“Prince Alvin, please, allow me to borrow a moment of your time!”
“Prince Alvin, this crowd is too large, may we continue to talk over at the caramel fountain?”
“Prince Alvin, tell us more about your daring adventures while fighting the Orcs!”
Alvin sighed, stirring the glass of root beer in one hand and swatting away groping noblewomen with another. He’d already lost track of how many were gathered around him, watching and whispering excitedly when he decided to murmur a comment or two on how well Marshal Weria had organised a ball like this in the middle of the Orc conflict.
A dark cloud was lingering over him - father’s condition had sharply declined yesterday afternoon - and, despite Weria’s insistence, hobnobbing with nobility had not done anything to quell the distressing thoughts that bubbled up all evening.
Weria, who had come with both his wife Evelyn and their shared manservant Terrence, was in a fit of giggles as he watched the prince try and remove himself from the harem of blue bloods he was succumbing to.
Alvin felt his only course of action might be to beat the girls off with a stick, or to even use the sabre Cressia had given him not so long ago. She would like that very much actually, skewering any aristocrat that stood in his way, good practice for what was to come when they departed to the Mylean forest a week from now to sort this Orc business out.
“Prince Alvin, you’re the most snazzily dressed man I’ve ever seen!” One particularly forward suitor purred, her fingertips trailing down on the scruffs of his left shoulder. She was older, much older, than the rest of the girls around him, and overstuffed from a lifetime spent guzzling down pastries in royal pantries. He started to grimace.
Deep down, he did not feel snazzily dressed at all himself. In fact he felt rather second hand and uninspired with his black waistcoat and breeches, along with a white linen shirt that was trimmed with purple buttons. He had worn the same outfit several years ago during the peace conferences between Zantzar and Pendaline, and he desperately wished that not even the most socially attuned party goers would notice he’d made the fashion faux pas of wearing the same outfit twice.
He couldn’t even find the time to get fitted by Ms Hastings, as Cressia had taken up every slot in her busy schedule in order to get fitted for the first ball in her life.
Cressia.
If it wasn't his sickly father he was ruminating on, it was Cressia. Ever since the uniform incident, he couldn’t find a way to shoo her out of his mind, not even after he’d asked Soothsayer Gretchen for a remedy to stem his thoughts. Gretchen, in her herbal wisdom, had listened attentively to the symptoms of the malaise he’d had, and decided he did not need a cure at all. He was not suffering from malaise, but from limerance, and the only thing she could prescribe was for him to stay away from Cressia until his thoughts had subsided.
It was not the solution Alvin had expected, but he agreed to do as Gretchen had asked of him. These past few weeks, his only contact with Cressia had been in the few lessons they had together, which had steadily decreased as the grand ball approached. Cressia was swamped in dressmaking, while Alvin had hidden himself away in cupboards or the attic to avoid her. By tonight he’d not gazed on Cressia in a weeks time, and that made his heart ache all the more in the strangest of ways.
“Prince Alvin, please elope with me this evening!”
“Prince Alvin, come and listen to my concerto performance in the music hall!”
“Prince Alvin, my muse, let me recite this poem I’ve written about you!”
It was all just too much, too fast for his soft, introverted nature. Everything around him was beginning to blur - the people, the music, the unscrupulous attempts to make a political marriage with his realm - Alvin just wanted to shrink down to the size of a mouse and get the hell away from all of this realpolitik disguised as pleasantries talk.
Then, just as he was about to throw the root beer all over his fan club, relief came in the form of his earlier headache.
“Who the hell is that?” A petite redhead whispered angrily to the others.
“I don’t know,” A plump sized princess whispered back, “but she looks very elf-y.”
“She is an Elf!” The tallest of the brunettes screamed, “what is she doing here in a ballroom?”
Alvin opened his eyes, and his breath suddenly become hitched as he watched Cressia move down the steps of the grand staircase. She was lavishly dressed, wearing a sleeveless black maxi gown, and without any of the pompous decor and decorations that adorned the other socialites here tonight. Her hair, normally cut short for practicality, cascaded down her neck in long waves, while her only accessory was a golden necklace which matched the colour of her dirty blonde roots. Her feet were bare, as they always were when she walked, and her smile was stilled, uncertain of how someone like her might fit in this strange world of shifting allegiances and blood oaths for crowns and tiaras.
