They stayed at the waterfall for what felt like too long. Everyone but Aeric had been soaked through, and they laughed and joked as they had been doing all day, and continued to do so with a tireless determination as they mounted their horses again and started on the trail back to the palace. If he wasn't already beyond befuddled by everything that had happened thus far, he would have gotten entirely too caught up on the fact that their unfunny jokes seemed inexhaustible and far too humorous.
He waited until everyone had trooped out ahead of him before he kicked his mount lightly to urge her to follow, and he almost immediately closed his eyes as tightly as he could. It wasn't being high up in itself that sent his mind spinning and his stomach convulsing. Something about the wild, sheer expanse of all that space beneath him...
Behind the safe confines of a balcony railing, or holding onto the banister of a steep set of stairs, he had his anchor and the fall ended in a very tame, flat surface. Was it the landing? Or falling? Or neither?
He'd only experienced the dizzying sense of being so untethered and open to anything the world had to throw at him once before. There weren't exactly any mountains or even high hills on the relatively flat plains he had been raised on, but there were plenty of trees.
He never would have climbed the tree if he hadn't been dared to do so, but as soon as he reached the point where the branches began to bend under his weight, the sense had hit him in full force. Something about the absolute lack of control. Anything could happen and he was powerless to stop it.
Falling from his perch in that lanky old tree had only solidified that dormant, unknown fear. Now the phobia itself had been revealed, but it was still just as unknown as it had always been.
He hated not understanding exactly why it bothered him so much, and that was probably the reason he despised the palace. Nothing made sense and he had no say in what happened or what didn't.
Was he that desperate to control what happened to him?
His mother, he knew, would live in a swamp if it meant getting her hands on a fancy title and a sack of cash. But he was by no means his mother.
Her desire was simple, something he could understand. But maybe it wasn't understanding that he wanted, because he hated his mother's lust of power and title more than he hated the palace or the fall beneath him, and he knew it inside and out. Every plan and scheme had revealed another piece of the puzzle and chipped another blot from the carving.
Was he just as insane as she was, but in a different way? The selective fear certainly seemed irrational enough to fit into the same category as her mind-rotting desire. Just as crazy, he simply wasn't as far along.
Before he knew it, the ride was over, and he was handing over his damp, tired horse to the stable hands. He returned to the palace and finally got the nerve to ask someone to draw a bath. He felt dirty.
But almost as soon as he'd finished getting himself clean, someone arrived to fetch him for dinner. And things continued to move too quickly for him to process. He was swallowed by the blur too completely to ponder it.
The days passed in rush, as if time itself was hurrying him towards the end of summer, where his fate would be decided for once and for all.
Sometimes he was taken on rides like the one to the waterfall, and there were days spent entirely inside, doing things like taking tea with various nobles that he would never remember and playing games that he learned from the younger lords and ladies, only for them to vanish from his mind again right away. He was engaged in conversations both dull and interesting, but all of them seemed to turn transparent in his memory. He could tell everything was there, but he couldn't properly grasp ahold of it.
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.
He tore it open with no care for the fine paper and discovered that it was an invitation. Seeing as there had never been an invitation to any of the previous events, he found it very strange. But what he found even stranger was the fact that it was a dance he was being invited to.
They'd never held a dance before.
Perhaps dances held a special significance when it came to invitations? Why else would they only send the invitation for such a specific event, and not every other thing that he'd had no warning for whatsoever?
Or maybe they just did whatever they felt like. Who knew? Everything was messed up and upside down and he had no idea how to puzzle out the pattern, if there even was a pattern.
Were they all crazy, or was he the crazy one? Was his mother perfectly reasonable, after all? Was that even possible?
He didn't know, he didn't know, he didn't know. He didn't know anything.
The invitation seemed to be a rock thrown into the spokes of the wheel that turned his life so completely upside down, and everything suddenly stopped moving so fast. Time crashed to a halt so immediate and sudden that he was struck by a breathless sense of emptiness in the absence of the rush.
He was left alone for the afternoon, and that singular afternoon passed so slowly that he wasn't sure that time was moving at all until he realized that the light was slowly shifting and dimming as the daylight ticked down to comply with the endless timer of day and night.
The sun was near the horizon by the time he finally decided to get ready for the mysterious dance. There was no time written on the invitation, which was frustrating, but at least no one came to knock on the door before he was clean and fully dressed.
He'd finally decided after the third infinity he'd spent in the palace to cave with the whole outfit situation, so it took nearly an hour to get the clown suit on properly. It was surprisingly comfortable for how strange it looked, but lace and frills were unavoidably a bit itchy. He felt stupid wearing it, but he'd seen plenty of the nobles wearing similar atrocities, and no one had pointed it out thus far, so it shouldn't be too bad. He just hoped he wasn't miscalculating in the choice of what to wear, as always.
Even after he'd taken such a long time in getting ready, he was still sitting and waiting for a rather long time before someone finally knocked on the door.
Aeric heard something rip as he jumped up to answer, but he was pretty sure it wasn't anything special or pivotal to his survival, so he kept going.
