At the sudden tension in the air with Fareeha's comment Liv looked up in alarm, her fingers striking the keys mildly harder than she had intended. With a mumbled apology she looked back down, focusing on the page of music without reading it, though her ears- rather than being focused on her work- were trained on the two older princesses. It seemed Mai had the situation well in hand, deflecting the comment about snakes with a comment about the zodiac, and rats, instead. Liv grinned to herself- her birth year, 2000, made her a dragon by the zodiac. She'd looked it up in a book on Liang, one day when she'd been bored, and had found it one of the most inspiring things she'd ever read about herself.

If Liv was startled by the way Fareeha moved to speak to her, she managed to conceal it. She blushed faintly at the praise, taking her hands from the keys to cover her mouth, her cheeks flushing the barest pink- her equivalent of turning beet-red. At the question about dancing the girl frowned, her eyebrows knitting together slightly as she pieced her reply together. She was silent for a moment before carefully articulating, "My parents thought it decent for my sisters and I to be instructed in dancing. I suppose I'm adequate at it, though not by any means the most graceful. But my instruction was not begun until I was nearly thirteen, so I suppose I can excuse it as inexperience." She swallowed the lump in her throat, looking away for a moment as she remembered when she had been small, asking why her sisters were getting taught to dance and she wasn't. And she'd taken the reply in the simple, thoughtless way that most children do...

[i]It's hard to dance with a boy when he's in a wheelchair, isn't it? Don't worry, little sparrow, you'll learn someday.[/i]

She shook the thought away, glancing back to Fareeha with an apologetic smile. She did her best to change the topic away from herself, asking, "You dance very gracefully, Princess Fareeha. Where did you learn?"