Cressia did awaken to see the Prince of the Zantzar sweating it up on a reddish Sunday morning. In fact she was already up for several hours, etching out ideas for her planned romance novellas that she had been working on for several months now.
She had repeated this practice in some form or another ever since she left the Zantzar armed forces, so she was forced to give credit to the military spirit that had been instilled within her, but also to the budding artisan soul that helped push her way through whatever writer’s block came her way.
She wrote 2000 words everyday, and preferred to do it in the mornings, as it gave her ample time in the afternoon to focus on the rest of her goals such as fencing and running and a whole host of other strange and pernicious habits which the military had not wrenched out of her during her years of service.
She hoped perhaps one of these novellas she came up with would turn out to be a surprise hit, and then she might not have to swap fencing lessons for hot meals any longer as she left the Boroughs to begin anew elsewhere. Where she would go, she could not settle herself upon yet.
The Artisan Quarters of Pendaline could be an option, where every wall and public mural was free to be scribbled and doodled upon by it’s citizens.
The sharply dressed eldest daughter of the human nations, as her elvish friends had put it, had always prided itself in its reputation as the first city of the Arts. But Pendaline had also suffered from a dearth of the wonderful art of fencing too, which meant she might have to search elsewhere for a new home.
This was of course assuming her current novella, Fencing Hearts, turned out to be a roaring success. The story, about an elven maid in service to a human prince, a fickle and arrogant man who nonetheless is a maestro of the foil, epee, sabre.
It also doubled as a spy caper, as each worked for a different secret service after assuming the identities of the real deceased maid and human prince. Blanking eachother in their “real lives”, the two would constantly run into each other in the line of espionage, until, by the novella’s end, they feel in love, forsaken their stolen identities and ran away to escape from all the pain and troubles that came with inter-species relationships between two surveillance states.
She had started to write it with little more than the acknowledgement it might cause a stir within the real world between elves and humans. She didn’t know the extent of how deep human espionage ran, but Elven Conclave spies were rampant anywhere elves gathered across in the east. She knew of course, because her mother had been the Grand Spymaster, and was subtly training Cressia in the hopes that she herself might follow her into that line of work.
She could not abide that kind of work, and it had been one of the many things that had pushed her to leave the Conclave and enlist in a foreign power, despite the stigma of such a treacherous act. That, and well, the lack of fencing, which was regarded as a human oddity and thoroughly banned by the Conclave’s Leaders in favour of more wholesome elven practices such as Archery and Lyre crafting.
And now she was in the position most Conclave spies dreamed of, in the centre of the Zantzar court with the resources of the entire palace at her whim. Perhaps she could even use her soft, precious student Alvin as the base for Prince Featherwick, the narcissistic blueblood but incredibly competent spy master, and at which point it might stray into roman-à-clef territory.
She paused - was she already beginning to imagine herself as an Elven maid passionately consumed by the hungry, terrible prince of a far, eastward state? She reddened at such a tempestuous thought, and decided to go back and rewrite a few passages here and there to disavow Featherwick of the prince title for the time being.
If she submitted it back to her homeland, it would surely be accepted, albeit after the most obscene and boisterous scenes were cut to scraps to ensure no elf had any ideas of crossing into the arms of a human. If she tried to pass it on to a human publishing house, they would take great strides to remove any hint that an elf had written it, which was unforgivable to Cressia.
Stuck between two dire choices, her mind began to wander away from her writing and the strength of her pen, but she never let her thoughts stray too far from her writing as she wrote. That would only allow the beating heart of procrastination to make its way in, and suddenly a whole afternoon would be wasted as she began running away from the actual determination needed to write.
Alvin was also running, but instead it was up and down the running tracks with such exertion that it broke Cressia out of her writing spell and suddenly found herself watching him from the balcony. She tried counting the laps he did, with a track yard the length of 800m he gassed out after 6 reps, 200m short of his initial goal of 5KM.
"Hiho!" She waved at him, "Busy workout session?"
