Post by max on Feb 2, 2010 18:43:11 GMT 10
Title: Weddings & Shiz (for want of a better title. You can tell how much thought went into this story, can’t you)
Rating: PG
Length: 948
Competitor: Uline of Hannaloff (which I mispell constantly. I'm sick and tired and that's my excuse though )
Round: 1/H
Summary: Kel, Dom, Uline, Tobe, Irnai, sea monsters and a lot of artistic licence. Originally intended as a drabble but wouldn't you know, I can't write them. GO TEAM ULINE!
Also - I read a drabble featuring an attack on ladies in the war. I kind of drew that into this... SORRY! D:
------
The day news of Domitan’s betrothal to Ulia of Hannaloff reaches New Hope, Keladry celebrates her friend’s joy by getting exceedingly (and most unseemly) inebriated. When Merric and Neal eventually persuade her to bed Irnai wakes up, processes the situation in a blink of her emerald eyes and then there are hands holding out a nightshirt for Kel and a cup of tea in her hands, and as the alcohol burns away and she feels the tears rolling down her cheeks, instead of taking the handkerchief Irnai offers her she takes the child’s wrist and hears her voice crack.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
The oracle girl blinks and gently unwraps Kel’s fingers from her wrist. Later the newly broken capillaries will feed a broken bracelet of blue shadows under her skin and Tobe will say in jealous and worried tones that she should have woken him, but for now, it is too dark for her to see (and therefore care about) what her skin is doing, and, besides, she has an answer to give.
‘Because your love for him will pale like a candle to the moon, when you find your heart’s desire,’ she says, and Kel falls asleep – still heartachey, but comforted.
***
The wedding is beautiful, but the Hannaloff girls are more so, the five of them so lovely that she feels her chest go tight to look at them, and when Uline slips out of the bridal party, Keladry, surprised to see her, not in the pinks and apricot shades she usually wears but a Yamani silk kimono that fades from indigo blue at her shoulders down into grey at her hips and then mother of pearl, realises she is gaping only when the older girl (woman, now) laughs and touches her hand to Kel’s jaw, closing her mouth gently.
‘I expected this reaction from my Aunt Eliodor – she remembers the last Yamani raids, and at one hundred and two years old she has more than earned the right to disregard discretion, really – but you grew up in the islands. Surely my attire isn’t so shocking?’
The voice is teasing but looking down into Uline’s eyes she sees some kind of worry there that she can’t understand, wants to erase.
‘You just… forgive me my lady, but your beauty truly is extraordinary.’
It is.
Kel is 19 now to Uline’s 24 and the soft roundness adolescence graced her with has fallen from her body to reveal high cheekbones and a suggestion of invincibility in the pure curve of her brow. At the edge of silk where her inner kimono – pure silvery-white – meets her skin Kel can see her collarbone, like the outstretched wings of a bird and, irrationally, she wants to reach out and touch it. Somehow since their last meeting, the Uline Keladry remembers has coiled and tightened into herself. Grown edges. She has a sudden recollection of hearing about an attack on ladies in waiting by the Scanrans, and things fall into place.
Uline, like so many others in the past 18 months, has seen the kraken.
But this is no place for talk of war, only joy, and Uline’s mouth twists wryly as she accepts the compliment before she leans up to whisper in Keladry’s ear that she’s been waiting for a chance to slip away, and would Kel mind keeping her company by the fountain to stop from every member of the King’s Own asking her to dance.
Kel looks around, meets a number of pairs of eyes begging her to invite them over and then follows Uline down a staircase between lush magnolia trees to a small stone courtyard.
***
‘Irnai? Irrrrnaaaai… this better be something actually useful you’re seeing here.’ There is something secure for her in the blueness of his eyes, boring into her own and pulling her back into a field of vision he shares too – somewhere along the line he has tied up her wellbeing into his own – but her cheeks are burning hot with embarrassment and there is no way she can share what she has seen with him.
‘Oh, it’s nothing, sorry. Not really. I mean… I can’t tell you.’
He stares at her a moment longer, trying to break past the defences in her eyes – jade green and just as hard – before he shrugs and lets her go.
‘Well we’re going to need to do this again,’ he says, gesturing to the ink-spattered parchment on the desk before them that had been a letter until she’d been pulled at by some power or other and knocked over the ink pot. ‘You know what my lord says about sloppiness… oh, not again,’ he adds exasperatedly as her eyes glaze over for a moment.
And even though Irnai loves letters she begins to pack up parchment and ink, locking the desk before turning to him.
‘Kel will be back tonight, and we need to tidy up. Lots. And maybe go to Fanche’s to sleep.’
The prospect doesn’t particularly bother him – Fanche makes the best seed cake in the village – but there is something about her urgency that makes him dig his heels in, determined to find out what’s got her so flustered.
‘I don’t see why – ’
‘She’s… going to have company.’
For all of half a day Tobeis Boon feels jealousy simmering in his gut, but when he sees the lady riding with Kel – as beautiful as the moon when it shines on untouched snow – the feeling dissolves. And when he sees his mistress, realises the depths of joy in her heart from the uncontained, un-Yamani smile on her face, it disappears entirely.
