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sabraeal · 4 months

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a heart felled by you, held by you; Part 1

[Read on AO3]

Inspired by @onedivinemisfit's Lilias Charity Gala pieces; Annie had a strong idea coming into the challenge, and we had a lot of fun hashing through what we felt would most represent Northern vs Southern fashion, and academic vs noble fashion. We struggle bussed hard over some of the male looks, had some real experimental ideas for Haki's dress that Annie really made into something special...and then I realized I would not have enough time to even get to the gala portions of this fic. So this chapter is a bit of a prequel, with more to come later...

The message arrives via the traditional method: clutched in the woolly mitts of a street urchin, another paw already extended for payment. The university is rife with them, always milling about underfoot, loitering in the exact walkways one would most like to hurry through before students— or worse yet, other academics— could waylay them. It also contains the traditional summons, or rather, the traditional stay put.

A representative will be coming, it threatens in the usual, toothless way the board prefers, as if their approval means anything more than being saddled with more responsibility. Please make sure that you are in-office when we arrive.

It is Lata’s personal tradition to disappoint them. To imagine them arriving at his closed door, scowls furrowing deeper with each unanswered knock. Sometimes he can even hear his name being cursed on the wind as his cart rolls out the city gates, headed to quarries unknown. They might find him when he returns, twice as cross for having been made fools in front of the whole department, but at least they meet on his terms, not some…board of academics so close to titles he can nearly smell it in their stiff collars and even more starched opinions.

That is not, however, how it happens this year. Oh, he meant it too— he’d already been looking at likely quarries when Shidan shuffled into his office, wondering if he might pull the same disappearing act he had the past seven years running. Lata may have spent his nascent years at Wistal dodging the dire undercurrents of Kain’s court, but even without such a thorough education in ignoring the unspoken intentions behind spoken words, he would have heard the man’s insinuations loud and clear: stay, please, our funding might depend on it. Academics weren’t exactly known for their subtlety, and Shidan was among the least of them.

It’s not the sort of appeal that typically moves him. And yet somehow as the day grew closer, he found himself more interested in the edits on Shirayuki’s proposal than in locations of wunderock veins, pausing more often to correct the application of Suzu’s hammer than the supply lists he’d kept on his desk since last semester. For all that he hadn’t meant to stay, somehow he had, and by the time he realized it, it was far too late to do anything but wonder how much more the temperature would drop before the university would finally open the thermal vents. The whole place would smell of sulfur for a season, but at least it would be warm.

It helped, of course, that their representative came early. Two days, in fact; the knock landing on his door with an airy cadence, as if the knuckles did not so much rap on the panels but dance across them. He expected something more thunderous, to be honest; a declaration and a reckoning all in one. He'd almost be offended, if he wasn't hoping for some noodle-limbed pushover as his auditor.

“Come in,” he grunts before he can think better of it. If he’d kept his mouth shut, they might at least assume he was out to lunch, or had been dragged out to Shidan’s lab to clap over whatever little achievement they’d eked out of those plants of theirs, as if it had anything to do with him. But now they know he’s here, trapped behind the mountain of papers on his desk— that’s the problem with being a collaborator, all the paperwork— with no escape but out a second floor window. An attractive option for a much younger, more morally— and physically— flexible knight, but certainly not open to him.

He braces himself. There’s seven years worth of scolding coming, of classes he hasn’t properly bought himself out of and reviews he has yet to provide as ‘part of this academic community’, with only a thin oak door to separate him from it. Just a simple twist of a knob, and they’ll having him so thoroughly pinned he might as well be up on cork. Scholaris Forzenalis, it might say, elusive specimen found on university grounds. Never before caught.

So it confounds him when they knock again.

“Come in,” he says, louder this time, annoyance bleeding into the words. “What? Don’t they teach you how to open doors in this university? Or do you all just sit around, waiting for your assistants to—”

With all the delicacy of shears slicing through silk, his door slips open. Instantly, his teeth clack to a close.

“Forgive me.” Those pretty manners he once protested protect him now, hard-ingrained habit driving him to his feet where intelligence fails him. “My lady. If I had know you would be the one sent on board business, I would have, er…”

Been in another country entirely. But one does not say that to Haki Arleon, daughter to a duke, sister to the commander of the guard, mistress of Lilias in her own right— and most important, Clarines’ queen-to-be. At least, not if one would also like to continue to rely on the crown’s largess. At least two of his grants came backed by Clarines’ treasury, and Lata would like to keep it that way.

“Would you like something to drink?” He glances at the kettle perched on the sideboard, probably as cold as the cup quarantined to the corner of his desk. “I could call for something.”

“That’s quite all right.” The future queen does not sashay into the room the way her brideroom might— the way he did once, the single, unfortunate time Lata fell squarely into His Majesty’s interests— but peruses it, stepping through the stacks of specimens and pausing to read each tag. There is no urgency in how she meanders through the room, no destination; at one moment bending over a table to squint over a fine bit of shale, and the next detouring to the cabinets for a well-tumbled example of aventurine. It reminds him of the girl who used to be carried through these hallowed halls on her lord father’s shoulders, those same wide eyes peering through every case, curiosity so strong it nearly put her hair on end— only to hide the moment a scholar approached, burying herself in the safety of his neck.

But that is not the woman who smiles at him now, settling into the overstuffed chair across from him with all the ease of a bird alighting to a perch. Or at least, it hasn’t been, not for a long time. “Are you quite sure I can’t get you anything?”

“I believe I am supposed to ask you for your books,” she informs him, too sweet to put him at ease. “The ones with your expenditures for the last year, as well as your proposed budget for the next one.”

Lata grimaces. Her father had a grimmer countenance, to be sure, but that pretty smile of hers is twice as implacable. Disobey me at your own peril, it says, radiating the same ruthlessness as a desert sun. I love to see crows feast on the corpses of poor listeners.

“That is what I’m supposed to ask, at least.” He glances up at her, quizzical, hands half-wrapped around his accounts. “But what I wanted to talk to you about is the gala.”

“The—” his mouth barely knows how to wrap around the word— “gala?”

“The charity gala.” A Wisteria might raise one brow— mockingly, the way their kind preferred to communicate— but she raises both, surprise and invitation rolled into one. “The one the board hosts every year to help fund their more promising projects.”

The one he always skips, since if there is one thing he likes less than rubbing elbows with lords and ladies, it’s watching his esteemed colleagues parade themselves like débutantes before them, courting every eligible purse in the room in hopes one might open for them. “Ah,” he manages. “That gala.”

What that has to do with him, he can’t fathom, but—

“We would like this gala’s funds to go towards funding the further research of the Phostyrias.”

There’s nothing in his mouth, but Lata nearly chokes on it anyway. “Excuse me,” he rasps, clearing his throat. Last years contributions topped nearly three million dir before he stopped paying attention. Enough to keep Shidan’s little pet project in the black for the next three years. Five even, if he minds his expenditures. “That’s no mean gift, my lady.”

She hums, hands folding neatly over her lap. “The board has been quite impressed with the progress made in the last year.”

Or rather, the progress one particular scholar has made in impressing its importance on the local lords. If the rumor going around the commissary had even a grain of truth to it, this year’s guest list was nearly half again the length of the last, and every one of them would be wanting to put their name on that girl’s dance card. One can only hope His Majesty has invested a similar interest in her footwork, otherwise there might be quite the crush in the infirmary come morning.

“Although I am always happy to hear of my colleagues’ good fortune,” he lies, the pleasantries falling from his lips with all the ease of oil from butter. “I must admit I do not see why you have chosen to bring me the glad tidings. The phostyrias is, after all, Shidan’s project, not mine.”

“Ah, but you are a collaborator, are you not, professor?” One corner of her mouth hooks too slyly for the sweetness of her face. “As I understand it, your wunderocks are crucial to the formation of those phostyrias bulbs no small amount of Lilias scholars have been sent to plant along the North's roads. And as such, I imagine that a goodly portion of that money will be given to you.”

It’s the same mental arithmetic he’d been spooling through since that announcement dripped from her lips. He hadn’t hitched himself to Shidan’s wagon for the money; there hadn’t been any when that girl cornered him at His Majesty’s little fête, just the sort of pluck that showed promise-- which wouldn’t have interested him in the slightest if the little she-devil hadn’t twisted his arm. Or rather, let her knight do it. But now that there is— well, it’d all been fine and good to give some free pointers here and there, or let Shidan’s students run rampant through his laboratory, pillaging his specimens in the name of science, but now that he could be paid for his time…

Well, there’s some personal projects that could do with a little attention. A lot of attention, if that guest list proves as flush as one might hope. “I suppose that is the case. Still, I am not sure why you would bring the news to—?”

