The servant quietly closed the door behind her, leaving behind a motionless tableau: the Emperor’s first wife, Lady Cahlila, and three teenaged girls standing before her in a line.  Raicha tried not to let her eyes drop to the mosaic under her feet.  It was a fine example, three centuries old, but she’d seen it before, and as Camilia was always saying, showing guilt was as bad as getting caught.

Cahlila leaned back in her chair and gave them a considering look from those famously brilliant eyes.  Camilia, next to Raicha, met the look evenly, nearly identical eyes showing nothing but polite inquiry.  The corner of her mother’s mouth lifted slightly.  Camilia’s half-sister Sai, standing on Camilia’s other side, stood straight and tall.  Raicha envied her ease.

“Lady Dahla had a very bad reaction to one of her paints this morning.”  They had known that.  Rumors in the hallways varied, but the overall trend suggested that she had a face full of hives and was refusing to come out of her rooms.

“Cosmetic creams go bad so quickly in the summer,” Camilia murmured sympathetically.  Her mother clearly did not believe that for a second, but faint amusement said it had been an acceptable parry.  “And she needs so many of them.”  That had been almost inaudible but Cahlila’s lips twitched.

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“You did that?”  Cy looked dubiously at a length of fabric so sheer that he could almost see through it and then at the sister who was holding it.  She was twelve.

“Don’t touch it!”  Make that twelve and bossy.

“I wasn’t going to.”  Cy looked guiltily at his callused hands.  He’d been a disaster with the finer cloths even before he’d joined up, and now?  Five years of continuous sword drills had left him with hands that would snag silk from three feet away.

A snicker came from the doorway.  “Eleven years of age and all that military training and Cala’s still in charge, huh?”  Their brother Brev, nineteen and the sanest person in the family, leaned against the doorframe, grinning.

“Strategic choices,” Cy responded promptly.  “We pick our battlefields.”

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The frog contemplated the golden ball.  It glittered through the murky water, half-buried in the black silt of the pond’s bottom.  He could hear the princess crying above, her voice weirdly distorted by the water but still distinguishable.  The wavering image on the surface showed him a green dress and dark red hair.  Red.  Never his favorite.

He swam over and prodded the ball with one sticky toe.  It was his way out of this mess, he supposed.  Back to the old life of flavored ices and servant girls, assuming he could avoid marrying the weeper.  He slowly blinked the nictitating membrane across his eye, the best he could do for a nostalgic sigh in this clammy body.  It had been a good life, if not useful.  He’d been an idle prince at best, years from responsibility in a peaceful kingdom that did just fine with no help from him.  Lovely.

His parents had put it about that it had been a spiteful fairy, he’d heard.  It probably sounded better than admitting that he’d insulted a witch on his way out of her rumpled cottage bed the second night, and that she had decided sliminess suited him.  True love.  He would have rolled his eyes if he could have.  But it only had to be true love for her, didn’t it?  That might not be so hard.

Red-headed, though.  He peered up through the water, trying to discern what sort of figure was attached to all that red hair.  Hm.  He pushed off of the golden ball with a back foot, and swished back into the depths of the pond.  Princesses were so much work, after all.  And perhaps a blonde would come by later.

Welcome to this week’s Trifecta Writing Challenge!  This week called for 33 to 333 words on the third definition of the word IDLE (adj.):IDLE

3: a : shiftless, lazy
b : having no evident lawful means of support

Thanks for reading!

When it came, she knew how she should be.  Glassy-eyed with wonder.  Struck silent with reverence.  Staggered by the magnitude of the change.

She wasn’t.  When it finally came, it was after years of dawdling, dragging its feet like a recalcitrant child, dripping stars and omens behind it in a messy trail of portents too exhausting to decipher.  When at last it lolled onto the stage, basking in the light of its own self-pleasure, it was exactly how she’d pictured it.  The sun still rose over wet green fields, the cows still needed feeding,  and the fraying hole in the pocket of her coat still consumed all her spare change.  Life went on.

In the end, she thought, the only wonder of it was that they had waited for it for so long.

Welcome to this week’s Trifecta Writing Challenge!  This week called for 33 to 333 words on the third definition of the word WONDER (noun):

Cy looked down at his pay slip and contemplated the latest misspelling of his name.  Seinen.  It had, in past weeks, been Sinan, Sainnen, and in a bizarre creative flight that he still had trouble believing wasn’t deliberate, Siiniin.  Sinan at least sounded Caleran.  What sort of a guy was Seinen?  Heid, maybe?  It had a Heid sort of an air to it, all E and I.

