[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/alIn4gR.gif[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/9qIY4OK.jpeg[/img][/center][table][row][center][cell][img]https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/019da8f2-ff75-7460-a849-f9930a44c6ee.webp[/img][/cell][center][cell][img]https://i.postimg.cc/Hx6VyXLK/generated-text.png[/img][/cell][/center][cell][right][img]https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/019da8f2-1c3f-709e-a9d7-7c7f502dc258.webp[/img][/right][/cell][/center][/row][/table][table][row][cell][justify][indent][indent][indent][indent][color=#808080]He had almost said something. It wouldn’t have been a reprimand exactly, because he had never been the type to reprimand, and certainly not here, in a crowded hall with every house in the Ninefold watching. But [i]something[/i]. A sort of redirection, maybe. Or a reminder that the person his sister was pulling away from had also just spent the last few minutes holding things together, and that winning a room was not the same as deserving to be left behind in one. But she had cut him off before the thought could fully form, and he had let her. She was right: this was not the place. And her grip on his arm, he thought, was desperate, and he would not be the one to pry it loose when she needed it.

So Raelan gave Saphira his arm and walked forward.

But not before he looked back. Just once. A brief, unobtrusive check.

In that sliver of time before the crowd sealed the gap, he found Zahara. Her posture remained impeccable, her expression composed. Both statements were certainly true. And to anyone who did not know her, they would have been sufficient, even reassuring.

But Raelan knew her. He had known her since he was small enough that she seemed impossibly tall, back in the years when she would sit with him in the shade of the oasis palms and read from whatever scroll she had borrowed from their mother’s collection that week. Her voice was patient then, rendering even the most arid passages worth listening to. He had learned to read her face long before he learned to read a room in those moments, and what he saw there now was not composure. It was a rose in wilting, still forever lovely but trembling at the beginnings of its own decline.

His sisters had always squabbled. That much was not new. When he was very young, he understood their conflicts as sudden and loud and then gone, leaving everything fine yet strangely unsettled in their wake. But as he grew, he began to perceive the fault lines more clearly, in particular the rifts that ran between two women who had been compared to each other since birth. Some of their quarrels were trifling, while others involving these comparisons left marks. And this, he suspected, was the latter kind. 

What he could not quite grasp exactly, as Saphira's arm pulled him forward, was why. 

The situation, as he understood it, was not without hardship, true, but neither was it without logic. One sister might yet become royal. The other would return to the Sunderlands with a genuine inheritance, their father’s lordship waiting like a patient thing. He was not naive enough to think either of them had chosen this freely. But it was not a zero-sum game, either. There was enough for both. And yet.

He looked at Zahara's face one last moment before the crowd swallowed the distance between them and thought that perhaps the accounting of enough was more complicated than he had understood.

Nonetheless, the ballroom opened before them, and Raelan let it all register in his head before moving on. The tables came next, stretching the length of the hall like rivers dividing suitors from the pursued. He found his name without difficulty amongst the former, far down at the opposite end from where Saphira was likely seated. He leaned toward his sister.

[color=#2f5e58]"Try to enjoy yourself."[/color]

She did not look at him. [color=#a34261]"I always enjoy myself."[/color]

[color=#2f5e58]"I meant without drawing blood."[/color]

That earned him one of her looks, this particular one being among his favourites for its hidden affections. 

[color=#2f5e58]"Play [i]nice[/i], Saphi."[/color] He nodded toward the far end of the table, where her name no doubt waited. [color=#2f5e58]"I presume your name is somewhere along here. I can walk you to—"[/color]

But Saphira declined graciously and firmly, and he watched her go for a moment before turning around. Zahara was still behind them, her hands clasped loosely before her and her gaze fixed on the flowing water of the mountain-like wall. 

Raelan crossed back to her, simply appearing at her side, and proffered his arm. [color=#2f5e58]"Shall we?"[/color] 

Zahara looked at his offered arm and then something in her shoulders released. She took his arm. [color=#d8a7b1]"Thank you,"[/color] she said, and they fell into step together, moving through the current of lords and ladies who were finding their places. The ballroom arranged itself around them in warm candlelight and the distant sound of strings, and for a while neither of them said anything. This wasn’t strange for either of them, however; Raelan had always been comfortable with silence in a way that made it feel inhabited rather than empty, and Zahara had always known how to move inside it.