It was so unlike that Alvin wondered if it was all a master ruse on her part to fool him into feeling as though he might avoid a fencing match for one afternoon. Maybe somewhere, under the fabric of her dress, was a pocket sized epee willing to be brought out so she could test his mettle in front of everyone that was here. Glumped as he was, their eyes did not meet as she scanned the room, and soon Cressia had gone off to make a beeline towards the catering section on the side, whose warm spot of activity was slowly dying down as the Orchestral band was in the middle of reorganising itself for the slow ballads that were soon to come.
Please Cressia, Alvin thought as his suitors went back to tugging at the clasps of his buttons, you’re my only hope!
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The strong, otherworldly aroma of sausage rolls made Cressia dart the lingering gazes all around her to the nearby catering table. Ms Hastings had confided into her that there was these sublte nuances and appearances she had to keep in mind when she trailed through a party for royalty like this, but all that went out the window when Cressia realised she could feast on such delicacies once again.
A culinary delight from Pendaline, she had not had them for over two years now, and she wasted no time picking up a paper plate and scooping several of them up alongside a few slices of cold, Venadian pizza. It seemed the Zantzar kingdom was working twice as hard to appeal to the broad spectrum of culinary tastes that would come and go here tonight in the palace. Try as she might though, she could not find any traditional Conclave dishes among the buffet line that was a mile wide. In fact, as she heartily dug deep into her pile of grub, she could not make out another elf here besides here tonight. She did not find it odd, in fact she’d expected it, but she’d hoped perhaps there had been a human noble somewhere who’d taken a young elven bride to be, and maybe they would’ve conversed on something that was related to the Conclave or other elven matters, and not some human topic such as poll taxes or rumours of philandering empresses.
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"Look at you, all dressed up."
She turned around, and saw but this was one seemed persistent to make contact with an elf.
He was very large and pale skinned, dressed in dark fabrics etched with the markings of runes, and wore a wide brimmed hat that hid everything but the wide protruding smile that crept up from the contours of lips. He was a Witherdom man.
"Err, thank you, I guess?" Cressia wiped away the crumbs around her face. She’d been with Witherdom men before, and knew just how bold they could get around women very quickly. Some of the other kingdoms had disparaged them as brutes with divided their estates between themselves using leftover loincloths. As dismissive as they were, Cressia knew firsthand they were not completely far off from the truth.
“I never knew the Conclave had renegaded on it’s anti-monarchist beliefs.”
“Excuse me?”
"Well, why else would they send a beautiful young woman as an emissary here?" He dabbled at the eye, and Cressia soon saw his eyes, which held pupils that were as yellow as rancid puss. Her stomach was beginning to wench.
"I'm here with someone already," Cressia replied hastily, "sorry." She did not want to hang around for too long, she wanted to get out of here as quick as possible.
“Oh?” Witherdom stepped in and took a strong grasp on Cressia’s left wrist, “with who?”
She started to feel queasy now. His hands were large, likely forged from a lifetime of carrying logs by hand, and Cressia wondered if it would be a good idea to recycle her appetisers all over him. But first she let her eyes stride across the room, and soon the penny dropped when she saw Alvin on the opposite side, being swarmed by a group of locusts disguised as frilly dames.
The annoyance she felt for Witherdom seemed to fade out into the background, and she was swarmed with much stronger feelings of malaise. Jealousy was one, possessiveness was another, and soon she began to move forward through the centre of the ballroom.
“With him?” Witherdom creep’s grip suddenly all but gave way, “but that’s the prince of Za-“
“Yes, the Prince of Zantzar, now let go of me!” She pushed him aside into would soon take her chances with a gaggle of housemaids than this sleazy Barbarian. Already the second half of the festivities had begun, but Cressia was not impressed the mediocre avantgarde piece that was being performed. Nor from the wandering eyes of other human men, who’s hands she swatted away as she moved further to Alvin, who’d grown an even deeper shade of red once he realised she saw the situation he was in.
“Hi-ho!” She smiled, not paying attention to the snake pit around them, “In need of a sparring partner?”
"A what?"
"A sparring partner." Her lips started to curl into her own pleasant smile. “You know, with me?”
Alvin seemed frozen in place, and the noble ladies around him began to huff, ready to brush off any filthy elven girl who got too close to him/ Cressia remained unperturbed. She was not going to be pushed aside by some thin skinned socialites who'd been bred to sneer at someone like her.
Does she, Alvin began to ruminate, actually want to da-
"Come on!" She grabbed hold of his sleeve and his cuff links, and began dragging him back into the centre of the ballroom, and Alvin, in a half attempt at keeping up appearances, pretended he was not enjoying this at all.