He looked ridiculous in his gym outfit - it had all the hideous trappings of what one would consider to be Zantar gym wear when asked to be designed by a courtesan who secretly nursed a grudge against her patron. Incredibly tight red pants were fitted with black short spats on top, alongside an embarrassing “royal headband” that was already out of fashion some 300 years ago, nevermind now. Perhaps it actually was 300 years old.
"You still have 200m to go." She remarked from above, "Do a few sprints, would you?"
Alvin seemed to wheeze and grunt and then he nodded in exasperation, and placed himself at the far end tracks and took off in a galloping sprint.
Credit was due though, he arrived much earlier than the crack of dawn. She'd expected for him to not show up at all, and per the terms of their contract, Cressia would be free to leave the palace, along with a not-so-small fortune of Zantzar gold coins for her troubles. Centuries of going back on their words, double crossing and all sorts of schemes had made even the lowliest of elves careful to keep everything down in print and by hand.
She would be hard pressed to call his running form good, as he moved less like a galloping racehorse and more like a shuffling skeleton that collapsed and rolled over every time he screwed up, but there was passion and persistence as he moved down the track. And hard work. Which, without, would make all his efforts fruitless.
Perhaps he really was serious about learning how to sword fight after all.
"Good, but you can do better!" She yelled as Alvin came to a thunderous stop on the western side of the track field.
He seemed disheartened by Cressia’s comments, and like an angrily child sulked off elsewhere, down the slope and away into a small park down by the stream nearby.
“Hey! Come back here!”
She didn’t want to run after him like his deceased mother, but perhaps she’d pushed him a little too hard already with such early morning training sessions. In truth, the Zantzar Blades had never done any track field sessions at all.
It was her fatal flaw, and she wished she wasn’t so caring for others, as it often made things very difficult for her when it came to being assertive and not being at the whims of another person, royalty or not.
It was only then, as she peered down did she realise that she was only dressed in her sombre babydoll bedtime dress, which left little to hide her slim athletic figure, or her perky breasts.
Had Alvin known the entire time?
She grew a shade of red so deep that she felt it was sufficient enough exertion in place of her own time spent training this afternoon.
A few half elf-half human curses were sworn, and then she ran back inside to change into something that was a little less provocative than elven lingerie for a warm Sunday afternoon.
A quick and smudgy skincare session completed her morning routine before she she began her search for the softy prince she was tasked to care of.
If Alvin was the kind to gossip - Oh My Goddesses! - Perhaps word had already made its way down the grapevine to the rest of the servants within the kingdom!
Rushing down the hallway, some of the servants already seemed to regard with her a salacious suspicion that perhaps she was secretly a nymphomaniac or exhibitionist type who’d been fortunate to find herself within the royal court at the behest of the Crown.
She shook her head. It’s just my imagination! Just my imagination!
The Royal Zantzar park felt like stepping into the middle of an untrimmed hedge bush. Cressia hated parks, and so did many other elves who felt it important to tear down anything that have been considered to have the astray from the path the Great Elven Forests had chosen. Parks were cold and artificial, and every time Cressia found herself in one she imagined herself reading sly human messages that had been engraved deep within an elven Oak tree.
"Alvin?" She called out, “Prince Alvin?”
She heard the quiver being released, and ducked beneath into the grass like a frightened child. When she scrambled away peered up she say his sweaty odorous body in the distance playing around with bows and arrows like a middling bandit from elven lore, right down to the colour of his flashy red running shoes.
She was very, very flipped off now.
"What are you doing shooting bows out here?" She yelled as she stood up, "We have fencing practice now!"
"I've just discovered this wondrous new thing, Cressia," He replied, releasing the tense bowstring, "Care to try it?"
She looked over his shoulder to see several target boards lacquered in arrows. He'd consistently hit high marks on all of them, and rarely had he strayed beyond 8 points, most of his shots clustered in or around the bullseye. This was probably the old shooting range from the time when the Zantzar army trained at the foot of the palace. She was well versed in her Zantzar history, perhaps embarrassingly so for a foreign elf.
“Taking credit for other men's handiwork,” She scoffed, “What did I expect from a Noble?”
