“Eh, well you know how he worries,” Gavin said, answering Ruli’s query about the Kartaian. “The herbs Kire brought back helped his nerves a lot, though. Pretty good herb, too,” he said, grinning wide. Kire smirked, shaking her head as she looked the lad over. In the relatively short span of his stay with Envy and the Ziadi, he really had changed. Hair kept unkempt, plain clothes, and a manner that was now much more at ease with other people. Even the way he spoke seemed to have loosened up. [i]Good.[/i] The scars of his ordeal as someone forced into blood magic would remain with him a long time, but it seemed that being here really was doing him good. If she took him to Amria and exposed him to his kin, it might reverse all that. She was about to ask him something else when some other person intruded upon them.

Immediately, the impression Kire got of the woman was that she reminded her of so many ladies and lords’ mistresses back at Amria, the kind she would try to spend as little time with as possible. The kind, definitely, that would talk about her and scheme behind their backs the moment the Empress wasn’t in their presence anymore. She kept quiet as Princess Risa spoke to them, or [i]at[/i] them. Her features wouldn’t have been too lamentable if it hadn’t been accompanied by an even uglier attitude. [i]If this and Aera are the only princesses he’s met so far, no wonder he has no love for the highborn.[/i] Kire was sure the woman would simply ignore her, and she exchanged glances with Gavin, who looked like he was biting back a remark of his own, too. But the princess just had to turn her attention to Kire, and she raised an eyebrow at the insult. 

“Ahh, the Princess Risa, we meet at last,” Kire said, putting on a big grin and giving her a mock curtsy, her voice dripping with artificial sweetness. “Do you mean this scar? Alas, when you’re an Empress, sometimes you must survive assassination attempts. Comes with the territory when you’re on the highest seat of power. Since you asked, I can tell you how I got it.” She smirked, moving the skin beneath her scarred eye, making the scar ripple and stretch. “We had been fighting an invasion, and I was surrounded, [i]Your Grace[/i]. Just as I had felled a brute twice my size, he swung his sword and [i]just[/i] caught my ugly little face, just so. There was so much blood streaming down my face, Sire, and still the monster was on his two feet. So I skewered him with my sword. Split him open from his cock to his neck. His guts spilled everywhere, it was a right mess.” 

Gavin looked sideways at Risa, then at Kire. He held no fondness at all for this princess, especially with the way she treated everyone else around them, so he could only barely contain his glee at Kire’s response. Having been forced to be around highborn lords as Ikegai’s slave, he felt if he had to follow nobility, he’d choose Kire any day rather than this lot. He was torn, however, between wanting to diffuse the situation and letting the obnoxious lady stew.