“There is a small problem with the gala.” There’s so much carrot in Lady Haki’s smile it can only hide a stick. “You see, it has always been my privilege to host the event at Wirant. Our staff has always been delighted to put in the sort of work it takes to make the night a great success. But this year, well…I’m afraid the ballroom is being renovated.”

No doubt to be just as resplendent as the one in Wistal. With the marriage between the North’s most darling daughter and Clarines’ king finally set, it would be the duty of the Arleons to throw the engagement celebration— and it wouldn’t do for these southern lords with their soft hands and snobby opinions to come up and find Wirant lacking. Half the collective North would fall on their swords before they’d allow it to be said that the royal palace threw a better wedding than they did an engagement.

“Most years, we might impose upon the university for the use of their function room, however—” her hands splay helplessly between them— “with the recent rash of guests who have replied to our invitation, it will hardly be large enough to hold them. So of course it falls upon us to find another location.”

“A pity. Perhaps one of your noble acquaintance would be willing to hold it, my lady.” They typically were, so long as they felt they would be appropriately compensated. And with the request coming from the Clarines’ next queen— well, there were few who wouldn’t clamor at the chance for her favor. “Preferably one who won’t have an interest in holding it over you once you become ‘Your Majesty.’”

“That is—” those wide eyes bat once, twice— “what I am hoping.”

Lata blinks. “My lady, once again, I must ask, what does this have to do with…?”

All at once, it comes to him. Dreadfully, finally. “No! No. My lady, that’s hardly—” he coughs, trying to catch his breath and his thoughts—“That’s not my estate.”

“Ah, that’s strange, then,” she says, too innocent. “When I wrote to your lord father, the duke was of the impression it was under your care.”

His teeth grind hard enough he can hear the fissures forming. “My lord father…?”

“He was quite confused why I would inquire about its use of him when his heir was already in residence.” Her head tilts, resting on two of her slender fingers. “I thought it best not to mention that you had taken an apartment closer to the university.”

But she would, if he proved too troublesome. It’s clear in the way that mouth of hers hooks into a smirk, too like another in recent memory. “I haven’t been in that house in years— nearly a decade! The whole thing is little more than a moldering pile. And the ballroom— why, it’s probably in pieces by now.”

“Is that so?” she says in the precise tone that implies, it isn’t. “Your lord father told me that he just had laborers in last summer to repair the place top to bottom. ‘Not an original board in the place,’ I believe he said. Quite proud of it in fact.”

Lata smothers a grimace. There had been work done on the place; father insisted. A bachelor with a skeleton staff can’t be keeping the roof in order, the old man had huffed, just let a place in town and I’ll have the place tidy as the day it was built. He could hardly tell the stubborn old goat he hadn’t been using it in the first place. “I don’t keep staff.”

“I’ll lend you mine.” The answer’s too quick— she’d been expecting that one from the start. “As I said, they’re used to events of this scale. It’s the extra bodies that causes the most logistical problems for these sorts of things,” she admits reluctantly, “and this time of year, Wirant is full of them. They probably would jump at the idea of using a space that’s empty to start.”

His words curdle on his tongue, mouth pursing sourly around it. If Lady Haki is anything like her father, this whole conversation has been planned in advance, every reversal anticipated and its counter prepared. She came in here with him already well and thoroughly routed, he just hasn't seen the how of it yet.

“I wasn’t even planning on attending,” he grits out, more confession than caltrop. “That fool celebration is always on the solstice, and I can’t abide the costumes and the dancing and the kissing games—”

“Then we will have none.”

Lata raises a brow. “You think you can stop that crowd from having their fun? Stop them from causing mischief when they’ve been saving it up all year?”

“We remove the masquerade element,” she says, firm. “And the roka garlands. Without the garlands, kisses have meaning, and without the masks, they have consequences too. Which will be discouragement enough for most.”

That’s true enough; southern lords might revel in their rakishness, but those from northern stock valued tradition, reliability, wisdom. To be caught kissing the wrong woman at midnight would do more than scuttle a courtship or two— it could turn half the north against a man, leaving a house to flounder to make contracts, sending their interests south when their neighbors wouldn’t deal with a liar or an oathbreaker.

“And the dancing,” he grunts, warming to the topic. “I don’t want it. I’ve attended a hundred galas in my time, and never once has anyone truly cared to—“

“I afraid, my lord—” Lady Haki lays a quelling hand over his— “the dancing is a must.”

“But…” He glances down where her palm rests, the point of her nails resting next to the soft flesh of his wrist, the weight of it pinning him to the wood.

“Fine,” he sighs, settling back in his seat, flexing his hand to soothe the burn of it. “Dancing it is.”

There was no hour in which the Royal Pharmacy slept; even in the dead of night the back rooms buzzed, pharmacists weaving through every inch of the labyrinthine passages, droning on like bees in their hive. Each one of them would sigh in relief at the end of their shift, shedding their duties along with their coats, eager to slough off the hustle and bustle for a moment of silence. But after so many years of haunting empty halls, catching only shadows of the people he called his parents, Ryuu found the commotion comforting. At least, so long as he wasn't in the middle of it.

When sleep dragged at his edges, tugging at the end of his pen or bobbing the crown of his head, it wasn’t to his dormitory that he wandered. It might have been a kindness to the pharmacists with no place to go, a luxury to the apprentices who grew up sleeping three or more to a bed, but to him it had only been another empty room, a convenient closet to keep yet another body. There was no comfort to be found there, no warmth, just the cold, silent shell of solitude.

But beneath his desk— that had been just the right size. With his back pressed to the wall, he could feel the steady thrum of the palace’s heart, the regular bustle of its pulse beating right behind the plaster. Curtain drawn, it was dark as a womb, and when he closed his eyes, the warmth of his body trapped between wall and blanket, he could believe he was being carried by his mother still. A drowsing child separated from the world by only the thinnest membrane, always feeling, never understanding, but safe all the same.

It wasn’t until he had come here to the university, with its hallowed halls and its neatly kept hours, that he knew it could be different. That a place could be quiet without being lonely. That he could live without the membrane between him and world, and still hear himself think.

A heady discovery, for a boy not yet thirteen. Exhilarating. Terrifying.

He misses it, now.

“Oh my,” Shirayuki gasps, squeezed from the crush lingering outside the laboratory door. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a crowd like that. Not in the university, at least. What is—?”

“The occasion?” Kazaha drawls, glaring up from his bench. “That would be Garrack Gazelt.”

“Garrack?” She follows the jut of his chin, but only so far as Ryuu, eyes rounding into a question. “Did she say she was going to…?”

“For the gala.” The very one he’s been dreading, now that Shidan’s informed him he’s old enough to attend. “The lab is being honored, and she’s come to—”

“Play plus one,” Suzu says, shouldering himself between them on the bench. “Shirayuki, do you think you could take over this distillation? It’s taking ages and I’m tired of—”

“Garrack Gazelt isn’t anyone’s plus one,” Kazaha huffs, nearly thunderous. “She’s the foremost expert on medical pharmaceuticals in the kingdom, if not the continent.”

“And Shidan asked her to go to this shindig, So she’s here.” Suzu shrugs a shoulder. “Plus one behavior, that’s all I’m trying to say.”

“That’s not—!”

“Really?” Shirayuki blinks, taking in the breathless crush. Scholars jostle each other, jockeying for their place in line, bony elbows taking the more determined further front. If they were wearing ball gowns instead of lab coats, Ryuu could have easily mistaken them for eager young ladies at their first soirée, ruthlessly trying to thrust themselves before the most eligible gentleman in the room. “All this for Garrack?”

“What’s that?” A cold breeze is all the warning they have before boots land on the sill, a disheveled uniform perched above them. “Don’t think the chief deserves the popularity?”

“I never said that,” she says primly, the smallest hint of a smile clinging to the corner of her mouth. “I just mean she’s more of a fixture here than she was a few years ago. You’d think the excitement might have banked by now. Just a bit.”

Suzu huffs. “Never underestimate the power of Head Pharmacist Gazelt. I shook her hand this morning, and I still haven’t—!”

“Wash it,” Ryuu tells him, wide eyed. “Now. Please.”

“Aw, but what if all the luck washes off?”

“You know how you always wonder why girls won’t give you the time of day?” Obi says, strained. “This is why.”

“But this many people?” Shirayuki murmurs, as if Suzu hadn’t spoken at all. “Who are all they, even?”

“Faculty.” Kazaha leans a hip against the bench, catching the crowd at a casual angle. “Students. More than a few fellows from neighboring labs. They’ve been coming in and out all morning with the worst excuses.”

“Oh, and your little not-really-a-question-more-a-comment was so clever?” Suzu snorts. “Maybe you should stop living in a snow house if you’re gonna throw ice like that.”