“Oh, feisty today aren’t we Zantzar blade?” He teased, “If you were wearing any more green I might have mistaken you for a blade of grass.”
She crossed her arms, narrowing his eyes at him. “Careful, I’ve cut down weeds that had more backbone than you.”
Alvin smiled. “That’s funny, because I didn’t see much of that elvish backbone when you ducked like a rabbit when that arrow passed you by.”
She began to simmer at his incredibly astute observation, but decided to change her course of action.
Ok Cressia, let’s take his claims at face value and then slowly emasculate him.
"How long have you been doing this for?" Cressia asked, playing the role of the innocent elf girl who didn’t have the slightest clue about bows, weaponry and warfare.
"This is my first time."
"For real?"
"For realsies."
She did not want to believe that, but as she looked upon his hands she noticed his fingertips were still as soft as satin.
"You must've practised somewhere else before."
Another arrow went flying, and another bullseye came back as it’s reward.
"Not at all, unless you count coming 2nd place in darts to Aeryn." He moved to her with the bow in hand, "Here, you try."
She took hold of it, and grimaced.
"Just because I'm an elf,” She said embarrassed, “doesn't mean I'm very good at shooting arrows."
"Oh come on Cressia, I doubt you're that bad."
Cressia suppressed a faint smile, but his reassurance felt warm. Very warm in fact. Which she so desperately needed at this point in her life, having stumbled through a mundane existence before his letters came calling for her.
Slowly, she began to sway herself in the proper form of an archer that her parents had taught her growing up. Her father had been an excellent longbowman in his youth, and her mother wasn’t half bad with a crossbow, but those skills seemed to have passed her by when it came to her own traits and temperaments.
She steadied herself as Alvin watched, drew a tantalising string, and then fired with that usual elvish confidence.
Stolen story; please report.
It was a total miss! It had hardly even grazed the direction of the practice ram, and instead was lodged deep in an oak tree nearby. She wanted to throw the bow to the ground and stomp on it to bits, but Alvin had other plans.
"Practice makes Perfect, remember?" He teased, watching her struggle with the string of the bow.
Such a sassy jab left feeling a little under the weather, and she began to grit her teeth to steady herself once more.
"Yes, practice makes perfect."
She stepped forward again, this time with more spring in her step as she pulled out another quivering bow. It was another miss, this time flying straight over the crown of the makeshift stand, and with it came a slew of elvish swears that only an esteemed human academic could decipher.
"What was that?" Alvin asked bemused.
"Nothing." She grumbled.
She moved even closer to the edge of insanity as each subsequent attempt stretched even further away then the arrow before. Cressia tried every secret trick her father had taught her as a child: Rethink your surroundings, consider that your life is on the line, the world depends on your shot, but nothing seemed to work at all.
"Time out." She conceded. Being shown up like this made her feel like she being was properly humiliated in front of her student.
"I thought elves were raised from birth to shoot arrows.” He remarked. He took the bow back, and another exhilarating shot that landed in the centre without so much as a glance as he fired.
"See, it's that simple?"
Now she was getting frustrated, and with it came a "Gimme me that!" as she grabbed the bow back off of him. Her next attempt breezed through the air, and then all known laws of physics along with their disbelief was suspended, as it took a sharp turn upwards into the branches of the great oak tree that hung over them and the shooting alley.
Her confidence was now reduced to a pile of smouldering ash.
"You might actually end up being the first woman to kill herself with her own bow someday."
"Shut up."
"You’re not a terribly great bow-woman, it has to be said."
"Okay, I admit it, I'm not great with a bow," She sighed, "Not competent, not adept, not useful, not good at anything that involves arrows!”
He listened to her feet stump the ground, and felt the tremor come as he released the string. It was a 7, his first ever to have gotten.
"I'm not sure what the issue is," Cressia continued, “Everyone in my family is a skilled archer.”
"Perhaps the proficiency with a bow trait just skipped a generation." He slyly spoke as another arrow went gliding in the air.
"I always fell at the first hurdle when it came to archery, always last place.”
"You did?"
