Location: Palace: Throne Room
Nuh uh. Nope. No way. Not taking this today. No siree. There had been so much bullshit today already that there was no way that he was going to be talked down to by some girl who'd only managed to be set up to become Queen in about half hour purely due to being in the right place at the right time. He was all set to punch somebody when he walked in, and the Queen-to-be was making a very inviting target of her face. There were many, many reasons that hitting her would be perhaps the worst decision of his life, most of them were quite obvious to anyone with clarity of though. Yet at that moment, none of them were factoring into his assessment of the situation. What did stop him was ingrained training at the hands of his mum and older siblings.
"Atkin! What did I tell you about hitting girls?" WHAP. Although he really, really wanted to lay into her, he managed to settle for simply tightening his fists to the point of nearly drawing blood. His Pavlovian instincts wouldn't let him do otherwise.
"Yeah, 'escort' me into that 'army' of yours so you can try to schmooze her up more? What, figured that your luck didn't turn out so good with the last Queen that you'd just keep at it with each new royal who finds herself sitting on the throne? Eventually luck's gotta go your way, right?" He wouldn't be making a friend of Puck with comments like that, but the pipsqueak wasn't the kind of person he didn't want to associate with anyways. He'd seen the type on the streets plenty of times, usually as leaders of petty gangs: well-mannered when dealing with people they wanted things from, but unmerciful and cruel with those they saw as beneath them.
"Thank you, Luna" he said, audibly grateful that somebody today wasn't being either cryptic, difficult or both.
"Princess Snaera's body is lying in the middle of the room and you're getting uppity about me usin' some crude language. Not letting people know what's going on is how people come up with crazy rumors. People already think you killed Queen Meliscente. Wouldn't be too hard for the wrong person to stumble in and think you and your witch friends killed Snaera so you could use her body parts for some weird Magykal ritual. Then go and gossip about it to their friends, who gossip to their friends and their friends."
"Next thing you know, you step out the door and there's a crowd of people yakking to each other about how before your coronation, you'd cast a spell in the throne room that would plunge the Castle into Darkness for the next 1,000 years using all the foreign delegates as sacrifices." Having been able to vent a bit of his anger at Puck, and actually receiving some answers from the younger Princess he'd managed to cool off enough to be somewhat more civil and level headed than a few minutes earlier. But he was still sore over how the bookstore goers had exaggerated everything while ignoring the reality of the situation.
"Like it or not, but we're going to be seeing each other a lot. And we're going to have to be able to work together; part of that is tellin' each other what's going on. Gotta look out for your own, after all." Then Arya came in. He figured she'd track him down sooner or later to whisk him away to the ceremony, so her arrival was just part of expectations. Her finding him this soon was a bit of a shock, however. What absolutely was not out of expectations was her chiding him over not wearing the damn Safe Charm.
"Oi, this one has nothing to do with me. Seems like I'm not the only one with people trying to off them every half hour. According to Luna, Princess Snaera thought Valda killed her pa or something and got killed trying to get revenge." He wasn't going to put it on, no matter how much he was told to. She'd have to force him to wear it, if she was that deadset on it. Most of his motivation was not wanting to communicate weakness to whoever was watching, but he was starting to build up a not insignificant amount of good old fashioned stubbornness.
Arya's face furrowed in concern, although she tried to hide it from being plainly written across her face. She looked away from her apprentice towards the body, biting down on her right thumbnail.
"I see," the ExtraOrdinary Wizard uttered upon returning her attention to Atkin.
"Yet we cannot allow this to delay the coronation. Come." That said, she turned back towards the entrance and walked away at a pace just a smidgen more quickly than it was normally.
Following behind his teacher through empty castle halls, Atkin couldn't help but notice how lifeless the place felt without servants and officials bustling through them. It reminded him of a knocked over beehive that was abandoned by its insectile workers. If stone had the ability to wilt and rot it would complete the picture. However, as they approached the site of the coronation itself, that lifelessness was replaced with a different sensation. The sound had begun as a far off thing. Less of something you heard with your ears, closer to a feeling your brain picked up. Then it grew to a buzz that was filtered through a sturdy wall. With every step it grew closer and closer. The raw sound of conversation and
people evolved from being mere noise into something of a picture, a pointillist portrait of the Castle, with the spoken word replacing paint.
It was so overwhelming that the apprentice was glad when at the last moment Arya moved into a room just a few feet away from the courtyard where the Coronation would take place. The door blocked out just enough of the noise so that thinking, let alone conversation once again became popular. It was rather plain, akin to a broom closet, yet here is where the last items for the ceremony were, namely a couple of extravagantly decorated pillows, upon which sat a ring and a circlet.
Atkin walked over to the one with the ring and picked up the little piece of jewelry. Emerald and gold, with the faces of two men where a gemstone would normally go.
"So this is it? The real thing." he asked looking up through the hole. It didn't seem all that special. Just kind of creepy, but otherwise unremarkable. Curiosity took ahold of him and he slowly began to move it to his finger, only for the ring bearing hand to be lightly slapped aside.
"Don't put that on, Atkin. That ring may only be removed in reverse. You'd have to remove your finger to take it off." Sheepishly, the apprentice apologized and returned the ring to its resting place on the pillow. Alright, game time. After the next 15 minutes, Valda would either be the new Queen of the Castle, or things would go horribly, horribly wrong. He couldn't say that his bets were on the former coming to pass. But he'd just have to bite his tongue and do his best here. Maybe this morning wasn't an indication for how the rest of the day would turn out.
He sincerely hoped so.
