[Wild Roses] Sun Queen era
Title: pirate's son; prince
'Verse/characters: Wild Roses (Sun Queen); Ulysse, Arianhrod
Prompt: 21C "redemption"
Word Count: 2024
Notes: after Phoebe offers bait, years before Ulysse and Fintain find common ground (much to Arianhrod's '...'). Really, around the timeframe of the spark an expression of complete aplomb.
---------
He had four half-brothers, two half-sisters, an uncle, and a brand new father. After a lifetime of only having his mother and a couple of cousins for certain, having so much of a family was disconcerting even without taking into account the other things.
His uncle had given him a set of keys that would let him into anything in the public spaces of a castle. The gap between his older siblings and him could be counted in centuries, not years, and nobody found that remarkable. His father's wife--the mother of two of his half-siblings--was teaching him magic, as matter-of-fact about it as his mother had been about training him to read a chart. And she was a Queen.
Like his father was a King.
And he was a prince.
If he'd felt like he'd done anything to deserve it, he'd have been congratulating himself: not bad for a pirate's son. A couple of years ago he'd barely even been that, after his mother played bet-you-can't with a whirlpool and lost. He still didn't know how the first letter found him--the second and the third had been easier--but it had, and he'd followed instructions. Brand new family, brand new name, brand new father--not that King Aifiric seemed entirely comfortable with that, but then Ulysse wasn't so sure about it himself--a new enormous foreign city and a family account that would probably buy him a ship if he felt like it, and he was still a pirate's son.
He hadn't been barefoot on a deck in months, let alone bowed to a sailmaster's roar and run up the shrouds. Instead, he was sitting, indoors and up high, in a room with big open windows latticed in brassy vine-patterns, wearing clothes that fit him much too well in colours he wasn't used to, trying to summon up a breeze on his own.
He'd been through the math twice; theoretically, he should have gotten results when he first tried. Almost an hour ago. He'd managed it yesterday, in the Queen's private study under her eye, but on his own something wasn't working. He'd picked the room first because it was oriented to catch breezes naturally, and secondly because it seemed to be empty most of the time. None of the books lining the walls were dusty, but he'd already had the surreal experience of watching some of the cleaning staff work over an area.
They could manage a breeze. He checked the math again, nearly poking holes through the thick paper with the point of his pencil, came up correct again, then growled, flicked both his hands towards the table in front of him, hard.
The papers--and the pencil--threw themselves towards the door beyond his table, spurred by what he mentally estimated as a twenty-five knot wind that didn't have an origin outside the windows. Several books joined the papers as the wind started to rise--
Someone yelped something he didn't catch since he was trying to get control of a wind he hadn't expected to raise, and he looked up from his own hands to find his half-sister Arianhrod standing in the hallway beyond the door, hands twisting and a pair of books orbiting her at chest height.
He winced as one of the books dropped to the stone tiled floor. Winced again as the other joined it, and she did a couple of dance steps that sent her palms pushing back towards him, and the windows behind him. Something snapped; if it'd been outside of his chest he'd have described it as a outhaul line snapping under strain. It still might as well be, only instead of a boom heading for his head it was his sibling.
Of course it had to be her; the only ones worse would have been either of her parents, or their uncle. The Queen for the sheer embarrassment of messing up so badly, the King and his brother for throwing a multi-knot wind and a few books at their heads. He almost dropped his face in his hands and groaned, but suppressed the urge, standing to go apologise instead.
She'd gathered up the books without bending down for them by the time he got to the door, and tiny whirlwinds were chasing the papers into a loose pile. In other circumstances he'd have admired her control; as it was, it just emphasized his own lack. The pencil was actually embedded point first in the wood of the door framing, he saw.
"I am so sorry--" he started, but broke off when she gave him a look she had to have learned from her mother.
She hovered her hand, palm-down, over the pile of papers, and they obediently rose to her hip height, where they joined the books, and she looked up at him, eyes narrowed in a way that on her mother would have told him she was thinking about something. He wasn't sure what it meant on her. He'd met her much the way he'd met the twins: in passing, like patrol boats flying neutral flags.
"Was that aimed?" she asked, and he mentally threw the bit of himself that was wondering if she'd been running up a fighting flag for this overboard. Shook his head.
"Was that intentional?" she continued, stepping forward into the room. From this close he could see that her long red hair was coiled up and anchored to the back of her head in a no-nonsense way with green-headed golden pins, and the dress that had looked plain brown from a distance was actually woven to imitate a cliff-face of variegated brown and red stone, embellished along her neckline with tiny golden stars. Even the stars were echoed by the earrings she was wearing, tiny pierced tinkling metal strung on small oval hoops.
