The prince’s brother woke up confused but otherwise unharmed, and he was big news for all of ten minutes before being shipped out to the Lieutenant's tent and was promptly forgotten.
Cas was by turns relieved and confused.
By all accounts, she’d just forgotten and put into danger actual royalty. In the movies, pulling something like that usually ended up with the perpetrator wearing a rope necklace.
But, in reality, no one really seemed to care; after the boy had been resuscitated, the prince’s brother had been placed in the Commander’s tent, a rookie officer had been charged with baby-sitting him, and everyone just kind of went on with their day.
Even Dacula, Anne and Reg, when they’d caught up with her, and she’d told them about it, merely offered a shrug before directing her to the all important dinner line.
Those with an empty stomach only had one problem, but Cas sensed there was more to this than that, and she complained about it to Sara.
Unhelpfully, Sara only seemed confused about the question. “I don’t understand what you mean? Why would anyone care?” she asked in return.
“Uhm, because the boy is a prince?” Cas said obviously. “I don’t know, shouldn’t we all be bowing or something? I kind of assumed saving him would be a bigger deal.”
Again, more confusion. “He’s… not a prince, darling. Where did you gather something like that?”
“What do you mean? He’s Prince Haowi’s brother, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Sara nodded obviously. “He’s the prince’s brother. That doesn’t make him a prince.”
That… was technically a fair point. Cas was still unsure how titles were passed around here. “Well… he’s still the king’s son, isn’t he?”
“The king has many sons,” Sara retorted.
Cas, growing frustrated, and wanting to justify her earlier emotions, exploded. “Well, he has a banner, doesn’t he? He’s the forty second banner of the EMBER REGALIA!” she boomed the name out in a dramatic and scary fashion. “Shouldn’t that mean something?”
Sara was unperturbed, and merely raised finger in an educational fashion. “He has a banner darling, not the banner. Basically every noble house has a Banner, most of them are simple Magic Tools or Great Weapons or other such nonsense.
“Trinket Ember is called the first banner for a reason. It is the heir to Regalia Ember, and essentially the only executor of its will. The other Banners are…”
“Useless?” Cas guessed.
“Not useless,” Sara corrected. “They’re formidable in their own rights, but they were created more for diplomatic purposes, as a show of friendship between the high-king and the lesser noble houses. But don’t let the names mistake you. The Trinkets are powers unto themselves, and far different from the mere Banners or Magic weapons every noble house carts around like they’re something special.” Sara ended her tirade with a thoughtful pause, adding. “Incidentally, don’t repeat any of what I’ve said. Some noble houses take their Banners quite seriously, and they wouldn’t be fans, to put it simply.”
“I’ll try not to,” Cas said, trying to get it all straight in her head. “I take it the only really important things are the Regalias and their Trinkets, then?”
“Yes!” Sara nodded approvingly.
“And each Regalia has one Trinket?”
Again, Sara nodded. “No Regalia has ever produced more than one Trinket.”
“How many Regalias are there, anyway?”
“Oh, just f- Company-” Sara interrupted her answer with a stretched whisper.
Their conversations were often done with an air of privacy, not wanting to arouse suspicion should Cas be heard asking about elementary topics. Naturally, their question-answer sessions often came to abrupt ends when company was near, as happened to be the case now, as they approached the lunch-line.
Reg, Dacula and Anne stood at the back of it, looking impatiently over at them.
“Hurrry now, Lady Cassandria!” Reg spoke in a refined voice with only a tinge of hurry in it. “We’ll lose our bargaining position if you dally!”
“Bargaining position?” Sara asked, strolling up beside Cas.“What’s this bargaining position he’s talking about?” She turned to Cas for explanation, hair springing about with the sudden motion.
“Oh, well…” Cas tried to put it politely.
“So, everyone wants to talk to the foreign princess, ya?” Anne leapt in with resolve, speaking very seriously about the issue. “Reg says: we can cut in line if we promise to let people talk to her. And I’m hungry!”