"Yes, my parents were always ashamed about it, and never wanted me to go back."
She bit her lip. Truthfully she had never opened up to anyone like this. At. All. And suddenly she was doing it here with the man she was tasked with training, the Noble Human Prince.
“Are you an only child?” Alvin asked. Of course, he already knew the answer from Weria, but he wanted to hear it straight from her. And how she would answer, and how she would phrase it, and what kind of voice she would use when addressing him.
“Yes, I am.” She said, and with it took her chance to learn more about this Aeryn, “What about you?”
“Twins, but she disappeared alongside the cavaliers at the hands of forest spirits.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK, not something worth getting upset about.”
A distant cold voice emerged right there, and Cressia decided she would not ask any further about Aeryn. She had often spoken in that distant cold voice herself when someone began to nag at her about something or another, or try to pry into her deeply, hurtful memories that she tried to suppress.
Despite the teasing, she did not actually want to cause him emotional pain. Not at all.
"Maybe I just prefer fighting with swords, there's little time to think, just you, your blade and your opponent.”
Alvin smiled. "I find this much more relaxing than the clattering of swords," He replied, "Much more enjoyable, much more peaceful."
"You think so?"
"Well, I'm pacifistic by nature, so it works and is more attuned to my character.”
This only made Cressia emboldened to ask something that had been at the centre of her mind since they’d first met.
"Do you really think you’re capable of killing someone in a sword fight?”
"I'm not exactly looking forward to it, no."
Then why do you continue on with it?" She was slightly befuddled now, "Training with me, I mean."
"It's tradition." He answered, waiting on her snarky counterattack.
"Tradition to whom?"
"To my family, to my friends, to my kingdom," He went on, "I don't want to be remembered as the Zantzar who ran away from his duty."
“Your sister broke away from tradition when she entered the cavaliers,” Cressia said, “So it’s not like you’re bound by blood to it.”
"Yes, and I would've been content to have lived in her shadow if it had stayed that way," He answered, "Aeryn was the one built for all that warfare stuff, not me. But now with her gone, I have to shoulder the responsibility."
"There's a first time for everything," She countered, "I didn't want to shoulder an elven longbow, so I came here and plead servitude to a foreign king just so I could fulfil my dreams of being a fencer."
"Well, I don't want to be known as the Zantzar who holed himself up in the castle while his men fought in the front lines against beastly Orcs and dastardly spirits," He replied tensely, "I can already see my portrait being lined up with the other miscreants who deviated from the norm."
She stood silent, but felt a pang of sympathy for him. There was pitiful shame running rampant through his line of thinking, but she couldn't really blame for feeling that way.
There had been times she'd walked out of misguided apprenticeships, or refused to play the game to advance in the cut-throat world of artisan bakeries.
And yet, despite their differences in social class, she was the one who could afford that luxury and restart again, not him. She could always go somewhere else, take a new name, join a new army, reinvent herself into something she wasn’t, but he could not. A life spent under the magnifying glass meant he would be forever bound to the Ostrich Zantzar crest.
She might not have been built to be a baker, and neither was he built to be a soldier, let alone a princely general who was expected to lead by horseback while the eyes of an entire kingdom watched and scrutinised your every move.
To fail miserably in front of everyone, or not even to try at all, would be an experience in humiliation that Cressia shuddered to even think about.
"You're getting better at fencing," She said, moving the subject away, “I would think.”
"You do?" He smiled, “But I’ve only just begun!”
"Yes, you’ve only started,” Cressia suppressed a giggle, knowing how silly that sounded now, “But you've made leaps and bounds with it compared to my forté into Archery anyway."
“Or my épee,” Alvin remarked, as his final arrow struck dead in the centre, “you flatter me, Cressia, but we both know it’s not my strongest suit.”
"If only there had been a way to prove myself without the clash of swords, then…”
“Then?”
“I would’ve been able to clear that high bar a long time ago.”
“I’m sure you won’t have to kill anyone when it comes down to it.” Cressia said to ease his festering worries.