Intellectually, he could recognise that he probably dressed as well as she did, and that she was hardly wearing the elaborate layers of a formal dress. He could even mentally figure that she was right handed by the fact that she had two piercings in her left ear. But he felt every inch a pirate's son, confronted with a ruling princess.
She didn't even have a hair out of place, which was more than he could say of himself. He still needed to find someone down on the docks who didn't know his name and face yet to give him a haircut, and the wind had ruffled his hair into what felt like a halo around his head.
"Not . . really?" he replied, then gave up and took the two steps to the side that let him reach up and yank his pencil back out of the doorframe. It left its point behind in the wood, and he scowled at the mess, then flipped it absently through his fingers a couple of times. "I'd been trying to get a breeze," he added, "but it wasn't working, I got frustrated, and then--"
"Voila, attack thesaurus?" she offered, and he blinked down at her.
"Breathe, Ulysse," she commanded, mouth quirking up into a conspiratorial smile. "My baby brother threw a fireball at me more than one morning. You're not even in the running yet."
" . . A fireball?"
"Oui," she said absently as she was sending the books back to where they'd been ripped off their shelves. "I think he was actually aiming for Mamán the first time, but it was me who had the joy of catching it. May I?" she asked, indicating the table and the papers she'd returned to it. He blinked; he'd gotten distracted watching the paths of the books, instead of seeing the whole room.
Then he moved to pull the other chair at the table out for her, which she let him do. As she sat down, he was reminded again that she was a mage, not just a princess, when she adjusted her seat minutely without ever scraping the chair over the floor.
She hadn't even particularly been paying attention to the adjustment, focused on glancing over his notes. After a moment, she nodded. "Your math's right--which I'm sure you know," she added, just impishly enough he didn't bristle as he sat down again opposite her. His chair creaked doing it.
"Which leaves either getting the physical gesture wrong--" she began, sketching in the air with her fingertips.
"I don't think that's it," he interrupted, demonstrating the motion he'd been taught and practiced, and she nodded again.
"In which case, you're probably overthinking it."
He stared. After a second, when she didn't expand her thought, he said "What?"
She raised her hand quickly to hide her mouth, bit her lip, then lowered her hand again. "Well, if you're focusing very hard on the form of a spell, the underlying math and the structure of it, it's hard to remember what you're doing. Which is calling up a breeze--" she flicked her index finger gently towards him, and an ash-scented tiny whirlwind crossed the table between them, dissipating as it brushed the rope scar in the webbing of his right thumb. "Much of a spell is intent," she told him, "Mattieu has a terrible habit of doing spells that are really nothing but intent, and the details and framework can go dangle in the breeze for all he cares." She pulled an eloquent face that all but shouted her opinion of that practice. "But if you've gotten bogged down in the details and the framework--"
"It's not really a surprise that I accidentally called up a wind that wasn't what I was trying to do."
She nodded.
"Huh," he said, thoughtfully, then flicked his index finger at her in a deliberate imitation of her gesture.
The scent of drying salty seaweed filled the room, and the papers between them ruffled gently.
He couldn't help grinning at her, and she grinned back.
---
Almost three months later, having finally gotten his hair cut--and made a few connections in the process--he'd gotten a line on a boat that didn't involve uncle Iarlaith raising his eyebrows in a rather pointed way. There was something immensely pleasurable about taking a two-man ship out, even on fresh water, and the feeling wasn't lessened by the fact that he no longer needed a second pair of hands to work the lines.
The Queen had been right; magic was worth learning. Her daughter'd been right, too, though--intent counted.
Which was what brought him up the stairs in search of his sister, on a lovely summer morning, in weather that he didn't even need to summon himself a breeze in order to take a boat out on the river.
He found her lazing in one of the smaller studies off the library, not by calling her name but by tracing the echoes of her presence--another new trick, and one that he hadn't been taught--and leaned his shoulder against the edge of the doorway. "Hey, Arianhrod?"
"Mm?" she replied around the rim of a mug of tea. Unless he missed his guess she'd borrowed the cup from her mother, and the possessive way she was cradling it in her palms implied she wasn't planning to return it.
He didn't blame her. Her majesty had really nice mugs, and many of them. "I was wondering if you'd come sailing with me today."
She blinked at him. Blinked again, and he slouched further, faking an easy nonchalance he didn't really feel, smiling at her.
"I don't do water," she said, slowly, like she suspected he might have been hit on the head with something.
"That's okay," he replied, felt his smile grow a little as he watched her notice the colloquialism, "I do."
"Ulysse," she started, then bit her lip for a second, visibly altering her tone. "I really don't do water."
He thought about that. Thought about trying to guilt-trip her by telling her the half-truth that he didn't really have anyone else to ask--he certainly wasn't going to ask her mother--then mentally shrugged. Just said "Please?", as neutrally as he could.