“Cas!” Sara said, aghast, turning to look up at the girl with a mortified expression. “You never told me about this?”
“You don’t approve, madame?” Dacula asked.
“Of course not!” Sara said, sounding almost offended at the question. “Bargaining Cas’s time just to cut a few places in line? A lady would never!” she huffed, turning her very nose up at the idea.
“And, why is that, exactly, Lady Sara,” Reg spoke slowly, managing deftly to hide the sarcasm in his address.
“Because,” Sara answered simply, turning back to face them all with a wicked smile. “A proper lady is trained in the fine art of negotiation. And, with such an interesting woman on our hands,” she gestured to Cas, “I can get us to the very front of this line in no time at all.”
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In the fine art of negotiation, as she had termed it, Sara was apparently a force to be reckoned.
Within seconds, she had announced her plans to the queuers, and before a minute had passed the entire lunch-line had the air of an auction house as all manner of people: soldiers, auxiliaries, medics and scribes screamed at the tops of their lungs for a bit of attention.
Of course, it wasn’t a universal reaction.
It had been a long day, breakfast had been skipped, and the Lieutenant – hoping to increase morale – had ordered for an extra fine supper to be prepared. Given this, not all present were so interested in giving up their spot for a chance meeting with an interesting stranger.
Sara quickly managed a solution to that, too, however.
“Everyone pull out your pattern squares!” she announced, holding up her glimmering – ivory framed – pattern square in demonstration. “We’re going to do a ticket system. Everyone starts off with a number of points equal to their place in line…”
Cas didn’t quite understand the whole of it. In fact, she doubted anyone understood the whole of it besides Sara herself, but – having gotten everyone to pull their pattern squares out, or to share with a neighbor if they didn’t have theirs on hand – the woman deftly organized a horrifying amalgamation of fractional favor chains and social credits that quickly started to remind Cas of international banking.
As far as she understood it, it involved someone getting goat milk in exchange for some wool and then trading that for a spot in line, which they could then exchange for a certain number of questions to be redeemed from Cas during dinner time.
All of this was kept seamlessly tracked, somehow, and it was amazing how little sense it made.
Still, the end of ten minutes bargaining ended with everyone happy, and, more importantly, with Cas at the front of the line.
The provisions master looked almost impressed as he scooped a double helping of stew meat and black bread onto Cas's plate.
Cas wasn’t in the mood to enjoy it. She was experiencing whiplash from how quickly she found herself at the front of the line, walking out on shaky legs like she’d just stepped off a rollercoaster.
“So, uhhh, wow,” Anne said, stepping out behind her, wide-eyes looking shell shocked. Cas could almost swear that her hair had a windblown look to it.
“Indeed,” Reg agreed, not quite able to understand what to do with himself. “You have quite an impressive friend there, Cas.”
“I’ve never had a meal this hot!” Dacula was almost crying as he sniffed at the steam rising from the bowl on his plate.
“Yeah!” Cas bragged with a superior look, almost bursting with pride at her friends accomplishment.. “She’s kind of a boss… She’s a psychic, you know!”
“Ohhhh!” Anne suddenly yelled, turning a painful look of recognition onto the Psychic. “You were the one talking in everyone’s heads during the battle!”
“Yes, yes,” Sara acknowledged it all with a graceful curtsey and a bow of the head, somehow managing the gesture while holding a tray in one hand. “It is I.”
“Where did you meet her?” Anne asked, turning the question to Cas.
“Oh, we ran into each other in the forest when she was traveling with some mercina-”
Cas heard the Psychic shout. She wondered for a moment what the point of pig-latin was in a private psychic line, but adjusted anyway. “When some merci-less monsters were attacking her!”
“Yes!” Sara leapt in, quick to take control of the conversation. “Cas here really saved me. My hero. Anyway, I think those seats there would be fine.”
