[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/JbyCTAZ.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]The servant came and went, filling her goblet as if he'd done the same motion a thousand times and had long since stopped expecting anyone to notice. Zahara noticed anyway. With a small incline of her head and a brief, uncalculated smile, the man’s step hitched as if courtesy had suddenly fallen upon him from a clear sky. Then, he recovered quickly and moved on without a word. She lifted the goblet and let the wine settle on her tongue before setting it down. It was good. Richer than what they kept at home, where wine was imported across the dune-sea at considerable cost and therefore poured with a little more restraint. Here, it flowed and was refilled before the glass was half empty, as casually as the water that wept from the living rock above them. Zahara was beginning to understand that this was simply how things worked in Thornvale. Abundance as architecture. Excess as atmosphere.  A tiny, disloyal part of her liked it. 

Her gaze moved along the table, and she found Raelan first, distant at the end of the table as he drank his wine. She had meant what she said to him earlier. Every word of it. What she had not anticipated was how much she would need to say it until the words were already leaving her mouth. It had been less advice than admission, she supposed. A thing she had been circling for months, finally spoken aloud in the time it took them to walk the length of a table. She hoped he would sit with it too, but Raelan had a habit of leaving things for later consideration rather than acting on them immediately. It was usually a quality she admired in him, except in those cases where ‘later’ became ‘never’ without her noticing. The frontier had taken years from him. Their father's summons had taken even more. And somewhere in between, her little brother had become very good at making the absence of a personal life look like a principled choice rather than a slow accumulation of circumstances none of them had quite intended. She wanted better for him than that. It had felt important to say so, even if he had given a lackwit’s equivalent response and made her laugh against her better judgment.

Rhea was not particularly difficult to find after this; the youngest princess had a quality of presence that drew the eye through a kind of warmth that radiated outward without apparent intention. Zahara had noticed it first in the great hall when Rhea had reached for her sister's arm and pulled her into a proper curtsy, and she had thought, in fact, that she would like to speak with her tonight because of it. Her intentions were also gentle with nothing strategic behind them. Alas, Rhea appeared not available for gentle intentions at present with a suitor Zahara didn’t immediately recognize in her vicinity. Later, then, she hoped. 

It was at that moment that a voice cut through the feast's ambient murmur that was the precise opposite of quiet. Zahara did not turn her head; she had been trained out of that reflex before she was old enough to attend formal dinners. Still, her attention shifted, tugged by the sheer, unapologetic volume of it.

[color=#38aac7]“It's so unfair,”[/color] the young woman spilled aloud, her tone carrying the flat assurance of someone accustomed to being heard.[color=#38aac7]“Why does Bran get seated so close to the prince? She doesn't get things. [i]I[/i] get things.”[/color] A dramatic slump followed, cheek pressed to her forearm.[color=#38aac7]“She must [i]hate[/i] it there.”[/color]

Strange. For a moment, all the petulance and certainty reminded Zahara of her sister. But only for a moment. Zahara revised the thought once the blonde continued her litany. Saphira would sooner drink poison than perform such public grievance over a seating arrangement. Almost without meaning to, Zahara's gaze drifted down the table toward her sister to confirm these assumptions, and what Zahara found was Saphira with one hand pressed flat over her mouth, engaged in active warfare with the urge to laugh. The battle, however, was not by the look of it going her way at all. Then, as if sensing the weight of attention from down the table, Saphira's eyes slid sideways, found Zahara's, and promptly fled. Crisis averted. 

[color=#846d49]"Well,"[/color] came a voice from directly beside her that was close enough to startle. [color=#846d49]"I did not realize, until this moment, that my mother's machinations would be so thinly veiled."[/color]

Zahara turned.

Prince Dorian sat right at her elbow.

How she had failed to register this until now, she could not quite say. Perhaps she had been too occupied with wine, with Raelan, with Rhea's unavailability, or with a young woman's theatrical grief over seating arrangements. Or maybe it was some stubborn part of her that had simply refused to look directly to her right, having already decided earlier to keep this particular man at a careful distance. Whatever the reason, the crown prince of Aethoria was her immediate neighbour, and she had not taken notice. She inclined her head with a grace that suggested she had absolutely intended this all along.