He can’t hate someone who makes her smile like that.
Rating: PG
Length: 948
Competitor: Uline of Hannaloff (which I mispell constantly. I'm sick and tired and that's my excuse though )
Round: 1/H
Summary: Kel, Dom, Uline, Tobe, Irnai, sea monsters and a lot of artistic licence. Originally intended as a drabble but wouldn't you know, I can't write them. GO TEAM ULINE!
Also - I read a drabble featuring an attack on ladies in the war. I kind of drew that into this... SORRY! D:
------
The day news of Domitan’s betrothal to Ulia of Hannaloff reaches New Hope, Keladry celebrates her friend’s joy by getting exceedingly (and most unseemly) inebriated. When Merric and Neal eventually persuade her to bed Irnai wakes up, processes the situation in a blink of her emerald eyes and then there are hands holding out a nightshirt for Kel and a cup of tea in her hands, and as the alcohol burns away and she feels the tears rolling down her cheeks, instead of taking the handkerchief Irnai offers her she takes the child’s wrist and hears her voice crack.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
The oracle girl blinks and gently unwraps Kel’s fingers from her wrist. Later the newly broken capillaries will feed a broken bracelet of blue shadows under her skin and Tobe will say in jealous and worried tones that she should have woken him, but for now, it is too dark for her to see (and therefore care about) what her skin is doing, and, besides, she has an answer to give.
‘Because your love for him will pale like a candle to the moon, when you find your heart’s desire,’ she says, and Kel falls asleep – still heartachey, but comforted.
***
The wedding is beautiful, but the Hannaloff girls are more so, the five of them so lovely that she feels her chest go tight to look at them, and when Uline slips out of the bridal party, Keladry, surprised to see her, not in the pinks and apricot shades she usually wears but a Yamani silk kimono that fades from indigo blue at her shoulders down into grey at her hips and then mother of pearl, realises she is gaping only when the older girl (woman, now) laughs and touches her hand to Kel’s jaw, closing her mouth gently.
‘I expected this reaction from my Aunt Eliodor – she remembers the last Yamani raids, and at one hundred and two years old she has more than earned the right to disregard discretion, really – but you grew up in the islands. Surely my attire isn’t so shocking?’
The voice is teasing but looking down into Uline’s eyes she sees some kind of worry there that she can’t understand, wants to erase.
‘You just… forgive me my lady, but your beauty truly is extraordinary.’
It is.
Kel is 19 now to Uline’s 24 and the soft roundness adolescence graced her with has fallen from her body to reveal high cheekbones and a suggestion of invincibility in the pure curve of her brow. At the edge of silk where her inner kimono – pure silvery-white – meets her skin Kel can see her collarbone, like the outstretched wings of a bird and, irrationally, she wants to reach out and touch it. Somehow since their last meeting, the Uline Keladry remembers has coiled and tightened into herself. Grown edges. She has a sudden recollection of hearing about an attack on ladies in waiting by the Scanrans, and things fall into place.
Uline, like so many others in the past 18 months, has seen the kraken.
But this is no place for talk of war, only joy, and Uline’s mouth twists wryly as she accepts the compliment before she leans up to whisper in Keladry’s ear that she’s been waiting for a chance to slip away, and would Kel mind keeping her company by the fountain to stop from every member of the King’s Own asking her to dance.
Kel looks around, meets a number of pairs of eyes begging her to invite them over and then follows Uline down a staircase between lush magnolia trees to a small stone courtyard.
***
‘Irnai? Irrrrnaaaai… this better be something actually useful you’re seeing here.’ There is something secure for her in the blueness of his eyes, boring into her own and pulling her back into a field of vision he shares too – somewhere along the line he has tied up her wellbeing into his own – but her cheeks are burning hot with embarrassment and there is no way she can share what she has seen with him.
‘Oh, it’s nothing, sorry. Not really. I mean… I can’t tell you.’
He stares at her a moment longer, trying to break past the defences in her eyes – jade green and just as hard – before he shrugs and lets her go.
‘Well we’re going to need to do this again,’ he says, gesturing to the ink-spattered parchment on the desk before them that had been a letter until she’d been pulled at by some power or other and knocked over the ink pot. ‘You know what my lord says about sloppiness… oh, not again,’ he adds exasperatedly as her eyes glaze over for a moment.
And even though Irnai loves letters she begins to pack up parchment and ink, locking the desk before turning to him.
‘Kel will be back tonight, and we need to tidy up. Lots. And maybe go to Fanche’s to sleep.’
The prospect doesn’t particularly bother him – Fanche makes the best seed cake in the village – but there is something about her urgency that makes him dig his heels in, determined to find out what’s got her so flustered.
‘I don’t see why – ’
‘She’s… going to have company.’
For all of half a day Tobeis Boon feels jealousy simmering in his gut, but when he sees the lady riding with Kel – as beautiful as the moon when it shines on untouched snow – the feeling dissolves. And when he sees his mistress, realises the depths of joy in her heart from the uncontained, un-Yamani smile on her face, it disappears entirely.
He can’t hate someone who makes her smile like that.