[Ruff Draft] MC meets his lady love
In homage to J. Dilla, a new post from an upcoming story arc with Eathel (MC) and Lady Masilla, his soon-to-be wife. This is their first encounter after attending the same court dance.
As they slowly danced, he tried another line from a poet ladies liked on her. Perhaps that would win back her lovely smile smile.
“How like you Vimíçitus, my lady?” asked Eathel.
“When younger, lord, I ended every night with him by candle,” Masilla1 said.
“Quite an image,” he said.
Her eyes left his to ascend to the vaulted ceiling in what had to be the most brazen roll of one’s eyes he’d ever seen. Perhaps it was because her eyes were so big.
Eathel took another tack.
“I read Rememberances of Youth in Ellabeth,” said he. “It was quite a thing a beauty. Vimíçitus is my favorite of the Vùve movement.”
“Mine as well,” said Masilla.
“I used to have most of the Remembrances completely fixed in memory,” he said.
“Well, now I’m not let you going away without hearing one,” she said.
He smiled. Her eyes softened a bit—she couldn’t help herself. He’d long ago learned that if he smiled just so, it had a tendency to draw women to him.
He always played up the smattering of the Dastrateran honeydrawl that all the young ladies loved. He got that affect from his mother’s side of the family. He liked to think it have him an air of rebellion that generally worked in his favor.
His dancing partner quickly resumed her playful, distant glint. She was quick to tell him with her body that she had only momentarily stumbled. He was still an unknown quantity to her. A source of intrigue and mild suspicion.
Eathel recited:
In the orchard where you and I would meet, the shadows upon your face were no longer those cast by the cherry trees.
He paused, having to remember the words. There they were.
The curves of your cheek held a new dark, which, though infant then, I think I knew it would never leave.
He was going to go on, but she stopped him.
“Then it gets too maudlin,” she said. “It always used to make me cry.”
He drew her closer and did not recite the next verse:
Then you told me what you had to say the love you felt had flown away.
“He gets too morose,” she said.
Although Eathel liked the poet, he was inclined to agree. She had taste.
“I have to confess, though, I care not much for poetry,” Masilla continued. She winced, mocking him in irony, as if this caused her real pain.
“That’s alright,” he said. “No one does.”
“You do.”
“I’m no one. Haven’t you heard that?”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“They call me Eathel Nothing. Eathel Nobody. Because I wasn’t born right.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. She had heard those things.
She turned abruptly and looked at the broad valley at nightfall.
“You’re no one? You’re one of the honorees at this feast. You took Dorascene. You sacked Serinippë. My father said it couldn’t be done.”
“What can—”
“Weren’t expecting a woman of letters, were you?”
“You’re a woman of letters, words, and entire paragraphs.”
“See, you’re not as quick as I, but you have the stupid way of talking that I find somehow endearing. At least for now.”
“I’ll take it,” he said. He let the silence hang, looking into her eyes, wondering if she was going to say more. He liked the space between them, filled with completely listening to her.
She smiled up at him with a little more warmth than her eyes. He felt as if he had passed some test.
“And you know when to shut up,” she said. “That’s all too rare.”
Eathel watched her with fascinated rapture. He let his silence continue a bit.
After a few moments, he said quietly and slowly, “Well… now I have to be careful not to talk too much,” he said.
She laughed. “You can talk,” she said. “Your qualifications as a strong, silent type have been established.”
As if to reinforce the point, he held his silence. She sighed.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” said Eathel.
“Tell me something about you that doesn’t rhyme,” she said. “Tell me who you are.”
They had been strolling in courtly fashion. They never touched, yet were locked in a kind of rhythm, like a gentle, loose dance. A gentleman must never take hold of any parts of a woman’s person; he should not even offer her his arm unless to prevent harm or provide needed help.
Growing up, Eathel had shadowed the steward’s lessons in the little academy of earls and countesses, which followed the man’s advice on geometry and etiquette.
A gentleman must never be alone with a lady unless the two are wed or blood relations, the steward had said.
The cherry blossoms in the garden around them were all a-blowing bright—pink and rosy ivory. The trees filled with soft clouds of flowers. The color of polished and tumbled rose quartz here at sunset.