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
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The first part of dinner was a quiet affair.
Everyone was hungry, and mouths were too busy chewing to engage in speech.
Cas, for her part, didn’t really feel her hunger, so she had the spare attention to look around.
Almost everyone else was scarfing their soup down with lowered heads, chugging scalding bowls of hot porridge like it was water. A surprising sight to Cas, who took a moment to remember that auras were a thing before quitting her habit of blowing on her spoonful's.
Other than that little discrepancy, however, everything looked surprisingly normal.
People sat in small circles around numerous camp-fires that littered the field grounds. In the distance, she could see the auras of the unlucky saps who’d been ordered onto guard duty. And all around her, everyone just ate.
It was an oddly human experience, just stuffing your face around a camp fire. Some of the soldiers were even holding onto their pattern squares as they ate, staring at the hypnotizing lights their auras created in the glimmering surface of the square plates. From a distance they almost looked like bored teens staring at their phones during meal-time.
Eventually, bellies were filled and bowls were empties, and people began to look up from their distractions.
Normally, this would be the time for pleasant conversations all around, but tonight was not a normal night, and Cas began to feel the expectations of a thousand minds turn in her direction.
…
As happened every night, the officers were the last to eat.
This was tradition, but they did have perks of their own. For instance, the command staff had their meals prepared separately, so cold food was never an issue. In addition, whereas the regulars made do with sitting on the ground, the command staff got an actual table.
This night, however, despite their table and rank, the most interesting seat in the camp was on the ground, around one of the fires, where all the soldiers, auxiliary and regular, had gathered to attend the interview of Cas – the princess from another land.
The seating arrangements around Cas were complicated, determined mainly by who had the better bargaining position during Cas's ascent to the front of the lunch line.
Officers, eating last by tradition, didn’t have the opportunity to bargain for a seat, and it was generally frowned upon for them to enter upon trading negotiations with the soldiers, but few missed the fact that – unusually for a commander – the Lieutenant had her table moved uncharacteristically close to rabble, and to the gathering of soldiers that had formed around Cas.
Even the Lieutenant could get bored of the same conversations after four months of campaigning, and she wasn’t immune to the excitement of meeting a strange person from the other end of the world.
As it turned out, Cas's sham status of being this world's first inter-continental explorer was the highlight of people's interest in her, and much of the early discussion centered around that.
People asked about her land, her people, her wealth, and generally all the ‘so how is it over there’ questions you would ask a foreigner.
Cas answered directly, constructing most of the answers from her experiences on Earth, helped along every once in a while by Sara, who would whisper in her mind hints such as:
And
Thankfully, no one seemed eager to cross examine her noble status.
Her mannerisms and generally unrefined demeanor were easily explained away by the fact that she was supposedly speaking in a second language, and her lack of ‘elegance’ as Sara had put it, was explained by the fact that she was from a foreign society with different customs.
Really, though. Cas somewhat suspected that they just wanted to believe that she was a noble. It made for a more romantic story.
Then came the questions about the details of her journey.
This went smoothly enough, with Cas playing the convincing part of an ignorant noble – one who knew nothing of sailing except the payroll for her crew. At least, it went smoothly until a man who'd been third in line asked his question.
"How did you get past the leviathans?"
"I'm not sure; they just let me through," Cas answered confidently.
“Really?” the man asked. “You didn't negotiate with them?” He sent that question out like a fishing line, and Cas could sense a bait in it.
Cas repeated the sentence word for word, which drew a laugh from the assorted crowd.
"Isn't that the truth," the man agreed.
Cas took control and moved the subject to safer topics, answering plainly everything that could be explained by analogy.
She was just getting into the details of the university system – drawing from her experiences on Earth – when Sara interrupted.
Taking that to heart, Cas lightened her answers, focusing more on entertaining stories than accuracy.