It was Camen. He'd been on and off babysitting duty sporadically, and it seemed he was back again for tonight.
He looked Aeric over once and something unknown darkened his expression for a split second before he bowed faintly and turned to lead clown-Aeric to the dance.
As they were walking, it started to set in exactly what a dance would mean. He would be almost forced to interact with at least one girl whose head was filled with nothing but small talk and an obsession with beauty. Or what she thought was beauty, anyway.
He thought they all looked like the work of an amateur dollmaker, plastic and painted and colored so brightly only to make up for the fact that they didn't look very nice at all.
A headache started to pound behind his eyes as he was led to a large set of double doors directly between and beneath both sets of stairs. He was dreading the evening, despite the fact that he was used to interacting and avoiding and everything else he was required to do. This was destined to be hellish.
His name was announced loudly like the king and queen's names usually were, which was a definite first. And he didn't like it one bit. Every single pair of eyes was on him as he stepped into a spacious room that looked as if it was designed solely for the purpose of pointless gatherings like this one. They were all dressed as gaudily as he was, if not even worse.
He already desperately wanted to leave, and he technically hadn't arrived.
After staring at him for an unbearable few seconds, the attention of the room shifted back to the champagne and the mind-numbing small talk and the string quartet playing from the raised platform in the corner of the room. The king and queen were mingling around the room, only detectable amidst the throng by the slight wake of empty space that followed where they went, as if the people were hesitant to tred on the same ground as someone so high above their lowly self.
It struck him that he'd never actually seen them sitting on any sort of throne yet. He wondered why they didn't want to accentuate their higher status more than they did. It would certainly help to remind any too-ambitious nobles from getting any ideas.
He hadn't even seen a throne at all, much less an empty one or a tiny one, at the very least. No crowns either. If he hadn't been introduced to them as the royal family, they would have blended in almost perfectly with every other stuck up noble in the room.
He shook himself out of his thoughts and descended the short flight of steps into the slightly sunken ballroom. Every wall seemed to be filled with windows or mirrors. Candles flickered from every available surface, casting a glittering glow onto the endless seas of glass in the room. He felt like he was walking in a dream, surrounded by living dolls that twirled on well-oiled wheels to the haunting melody. Whether or not it was a good dream was yet to be decided.
Then he spotted what seemed to be the only real cluster of people in the room. There were plenty of cliques and little groupings, yes, but this was different. It was a bouquet of brightly dressed men and women, all surrounding a single person.
It took just a brief moment of observation to catch the flashing glimpse of golden hair that he knew so well. He hadn't met the princess yet, but he was well acquainted with her hair, and the soft ivory glow of her cheekbone, always turning away before he could truly look at her. She always wore blue, and he had come to associate the color with her. It was the sky in which the fleeing songbird always seemed to escape into.
He took a deep breath and started walking. His trajectory almost faltered several times as he headed to the center of the room, but he held true. He might as well get their meeting over with while he had the change. The sooner the better. She would either be worse or better than he thought she would be, and there was only one way to find out.
The sudden apprehension was foreign, and he pushed it away. This was one of the only things he'd truly thought about and wanted during the long blur of quasi-memory that was the past few weeks, and now it was within his reach.
There was no hidden hallway or hedge or doorway to flee into, now. He had the songbird within reach, at last.
Perhaps that was why he didn't want to catch her. He would be willingly cutting that last golden thread, and he had no idea if another thread would take its place to prevent his spiral.
His heart was pounding by the time he reached the group. The princess was in the middle, her attention clearly being pulled one way and then the other by loudly talking individuals. A good half of them were probably attempting to court her, as most were male. He was, by an outside observer's standpoint, also trying to court her.
The thought almost made him opt out, for sure this time.
He pushed his way as close as he could to the center of the group. And for the very first time, he got a real, close-up glimpse at the princess. She had a delicate face, the ivory undertone he knew so well actually hidden beneath a caramel-smooth tan. Her eyes were blindingly green.
Then her back was turned as another girl snagged her attention yet again. She was about as unlike the queen in body language as she possibly could be as she spun around. She seemed harried and reluctant to indulge in the crowd's fevered excitement. She didn't like the spotlight even vaguely as much as her mother.
But then it struck him that something about the way she moved seemed familiar.
The way her shoulders curved beneath the satiny fabric of her baby blue dress, her hands curling into matching fists of near-frustration... even the shimmering silhouette of her face beneath the curtain of pure golden hair seemed more familiar than it should have.
He'd never met her up close before...
Then she froze, her words fizzling out into silence. She turned, ever-so-slowly, back around to face Aeric.
Her eyes were as round as saucers, and her mouth hung agape. He knew that face...
It was Ryall.
Looking closer, he could see it clearly and wondered how he'd ever missed it at all. Her hair, which was her most defining feature when it was a frizzy mess, had been tamed into soft, golden curls that fell like the glimmering curtain of a waterfall to the small of her back. The blue of her dress transformed her eyes into a golden green instead of the muddy color he'd always thought they were.
Ryall the gardener was actually Kyra...
Kyra the princess.