He shook his head and pushed off the wall, turning toward the offices.  Every week, a new man here in the military.   He’d wondered at first if he should try to correct it — but he was having enough trouble about his foreign looks without making a fuss over the spelling of his even more foreign first name.  It was the least of his problems, really.  If he’d been one of the farmers’ kids, he probably wouldn’t even read well enough to know.

Of course, if he’d been one of the farmers’ kids, the Atan officers wouldn’t all look at him like he was a mercenary.

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The door slammed.

Tassin came out of the back room, a startled look on his face.  “What was that?”

“Another entry for the list of people who are not happy for us.”

The alarm dropped away and he ambled forward.  His look said, plain as day, is that all?  “We’re going to run out of paper.  Who was it this time?”

“The priest.  He offered to heal me of your corruption.  I would have been touched if I wasn’t pretty sure there would have been fire involved for both of us.”

He sat back onto the arm of a chair and pulled her in.  “Who knew a cross-marriage would be so popular?”  He sounded inappropriately delighted.  His hand wove into her hair, pushing it back off her neck.

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It pressed on Michael from the moment he walked in the gallery door.  The last exhibition of Itu experiential art, and it was packed, but the crush of humanity was hardly more than a thread against the overwhelming presence of the art.  The almost tangible buzz made him stumble and apologize to a woman who barely knew he was there.  A pickpocket’s dream, if only there were earplugs for the mind.

Michael looked out over the swimming room and saw him. A slouched figure, strangely alone, in front of a jangling, twisting work in the corner.  He closed his eyes, then pushed his way across, deliberately avoiding looking at the other man.  He fixed his gaze thoughtfully on a corner of the frame, trying not to see the art itself, and spoke.

“I was afraid you’d be here.”

A sharp laugh, and a twitch of the hand.  “You did say you wanted to say goodbye.”

“This isn’t what I meant.”  He slanted his eyes left.  “You look terrible.”  It was true.  Lucien was gaunt and jittery, unshaven.  Worse, the same consuming aura that radiated from the art seemed to spark from his skin.

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The boy was quiet when he told them.  His chin was held determinedly high over the brand new Church soldier’s uniform, and his face was a mixture of resolve and apology for the shock he was giving them.

It was almost enough to make the old man laugh despite it all.  They had been headed here all the boy’s life.  Longer — ever since the moment his daughter had led an Eastern mercenary in the door.  He might never forgive Dyan for marrying Ellin then dying on that pointless campaign, but he’d seen that coming the way he’d seen this coming.  Inevitable.  It had been in every line of the boy from the time he was six, an uncanny anticipation of the soldier now before him.

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She stood in the dusty parking lot, the peeling wooden door before her.  The warm glow coming through the bar windows seemed to beckon, a welcoming yellow that spoke of candlelight and the hearth.  Behind her, the unlit road stretched, featureless, into the dark.  She couldn’t remember how she had gotten there.  Her eyes narrowed suspiciously.

She pulled the door open.  The bar was empty but for the man behind the counter, and instead of stale beer, there was a faint whiff of incense.  She sighed.

“Is this another one of those damn allegorical bars?”

The bartender looked up from wiping a pint glass with a striped bar towel –when did real bartenders ever do that? — and nodded.  “You got yourself into a pretty bad accident,” he said with a lift of the eyebrow.  “What did you expect?”

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He stood quietly, wind ruffling his hair, and watched her crush the talisman to powder.  The crunch of it under her boot was unnaturally loud, and this deserted corner at the edge of the city felt like the ends of the earth.

“You’re that sure.”

She didn’t even spare him a glance.  Her gaze was intent on the sparkling dust on the concrete, and a deep satisfaction showed on her face.  She spotted a thumbnail-sized fragment that had escaped destruction and hastened to remedy the situation, grinding it under her heel until what was left was lifted by the wind and blown away.

His hand lifted involuntarily to his own talisman, reassuringly safe and whole in his hip pocket.  “You’ll never be able to go back.”  He knew that she knew, that it was the whole point of the thing, but the words spilled out all the same.

She lifted her eyes to his, and they sparkled with an honest delight that he hadn’t seen in years.  “Never.”  Inexplicably, she gurgled a laugh, grabbed his hand, and pulled him off toward the city.

Welcome to this week’s Trifecta Writing Challenge!  This week called for 33 to 333 words on the third definition of the word CRUSH (verb):

1a : to squeeze or force by pressure so as to alter or destroy structure <crush grapes>
b : to squeeze together into a mass
2   : hug, embrace
3   : to reduce to particles by pounding or grinding <crush rock>

Thanks for reading!