“I didn’t say—” Kazaha lets a breath hiss through his nose. “You’re just jealous that she said I had thought through the problem from every angle, while she only told you that yours was an interesting endeavor, which everyone knows means it’s stupid—”

Suzu’s close enough Ryuu feels him take a breath rather than hears it, rebuttal poised at the tip of his tongue— but the slam of the laboratory door startles it right out of him.

“There,” Shidan says, one hand still pressed to the paneling. “That’s enough of that.”

“Oh, come on now, it’s easier this way.” Garrack doesn’t so much perch on as prowl to his desk, improbably long legs stretching across the floor. “They’re not used to this sort of excitement. You gotta let them get it out.”

“You could get out,” he grumbles, ambling behind his desk. Ryuu doesn’t need to be as perceptive as Obi to know he doesn’t mean a word of it. “Then maybe they might find somewhere else to be.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” The scant few years he spent under her careful eye is more than enough to know the smart comment that smile hides, one that’s sure to slide right under Shidan’s skin and send him skittering for some science to hold before his temper can get the best of him, but—

But it all goes up like smoke when the door nearly bursts off its hinges, a bolus of black wool hurtling through.

“What is the meaning—?” Shidan’s teeth snap shut. “Professor, I didn’t expect you to—?”

“That woman!” Lata doesn’t so much rage as froth, pacing like a pot just before a boil. “Comes into my office, just to trap me in a corner. No! To flush me out of a my den, like a hound does a…a-- a fox would say she speaks out of both side of her face, that’s the sort of woman she is. And she came to me.”

“Ah.” Shidan leans back in his seat, hands folded over his belly. “I see her ladyship spoke to you about the charity gala.”

“Spoke? Strong-armed is more like!” Steam would be rising from him, if it could from a person. “Practically mentioned the thing in one breath, and then had me hosting it the next! As if I don’t have anything better to do than bring the glittering ton into my own home and let them pick over the place like locusts!”

“Host? You? In your poor excuse for a house?” Garrack raises a thick brow. “How are we all going to fit around the rocks?”

“Not my personal abode.” He scowls down at the chief pharmacist, clearly just have noticing her presence. “Her ladyship asked for access to the estate.”

“Your family’s estate?” Both brows hike to her hairline. “I thought you were disowned.”

“Dis—? You thought—?” Lata sputters, words rattling like a pot’s lid. “I went into academia, not— not gotten a girl in the family way!”

She lifts a shoulder at the precise angle meant to annoy. “Wouldn’t be the first noble boy to do both. Maybe you thought a book might shield you from a bad marriage as much as taking the cloth.”

He stares at her for a long moment, simmering, before turning back to Shidan. “In any case, the woman’s taken my whole household firmly in hand. Told me there’s to be dancing too, if you can believe it.”

It’s with practiced patience that Shidan manages a mild, “You don’t say.”

“Dancing?” Garrack drawls, arms folding across the stark white of her coat. “What next? Kissing at midnight?”

“No, none of that,” he huffs. “And none of those silly garlands either. It’s bad enough I have to suffer through the moon eyes children make during a reel, I hardly need them making worse decisions in an empty bedroom.”

“Or unlocked closet.” Her lips twitch, dangerous. “Or just a really nice, shadowed corner…”

Lata frowns, the sort that might be more forbidding if Garrack possessed the ability to be shamed. “If you’re quite done being a degenerate?”

One shoulder lifts, lazy. “Hardly.”

“In any case,” he huffs, putting his back to her— and Shidan square in his sights. “I suppose my one consolation is that I cannot be made to dance—”

“Lata!” The name bubbles out of her, escaping through the hand she claps over it. “You’re the host.”

“Yes?” His mouth pulls thin. “Oh, some will find it rude, I’m sure, but a man can’t be made to dance, not in his own home. Not even by that— that—”

For all that his mouth works, teeth biting around the start of syllables before abandoning them for the next, Ryuu finds he hardly needs words to understand what Lata is trying to convey. Not when his hands clench so eloquently before him, the way His Highness Zen’s does when Obi really has gone and done something unwise.

“No, I mean—” now it’s Garrack waving her hands, thought it seems she’s having a far better time than Lata is doing it— “it’s the host’s job to open the floor. So you’ve got to at least do it the once.”

His shoulders stiffen to an edifice even mountains would shy from. “I must do no such thing. If the host must open the floor, then everyone can spend the night with their heels firmly on the parquet. Why, who would even be my partner? There’s not a single woman in the whole of the continent that could compel me to—”

“'Not a single woman.' You poor bastard!” A guffaw tears out of Garrack, putting tears in her eyes. “Do you really not get it? Not only do you have to open the floor—” her voice burbles up to a pitch that blots out all Lata’s attempts at protest— “but you have to do it with the highest ranked woman in attendance!”

Lata stills. Blinks. Once, then twice. And with no fanfare at all, his whole face rumples up, twisted around a sneer. “Oh—!”

Whatever else the professor says is lost to him-- Shirayuki clamps her hands right over his ears, so hard it leaves them ringing. By the time he’s quite recovered— and Lata’s quite finished— the first thing he hears is Obi murmuring, “Well, Yuzuri’s not going to like this.”

“What do you mean there’s not going to be kissing?!” Izuru makes a good attempt to shush her, but Yuzuri refuses to be silenced on this, even if the whole commissary is staring at them. She even drops her utensils for good measure, fork and knife both, letting them clatter to the table in the growing lull. “I finally get invited to the most exclusive Solstice party in Wirant, and there won’t even be garlands?”

“It’s not in Wirant,” Kazaha adds, right at the same time Shirayuki offers, “It’s a charity gala, not a Solstice party.”

The both stop, sparing each other the briefest glance before Kazaha pedantically plows on, “I think the Forzeno estate is somewhere outside the main city. Before the checkpoint, at least, but not within the walls—“

“That’s not important,” she snaps, wishing she could take a pair of scissors and even out that terrible hack job he likes to give himself, as if a lack of skill and a proper mirror could pass for fashion. “It’s a charity gala on the solstice, which means it’s a Solstice party and there should be kissing.”

“We go to the university party every year and you find someone to kiss just fine,” Suzu comments around a mouthful of yams. “I don’t know why it matters so much that you can’t kiss someone there.”

It’s impossible to explain to him that she’s running out of boys to kiss— or at least, boys to kiss that aren’t Suzu. Which she can never do, because wanting to put her mouth on him is a new, debilitating mental illness she’d rather die than indulge. She just needs to go out and— and touch a little snow. Meet people who know that a quadrille is a dance, not some sort of…of duck species. Reintroduce herself into a dating pool where more of the mate selection know how to chew with their mouth shut.

“Because the university party is full of academics,” she settles on instead, as close to a confession as she can bear. “And this place will has a ton of guys— normal guys, who can talk about stuff other than…sediment layers and rhizomes and…and which side of the body your kidneys are supposed to be on.”

“They’re supposed to be on both sides,” Kazaha informs her with a concerned frown, just as Suzu adds around a swallow, “I thought you loved rhizomes.”

She does. That’s sort of the problem. “There’s going to be actual gentlemen at this party, with titles and money and good manners, and I’m not going to be able to kiss any of them! It’s demoralizing.”

“Well,” Obi hums, mouth already hooking into trouble. That what she like about him: he’s always ready to break the rules. Or at least scuff them up a little. “That’s only if you get caught.”

Shirayuki casts him one of her knowing looks, the kind that doesn’t say I know what you’re up to so much as I know you’re better than this. “If Lata isn’t comfortable with kissing, then you shouldn’t be thinking about sneaking around to do it.”

“Aw, Miss,” he sighs, fluttering his eyelashes; a poor way to hide the fondness in his eyes. “But sneaking around is the best part.”

“There’s going to be dancing,” Kazaha interjects, heading their frustrating not-flirting flirting off at the pass. “You can at least do that with your moneyed and mannered gentlemen. Aren’t there a half dozen novels you’ve read where romance blooms over a reel?”

“A waltz, usually.” Sometimes maybe even a schottische or a polka, if the heroine was more plucky than limpid. “And that’s still not the same as kissing.”

“Lata’s even opening the floor.” Suzu mulls the thought over as he picks at a roll. “Do you think he can dance?”

“Well, he is a lord,” Obi reminds him, loading up his fork. “Aren’t they born knowing how to cut a rug?”

“Well, sure.” His hair’s gotten longer in the colder months, the ends lingering down around his shoulders rather than up my his chin. Yuzuri hates how much she wants to run her fingers through it. “But I mean…he’s been holding up in his lab for years. He’s got to be rusty, right? Like if he breaks one of Lady Haki’s foot bones, is that going to come out of our—?”

“He did just fine when we danced,” Shirayuki adds with a pointed look. “That wasn’t so long ago.”

“Miss.” It’s more a laugh than her name, and Obi leans in, far too close for just friends. “Back then, anyone would have seemed like a master next to you. I think I still have bruises from that night.”