It was a good experience, to be so cross-examined. It helped get the story straight in her mind for whenever she’d need it in the future, not that there was much to get straight.
It was a simple story, in the end.
Cas was the third daughter of a powerful family. She was given a ship and a crew as her independence present and tried her hand as an explorer. It was a good try, until her ship hit the bay of monsters and exploded.
The man that was third in line stood in the way of this simple story, complicating it with his earnest questions and genuine interest… disgusting.
“You said your family was… how do you say… two ranks below the king of your land?” He spoke in the same accent as Anne, and Cas tried not to sound hesitant as she answered the minefield of a question.
“Yes,” she nodded.
“Then, do you have a Banner?”
Cas made a sad expression, remembering Kari to help sell the effect. “Unfortunately, I was unable to retrieve it from my ship before it capsized. I barely survived the event myself.”
Supportive faces were all around, and a few of the more noble personages made cringing, sympathetic expressions from the officer’s table.
Cas kept her sad face up, and soon questions about such personal matters were abandoned entirely.
The conversation shifted in favor of more interesting things like:
“Makeup?” Cas asked, staring into the wide eyed innocence of the preppy girls as they crowded into her inner circle.
“Ya,” a pale girl with black hair and Anne’s accent asked. “Tara says you would wear white, but I say darker color would suit you best. We want to know.”
Cas hurried remembered the basics. “Uhh, purple and gold, generally,” she nodded, surprised at the awed squeals that came from the trio. “You must show us!” the girl begged.
“Maybe another time!” Cas answered. “Unfortunately, my makeup also capsized.” She made a mental note to avoid the girls in the future. Nothing against them, but she was afraid they’d keep asking about her makeup, and – while Cas wore makeup – she’d never really developed the skill beyond what it took to get her through the day, and it frankly would have looked amateurish compared to the three girl’s masks… and that’s if she wasn’t colorblind.
This naturally led to the next obvious question, which drew much sustained interest.
“Yes, but why,” a younger woman asked, sitting forward in a thinking posture as if it pondering the greatest conundrum.
“Hmm… well, the southern lands here host darker people,” Reg supposed, gesturing to a regular soldier, “and everyone can get naturally darker from sun exposure,” he gestured to a tanned Slyxian. “It follows then –” he continued, tapping the last bits of ash out of his pipe “ – that wherever Lady Cassandria is from must have more intense sunlight than any land hitherto ascertained by human eyes, uhmm… excluding the people of your kingdom of course," he gestured to Cas directly.
“I think that sounds about right,” Cas nodded, thankful to have someone else explain the obvious for a change.
Of course, even this topic wasn’t enough for the short scholar, who suddenly jumped in.
“Are you married?”
“Ooooohhh!” A chorus of spicy interest rose through the crowd.
“No,” Cas answered shortly, drawing a disappointed ‘awwww’ from the section of the crowd who had been hoping for a tragic romance.
“Although,” Cas hastened to backpedal, sensing the disappointment. “I have dated.”
“Dated?” Anne asked, looking as if she were speaking a foreign language.
“Uhm,” Cas struggled for the appropriate term. “It’s like courting.”
The word had barely left her lips before a new, renewed, “Oooooooooooohhhhhhhhhh!” spread through the crowd, louder than ever.
Of such interest was the topic, that people for a moment abandoned their earlier agreements to yield questions in favor of shouting them.
“Did your family choose them?”
“Was there a fight?”
“Is that why you left?”
“Did they die on the ship?”
“What!?” That last one was Sara, who looked at her with a heartbroken expression. ‘How could you keep something so important from me!?' the look on her face seemed to ask.
Cas, sensing she’d set up a land-mine she didn’t know how to diffuse, tried to walk back her claim. “Well… it’s not as serious as you’re all thinking, I’m sure.”
“Yeah!” Sara pouted, crossing her arms with an annoyed huff. “It’s not important at all, is it? Anyway, go ahead. Tell us,” she beckoned.
