Chapter 23 To Kiss a Friend
To Kiss a Friend
The time and place where Arris and Demelza planned to put a stop to the rumors had been carefully chosen.
They would meet right after breakfast, in a copse of trees beside the winter courtyard, where the contestants would be gathering to hear the rules for tomorrow’s trial.
The trees were the most important part, for they were peeping myrtle.
The blossoms—dramatic, velvet and black—were notoriously voyeuristic and in the presence of any sort of intimacy turned translucent as a glass pane.
They were popular choices for the walkways of a garden around a ballroom.
Arris had heard that a particularly suspicious wife in the Ulva Wylds had elected to begin her second life as a peeping myrtle, provided she was planted just outside her husband’s bedroom.
Arris had woken early this morning in anticipation of the planned kiss.
It all felt rather clinical, and since he knew the whole idea was to be witnessed by everyone, he had stressed about his attire for an entire hour.
He couldn’t wear white, considering that had been his sartorial opening for the start of the tournament.
He had worn copper for the first trial. Silver would look trite amongst the frost and sparkle of Rathe Castle’s winter atmosphere.
Blue? No. He always looked younger in blue.
Red? Far too aggressive. Yellow would make him look like a bird.
He had settled, in the end, on a color he rarely wore. Black.
One would think he eschewed the hue because it might as well belong to Yvlle entirely, but Arris avoided it for a different reason: he liked it. In fact, he felt he liked it too much. When he wore black, he looked good. Older. He felt authoritative.
It was like staring at an alternate version of himself. The dark Arris could waste time with abandon. The dark Arris could love at no risk to his life.
The dark Arris got to grow old.
Arris shrugged on the sable-colored jacket as if it were a talisman. He adjusted the silver buttons as if they were stars spelling a fate within his control. He thought about a cape, but decided against it. And with that, he went out into the cold.
It was far too early to meet Demelza, but Arris couldn’t stand another moment in the Castle, so he went in the direction of the Grove of Ancestors.
As the second trial was almost underway, the weather of Rathe Castle had begun to change.
The winter frost that sleeved the branches had thawed.
The shy heads of crocuses and daffodils poked up from the icy dirt.
Deep in the Grove of Ancestors, Arris greeted Argento, his grandfather tree.
The rest of his family was still dormant, but Argento was humming, his roots rippling.
In his boughs, a family of squirrels had made their home.
Argento laughed as a squirrel kit that was mostly tuft and tail scuttled up his trunk.
“When did they arrive?” asked Arris.
“With the frost,” said Argento, with uncharacteristic softness.
“I thought you said you refused to be a ‘hovel for vermin,’” said Arris.
Hypocrite, thought Arris, charmed as his grandfather gently lifted his bough to one of the squirrel kits. The kit appeared to be exploring outside its nest for the first time and it tumbled happily into Argento’s grasp. It trusted him completely.
“I imagine this is what it must be like to hold a child,” said Argento. “Never had the chance to do that with Eustis, you know. By the time he could sleep in my branches, he was eight! None of that newborn scrunching business that I had heard spoken of so fondly.”
Arris watched his grandfather’s boughs gently swishing, alternating like cupped hands to form a staircase for a pair of cautious squirrel kits.
“Do you regret it?” asked Arris.
“Regret is a dangerous path to walk down and fortunately I have been stripped of my legs. Roots cannot drink from regrets.”
“I see,” said Arris.
“How is your exercise in procrastination faring?”
“You mean the tournament for my hand in marriage?”
Argento huffed.
“It has been … illuminating,” said Arris.
“Eh? Is that so? Kissed any of them yet?”
“Many,” said Arris.
“Anyone beautiful?”
Immediately, Arris thought of Edmea’s blue eyes and Zoraya’s silken hair, Orinthia’s dimple and Talvi’s slender silhouette. He grinned.
“Lots,” said Arris.
“Anyone funny?”
He had exchanged charming witticisms with Heka. Flykra did a hilarious impersonation of a snow ferret that made him chuckle. Demelza … well, Demelza didn’t count, but he often laughed in her presence.
“A few,” he said.
“Anyone you trust?”
The question took Arris aback. The only person he really trusted was Demelza.
When he was around her, he never looked over his shoulder.
With Demelza, he gave no thought to the dangers of his future because he was too busy reveling in the delights of his present.