Pink chases up the column of her throat, settling right at the tips of her ears. By the way her eyes dart down before skittering away, Yuzuri doubts it’s from the teasing. “W-well, still. He hardly stepped on my feet.”

Obi’s grin goes sharp, wolfish, like she’s just a little frolicking lamb, and he’s hungry for lunch. “How could he when yours are always so quick on the draw?”

This is getting ridiculous. “I think we’re missing the most important part here,” Yuzuri reminds them, startling Obi back to a less ravenous distance. “Which is that there’s going to be no kissing! For anyone!”

“Wait, will I have to dance?” Suzu asks, worry slipping the last few syllables shrill. “I’ve never danced before. Not the real stuff. I don’t even know where to put my hands!”

“Maybe,” Kazaha drawls, angling himself toward her— and away from Suzu’s spiraling. “You could spend all that time you wanted to be swapping spit with rich boys and use it to kiss up to our donors instead.”

Yuzuri groans. “That is not the kind of kissing I want to do.”

His mouth twitches, threatening amusement. “But it is a kind of kissing.”

“Obi.” Suzu grabs his sleeve over the sweet potatoes. “You gotta teach me how to dance.”

Kazaha sighs, shaking his head. “Great. And now the blind are leading the blind.”

#obiyukidosido #obiyuki #akagami no shirayukihime #snow white with the red hair #my fic #ans #I had been hoping to actually get to the bits that had annie's designs in them since we like #spent a WHILE going back and forth about what we thought northern fashion would be #and i actually have a whole draft for what was supposed to be this ENTIRE fic #but unfortunately i realized that my project 6K was more like....9K+ total #and that just was NOT going to happen this week #while kids were sick and we had PLANS and such #but ONE DAY. maybe even soon. SOONISH. we'll see what the fates hold for this little project 🤣

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sabraeal · 4 months

Text

she fills the whole paper, and crosses half

[Read on AO3]

The letter arrives in an admittedly sorry state, the paper itself stained yellow several times over, as if it had been dropped in every puddle between here and Yurishire and left out to dry between each one. The edges are ragged, nibbled at by neglect, nature, and perhaps— if some of these marks are to be explained— a very enterprising member of the order rodentia. By the time it is tendered to Shirayuki— long after the rest of the post has been read and replies penned— the paper seems so brittle she’s half-afraid it will crumble under her touch, snowing shreds of correspondence across the silver salver.

But it doesn’t— though the paper does spare a single, ominous creak as she turns it, bowing beneath the press of her fingers. Miraculously, the seal is intact. And familiar.

Her breath catches on the elegant spike of an l, the achingly familiar sweep of an h. The air burns in her lungs, setting her fingers shaking as she sweeps them beneath the fold. The seal does not so much pop as crack, two waxen pieces shedding onto her palm, but she’s beyond such concerns. All her attention has come to a quivering point, focused upon the looping scrawl, crammed into every space ink would hold. Left-to-right, up-and-down, squeeze into the margins— Shirayuki follows it with the same vigilance as those children did their breadcrumbs, or that Greek lad with his string, all the way back to its first too-large loops.

My Most Dearest Heart, it reads, ink spidering out from the force behind the stroke that wrote it— or perhaps the puddles that came after. My Most Bosom Companion.

The words blur, endearments swimming across the page before eyelashes flutter them back in place. The rest is quickly set to rights by the application of the back of her hand, staunching the stream before it can truly begin. It would be silly to lose her head over a few fond words, especially if it kept her from enjoying the rest.

Her walking dress is hardly meant to curl up in, especially with her hem smudged from the city’s streets. Her Spencer— fashionable though it may be— also makes the room unseasonably warm, but there is no time to undress, not when she can see that every page of the letter is as cramped as the first.

She bows just enough to good sense to remove her slippers— a pair that is quickly scurried away to be cleaned as soon as they are abandoned— and unbutton the most offensive barriers to her comfort. But that is all the care she can spare before she collapses to the sofa, letter clutched in her trembling grip.

I am of the impression, the scrawl begins, Kihal’s blistering tone well preserved between its spikes and sprays, that it must be a particular gift of yours to have such incredible, impossible reversals of fortune happen in so slight a time. Your grandmother cannot have been laid to rest more than a fortnight before those cursed relations of yours descended, scurrying you out of the shire without so much as a by-your-leave! And you have not penned me so much as a jot in the way of explanation! What am I to assume then, my dear, but that you have been laid in a ditch? That your life’s flame has been summarily snuffed— perhaps even by that pretty cousin of yours!— for standing between them and the bounty of your great uncle’s estate!

The softest sigh escapes her lips. Novels may improve a lady’s mind, but the ones Kihal reads only improve her sense of the dramatic. Which hardly needed much help to start with.

But provided this letter finds you before you succumb to the elements— as I am certain there must be some in your final resting place, as all the finest ditches must, and you, my dear, deserve only the best nature and your cousins’ villainous minds can devise— another sigh slips from her, larger this time, heavier, sending her flyaways skittering at the extremes of her vision— I should tell you that I am well, and my noble father is as fine as he has ever been, which is to say choleric without potential for relief. When he is in bed he is certain he should be out of it, and when he is out of bed he only longs to be in it.

Worry wells up like bile in her throat, the acid taste coating her mouth. Kihal would often complain of her father’s exacting temperament, but Shirayuki had rarely seen the man raise his voice even to a man of work, let alone to his beloved daughter. What complaints he had were saved for his affliction; despite once being a hale and hearty gentleman in his youth— at least according to Nan— Sir Kazuhane had met middle age with a long list of complaints, few of which even the capital’s doctors would address with any serious thought.

Now that his favorite attending physician has been swept from town by her nefarious relatives, we have been forced to send for some charlatan from Tanbarun, a man who came highly recommended by my own odious relation.

Brecker. Her mouth twists, sour. She remembers the man well, though not fondly; a distant cousin who had the fortune to be the sole male produced in his generation. He had not taken kindly to Kihal’s rebuffs, not her father’s insistence in abiding by them. And awkward summer, to say the least.

As little as I like his choice of acquaintances, the good doctor does seem to possess some skill. He identified some of Father’s worst ailments as complaints of the liver, and while he will certainly not like the changes the man has requested we make to his diet, it is a small price to pay for many more years of listening to his carrying on. Which the doctor is quite sure he will have, so long as we pay strict attention to the strictures he suggests.

The pages that follow are filled to the very brim with the shire’s goings-ons: weddings and those lucky few who will certainly find themselves at the altar— or jumping the broom— before long, births and those that aren’t long from the announcement of them, new animosities and old feuds. All the day-to-day minutiae that Shirayuki herself had once lived and breathed, and now only heard about them so long after their post dates those same babies might already be born and those hot-tempered feuds long ended.

If I were not so well-raised, a veritable beacon of patience and generosity as all who know me comment upon, Kihal writes with a theatrical flourish, letters looping so elegantly they nearly tangle with the text above them. Then I would ask when my most misfortunate friend would be able to rise from her shallow grave and once more brighten her Dear Kihal’s doorstep. But I know now with the Easter Holiday approaching, you will be buried beneath quite a number of familial obligations. To which I am most obviously referring to your duty to marry well and quickly, primarily by evincing yourself in the capital for the Season. One I am sure you have taken to quite well, seeing as how you are the most agreeable creature I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, and are beloved of everyone who spends more than two breaths in your presence.

“You might be quite surprised,” Shirayuki murmurs, resisting the urge to clench her fists. Unbidden, the image of pale chamois upon black kidskin flashes through her mind. Her teeth grit, hard enough her jaw twinges, unused to such abuse. Even now, it seems, the man finds a way to be underfoot, invading even her most private ponderings.

In any case, I must remind you that as your best and most bosom friend, it is your duty to ME to report every bead on your gown, and certainly every beau on your arm. You must tell me over whom we must swoon, and who is to be our most direst enemy. Should father’s health continue as it has, I imagine that we shall meet there, though I understand that now you will be as much above me in station as I was once above you, and may have far many more appropriate acquaintances among your rank. Still, I will hope that you will not forget your old friend, who will always remain humbly yours—

Her signature is little more than a few spikes bookending her tightest scrawl, but it is so familiar that for a moment Shirayuki clasps it to her, as if the ink might tattoo itself upon her heart if she held it close enough. Eyes closed, she half-imagines she can feel the warmth of Kihal’s hand still on the paper, proof that she still exists, that Yuris was not simply a place she imagined on her pillow, desperate to believe in a kinder place than the dour walls of her great uncle’s manor.

And all at once, the fancy passes, the heartbeat trapped within the page fading until it is but paper and ink once more. Yet it is still just as magic, still just as beloved. She cradles the letter between her palms as she crosses the room, as gentle as a nurse with a babe, setting it on the oiled wood of her writing desk. Mahogany, she’d been told, far finer than the escritoire she had shared with Nan and Pa, squirreled away in a corner of their parlor.