“Well…” Cas continued, seeing Sara had abandoned her and looking around for help.
Anne came to the rescue. “All of you are so nosy!" she chastised. "Of course she’s not married; look at how young the girly is!?”
Cas was surprised to be hearing that from a girl in her early twenties, but a look down revealed that her outfit was worn loosely over her figure. A look at her status sheet confirmed the same. She was 16 again!
Hadn’t she been twenty two just days ago? Was that why she’d been so awkward and emotional the past two days?
How, though? Cas distinctly remembered eating just enough mass to turn twenty two the morning of the battle… right before she ran into the screaming cloud and lost several pounds of mass...
It was a strange thing to remember: having to to check your age, of all things. She’d have to keep a better eye on that, in the future.
All further musings were interrupted, however, as a bonfire of exclamations roared through the crowd at Anne’s next, gasoline statement:
“Besides,” Anne continued, growing unusually heated about the matter. “Cas had no need to run away. She told me herself. Nobles from her land can choose who they marry, whether they join the army or not!”
Anne said this with a raised chest, as if proud of her exclusive sources.
The reaction from the crowd was immediate, and far less subdued.
“What!” they all seemed to roar in unison. “You chose your courting partner entirely by yourself?” Reg asked, amazed, pipe nearly slipping from his lips as he stared at her.
“How romantic~” one of the preps nearly fainted.
“How scary!” A scholar woman replied, rolling her fingers together.
“My,” Sara said through gritted teeth. “You certainly seem to be telling everyone everything.”
“Where did you meet them?” a voice in the crowd asked, all pretensions of favors and question trading forgotten as the whole crowd silenced themselves and gathered about her for story time.
Several of them held up pattern squares to their vision, letting them glow with psychedelic patterns as they ran their auras over them.
“Well…” Cas, deciding she’d stepped into it deep enough, already, decided to go for the truth. “I just met them at my university. I thought we got along, and they agreed, so… we started dating.”
“Ohmahgaw!” one of the preps, a regular soldier squealed. “It’s just like the stories!”
“Hmpf! Well, maybe it needs to stay in the stories. How scandalous to court someone without even the good advice and proper attention of your family! This person could have already been married for all you know, or been who knows what sort of scoundrel!”
Several other murmurings of disapproval were apparent in the crowd.
Anne rose up to her defense with the wrath and singe-minded focus of a bulldog, face growing pink from emotion. "Who are any of you to speak such things?" she challanged. "I’ll have you reminded: it is not your station. Simple, free-people like us have no right to speak of nobles in such a way. Most of your families have no lands to weigh over your happiness; it is not the same with noble girls, at all. My dear friend in the spotted unit was a third daughter I’ll have you all know, and she was a very kind girl, a very sensible girl, and if she had been allowed the freedom, the world would be a better place, I say. It’s absolutely scandalous that we allow fine ladies to trudge in the dirt and even do mercenary work just to have a say in their lives!”
Anne was exanuating, growing emotional at the memory of her passed friend, and heated over her political opinions, and angry at how everyone was dismissing the evidence Cas had presented for a better way.
And her passion was apparent, in the way it silenced all.
Sara was silent, too, though for a different reason, Cas knew.
Sara showed nothing. At least, there was nothing in her expression or body language to hint to it, but Cas knew mercenary talk was a sore spot for her.
She stood up with a sigh and brushed her dress:
Some people near her begged her to stay.
Sara had a perfectly serene expression as she denied their requests. A person in command of fewer facts might have believed the facade.
“No, no,” she said politely, embarking on a departure. “I must be going. Besides, I’ve spoken to Cas for so long. I’ve already heard all her stories. My presence here is just taking the place of someone I’m sure she’d much rather tell her stories to.”
Cas continued her stories, with just as much cheer, but her heart had fallen out of it.
The reaction from Sara had been… not great, and somehow she felt that she had something to do with it.