand at sewing meself, and I was able to take me mum's old church dress and the curtain in the kitchen, an' came up with something that would suit the queen 'erself! My Alice looks a right pearl in that dress, let me tell you! Look, there she is, my Alice; right over there. Halloo, Alice, my pet!" She waved enthusiastically with her other hand, the wine glass flopping around precariously, at a group of girls who stood together in a little clump, all giggling and chatting amongst themselves.
One of them, who couldn't have been more than sixteen, turned around at the call, and waved back at her mother. She had her mother's jet black hair, and cheeks that were so pink that either a flushed complexion was genetic, or she was a drunk at her mother. She was a pretty girl, but very much still a teenager, slightly gawky, and far too young, in my opinion, to be pursuing marriage prospects. The dress she wore was blue and white, and to her mother's credit, it did look quite nice, flattering the girl's not-quite grown-up figure.
Well, the woman in green wasn't the stepmother. But the haughty woman she was speaking to still could be; she certainly looked like the evil-stepmother type, with her cold eyes and her mouth puckered up in a manner that left no one with any doubt that she was thoroughly judging the woman in green.
"My daughter," said the woman in black, "Is over there." She gestured in a stately manner to a young woman that was surrounded by a small crowd of men. Her hair was a rich shade of auburn and fell loose down her back. She stood taller than half of the men around her, and wore a dress in tones of jewel blue and gold. Despite the eager male attention that was being bestowed upon her, the expression she wore was as aloof as her mother's. As I watched, I saw her wave a hand at one of the men, and he and three others scurried off to fetch her a drink from a passing servant.
The woman in green saw this young woman, and her face fell slightly. "That's your daughter? Aye—she's a pretty lass. Though it seems as though she's got enough prospects that you may not be needin' a prince, eh? It wouldn't hurt to let the other girls have a chance, now would it?"
"No other girls stand a chance," sneered the woman in black, and she rose to her feet and swept away. I immediately followed after, staying as close as possible as she strode over to her daughter, grabbed the young woman by the arm, and dragged her away from the crowd of fawning men.
"Rowena, what are you doing?" the mother snapped. Her daughter, Rowena, pulled her arm out of her mother's grasp.
"I'm talking," she replied, with that same haughty expression she had wore while conversing with the men.
"To men who are not worth a moment of your time!" her mother scolded. "You should be talking with no one but the prince!"
"I did talk to the prince," Rowena protested coldly. "And I didn't like him. I don't believe he cared very much for me either."
Her mother spluttered. "You... you didn't like him? What does 'liking' have to do with anything? He's a prince! He's only going to be your husband, you don't have to like him!"
"He bored me," her daughter replied, glancing down at her perfectly shaped fingernails. "I don't want to marry someone who bores me. I've spent my whole life being bored by people, I think I'll go mad if I have to marry someone boring as well."
"This isn't you you, Rowena!" her mother hissed. "You are my only child, and after the disgrace of your father, I am replying on you to make a good marriage! If you don't marry into royalty and regain our social standing—"
"Can't I just marry a courtier?" Rowena sighed. "A duke or a count; maybe a baron."
"Well—yes, that would be acceptable if we have no other choice, but a prince—"
"A prince is just a duke with more people who want to assassinate him," Rowena interrupted, rolling her eyes. Behind her still-spluttering mother, just in my line of vision, a man walked past, and he caught both my and Rowena's eyes immediately. He was bizarrely out of place; he wore the clothes of a soldier, but not one of this country. They were worn and tattered and covered in dust from the road. His jaw was unshaven, and he carried a sack on his back, over one shoulder. He was looking around in a slight daze, as if unsure how he had come to be there.
Rowena's face split into a wide smile, and she waved a dismissive hand at her mother. "Enjoy the party mother, and do try to have a little fun for once in your life. I'm going to mingle." She swept past her mother, who stared after her recalcitrant daughter, open mouthed.