And yet, when she sits, it’s uncomfortable. It’s in the newest style— or rather, the oldest, now made new again— with a surface that slants, ostensibly to help with the sweeping style of penmanship of which the fashionable are so fond, but she finds her elbows falling off at the most inopportune moments, sending her stroke wild. The chair is a scant inch too tall too, with no convenient rungs on which to prop herself, leaving her heels to hang in the air no matter how she places them. It’s as if at any moment she could pitch right off of it, sending correspondence scattering to the four winds. Her great uncle kept a bureau mazarin in his study, one large enough to hold nearly four writers side-by-side, and yet—

Yet it’s too formal. Too…different. Too much like being a lord when she is surrounded by ebony and brass and bronze, instead of a country girl who tripped into it by virtue of being born to the right people at just the right time.

So she perches at the edge of her just-too-tall chair and folds her foolscap, letting the pitch guide her pen as she writes, My Most Beloved Kihal.

I cannot convey the depths of my regret that this letter has only now found me, much alive and in great comfort. How long you must have agonized over what had passed once my relations spirited me away from Yurishire; had I but spared a moment, I might have thought of your poor nerves at finding the store empty and no one living amongst the dust. I must admit, although at times I believe they did contemplate leaving me by the side of the road— convenient hole to put me in or not— I arrived in all comfort to my late grand uncle’s estate, where I was informed that I would be the inheritor of both his title and lands, with only the sparsest parcels to be given to the rest of my cousins. I am to understand this came as quite a shock to the eldest, a Miss Kaval, who had veritably taken on the position of nurse during his long decline-- a duty she had undertaken with an understanding that Mr Kaval, her brother, would inherit. They were understandably miffed to find that the cousin they had once thought thoroughly disowned had not only been kept as his uncle’s heir all these long years, but had a daughter as well— and one far more easier to find than my father, God rest his soul, provided he is no longer living.

However they felt, they found me and saw me safe to my inheritance, though both of them seemed quite convinced that I would have them out on the streets by the time the ink was dried. More than a few of my other sudden relations counseled to do the same, but I could not bear to put them out, not when they had both been so thoroughly taken advantage of by the late count. And thus they are now at the estate, and I have come to the townhouse in Wistal, and I think we all like each other much better for the distance.

I do hope your father has improved; it would give me no little delight to find you here among the crowds of the capital. A friendly face among so many strangers! Though worry not— I made fine friends during my months in the countryside, ones I’m sure you would approve, if you only met them. It was they who encouraged me to come to Town for the Season, and though I cannot say it suits me, it has provided some entertainment. Only just today—

Shirayuki hesitates, her fingers clenching tight around her quill. But she can hardly stop when she has only just started. Only just today, I was having a walk in the park with one of my companions, who I am sure you would know by reputation, if not acquaintance…

The country had always been slow to wake from its long winter’s sleep. The snow lingered some years, not melting during those first stirrings of spring but clinging to the fields and furrows long into May, turning from slump to slush as the days marched on, growing warmer with each rise of the sun. More than a few times they’d danced around maypoles dug into the more stubborn drifts, laughing and shrieking as snow churned to puddle beneath their feet.

The village folk moved slower too. Housekeeps might throw open the windows at the first sign of fairer weather, letting the stale air of their rooms out and a cleansing breeze in, and farmers might brave the last dregs of winter to survey the state of their fields, but most of Yurishire had been happy to keep cozened up to their fires until the first melt. Nature might rouse, stumbling out on on coltish legs for its first foray into spring, but the townsfolk linger at their windows, thinking of summer.

All save Shirayuki. She woke with the snowdrops, leaving small vases for them on the table that served as Nan’s vanity, silver mirror chipped and aged where it sat against the wall. By the first melt she’d have shucked her shawl on the tavern’s rail and abandoned her boots by the back door, walking amongst the trees and the birds the way her ancestors must have once when they first rolled the stones up on the tor. Another set of guardians might have despaired of her, but Pa and Nan would only laugh at the footprints leading from their kitchen, telling her to watch her hems.

A more proper set of custodians might also have worried about what such leanings said for the state of her eternal soul, but service held little appeal to either of her grandparents-- there was something that always needed doing to keep their public house afloat; casks that needed tapping or floors to be swept, rooms to be tidied for the few visitors that passed through Yurishire each season, on their way to more interesting places, and little time to sit in contemplation of the divine. Even so, they had been friendly with the vicar— or at least, friendly enough that he turned a blind eye when their pew sat empty more Sundays than it didn’t. If there was a fine to pay for not lifting their eyes heavenward once every seven days, they paid it in full with a stout mug of ale, ready each time the good reverend walked in the door.

And so the forest had become her chapel, the trees its flying buttresses, their branches its lofty vaults. There could be no greater heavenly choir than the songbirds that lifted their warbling voices, greeting her as she trod down their aisles. And when Shirayuki sat among it all, she had been as at peace with her Higher Powers as a pastor in his pulpit, more at home than any place that could be contained with four walls, no matter how pretty the glass.

That feeling, however, does not extend to King’s Park.

“Are we to be besieged, Miss Shirayuki?” Lady Kiki tilts her chin, not setting a single coil on her perfectly coiffed head out of place. “Your shoulders are practically parapets.”

“Ah, no!” She hastily puts both her spine and smile in good order, which has the immediate effect of disordering her feet. Her boot catches on the trim at her hem, and only a firm tug from the countess sets her to rights, so quick Shirayuki barely can believe it happened at all. “No, it’s only, um…”

Her hesitation stretches a moment too long.

“…Only?” Lady Kiki prompts, arching an elegant brow. Every part of her is elegant— born elegant, like how a horse might be bred for racing, faster than all the other foals the moment it drops from its dam.

“It feels as if everyone is…” She casts a surreptitious glance behind them, meeting a set of eyes that quickly slips away. It happens again when she looks to the side, and once more to the front. “…Is staring at me, doesn’t it?”

Kiki’s mouth hooks into a smirks, the kind that recalls stained knees and snagged trousers, a mellifluous voice artfully lowered to a man’s register. “Is that not the point of a promenade? To see and be seen?”

An easy thing to say for a lady born into her station. Shirayuki had hardly been a countess for a season, promoted to the position by distant and unwelcoming relatives, and thrust into the unforgiving embrace of high society without a single hand to hold.

“I don’t think I’m ready to be seen,” she admits, more breath than bravado. “I’ve only just been presented to Her Highness.”

An event that although may not be termed a public disaster, Shirayuki scrawls, finding a strange sort of catharsis in penning the complaints to page, was certainly a personal one. You may chastise me for denying you the details of my disgrace, but I can hardly speak of it without wishing that I had some cause to forget the whole. Suffice to say, my behavior on the night in question gives me only the deepest sense of dissatisfaction.

Unfortunately, she continues, mouth pulling thin. This opinion is not universal among my companions.

There is a twitch at the corner of Lady Kiki’s mouth; it’s as good as a laugh, in such company as this. “I hardly think she found you wanting. On the contrary, I believe she told me that you were…quite amusing. High praise indeed.”

“Still.” With her arm twined so tightly with Kiki’s— a position the countess insisted on the moment they alighted from her carriage— Shirayuki cannot fidget, cannot fuss in a way that might dispel the flutter in her chest. “That hardly means I am eligible for, ah…”

“Letting an interested gaze linger on your trousseau?” Those noble brows arch, too amused. “I was under the impression that to be out gave permission for exactly that. Besides, it is not as if you are some young girl at the precipice of her first Season. Unless you mean to say that young marquess’s plea was quite—?”

“Raj wasn’t…” Her denial flounders beneath the smallest hitch of the countess’s brow. “Well, he didn’t mean…”

The problem, as you might have surmised, having suffered his attentions before, Shirayuki scrawls, each loop spiking up sharply. Is that Raj certainly did mean. He arrived at my late, great uncle’s doorstep not two weeks after I had been scurried off to it, barging into the dining room to declare all manner of passionate love right before the breakfast spread. I think Mr Kaval nearly lost a sausage right off his plate from all the carrying on.

The temptation to make me a marchioness— and remove the complication of my birth— might have been too great in that moment for my dear cousin had he— she grimaces, blotting out the word before continuing— a storm not stranded Marquess Laxdo at the estate the night before with his companions. We had known each other for mere hours, and yet he perceived my distress at his declarations and came to the conclusion that Raj must have been a spurned suitor, refusing to learn that his protestations of feeling were unwanted.

She hardly needed to add just how close to the crux that particular assumption cut; it had been Kihal, after all, who pushed him into the lake when he declared that he would take Shirayuki as his mistress. They had been all of fifteen— he could hardly have known what the offer meant in truth— but Raj was the sort of boy who could use a good dunking now and then.