But it was she who eventually spoke first.

[color=#d8a7b1]"She did well today"[/color] Zahara said, her voice low enough that it carried no further than him. [color=#d8a7b1]"Whatever she may think."[/color]

Raelan said nothing immediately. He had learned that Zahara's observations about Saphira were rarely as simple as they sounded and that they tended to carry something in the neighbourhood of guilt and grief underneath them.

[color=#2f5e58]"She knows that,"[/color] he said finally. [color=#2f5e58]"She just needs time to…figure it out herself. That is all."[/color]

[color=#d8a7b1]"I suppose so…It is only…"[/color] She paused, a slight furrow appearing between her brows, then gone. [color=#d8a7b1]"I worry sometimes that the distance between us has become the natural state of things. That I have grown so accustomed to managing it that I have forgotten how to close it."[/color] Her gaze remained ahead, moving over the room while her mind seemed far away in the past. [color=#d8a7b1]"And I cannot always tell whether I am the cause of it or simply… unable to stop it."[/color]

Raelan considered this with a light frown before responding.[color=#2f5e58]"I don't think those are as different as you believe,"[/color] he said at last. [color=#2f5e58]"But I also think you are treating this as though you have already run out of time to find out which one it is."[/color] He paused, choosing his next words with care. [color=#2f5e58]"We are here for six months, Zahara. A great deal can change in six months. A great deal can be lost in it, too. You should not wait until you are certain before you try."[/color]

Zahara was quiet for a moment after that, and then the corner of her mouth curved in a way that was both fond and reproachful. 
[color=#d8a7b1]"You know,"[/color] she said, [color=#d8a7b1]" for someone who has just dispensed rather sensible advice, you have a remarkable talent for exempting yourself from it."[/color]

He opened his mouth, but she continued before he could form a reply. 

[color=#d8a7b1]"You are here, Raelan. Truly here, in a place none of us have been before, surrounded by people none of us have met. And you are spending the evening steadying the rest of us as though that is the only function available to you."[/color] Her voice remained gentle, but there was something underneath it that was less gentle but no less true.[color=#d8a7b1]"The desert will still be there when we return. The people who have named you their own will still be there. But you are also four and twenty, and whatever Father may need you to believe about yourself, this will not come again."[/color] A small pause, punctuated by a nearby servant filling a flagon of spiced wine. [color=#d8a7b1]"Be present in it. All of it. Including,"[/color] she added, with the lightest possible emphasis, [color=#d8a7b1]"the parts that have nothing to do with duty."[/color]

Raelen said nothing to that until–

[color=#2f5e58]"Are you telling me to find a wife?"[/color]

Zahara rolled her eyes, a gesture so familiar with exasperation that it could have belonged to any of a hundred childhood afternoons.[color=#d8a7b1]"I am telling you to keep yourself open to the possibility that something here might matter to you [i]personally[/i], and if a wife happens to be part of that, then I shall not complain."[/color]

[color=#2f5e58]"Well,"[/color] Raelan said, after another moment's deliberation, [color=#2f5e58]"I imagine it would not matter much if you did. You are not the wife."[/color]

Zahara turned to look at him, her expression teetering between disbelief and reluctant amusement.
[color=#d8a7b1]"You,"[/color] she said, with great dignity, [color=#d8a7b1]"are a complete lackwit."[/color]

[color=#2f5e58]"So I have been told,"[/color] Raelan replied, apparently at peace with this assessment. Some truths were not worth the dispute anyhow. 

Zahara shook her head before she collected herself, releasing his arm at last, her card found and her seat waiting with it. 

[color=#d8a7b1]"Go and sit down, Raelan,"[/color] she said, which was almost exactly what Saphira had said to him not ten minutes ago. Such bossy sisters he had. 

Raelan inclined his head, something warm in his expression that he did not put into words, and left her to it after helping her into her seat. He made his way back through the room alone, people finding their footing with one another around him. Not that he truly noticed any of it, with his thoughts filled with everything that had been said. 