Nope. Rowena and her mother weren't Cinderella's stepmother and stepsister. I left the mother still standing there, aghast, to resume my search. I passed by Rowena and the strange man as I went, and overheard a snippet of their conversation.
"I'm a soldier from Alberny recently retired. I only arrived this night, and when I heard about the ball, I thought it would do me no harm to attend."
"All the way from Alberny? My, you have traveled such a long way!""All in search of my fortune—and I've had many an adventure along the way. This sack I carry on my back was a gift from a witch who I carried across a deep river on my back. Trapped inside are the four winds, and when I am in dire peril, I may release one to help save me."
"Oh, how fascinating! What sort of peril? Have you been on many adventures? Tell me all about them!"
I briefly considered telling Rowena about all my perils; maybe she'd take over this quest for me in order to quench her apparent thirst for excitement.
But no—success seemed to hinge in a large part to my particular knowledge of the fairy tale realm. Let Rowena find her adventure in the retired soldier.
I soused out and investigated three other women who fit the bill for Cinderella's stepmother in the next half hour, but not one of them ended up actually being her.
Eventually I crossed paths with Erik again, seeing him from behind as a couple of dancers swept passed me. I came up behind him and grabbed his shoulder to get his attention, and to my surprise, he jumped near a foot in the air and whirled around, raising his hands as if to ward me off.
"Woah, relax there, I'm not going to attack you," I said hastily.
"Oh—Rikki, it's just you." He sighed in relief.
"What in the world are you so worked up for?" I asked, raising an eyebrow at him. I noticed that he looks a bit ruffled, his hat slightly askew, the plumed feather looking a bit bedraggled, and a bit of a stain down the front of his doublet.
He huffed a frustrated breath. "I've been assaulted half a dozen times!"
"Assaulted?" I repeated, raising my other eyebrow.
"All these woman!" He threw out his arms to encompass the crowd around us. "No—not the women; their mothers." He glowered.
"I don't follow."
"They all keep trying to talk me into marrying their daughters! And some of them don't just try to talk me into it; they get physical about it! I've been grabbed, pushed, pinched, prodded, poked—one woman examined my teeth like I was a horse! I can't take it anymore, if one more woman tries to touch me, I'm throwing her out a window!"
"Actually, I've seen a couple of women myself who seem to be throwing their daughters at any eligible man who crosses their path. I suppose those who have given up on the prospect of hooking up with the prince are starting to feel desperate to catch the attention of literally anyone," I commented, glancing over the crowd around us.
Erik narrowed his eyes at me. "Desperate?" he repeated.
"What? Oh!" I widened my eyes at him. "Not that you're a desperate last-chance choice, of course. I'm sure you're an absolute catch for any girl who likes living completely isolated from civilization in a forest plagued by giants, eating nothing but nine-day-old pease porridge for breakfast, lunch, and dinner while you glare at her over the kitchen table."
"My forest is not plagued by giants!" Erik growled, jabbing a finger at me to drive home his point.
Before I could reply, a shrill, cooing voice rang through the air, and the blood suddenly drained out of Erik's face.
"Yoo whoo! Mister Erikson! Mister Erikson, where have you gone?"
"Quick," Erik hissed at me, grabbing me by the wrist. "Let's go, before she—"
But it was too late, the owner of the voice materialized out of the crowd like a stage magician, and spotted Erik standing there. She was in her mid-fifties, her mouse-brown hair streaked with grey, had a pair of gold wire-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of her nose, and wore a dress of cream colored lace. She bustled over, a fiercely determined expression plastered all over her face.
"There you are! I thought I'd lost you for a moment there!" she admonished, waving a finger under his nose.
He smiled weakly. "Yes, so had I."
"Now where's my Giselle? She can't have gone far—what is it you said you did for a living?"
"Uh... I don't really have a steady job. I hunt dangerous creatures for money on occasion. But I don't need full time work, you see, I live in a cottage in a forest that's plagued by giants, eating mostly old pease porridge, so I don't need much income to survive."