His demands for satisfaction may have been unnecessary, but it did serve to dampen my cousins’ interest in the marriage. Laxdo’s companion, a Mr Lowen, whose steady kindness is only overshadowed by the immensity of his body, was able to quietly get both parties to come to terms. But the damage was done, as they say, to dear Raj’s reputation among the marquess’s party. I doubt either of them should become good friends, no matter the amount of goodwill on Mr Lowen’s part…

“A publican’s granddaughter does not come out,” she settles on, simply. “I merely grew older, and men inquired about whether I was old enough.” Some with more honest intentions than others. “I may not know much about being a lady, but I do know that there is more to it than that.”

“And you have done it.” A gloved hand raises, the neatly stitched kid still supple and pristine. “You have come to the capital and presented yourself before the queen. Now everyone awaits the news of which parties the mysterious young countess will attend, and which worthy gentlemen she will allow on her dance card.”

“But that’s not”—Shirayuki splutters, trying to marshal her words into a single line— “I cannot simply be out.”

The countess shrugs, a single lift of her shoulder that sends the shadows beneath her parasol skittering. “And yet here you are.”

“But I’m not here to be— be seen,” she insists, a flush building beneath her collar. Perhaps her maid had been right; the Spencer might be too warm for such a fine spring morning. “I just like the exercise. And the company, of course.”

That fine glove lifts, covering the first stirrings of a smile. “The exercise, you say?”

Shirayuki blinks, heat creeping up from her collar to her cheeks. “Is that really so odd?”

“Not odd,” Lady Kiki assures her, the harsh line of her brow softening as she lays a hand over hers. “But I do believe it is the first time I have ever heard the sentiment from a countess’s mouth other than mine.”

“Well, I’m much more accustomed to tending a bar than keeping court,” Shirayuki informs her, as primly as she can without a giggle breaking through. It’s a near thing, when Kiki stifles her own. “And far more familiar still with a public house than any public park. The closest thing we had in Yurishire was the commons, and I think more sheep went for a promenade than people.”

That finally shocks more than a snicker from her companion, a full laugh bursting straight out from between her lips before she stuffs it back under lock and key. It feels like an accomplishment, possibly the best Shirayuki has achieved since she’s come to the capital, dressed and trussed like a fatted calf ready for market.

A breath is long enough for the countess to recover, even if Shirayuki might never. “Is it so different there?”

“I have never been so idle in my life!” she confesses. “Every day I would be on my feet from morning ‘till night, helping Nan in the kitchens, or Pa roll out a cask— and once the doctor retired, I’d even go around the shire sometimes, making sure the ailing had what would give them relief. But here…”

She hesitates, unsure of how to put the thoughts to words without giving insult. Kiki merely raised her brows, encouraging. “Here?”

“Well, it seems everyone spends the morning just…staying in one place, waiting for someone to visit.” She dares a glance at where Kiki keeps pace next to her, desperate. “I don’t know how you stand it!”

“By doing visiting of my own.” The countess slants her a sly smile. “Its benefits are twofold, you see: I do not suffer the very purgatory that is awaiting on another’s pleasure, and I avoid those of my acquaintance I would rather not entertain.”

Visiting was hardly much better that being visited. One may not be bound to their home, tasked with finding some occupation not dear enough to mind interruption, and yet might sufficiently occupy the mind when not currently receiving guests, but to be cooped up in a carriage riding over cobblestones is hardly what Shirayuki would call exercise. To be picked up at one door only to be dropped off at the next did not encourage exertion by any means.

Her thoughts must be writ large upon her face, for Lady Kiki only hums, amused, before she tells her, “You would hardly think our lot so idle, Miss Shirayuki, if only you rode.”

“Ah!” She shakes her head, hard enough that she nearly knocks her bonnet loose. “I’m afraid that I’ve had more occasion to drive a horse than ride one.”

And she hadn’t much enjoyed the former. Horses were skittish creatures, ready to gallop at the bare rustle of a leaf. The first time Pa let her have the reins, a rabbit skittered out in front of their old mare’s hooves, and nearly sent three casks of the finest ale in three counties rolling down High Street. Even when they’d gone and gotten a newer gelding, it’d been one of her least favorite tasks on her list, one she only handled because the only thing more shy than their horses was Nan trying to hold them.

Kiki waves a hand, unconcerned. “You have time enough to learn. I can think of at least one fine horseman that would be delighted to teach you.”

It’s terrible the way her skin heats, the way she knows it is absolutely the most brilliant candy apple red by the amused arch of Lady Kiki’s noble brow. “I would hate to presume upon anyone’s time.”

Not when the single time she has tried to mount a horse, the stablemaster laughed, telling her it was a good thing they’d chosen the most amicable of all their borders. She never quite made it into the saddle.

A well-trimmed elbow nudges her side. “No need for concern on that account, Miss Shirayuki. I’m quite sure he would lay his whole person across the gutter should you mention you feared getting your feet wet.”

And there would be an entire country to castigate her for daring to do so. Marquess might be his title, but it was a courtesy, one kept only when the situation did not lend itself to Highness. A fact that might have benefited her to know before—

“This is only your first Season,” the countess assures her, with all the confidence of a lady who knows her birthright will assure her relevance long after beauty fades. “By next year you will be riding with the same ease as the rest of us. Perhaps you’ll even be able to face a reel without going white as a sheet.”

Perhaps that could be true if only she too had danced her first quadrille with her first steps, or learned which fork went with shellfish when she first learned to hold it in her fist. But Shirayuki is hardly as accomplished as Lady Kiki, at least so far as Wistal society is concerned. When the countess had debuted at fifteen, she had been finished, a diamond polished until it would outshine all the pearls around it, but Shirayuki— Shirayuki is three years older and barely started. Ask her to pour the perfect pint, or pick the right herbs to stave off a cold, and she could not only succeed but impress. But hold coy conversation with a count? Curtsy in front of the queen?

If Shirayuki were made of any less sterner stuff, she might faint from the thought.

“Don’t worry.” Kiki is not one to smile, but her mouth softens in the implication of one. “You will see how diverting Wistal can be.”

“It’s already diverting,” she murmurs, so faint she hopes the countess cannot hear her. “I can hardly hear myself think sometimes.”

Kiki’s arm squeezes right where theirs are linked, laying a hand upon her sleeve. “It can be like that, yes. Especially the first time. I was lucky Zen’s mother took me under her wing when it was time for mine. Otherwise I might have married the first man I saw, gentleman or no, just to be done with the whole thing. Perhaps even a soldier.”

I must admit— her pen hesitates above the page, reluctant to commit these thoughts to paper, to allow them to escape like Pandora and her evils— for as fair and learned as my companions are here, there are times I cannot forget that they have never walked a country road with shoes in hand, wishing for a cobbler. Or that they have never wondered what doors might close to them if their beloved guardian did not ever rise again from their fever.

Only a few months ago, Nan would have delighted if I arrived at her door with a bridegroom from among the regiment’s men. She would have washed the whole room in blue and white, raising pints to queen and country, and asked for God to keep him when he went to war. I had even considered it once— do not judge me, I had worried when you had your Season, and thought it might be a way for us to remain friends, so long as you did not catch the eye of the prince himself.

A flight of fancy that had lost its humor, now. Even you had looked among those fresh faces when they marched through. Perhaps not the most suitable of spouses for a baronet’s daughter, but your father hardly would have balked. And yet, now it would be unthinkable for a lady of my position. Not unless he was much decorated, a man meant for higher position.

I am not much sure that I like the change.

“I hope you know that I would not leave you to the wolves, Miss Shirayuki.” Lady Kiki pats her arm, mouth curved fondly. “You will have the finest Season of any young débutante. Only the most glamorous parties, and only the most interesting acquaintances.”

It is an effort to keep her shoulders from rounding. “You’re too kind…”

“Not at all.” Her head tilts, thoughtful. “Lady Haruka should be sending out invitations to her annual gala soon. Anyone who is anyone will be invited. Not a guarantee of scintillating conversation, I know, but in all the years I have attended, I have at least never been bored.”

“Haruka?” Shirayuki bites back a grimace. “I hardly think I would, um…”

Merit a spot on the guest list. Not after the words they exchange in the servants’ corridor of the palace, the gas lights sputtering in their sconces.

“Please. The marchioness is of irreproachable taste.” Kiki’s mouth twitches toward a smile, even if it never quite achieves the shape. “As fine a man as the marquess is, he is a staunch traditionalist. A stick in the mud, socially. But his wife does not consider herself beholden to his politics, and he is wise enough not to meddle in hers.”

“Still—”

“There’s no need to worry, Miss Shirayuki. You’re the most interesting débutante of the Season.” There’s a slyness to the way her brow lifts, a satisfaction. “I’ve already put in a request with my modiste.”

