I LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE.
Mosca looks at the Queen (with whom Clent has gained an audience, to his delight; and he only took her along after many cautions that she should behave, none of which she paid any attention to) with pepper-black eyes, as even as though they're equals; but it's only when the Queen laughs and takes an old pipe out of her gown that Mosca warms to her.
~~~
"All I'm saying," the young man said, and the leer on his face was nothing short of a threat, "I'm saying is if you serve piss instead of beer, someone should take you outside and let you know what it tastes like."
~~~
"I'm not cynical at all, really I know nothing about cynicism," Bossuet smiles, deflecting Feuilly's attempts to understand him with a kiss.
~~~
In the sea of warm bedclothes they struggle as if to stave off drowning, and finally Courfeyrac throws everything aside, leaving only their two selves; Mordred catches his breath at the cool air that washes over them, and at Courfeyrac's loving hand on his scars.
~~~
She dances like all the trees in the forest, only one of which belongs to her; they'll never find her, and never find her tree, and she dances with joy, for her secret is more powerful than a forest of Kings.
~~~
The boy visited as part of a foreign King's retinue; he was dressed in mourning and kept trying to hold his father's hand, while his father shook him away and murmured admonitions. Mordred, fresh out of the safe seclusion of Orkney, noticed and tried not to notice. They seemed to mirror one another for this invisible reason, both lost of a dear thing, both trying to find something else to grasp instead.
~~~
"Don't move," Tamarind says, as soft as white powder in a bowl, as she brushes white paint on the red lips of the girl who washed down the river to her.
~~~
When Gawain turns twenty, their mother insists on a vast banquet--Gaheris holds to the edge of the room, clutching his cup of wine, shaking every time the firelight draws his eyes again to Mordred, laughing among a crowd, more bright than the gold in Gawain's crown.
~~~
Their dreams both fade (his of Zara and her bright anger)(hers of Theo before the sickness took his laugh) and when she comes back to Marianstat smelling of Sweet William and the road's dust, his heart surges with tired joy.
~~~
The first time Percy got hold of a pewter spoon he demonstrated to Galahad how it could be hung from the end of his nose, and Galahad wondered, for a brief thoughtless moment, why no one had ever showed him anything like that in the convent.
~~~
As the waggon makes it slow way towards the gate where the soldiers wait to check their papers, Theo looks over at Zara, his once-clear face now a crinkle of frowns and battles, and whispers, "Why didn't Florian come with you?" Her eyes flash as she kisses him like a husband.