The woman pursued her lips. "You are a bit of a fixer-upper, but I see potential! There's a diamond in the rough within you, my dear boy! How many rooms does your cottage have? Oh, it doesn't matter, we can always have another room added on for me if we need to. Giselle! Giselle, where are you? Let me have another look at your teeth, Mister Erikson; teeth are a fine indicator of health, you know."
Erik had gone a shade of pale green, and looked more as if he was about to jump out a window himself rather than start throwing any overbearing mothers out of one.
"Uh, I'm sorry," I cut in with an apologetic smile, "but I'm afraid I've claimed this next dance with Mister Erikson. Please excuse us." I dragged Erik away from the woman, leaving her gasping in
affrontary at the snub after us.
"Rikki, thank—" he began with a deep breath of relief, but I shushed him.
"Quick, start dancing, she's still watching," I hissed, glancing at the woman over his shoulder.
I don't know what I expected; when I said it, I was thinking of the kind of dancing I was accustomed to from my own youthful days at high school dances: a lot of awkward shuffling and swaying in place, several feet away from the partner you felt too embarrassed to look in the eye.
But instead, Erik abruptly reached out and grabbed me, pulling me in close enough to link his arm with mine. He spun me around, released my arm, came around my other side, and then took my by the other arm, spinning me in the opposite direction. It was so sudden that I was nearly thrown off balance, stumbling over the hem of my dress.
"What are you doing?" I hissed.
"Dancing," he muttered back, his eyes down on his feet. "Shh, I'm counting steps." He spun me around again, did a sort of skipping hop thing, and then raised his hand up in the air, palm out.
Not sure what else to do, I high-fived it.
He stared at me like I grew an extra head.
"I don't know what we're doing," I admitted. I hadn't been paying much attention to the dancers while I'd wandered the ball room, but not that I looked around, I saw that the other couples were all engaged in similar spinning, skipping dances. Everyone was in time with their partners, as if their moves were choreographed. "How does everyone know these dances?" I asked.
Erik sighed. "I forgot, you're from... somewhere else. Everybody learns these dances. You just learn them as you grow up, at courtly balls like this, or at village festivals in the country."
"Well, I don't know the moves," I told him. "Actually, I know a couple of moves, but I don't think the hustle is exactly appropriate for this atmosphere."
"Is she still watching?" Erik asked, without looking over his shoulder himself.
I glanced towards the woman. "Yep, and she looks a little suspicious." Probably because we'd stopped dancing, and I'd high-fived Erik instead.
"Alright, come here. I'll teach you the moves, and we'll slowly dance away from her until she's out of sight. Just try to mimic my moves, all right?" He reached his hand up again into the air. I hesitated, but he beckoned me forward with an impatient huff. I raised my own hand and pressed my palm against his. He went straight backed, placing his other hand behind his back. I did the same, and we slowly rotated in a circle. Erik stared at his own feet, counting under his breath. I stared at his feet too, also counting, trying to mirror his movements as best I could.
"Okay, now we separate and spin counter clockwise, and then come together again and link arms for a clockwise spin," He said.
"Yeah, I didn't catch any of that," I said as she released me. I spun anyways, probably the wrong way, and just left him catch me before I whirled away like a confused tornado.
As we awkwardly danced our way to freedom, I realized that the dance was vaguely familiar. I had a sudden flashback of the dance scene in the Pride and Prejudice movie with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen. It wasn't exactly the same, but the concept was similar. For the first time, I paid attention to the music too. I had thought it sounded classical at first, but now that I was really listening, I realized it wasn't [i]quite[/i]. Again, it struck a familiar note, but it couldn't quite place it...
"Baroque!" I said aloud suddenly.
"What?" asked Erik, casting me another one of his looks that made it clear he thought I was a little off.