“As a child,” Eathel continued, “I would spend the winters and most of the spring here at my father’s house. I was fascinated by the comings and goings of all these different people, living in the—”
The petals blanketed the ground so completely neither Eathel nor Masilla could see the light rocks of the pummeled granite pavement of the walkway. Underneath the cherry petal floor, the white of the pebbles contrasted so prettily with the saturated emerald of the spongy, closely cropped grass.
“I was enraptured also with how things were done,” he said. “Watching how things are done can tell you why things are done. I learned early on that I tended to notice things that others did not. I learned later on this was due to the fact I was ever on the outside. Those who are not on the inside know it better, in some ways, than those living in it.”
“I noticed how the groundskeepers raked up, with a feverish celerity, all of the rotten ground leaves in the autumn,” said Eathel. “However, in the spring, when the rose cherry tree blossomed, the groundskeepers were under strict orders to leave the petals lie, for the pretty effect they had on the gardens.”
“That’s when,” he said, “I first had the notion that the way things looked to us determined what we saw in them.”
She had been enjoying his talking, but she couldn’t resist taking a dig. “The way things look always determines what we see.”
He laughed. He didn’t just laugh. He stopped walking so that she had taken a few steps ahead while he stood still. He pulled his arms up close to his chest, and his mouth lit up into a smile and then into laughter.
She felt like she hadn’t really seen him until now.
He had a laugh that reminded her of a happy thing. She liked him in that moment and wanted him to know something about her.
“When I was six or seven, a few workers installed swings for the children on the grounds of my father’s estate. I was famous all about the bailey—for I alone would drive myself with my skinny legs far higher than any of the boys dared go.
“Whenever I was sad, I tried to think of the sunny days when I could make myself soar to touch the sky. I remembered the feeling in my belly when I leapt up and felt, for one moment, as if I stepped smoothly outside and off the wide leather strap of the swing—that I really would be able to walk on the air and bounce and fly far away, over even the imposing nine-foot-thick tower that surrounded us in every direction.”
What she did not tell him was that this was the same feeling she felt seeing him smile now.
His eyes twinkled as his fit of laughter ended.
When the corner of his mouth was drawn by the lights dazzling his eyes up, and the skin of his high cheekbones wrinkled, the dimples sent a little charge through her—a thin blue web of charge bolted down from her right shoulder to the left inside of her thigh.
Those goddamn dimples. Fuck.
Eathel had spent his summers in the house his mother’s family had in the mountains of Strattera. His constant companion there had been his girl cousin, and they grew up together.
But ever since he was eight or ten, he felt like he had never said more than fifty words to a woman in a row. He had been surrounded by men and boys forever, half of his life up until that point. Though he had no privacy in the barracks or the camp or anywhere else, the only comments he ever heard on his body were the insults adolescent boys threw at others who had acne or strangely shaped feet.
Had those years seen one or two more women, they might have relayed the fact that his smile looked like the sun cracking through a dark cloud cover.
For all his other physical faults—and he had many—she was only just now seeing his straight, smooth, white teeth. Cool, cinnamon breath. His eyes that added each an additional crinkle and one extra speck of light when he smiled.
The angle of his smile was the kind of crooked that made a convincing argument against symmetry.
“One day, you’re going to want to tell someone the truth. But they’re not going to believe you, because you seem to dodge everything like it’s a joke.”
“You either laugh or you cry, alright? I choose to laugh.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do.”
“You may think you do, but I see something else in you.”
He almost took the bait. Something about this girl, this night… all this feeling right here, right now—it all made him desperate to know what she thought of him.
But it terrified him to hear what she might say.
“Is it not strange,” Eathel said, “that we know everything wrong with a man”—he looked at Masilla—“the moment we meet him?”
Masilla didn’t indulge him. “Well,” she said, “our night has commenced in spectacular fashion.”
“I am the one who caused it,” Eathel said. He grew stilted and formal. “I apologize, Lady Talebrand. I left my manners in the sand of the Tandheran, madam, and I beg pardon for any offense with which I have affronted you.”
“I’m not a ducches, for heaven’s sake, Earl Darren,” Masilla said. “You are permitted to be a boor sometimes—it’s all well by me. You are not required to remain without flaw in my presence.”
Eclestinestra Mesillasandra COREYON (née TALEBRAND); “Masilla” (/mɑˈsɪlə/)