[i]Be present in it. All of it. Including the parts that have nothing to do with duty.[/i]

Zahara was not wrong, exactly (not that he’d ever admit this, but she rarely was). But his circumstances were practical in a way that she perhaps did not fully account for or had chosen, in her sisterly generosity, to overlook. He was four and twenty, yes. Old enough, by the standards of most holds, to have already had a wife. In the Sunderlands, men of his station were often matched well before his age, and yet here he stood, the question still open for reasons that had seemed, until very recently, entirely sufficient. The frontier had come first. Years of it, building something out of nothing in a region the capital had all but abandoned, and he had not begrudged a single day of it. Then his father's summons, framed as counsel sought, which he had understood for what it actually was: a leash, gently applied, to keep the Sirocco placid and close. There had been no room in any of that for the kind of presence Zahara was describing. No room, or so he had told himself, for the parts of life that had nothing to do with duty. The frontier had demanded everything he had, and he had given it without complaint. His father's summons had demanded his compliance, and he had framed it as wisdom. Tonight, standing in a crowded hall with every house in the Ninefold watching, he had almost said something true and necessary about what Saphira's reach for his arm had cost the person she had reached away from — and he had swallowed it, because the moment was wrong and she had needed the ground beneath her to hold, and he had told himself that was the right call.

But he was not certain, walking back through the ballroom now, that it truly had been. He was beginning to suspect, in fact, that he had been making the same call for a very long time. That which he had named patience was sometimes avoidance. That which he had named duty was sometimes the simpler thing of making himself useful so that no one, including himself, ever had to ask what he actually wanted. Especially if what he wanted would cost someone else their wants, their needs. 

He reached his seat and pulled himself out of his own head just in time to catch the tail end of something he had not been present for. The Járnbjørn heir — Elrik, the elder one — was settling beside Princess Maeve with a measured bow and a voice smoothed into court register. And then there was the small instruction to the servant to serve the princess first, as though even this minor courtesy deserved to be done properly.

Raelan sat. And then, because Zahara had told him to be present and he had decided, somewhere between her card and his own, that he was going to try, he looked.

Princess Maeve sat directly across from him. The first thing he noted, with the precision of a man who had spent years assessing things that could kill him, was that she was extraordinary to look at. The second, following hard on its heels, was that she could, without exaggeration, kill him. Not figuratively. Literally. In a dozen ways he could imagine and probably several he could not.

Every line of her was intentional. Every detail considered. She wore her beauty the way experienced soldiers wore their armour: as the first and most important line of defence, a carapace of poise and perfection that warned others away before they could draw close enough to test whatever hid beneath. He had watched her in the Great Hall, so this all made sense to him. He had seen the curtsy that was barely a curtsy, and he had watched her tear her arm free from Rhea’s grasp and retreat to Valenya’s side as though the world owed her a different standard than it offered everyone else. 

He had noted it all then without conclusion. But now, with this closer vantage, he thought he could make out the full topography of her. And what he found was this:

Across the table sat a woman holding herself very straight, her attention moving along its length with a quality of assessment so practiced it had become invisible to anyone not looking for it. She was not performing ease. She was performing something far more demanding: the appearance of someone to whom ease was irrelevant, because she had already surpassed the need for it. And underneath that, so far down that he almost missed it entirely, was the faint outline of a person who had been performing for a very long time. Someone who had perhaps forgotten, in the way one forgets things one has not used in years, what it felt like to simply… stop.

Or perhaps he was reading into it. He had been known to do that, lackwit that he sometimes was.

Raelan reached for his wine. [/color][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/justify][color=2e2c2c]..............................................................................................[/color][/cell][/row][/table][center][img]https://i.imgur.com/9qIY4OK.jpeg[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/9qIY4OK.jpeg[/img][sub][color=9b9b9b][b][i]Location: Ballroom
Interactions: [color=#a34261]Saphira[/color], [color=#d8a7b1]Zahara[/color]
Mentions: [color=#5B90B5]Elrik[/color] [/i][/b][/color]
[color=#2f5e58][b]#2f5e58[/b][/color][color=2e2c2c]...[/color]|[color=2e2c2c]...[/color][url=https://i.pinimg.com/736x/58/53/c6/5853c6d6da9e4f00b2ca89b4e2bf36ca.jpg][color=9b9b9b][b]outfit[/b][/color][/url][/sub][/center]