“Modiste?” Shirayuki blinks beneath her bonnet’s brim. “My cousins have already had more dresses made for me than I could possibly wear.”

“I’m certain,” the countess says with a chill that implies those selections were hardly up to her standards. “But you can hardly wear any of those to a ball can you?”

“I could! I mean, I have.” It’d been the finest thing she’d ever laid eyes on; the muslin woven so fine it felt more like water than cloth. “That was where I met you. I mean, the first time I saw you out of, er…”

It felt impolite to mention trousers in this context. Not when Lady Kiki took such pains to disguise herself when she wore them, maintaining careful distance between the Countess Seiran and Laxdo’s plucky retainer, Master Kit.

“What’s fine enough for a country dance hall falls far short of the mark here in Town,” Kiki informs her. “I do hope you have kept free the morning two days hence. The man was quite in raptures over the opportunity to dress you. I would hate to disappoint him.”

And Shirayuki would hate to disappoint her. So she merely takes in a breath and asks, “Do you think the weather might hold today?”

“It ought to.” It’s a firm answer, the kind that even Mother Nature would think twice before crossing.

Shirayuki hums, nervously rolling her words around her tongue. “I saw the most interesting shop in town the other day. They were selling ices, and—”

Kiki squeezes her arm tight, so sudden she stumbles, at the mercy of the woman’s relentless tug. Not a moment after, a carriage rumbles up, so close it might have shaved the elbow from her Spencer if she still stood where she’d been. Definitely would have plucked the feather right from her bonnet.

“What are they thinking?” Shirayuki yelps, half-extracting herself from the countess’s grip, bent on giving the driver a piece of her mind. “They could have hurt—!”

“Kiki! Miss Lyon!” The shade raises from the window, replaced by the blinding glitter of Z— Laxdo’s silver-blond. “Are you two out for a walk, then?”

A gloved hand splays, Kiki’s mouth quirking as she gestures between them. “As you can well see.”

It’s the sort of tone that would give another man pause, but not this one— he only spares her the briefest scowl before asking, “Might I inquire if the two of you had a destination in particular? Or do you promenade without purpose?”

“Oh…” Shirayuki’s hardly had the chance to speak to him these past few weeks, and her tongue tangles in her mouth, too laden with what needs to be said to bother with lighter fare. “No, we were only…”

“I believe Miss Lyon was about to suggest we turn toward Town for ices.” The countess gives the carriage a measuring glance, arithmetic tabulating behind her eyes as she adds, “I suppose that wouldn’t interest you and your company, would it, Laxdo?”

His face brightens. “If that is not the most fortuitous coincidence! We three have been cooped up in this cab all morning on my lord brother’s business, and were just talking of how fine it would be to take in a cool treat before retiring to the townhouse.”

“Very good.” There is mischief in the way the countess’s mouth curls, a calculation in the glance she spares her. “Shall I call for my carriage? We would meet you there.”

“And leave two well-turned ladies such as yourself here to wait while there is room enough in mine?” Laxdo gives a playful shake of his head, hair splaying like sunlight. “My mother would take a strip from me for such ungallant behavior.”

Kiki hums, coy. “What say you, Miss Lyon? Shall we accept Laxdo’s offer and spare him a hiding?” It’s with no little relish that she adds, “I quite think he deserves one.”

“Kiki.” It comes on the heels of another, deeper voice sighing, “My lady.”

It’s hardly any good; the addition of a fair pair of brown eyes above a marble-chiseled jaw only moves her to greater irreverence.

“A little discipline would do you good,” the countess deadpans, one arm folding beneath her chest. “You could do with a little more character. Some backbone, perhaps.”

“I have plenty enough for—”

“I think,” Shirayuki starts, pitching her voice to be heard and lowering it once she’s captured their attention. “It would be quite nice to pass time among such amiable company.” She darts a questioning glance at the countess. “Wouldn’t it?”

Her mouth twitches, too knowing. “Well, if Miss Lyon pleads mercy, I suppose we must give it.” Her hands waves, impatient. “All right then. Squeeze tight, you three!”

Shirayuki coughs. “Three?”

I have already accounted to you the bare necessities of my introduction— or lack thereof— to the man known as Marquess Laxdo. As I am sure you know from your time in Town, he is a gallant young gentleman, given more for the age of knights and chivalry rather than our more civil times. He has come to my aid more times than I could possibly measure— my cousin’s machinations are only the start of the favors I owe to him— and there is little I can reproach him for. Save for perhaps impatience, which might be the least among the vices ascribed to young men of his station; and a certain irreverence for his familial duties, which might be excused if one considers who, exactly, he answers to.

A certain sort of reticence has recently come to light, as well, but even though it caused me some discomfort—again, one I will detail later, when I can bear to think on it— I cannot quite him to task. Not when it comes from experience and an abundance of caution. Of anyone, I am the most sympathetic of such things.

I can, however, fault him for his choice in companions. Not Lady Kiki, who is a bastion of grace and good manners, nor Sir Mitsuhide, who is best among all men. No, there is a third to his party— a recent addition— and though you may think me quite incapable of pettier feelings, my dear, I must admit…

I cannot like Mr Obi.

Laxdo and Sir Mitsuhide may have been the only ones visible from their place on the promenade, but when the stair are put down and the door swung open, it is to Shirayuki’s great surprise— and even greater consternation— that there is one more to their number, his long legs sprawled across the cab floor.

“Oh.” The noise simply falls out of her, lips too numb to form anything more like words. He at least has the grace to look guilty, wide eyes searching each corner as if just a few inches more might give him a place to hide. “I hadn’t realized…”

“Mr Obi,” Kiki hums over her shoulder, not only unsurprised but pleased at the addition to their party. “What a pleasure to see you lurking in the shadows.”

“Shadows? Lurking?” Guilt melts away to showmanship as he unfurls from his hunch, narrow brows teasing at the roughly shorn bristle at his hairline. There’s a scar just below it, crumpling beneath his protestations of innocence. “Why, I’m practically in full view from some angles! Don’t blame me if you didn’t bother to look in from any of them. Might as well blame the sun for not shining through properly and showing you this handsome face.”

“I think I can blame you well enough for a lack of proper posture.” The countess surveys the cab, performing the same mental acrobatics with which she makes her seating charts. “Now, Laxdo, make room. If you sit to that side and Lowen to the other, I can take the seat between you and make a merry party.”

Someone might have put a cat in the bath with more ease than Sir Mitsuhide takes the suggestion. “T-the carriage is really only meant to seat four! Surely the best solution is to have one of us gentlemen step out so that the ladies can comfortably sit—”

He’s already half out of his seat, his giant shoulders braced against the ceiling to make room, but the countess merely clucks her tongue. With the application of one gloved hand to his clothed thigh, she drives him back to the bench with little more than a tap.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she grunts, settling in beside him, oblivious— or perhaps, more accurately, ambivalent— to the way sweat dews at his brow. “Five can fit just fine. Laxdo, come here and—”

“Why must I move?” Z— the marquess, usually sanguine in temperament, knots himself into a pout. “Shirayuki can sit next to me, and then Obi just has to fold himself up against the window on your side, and we’ll all be just as merry.”

“Me, stuck between them?” Kiki asks, arch. “That’s two full grown men.”

He flushes, pretty as the porcelain dolls Kihal use to keep up on her vanity, back when they both wore their hair in ribbons. “I’m a full grown man.”

“Of course you are, Master,” Obi replies jauntily. “Just a little less of one than me and Sir.”

“It’s simple arithmetic.” The countess slices each syllable as neatly as cake. “Both Lowen and Obi could sit quite comfortably to one side, and together, you and I could make up one of them. Put both of them and myself, however and—”

“Obi’s narrow enough,” Laxdo drawls. “You’ll hardly notice.”

Kiki slants the man in question a sharp look, one he parries with little more than a shrug. “You know me, princess. I’m happy to cuddle up to whoever will take me.”

“I…” Shirayuki hangs on the last step, one boot hovering above the promenade. In Yurishire, she could have begged off— she had a half dozen times before, with young gentlemen who had meant to woo Sir Kazuhane’s pretty daughter but were enticed by the idea of a dalliance with her red-haired companion instead. No one would bat an eye at some village girl strolling down the roadside, dew collecting in her hair. But a countess, a close personal friend to the marquess himself…?

“You might well put Miss Lyon between the both of you.” It’s with an arch sort of wave that the countess gestures toward the empty stretch between Laxdo’s hand and Mr Obi’s thigh, the kind that begs for a timely objection. “She’d hardly be crushed. After all—”

“You can’t expect Shirayuki”—Zen flushes, pink blooming delicately over his cheeks like a doll’s—“I mean, Miss Lyon to sit— two men! And Obi isn’t even—even—!”

“Decent?” the man in question offers, too innocent.