He didn’t respond, and silence began to linger. Cressia enjoyed silence, and the calmness and the breeze that let her mind work it’s way around a whirlpool of emotions circulating in her head, that she carefully only allowed out when it came to fencing and her artworks back home.
That was another thing she was going to demand of him: Having her artwork plastered all over the royal walls alongside with the rest of those miserable portraits that had been hung up for the past few centuries. Of course, it had been part of a bet she agreed to do with the children she taught, who eventually had hopes their drawings would be on display in the royal residence too.
"Knowing the weather, those arrows might get all rusty and blunt." This was the environmentalist prince now speaking, not the one slicked up in violet wolf furs.
"Mhmm."
"And you know, cleaning up is usually reserved for the servants of the Palace."
"Of course it is." Cressia said, “Of course it is.”
"And, would you, maybe, I don't know, help me out with that?"
There was hesitation, and then she briefly nodded her head and follow her prince in tow. The insistence of to Help me out with that made Cressia go along with him.
He could’ve easily demanded that she turn into his personal squire and bundle up the arrows with her back to the palace, not too far removed from her duties as a common foot soldier back in the day.
But to ask, made her turn the opposite cheek at the procrastinating behaviour he was going through at the moment, and also, well, made her also put aside that he’d nearly skewer an arrow straight into her petite little cranium.
She had heard once beastly human princes would aim for the ears of elves during skirmishes back in the day, and Cressia wondered if that trait had skipped a generation or two, only to land in Alvin’s lap while the rest of the Zantzar family been proficient in swashbuckling.
There was a gentle grasp as he plugged out the arrows from the target board, which, if Cressia had gathered up her score count correctly, meant that Alvin was almost at the same level of an elite Elven Fencer from the National Elven Army.
If Cressia’s score had been been counted, at best she would wind up as the perennial laundry folder candidate instead.
"So, tell me more about this Elven Conclave of yours."
Walking now, heading back in the direction of the palace and away from all the foggy mountain dew that covered all over the place. Alvin had the bow slung over his shoulders, and Cressia carrying the arrows underneath her arms. Such a royal gentleman that he was, he’d offered to do the harder part for her.
"I'm not sure you really want to know." Cressia answered.
"Oh, but I do." Alvin replied, "I've never met someone from the Elven Conclave."
"You haven't at all?"
"Well, I have met elves, but they ran away from the Conclaves.”
"The conclave." Cressia corrected him.
"But there's multiple Conclaves, isn't there?" Alvin began, "And the all converge into a super Conclave, don't they?"
"Yes, that is true," Cressia began, already dreading the history lesson she felt forced to give, "But you wouldn't really call them conclaves, more like a town hall meeting that's been dictated by someone else."
"By someone else?" Alvin decided to press on it, "You mean the Conclave isn't the most democratic entity in existence?"
There's that big word again, Cressia thought, Democratic. And the Prince understands it too.
"No, to be truthful, it isn't the most democratic government in the world." She kicked at a pine cone that was in her path as they walked, “If I’m honest, it falls more in line with the monarchies that preceded it.”
Alvin knew what she meant, for the Elves had always seemed to him like a group of vassals who masqueraded as people.
The Elven Monarchies were not bound to rule by divinity or through winning a legendary contest of chivalry, but rather elven chiefs who had been supported by the Old Kingdoms in the east. In truth there were several Elven Monarchies, each one backed by a different human royal family, and most of Elf history had essentially been a clannish geopolitical battle between the human Kings through their elf pawns.
Once the Conclave emerged some 80 years, deep within the lands of the Pendaline backed Monarchy, A nasty civil war quickly spilled out after the assassination of the Pendaline elf chiefs. Humans were lived there were largely expelled, and, after the Conclave had won, it isolated itself from the rest of the world for the next 60 years, rebuilding itself into a terrifying nation state that was suddenly parallel with it’s old human overlords.
“For all our faults, as humans, I mean, the elves have a distinctively hollow appreciation for the Arts.”
“You think so?” Cressia wasn’t offended, for she knew he was correct.
“Indeed, it seems extraordinary in all the time the elves have lived they’ve never developed something instinctive of their own.”