Odd how he had only just realized that. None of that mattered though. Demelza didn’t count.
He started to explain that much to his grandfather: “She—”
“Marry that one,” said Argento.
“Pardon?”
“The one who made you hesitate,” said Argento. “Marry her.”
“She’s not truly in the competition, grandfather,” Arris said cagily.
“And why would she be?” retorted Argento. “If you trust her and she makes you laugh, then what competition could there be?”
Arris saw Demelza before she saw him. She was crouched on the ground, half-hidden in the morning fog that moved sleepily over the grass.
Beside the copse of peeping myrtles, the glass wyvern boat lay curled up in the middle of the lake, its nose hidden beneath the flop of its great, spiked tail and its sail wings neatly tucked along its back.
Demelza’s hair was still mud-spattered, but the mud had begun to crack, and Arris spied bits of gleaming red hair.
Demelza was wearing a nightgown. It had a high collar and long sleeves and billowed out around her.
It hid her body completely from view but Arris blushed anyway.
He had kissed girls who revealed far more skin than Demelza, but he had never kissed a girl in a nightgown.
It was strangely intimate. Scandalous, even.
It was the only garment meant to know one’s skin as well as a lover.
His heart beating uncommonly fast, Arris cleared his throat as he approached.
Demelza turned and grinned. She looked bright-eyed, the previous evening’s panic gone from her eyes.
She pointed at the shrub’s peculiar blooms, which looked like roses with petals of gray smoke. Arris had not noticed them until now.
“When I was a hatchling, my mother planted these in our nest,” said Demelza. “They’re fog roses.”
The word “hatchling” seized Arris’s thoughts.
“I’m sorry, when you were a what? Are you suggesting that you came from an egg?”
“Yes?” said Demelza. “Why? How were you born?”
“Violently, I’m told,” said Arris.
“The birth of a veritas swan is the opposite of violence. It’s supposed to be serene. Musical. We hum when we hatch, our voices rising into a crescendo of magic and purity so that our parents might bask in the truth of our perfection,” said Demelza.
The words were lofty, but she spoke them drily. And she scowled when she finished.
“Apparently, however, I squawked like a goose and sounded like someone had taken an instrument and thrown it off the cliff where, in the midst of its descent, it was attacked by a hailstorm,” she said.
Demelza then did something Arris did not expect. She laughed. At herself.
“Did it ever bother you?” he asked.
“Certainly,” said Demelza. “I learned to love it though. My sisters’ songs might be magical, but, I’d argue, mine is the most memorable.”
Demelza beckoned him behind the row of peeping myrtles. Not far off, Arris heard the sound of the other contestants approaching the garden walkway.
“Shall we?” asked Demelza blithely. She picked at something on her nightgown and scratched her head, where a great chunk of mud flaked off and tumbled to the ground. Beneath it, Arris could see the dazzling red of her hair.
Demelza faced him with an expectant look. “Or should we try to time it for the moment they walk past?”
“Have you … er, done this before?” he asked.
He really did not have a reason to be nervous, but her frankness was disquieting.
“No.”
“You seem quite … unfazed by the prospect of a first kiss,” said Arris.
Demelza waved a hand. “I have read enough of kisses and the like in my sisters’ letters.
They seem to have varying degrees of passion.
Dulcinea found her kisses with the king quite gentle and boring, and much preferred the heated embraces with his consort.
Evadne, Eulalia and Eustacia prefer kisses of a crueler variety and intimacy that derives its fervor from the illusion of control or presentation of ruthlessness.
Euphemia is, by her own admission, ‘deliciously depraved.’ So you see, from their letters, I have known a thousand first kisses. ”
“Oh,” said Arris. “Well, in that case.”
He bent his head toward her, but Demelza moved back.
“Wait a moment,” she said, reaching forward to pick something from his hair. “I got a bit of mud on you by accident.”
“Oh, that’s all right.”
“Considering how particular you are about your appearance, I doubt you’d take kindly to being caught in an embrace speckled with dirt,” said Demelza.
“You are calling me fussy!”
“You are fussy, Arris,” said Demelza, arching an eyebrow and smiling at him. She brushed her fingers through his hair once more, pushing a curl behind his ear. “There.”
“Thank you,” said Arris.
“Of course,” said Demelza. “What are friends for?”