Waking Beauty by Sarah E. Morin

Author:Sarah E. Morin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781621840442
Publisher: Enclave Publishing
Published: 2015-04-23T17:22:10+00:00

Part Four

Is not general incivility the very essence of love?

Jane Austen

I am by no means of opinion that a ball of this kind,

given to respectable people, can have any evil tendency.

Jane Austen

31

Arpien

He wasn’t in the unknown. He was home.

It wasn’t home as Arpien remembered it. This was the Conquisani palace, but the red and gold banners were smaller. The stone bust of Great Great Uncle Nedferin, the very one he’d broken as a boy, had his beaky nose again.

A pair of gentlemen in antiquated parti-colored hose passed by. One gestured grandly, in the throes of a traditional Conquisani boasting story.

Arpien sheathed the vademecum sword and stepped into their path. He tucked his right arm behind his back and extended his left to his side, pointer finger up, and bowed the Half-Bow of Mannerly and Slightly Urgent Interruption. “Three thousand and three pardons, my lords—”

They walked straight through him.

Arpien’s spine tingled. Ghosts? If so, who was the ghost?

No, no, it was a dream. Brierly’s dream, not his, judging by the strains of old-fashioned string ensemble music drifting from the ballroom. He’d cut into the scene enough to see and hear and smell the ball, but not enough to take part in it.

He headed toward the noise—always a good place to look for Brierly. He spotted his princess in the middle of the ballroom floor, where a long line of ladies danced with a long line of gentlemen. Must be a style of dancing popular from Brierly’s memories. Arpien couldn’t remember ever seeing it in his own time. She’d exchanged her white gown for the pink one he’d first found her wearing in the tower, on Kissing Day. Then it had been dingy and sleep-rumpled. Now it was so pink it gave him a toothache.

He had full view of her face, so he saw her yawn so wide as to drink up the sea in one gulp. He’d pity Brierly’s partner if the gentleman were real. Good luck trying to impress her.

The line of men reached across to the line of ladies. Partners spun and crossed in a neat drill of collapsing geometric figures. Only when the row of ladies and gentlemen switched positions did he get a good look at Brierly’s dance partner.

It was he himself.

He squeezed through the crowd to get a better vantage point, and clutched a column.

No, wait. It was Great Grandfather Herren.

No wonder Brierly insisted on calling Arpien Herren. Arpien was only a pale copy of her first love.

But look at her face. Arpien had seen the same expression on the faces of his childhood friends, when he rambled on too long about the comparative merits of hedge clippers versus pruning shears.

She’d had one hundred years to shape Herren into the literal man of her dreams. He still wasn’t enough.

Most of the night was an endless cycle of the same dance to the same music. Midnight trumpeted Brierly’s birthday in with red and gold fireworks. Herren beamed at his betrothed. Brierly yawned. How many times had she turned seventeen?

Brierly brushed through Arpien on her way from the ballroom.

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