[color=#d8a7b1]"Your Grace,"[/color] she said, and then, because leaving it there felt like a missed opportunity and she had been raised in a house that did not miss them, she added with some measured lightness: [color=#d8a7b1]"I imagine the Queen would say her machinations are never thinly veiled, only that some of us are slow to perceive them. Myself included, it seems."[/color]

The corner of his mouth twitched, just beginning to shape itself into something that might have been a smile or a wince. She would never know which because it was at that very moment when the complaints returned tenfold from further down the table. Zahara watched Dorian's gaze flick involuntarily toward his mother, drawn by the same magnetic dread, and his hand tightened on his goblet. He drank.

The wine went down the wrong way.

The resulting cough was emphatically [i]not[/i] quiet. Neither, as it turned out, was the sound from somewhere nearer Saphira's side, where a woman Zahara had not yet properly looked at appeared to have aspirated a piece of her meal at the worst possible moment. The two events arrived in such close succession that Zahara was uncertain which direction to turn at first. 

She turned to Dorian. 

Practicality, she told herself. He was beside her. He was a prince. And whatever arcane protocol governed a lord's daughter watching a crown prince choke on his wine at a royal feast, she was reasonably certain that doing nothing ranked somewhere beneath 'somehow setting his sleeve on fire'. She reached for the small pitcher of water near her setting and slid it toward him just within easy reach. 

He did not take it.

Instead, he coughed again, swallowed hard, and waved off the concern that had not quite been offered.[color=#846d49]"My apologies."[/color] The prince spared them each a weak smile and fleeting glance. [color=#846d49]"I must confess I am not much for court. It is far too formal for my liking, and I waste no time making a fool of myself."[/color] He cleared his throat and reached for his wine again—bravely, foolishly, or perhaps just stubbornly. His gaze fixed on the silver bowl before him as if it held the answers to his own motive. 

[color=#d8a7b1]"No apology is necessary, Your Grace,"[/color] She reached for her own goblet at last, completing the journey she had abandoned. [color=#d8a7b1]"In my experience, court tends to reward those who are not much for it, while the ones who are entirely comfortable here, well…"[/color] A brief pause as she turned the thought over. [color=#d8a7b1]"They are usually the ones worth watching most carefully, I think."[/color]

Zahara took a sip of her wine. It was, she reflected, a somewhat pointed thing to say to a prince whose mother had publicly corrected her father not so long ago. But it was also true, and she had been raised in a house that did not waste true things. Besides, Rowan Storvane himself had said he preferred a painful truth to a liar's knife in the back. She could only hope the sentiment ran in the family.

Dorian set down his goblet. He lifted his napkin, draping it across his lap with a care that suggested someone had taught him the motion, protestations of ignorance notwithstanding.[color=#846d49]"You all look radiant in your family colors,"[/color] he said. His fork speared a piece of meat and paused just short of his mouth.[color=#846d49]"Or so I presume. I never quite mastered my lessons."[/color] A chuckle, self-deprecating but not unkind. [color=#846d49]"It would appear that I have no idea how to hold a conversation with so many beautiful women."[/color]

Zahara regarded him over the rim of her goblet. Pleasantly surprised, she found. The admission was a remarkably unguarded thing for a prince to say at his own table on the first night of a six-month courtship. Either he was artless, which seemed unlikely for a man raised by a queen who wove machinations like other women wove silk, or he was artful enough to seem artless, which was a different creature entirely. She set down her goblet after taking another sip.

[color=#d8a7b1]"Black and gold,"[/color] she offered. [color=#d8a7b1]"House Al'Seren. Though I would not hold the gap in your education against you. Our hold is considerably farther from Thornvale than most."[/color] Then, because she had never learned to leave well enough alone: [color=#d8a7b1]"And the compliment is noted, Your Grace. But I suspect you are rather better at conversation than you let on. A man who admits his own inadequacies so freely is either very honest or very strategic. Either way, it is not the mark of someone who lacks skill."[/color]

It was here that Zahara picked up her fork, and it occurred to her, not without some private amusement, that this was perhaps what she had meant when she told Raelan to be present in the parts that had nothing to do with duty. She had meant it for him, but the words had lodged somewhere in her own chest instead, and now here she was sitting beside a prince she had already decided to keep at arm's length for her sister’s sake. Strange. 