“It is, actually.” When he said the Arts, Cressia knew what he really meant was culture.
Before the Conclave came along, the Elven Monarchies had simply borrowed their patrons own culture with them - it wasn’t uncommon for a long eared elf girl to be named after a newly born human princess.
Once the last human had been thrown out, the Conclave decided it was time to brush all the embarrassing human influence away from elven history as they charted on their own path from now on.
Genesis and Mythology, the establishment of a state religion with Gods and Goddesses, boys and girls names that would befitted any child who wanted to trace their ancient heritage back to the tale of a normal man who was the champion of a deity. It was a mad dash of dreaming up myths, tales, legends and all sorts of creatures that lingered in the shadows.
It had taking only 6 decades, but, once the period of isolation had ended, the rest of the Mylean world was amazed that the Elven Conclave had discovered a treasure trove that had always been there, waiting to be unearth by a band of crazed revolutionaries steeled by the threat of another human Imperialistic project.
Everything was artificially created, and not the synthesises of centuries of fables and tall tales and legends that had travelled from worth to mouth, something which only had it’s emergence after time had passed, and generation from generation had shuffled off this mortal coil. Cressia could even trace her name back to the pet name one leader had for another, and not, as the Conclave tried to make her believe, had meant “Moon” in the old elvish tongue.
“It is not all amiss, however, their craft into religion is certainly more pleasant than our Dominion Sect.”
“Yes, I would agree with you there, Elven Pantheism feels more natural than an eternal flame that is whisked away the moment a God is to reappear.”
“Are you a believer?”
“I follow Pantheism, though I am not at all that lenient or devout, how about you?”
“I am much the same, neither devout or devoted, but I lack the necessary will to stray further into the atheist camp.”
As they walked further, she was beginning to feel more and more like she was the wild courtesan a Prince might’ve picked out to be his companion for the afternoon. She had often read romance novels that followed this same premise, of how the initial friction between the pair had cooled off and soon they began to confide into each other with a great deal of warmth, until eventually love blossomed.
Of course, Cressia would never devalue herself enough to be a courtesan, and the thought of selling her body for a few gold coins sickened her to the ends of her stomach, but here she was, spending the afternoon with a Prince, opening up to each other with a gentle ease neither had expected.
The talked some more, trading stories all the while treading through any overgrown weeds that had more backbone than Alvin. Cressia then decided that she would take it back, Alvin, for all his flaws, did have some backbone if he was willing to trade barbs with an Elf fencer like Cressia, even if his snark fell flat on his face more often than not. He was also content to let her wardrobe malfunction earlier go, something which Cressia was thankful for, as she would’ve been left a little reddened in the face had he brought it up.
That’s when they found it, an old temple that had once belonged the Dominion Sect, but had gradually been forgotten about and ensnared with weeds, plain old dirty Zantzar weeds. Alvin, as always prone to superstition, was content to walk past, but Cressia wanted to enter and have a little rummage through what might’ve been left behind the priestesses on their way out.
“Perhaps we could fence within it, I mean, I’m already tired of trying to make grounds with furry coats and white hats.”
“It looks like a crumbling mess Alvin.” Her jovial attitude suddenly disappeared. She didn’t want to be crushed to death because she stood in the wrong corner as a pillar came upon her.
“Renovations will be done within a week, and then it will be our personal fencing ground, away from all that Palace hustle and bustle.”
Cressia was still unsure, but decided to push how far Alvin was committed to go.
“I want it renovated to my liking, and I want a fresh new coat of green and white to be painted on it.”
An Elven mark, she thought, deep within Zantzar territory.
He nodded, “Shall we enter then?”
“Yes, we shall.”
They yanked away the plywood boards and crept in like children afraid of being discovered by the vengeful spirits haunted this place. Cressia took to her renovations as they explored, and Alvin was soon finding ensnared by a woman’s measurements and decorations and all sorts of things as he took down notes on what Cressia wanted her for little Fencing square. The rest of their afternoon was spent in a respectable, but comfortable partnership, as the prince found his tutor secretly had an eye for interior design too.