As was custom for the host, the rest of the visiting nobility gave a wide berth to the two of them in the centre as the Orchestra performed Mariwen's Red Skies under Red Weddings, a slow melodic piece which was based off a gruesome legend from the past. Cressia knew it by heart, as did Alvin, of a Dwarven civil war battle underneath a wedding between an elven woman and a human man. Stigma was much higher in the past around mixed species couples, so the couple were left without any company to celebrate their new union until bloody dwarven survivors started to pile up onto the surface.
It was one of the few universal stories held by all races in Mylea, but it’s themes considerably differed between realms. It was thought a tragedy in the Conclave, a comedy in Zantzar and from the dwarves she'd met in her travels, was seen as an event to have some factual basis in the Dwarven Civil War. It was widely considered Mariwen’s magnum opus, who felt she could only come up with such a rendition if it cycled between the three genres as the composition went on.
"This is not what I had in mind when you mentioned sparring." Alvin said, as he moved his free hand to her waist before she could even think of doing so. He was quite useless in all manner of things, but one of the few feathers in his cap was the repertoire of dance he’d built up from years spent watching the royal ballet after bedtime.
“Oh?” Cressia giggled, “what did you have in mind?” She took the lead, always the lead when she was with her student, and pressed him forward as the as the noise of distant cymbals steadied on. She had learnt to do the waltz too, it was apart of the Conclave curriculum growing up, but she studied it under it’s elvish name - the Isadervyn.
Waltz or Isadervyn, the words didn’t matter - the language of dance was the same across countries and peoples.
“I was half expecting you to whip out a sabre, challenge me in front of everyone as part of some dastardly final fencing exam of yours.” Alvin replied, feeling very rusty.
He’d almost crashed into a bald Pendaline noble and his husband during their first cycle, but Cressia steadied him doing so. Her hands were as hard as callouses, and for the first time, Alvin noticed just how badly scarred her biceps and arms were. She’d had taken her fair share of dhots during her Zantzar blade days.
“I would never do such a thing!” Cressia exclaimed with shock horror, “I’m mortified enough as it is being here!”
“What?” Alvin nudged gently, “are you ashamed of being seen with me?”
“Alvin, I am never ashamed when I am with you.” She let herself smile warmly, and soon Alvin found himself getting lost in those big oval eyes of hers. In fact, they seemed to be getting softer and more expressive as the days went on with her, and suddenly his mind was racing with all sorts of thoughts and unspoken truths that lingered in this moment between them.
Cressia was lost in his blue blue eyes too. How soft and blue they were, she thought. How blue she felt too, when she hadn’t been around him for this past week. She’d never done the waltz with someone much taller than her like this growing up. She was considerably taller than her female classmates, and that meant the keeper who looked after them could her with the boys who were closest to her own height.
She was very plain then, and perhaps overheard too many comments that implied her partner was with another boy, all of which only made Cressia want to disappear into the floor and go back to the confines of the Conclave library.
She’d so desperately wished she was as petite as her friends, to the let shadow of a man’s skin linger over her as they did the Isadervyn, and here she found it coming true with the Prince of Zantzar himself.
"Are you wearing Mascara?" She whispered, not willing to let the royal court learn about this crucial matter of fact to punch and leverage against Alvin. Red Skies was now the dimmest part of it’s composition, where even a penny being dropped could be heard across the room
“Err, yes.” He smiled, and for the first time she saw the faintest of blushes beginning to creep up his neck.
“That’s so you!”
“Please don’t tell anyone?”
“No, I won’t don’t worry,” she giggled, “but how
“I think they were a bit overwhelmed by the dull stories I told,” Alvin snickered, as I started to twirl Cressia around. “you saved me from them, you know.”
“It looked like a bunch of dogs salivating over a bone.” She pointed out once she’d finished her twirl, “I couldn’t leave a friend behind to such a fate.”
“Well, that’s one truly earthy peasant way of putting it, I would think.” A remark which left Cressia lightly kicked at his ankle as they did another sidestep together. “Shut up!” She said, but not without a few suppressed giggles too.
“I’m just thankful Cressia, that’s all.”
“For what?”
“For being with me, for helping me, and for spending so much time together.” Alvin’s cheeks started to burn, “I’m just so very thankful for what you’ve done.”
Cressia felt her cheeks beginning to grow red too, but couldn’t think of anything to answer with, other than to ask him for another dance once Mariwen’s Red Skies had finished, and then another and another as the night wore on.