She took a bite of her food. It was excellent, genuinely excellent, and the kind of thing that deserved acknowledgment. So, when a servant passed—not the same one as before, a girl this time and younger with a nervous way of holding her pitcher—to refill the goblets nearby, Zahara caught her eye with the same inclination of her head she had offered the first.
[color=#d8a7b1]"This is exceptional,"[/color] she said, nodding toward her plate. [color=#d8a7b1]"Whoever prepared it has skill. Will you tell them a guest from the desert sends her thanks?"[/color]

The girl blinked. Perhaps she had expected a demand for more wine or a complaint about the temperature of the meat instead. Her gaze even flickered briefly toward Dorian first as if to check that the compliment was permissible before it could be received. She dipped her head. [color=#d6d6d6]"I—yes, my Lady. I will. Thank you."[/color]

Zahara smiled and let her go. As she took her leave, she lifted her goblet and took a slow sip and thought that wherever one happened to be seated, at least the evening was still what she could make of it. Valenya's invisible hand notwithstanding.[/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=#846d49]Dorian[/color] ([@Mjolnir])
Mentions: [color=#2F5E58]Raelan[/color], [color=10636f]Rhea[/color], [color=#38aac7]Junia[/color][/i][/b][/color]
[color=#d8a7b1][b]#d8a7b1[/b][/color][color=2e2c2c]...[/color]|[color=2e2c2c]...[/color][url=https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/019bdf54-4af9-77a7-b385-5133c5eb507a.webp][color=9b9b9b][b]outfit[/b][/color][/url][/sub][/center]

[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]Her gaze found him first.
That, Raelan had not expected. In truth, he had assumed he would be granted a moment, perhaps two, before [i]anyone[/i] thought to look his way. A guest of his standing, being the youngest son of the Al'Seren House, rarely commanded immediate attention, and he had learned to appreciate the small mercies of being overlooked. The freedom to observe without being observed in return. The ability to take a sip of wine without it being read as a signal. The particular ease of existing in a room without the room existing back at you.

But the princess's eyes landed on him with the calm deliberateness of someone who had already decided the order of all things long before the question ever left her mouth.

He set down his goblet. The wine inside barely rippled.

[color=#2f5e58]"The Sunderlands. It is the largest desert on the continent. Flat, mostly, except where the dunes build themselves up against the rock formations in the south."[/color] Raelan paused for a moment, preferring, as always in situations like this, to say the right thing rather than the first thing. [color=#2f5e58]"Most people imagine it as empty, I’m sure, but it is not. The oases, the trade routes, the wind patterns, everything that matters there announces itself quietly and then proves impossible to ignore once you know [i]how[/i] to look for it. The gardens there are also—"[/color] 

He stopped himself. The gardens. He had not intended to mention them. They were practically his mother's province more than his. It was also a subject that tended to produce in him a specific and slightly embarrassing softness. In past instances, it was the kind of softness that often made Saphira pinch his arm and whisper, [color=#a34261]‘[i]You're doing it again.[/i]'[/color] Furthermore, that softness had no place at a royal feast, right under the princess's unblinking stare.

He cleared his throat. 

And yet.

He should at least [i]try[/i], shouldn't he? To take his sister's advice? To offer something true before he retreated into the safety of being overlooked?

Damn. 

[color=#2f5e58]"Well, they are my mother's, mostly,"[/color] Raelan admitted, and there was something in his tone now that was almost of a self-deprecating quality, like a man attempting a read he had not fully rehearsed. [color=#2f5e58]"The gardens. She designed them herself. There is one in particular at the far edge of the eastern oasis that she planted the year I was born, and it is by far the most impractical thing in the Sunderlands, as it requires twice the water of any other garden. The soil there is also terrible, and the birds eat half the seeds before they ever take root. And every year, she swears she will let it go, and every year, she does not."[/color] A brief pause. 

[color=#2f5e58]"But it is also, I think, despite all those outward disadvantages, the most beautiful place I’ve ever known."[/color]

He said it plainly. And then, because he was apparently doing [i]this[/i] now—offering pieces of himself to a room that had done nothing to earn them—he pressed on.

[color=#2f5e58]"The landscape here is…not what I expected, I must confess."[/color] His gaze moved briefly toward the falling water before returning to the table — and, for just a moment, to the woman across from him. [color=#2f5e58]"The desert wears everything openly. Its dangers, its beauty, everything worthwhile. There is no pretense in sand. But here…"[/color] He hesitated, searching for the word. [color=#2f5e58]"Here, it seems, the same things tend to stay underneath the surface. Harder to reach, perhaps."[/color]He tilted his head to the side, a small knowing smile on his face. 

[color=#2f5e58]"But possibly worth the patience."[/color][/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=#2d5a32]Maeve[/color] ([@Mjolnir])
Mentions: [color=#a34261]Saphira[/color], [color=#d8a7b1]Zahara[/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]