"Nothing, never mind," I said, shaking my head. It wouldn't mean anything to him, but it did to me. "If it ain't Baroque, don't fix it"—it was a line from Disney's Beauty and the Beast, and after hearing it when I was a teenager, I had done a bunch of research on what Baroque was out of curiosity. The Baroque period was from the 1600s to the 1750s, right after the Renaissance, right before the French Revolution. This was a Baroque dance, and this was Baroque music that was playing. I'm wearing a Renaissance-style dress, speaking modern English, in a world governed by a medieval socio-political structure. It was enough to give anyone a headache. I suppose fairy tales were supposed to be timeless, influenced by any different time periods and cultures, but this was just ridiculous.
"See? You've got it now," Erik said, interrupting my wandering thoughts.
I pulled myself back to reality, and realized that once my mind had stopped focusing on desperately trying to dance with mechanical precision, I'd started copying Erik's movements a little more naturally. Of course, the minute he drew my attention to it, I immediately screwed up, missed a step, and threw off the rhythm we'd briefly achieved.
"Well, you had it," he amended, and he took my hand again.
"Uh... yeah," I laughed awkwardly, glancing at our hands. His palm was cool against mine, and I didn't know if it was because mine hand was unusually warm, or if his was unusually cold.
"Your cheeks are pinks," he pointed out, out of the blue.
My free hand flew up to my face and pressed against my cheek. It was even warmer than my hand, if that were possible. "Are they? Damn. I've had a couple of glasses of wine while I eavesdropping on random middle aged women, trying to look casual. I flush easily when I've been drinking." I might actually be a little tipsy, I realized suddenly. That would certainly explain why I was struggling so much to dance this stupid dance.
Erik snorted. "I've had a couple of glasses myself. Liquid courage, to help me survive dealing with all these desperate mothers."
I shook my head. "Neither of us should have had anything to drink—we have a stepmother to find and a wand to steal, we need to be clear-headed."
"I'm feeling pretty clear-headed right now."
Something about the way he said it made me look up from trying to count my steps, and I find him looking at me with an expression that was a far cry form the usual dour one he wore. It was the same way he'd looked at me when I talked to him on the side of the road, right after we met Alfred, after I'd shared what had happened to my own parents with him.
"I'm not," I said, looking up at him and realizing just how much my head is really spinning. "I'm getting pretty dizzy, actually."
Erik stops, but I'm still caught in the momentum of our spin and bump right into him. He catches me by the elbows, and then we're just standing there, close enough that we're just barely touching.
"The fairy god mother did a good job," he said. My face felt like it was growing warmer by the second, but I couldn't tell if it was because of the wine, or because of how close we're standing.
"A good job of what?" I asked, because at that moment, I couldn't remember what on earth the fairy godmother had actually done.
"You." He cleared his throat. "Your dress, I mean. It's a very nice dress."
"Ah, thanks. Your..." I trailed off. Codpiece? Jesus Christ, no, I can't say that. "Your hat's cool." Oh god, that was pathetic. Can he feel my heart beating? Because I can feel it beating, and it's ricocheting off my ribcage.
The strange expression his face intensified,a little determined, a little uncertain, a lot irritated.
"Rikki, I think you should know something—"
"Erik! Rikki! There you two are!"
Jack's voice cuts through the background noise of music and conversation, jerking the both of us back to reality. We pull apart abruptly, and I whirl around to see Jack shoving his way through the crowd towards us.
"What? What is it?" I snap, with a bit more irritation than I had actually intended.
"You won't believe who I've just been talking to—"
"The stepmother? You found the stepmother?" I gasped, my annoyance at his poor timing instantly forgotten.
"No, no I haven't found her yet—"
"Damn!" I swore through clenched teeth. We were running out of time, fast. How long had it been so far? An hour at least. More? I thought so.
"But almost as good," Jack insisted, his eyes flashing. "I've just been talking to the prince himself!"
Whoops; somehow I skipped this chapter. Sorry. T_T It's fixed now, obviously. I can't believe no one noticed, or thought to comment that there was a big bizarre time skip. How many people are actually reading this???