“A peer,” Laxdo settles on, pointedly.

“Mine was better,” Mr Obi informs him, idly crossing his ankles. They reach nearly under the other bench, even without the slouch. “At least my behavior is something that can be held to my credit.”

Lady Kiki lifts a brow. “Is it now?”

One corner of his mouth hitches slyly. “Now, now, princess. I didn’t say good credit.”

Quite against her own good sense, a laugh escapes her. No more than a huff, a breath of air really, and yet—

And yet, Mr Obi glances up at her, hitching his brow the way Nan used to when the visiting gentry got too high-handed. Or the way Cook would look at her when one of Kihal’s suitors sent down requests as if her country manor kitchen had the same manpower as that of the palace’s, sending back fruit with the smallest bit of browning and demanding luxuries that Shirayuki had hardly heard of outside of Kihal’s novels. A subtle aside that suggested there was an earthly tether between the body and brain, one that broke the further up the peerage one climbed.

“You might well come over here already.” Kiki just her chin toward the empty bit of bench beside her. “We would have ices already well in hand if only you did not need to try yourself against me.”

“I—” Zen splutters, flush deepening to an angrier red—“I wasn’t trying myself against you. I was simply—”

“Come now, Master,” Mr Obi hums, too amused. “Shouldn’t you know by now that in a battle of wits, all men stand before Countess Seiran unarmed?”

Kiki lifts her brows in simple agreement. Which only spurs Laxdo into stuttering out, “W-well, wouldn’t it be…i-impropitious for you as well? You’re a woman, too, you know!”

“How many times have I been squeezed between you and Lowen in that little phaeton of yours?” she huffs with a proud toss of her curls. “Either my reputation is more resilient than Miss Lyon’s, or I am already considered ruined. By any road, no harm will come to me.”

While plenty would for her. The countess is too well-bred to say it, but by the marquess’s stricken expression, he hears it just as well. “Fine. If I must.”

Laxdo does not so much relinquish his seat as throw himself across the cab, scowling when his oldest friend pats his leg in much the way a master did their most obedient hound. For as much as he protested her equations, Shirayuki must admit: the three of them fit quite nicely side-by-side, Lady Kiki and Laxdo as similar as shakers in the same set, and Sir Mitsuhide cutting a fine figure beside them.

If only she could say the same for her own arrangement. For all that Mr Obi smiles, satisfaction curling his lip like a cat who has lapped up all the cream, it’s his eyes that scuttle away as she tries to negotiate between the length of his legs and her skirt. She nearly trips before he retracts them beneath his knees, grunting out gnarled, “Here.”

“Thank you,” she says stiffly, all-too aware of Lady Kiki’s eyes lingering upon them. “You’re too kind.”

You may protest my assessment of his character. I admit— she bears down harder here, pen biting into the page— he is, at times, rather droll. Charming even, if one allows for his usual asperity. But the more one comes to know him, the more one understands his TRUE nature, which I cannot abide. I cannot list out all his faults here— they are too numerous, you understand, and require much explanation, and already this letter is crossed—but suffice to say they are enough that not even the most clever of bon mots could redeem him in my sight.

But let me say this: he professes to be friendly with me before our party— as I do, I admit, if only to put less of the burden on the others to contrive to keep us apart— but by chance when we arrived at the confectioner’s, it was his hand that helped me from the carriage. I knew a man may have warm hands, but his touch practically scalded, even through two layers of kid! Enough that should I linger long enough without employ, I feel it still. And when we parted, for all that he endeavored to be subtle, I saw him wipe his hand after, right on his coat! I am quite sure even Lady Kiki saw him, though she is too kind a lady to expose such a man as him when in good company.

Oh, and that is not even considering his behavior at the confectioner’s! The marquess asked me what I meant to order from the menu, and when I gave my answer, he quite interjected, saying—

“Lemon ice?” Mr Obi’s hum lends ices more intrigue than the flavor warrants. “A bit of an expected flavor for an adventurous young miss such as yourself, don’t you think?”

Shirayuki hardly has more than a moment to blink before Zen— Laxdo hisses, “Obi! You can’t just…say that to a lady!”

“I’m not saying it’s a poor flavor, by any means.” His smile stretches like a cat in a sunbeam, luxuriating in the marquess’s radiating disapproval. “I just wouldn’t expect it from a young lady you found jumping walls—”

“I didn’t jump the wall,” Shirayuki insists. At least not that wall, that time. “Zen did. I mean, Laxdo. It was on my estate.”

“And quite derelict, too,” Kiki adds, not in the least helpful. But the cant of her lips, she’s not trying to be.

“Derelict.” Mr Obi wraps his mouth around the word with far too much relish. “You see? A young lady living on a derelict estate—”

“It was really just the garden wall!” It hadn’t been maintained since the last lady of the house passed— her great-grandmother, if she remembered correctly, which considering her hurried education in the family history, she most likely did not. “The rest of it is quite adequate.”

“—Receiving young men who jump over walls—” his voice lowers, having entirely too much fun— “thinking they’re some sort of ghostly apparition—”

“I didn’t think she was a ghost!” Laxdo protests, hands landing on the table hard enough for dishes to clatter. “I thought she was a…er…”

Kiki raises a brow. “Beggar?”

“I’m simply saying,” Mr Obi plows forward, ignoring the marquess’s scowl. “None of that says lemon. Especially since said lady held out against a band of highwaymen until my good master could come in on his white horse—”

“I walked, I’ll have you know.” Laxdo’s mouth twitches. “Climbed, really, considering the grade of that mountain.”

“It was only one highwayman,” she adds. And not much practiced; still more nobleman than cur. Not that either of those points had improved upon his temper. “He wasn’t very good.”

One narrow brow raises. “I didn’t realize you knew enough to rate them, Miss.”

She hardly knows what to say to that--- it's certainly not a usual sort of comment, nor would my father had a reputation as one of the best be the usual sort of answer. So instead she crosses her heels, composing her face into the most frigid expression of polite inquiry, and asks, “Just what sort of flavor should I have ordered, Mr Obi?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He lifts his shoulders in a spare sort of shrug. “I would assume barberry, at the least.”

Her jaw drops. Of all the things! “Barberry? We would pick those right off the bushes. Lemons come from quite far away! They’re…exotic!”

There’s a twitch at the corner of his mouth, lifting that smile to a smirk. “I’ve found it standard at every fine table I’ve been invited to. Almost pedestrian among all the ices.”

“Well, I’d only ever seen it the once.” She pulls herself up primly, hands folded in her lap. “I was fortunate enough to be close companions with a gentleman’s daughter. They didn’t often host house parties, but during her first Season, her father spared no expense— he invited all her acquaintance, and when all the quality had their fill, us two nearly licked the bowl clean.”

It’s only after she’s finished— now that all eyes have turned wide and all jaws hang slack— that she truly hears the words she’s said. Licking. Having their fill. Her.

“That explains it then.” Mr Obi speaks softer now, less showmanship to his smile. “Lemon is an adventure. At least, to you.”

He might mean it kindly. Conceivably, he does. And yet, her back bristles at the very thought of him relenting. “Thank you, Mr Obi,” she says stiffly. “I’m happy that my tastes meet your approval.”

He startles back, as if slapped. His mouth works for a moment, but clever quips, he never quite finds one. At least, not before Lady Kiki asks, “And just what did you get? Since you were all for adventurousness before?”

“Ah.” Mr Obi does not pink the way that Laxdo does, a nice clean little patch on the apples of his cheeks, but his skin does darken, right along the sharp cut of his bones. “Lemon.”

It is with all the relief of a confession that Shirayuki leans back in her seat, cheeks flushed as she adds, I do hope we do not have to wait so long to hear from each other again. With all my love and best wishes—

It’s a simple sweep of the pen to sign, and when she sets it down, the clock chimes the hour.

“Five?” She blinks down at the cross-hatched pages, blotting them dry. “That can’t possibly be right. I only just…?”

Her stomach growls, agreeing with the stern old grandfather set against the wall. “I suppose I might think about dinner.”

“My lady.” She will never quite get used to the way domestics can quite suddenly be there, without her ever having seen them. Her butler bows in apology. “There has been an invitation.”

Shirayuki stifles a sigh. “Ah, of course there has. Will you bring it here please? I can at least consider it.”

The moment it lands in her hands, however, she knows she will be attending. Once does not simply consider an invitation from Duke Wirant.

#obiyukidosido #obiyuki #akagami no shirayukihime #snow white with the red hair #my fic #regency au #she fills the whole paper and crosses half #ans #oh how i dreamed of having a solid 15K of this done for you all #just a whole ass fic fully completed!!#and yet here we are 🤣#eyes were perhaps a little bigger than my stomach #but i actually do have the WHOLE of this drafted #so hopefully i will be able to get more of it done this coming year

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