She mock-scowled up at him. "If you tip me into the water I reserve the right to light your Winter-kissed boat on fire."
He grinned. "Okay."
'Verse/characters: Wild Roses (Sun Queen); Ulysse, Arianhrod
Prompt: 21C "redemption"
Word Count: 2024
Notes: after Phoebe offers bait, years before Ulysse and Fintain find common ground (much to Arianhrod's '...'). Really, around the timeframe of the spark an expression of complete aplomb.
---------
He had four half-brothers, two half-sisters, an uncle, and a brand new father. After a lifetime of only having his mother and a couple of cousins for certain, having so much of a family was disconcerting even without taking into account the other things.
His uncle had given him a set of keys that would let him into anything in the public spaces of a castle. The gap between his older siblings and him could be counted in centuries, not years, and nobody found that remarkable. His father's wife--the mother of two of his half-siblings--was teaching him magic, as matter-of-fact about it as his mother had been about training him to read a chart. And she was a Queen.
Like his father was a King.
And he was a prince.
If he'd felt like he'd done anything to deserve it, he'd have been congratulating himself: not bad for a pirate's son. A couple of years ago he'd barely even been that, after his mother played bet-you-can't with a whirlpool and lost. He still didn't know how the first letter found him--the second and the third had been easier--but it had, and he'd followed instructions. Brand new family, brand new name, brand new father--not that King Aifiric seemed entirely comfortable with that, but then Ulysse wasn't so sure about it himself--a new enormous foreign city and a family account that would probably buy him a ship if he felt like it, and he was still a pirate's son.
He hadn't been barefoot on a deck in months, let alone bowed to a sailmaster's roar and run up the shrouds. Instead, he was sitting, indoors and up high, in a room with big open windows latticed in brassy vine-patterns, wearing clothes that fit him much too well in colours he wasn't used to, trying to summon up a breeze on his own.
He'd been through the math twice; theoretically, he should have gotten results when he first tried. Almost an hour ago. He'd managed it yesterday, in the Queen's private study under her eye, but on his own something wasn't working. He'd picked the room first because it was oriented to catch breezes naturally, and secondly because it seemed to be empty most of the time. None of the books lining the walls were dusty, but he'd already had the surreal experience of watching some of the cleaning staff work over an area.
They could manage a breeze. He checked the math again, nearly poking holes through the thick paper with the point of his pencil, came up correct again, then growled, flicked both his hands towards the table in front of him, hard.
The papers--and the pencil--threw themselves towards the door beyond his table, spurred by what he mentally estimated as a twenty-five knot wind that didn't have an origin outside the windows. Several books joined the papers as the wind started to rise--
Someone yelped something he didn't catch since he was trying to get control of a wind he hadn't expected to raise, and he looked up from his own hands to find his half-sister Arianhrod standing in the hallway beyond the door, hands twisting and a pair of books orbiting her at chest height.
He winced as one of the books dropped to the stone tiled floor. Winced again as the other joined it, and she did a couple of dance steps that sent her palms pushing back towards him, and the windows behind him. Something snapped; if it'd been outside of his chest he'd have described it as a outhaul line snapping under strain. It still might as well be, only instead of a boom heading for his head it was his sibling.
Of course it had to be her; the only ones worse would have been either of her parents, or their uncle. The Queen for the sheer embarrassment of messing up so badly, the King and his brother for throwing a multi-knot wind and a few books at their heads. He almost dropped his face in his hands and groaned, but suppressed the urge, standing to go apologise instead.
She'd gathered up the books without bending down for them by the time he got to the door, and tiny whirlwinds were chasing the papers into a loose pile. In other circumstances he'd have admired her control; as it was, it just emphasized his own lack. The pencil was actually embedded point first in the wood of the door framing, he saw.
"I am so sorry--" he started, but broke off when she gave him a look she had to have learned from her mother.
She hovered her hand, palm-down, over the pile of papers, and they obediently rose to her hip height, where they joined the books, and she looked up at him, eyes narrowed in a way that on her mother would have told him she was thinking about something. He wasn't sure what it meant on her. He'd met her much the way he'd met the twins: in passing, like patrol boats flying neutral flags.
"Was that aimed?" she asked, and he mentally threw the bit of himself that was wondering if she'd been running up a fighting flag for this overboard. Shook his head.
"Was that intentional?" she continued, stepping forward into the room. From this close he could see that her long red hair was coiled up and anchored to the back of her head in a no-nonsense way with green-headed golden pins, and the dress that had looked plain brown from a distance was actually woven to imitate a cliff-face of variegated brown and red stone, embellished along her neckline with tiny golden stars. Even the stars were echoed by the earrings she was wearing, tiny pierced tinkling metal strung on small oval hoops.
Intellectually, he could recognise that he probably dressed as well as she did, and that she was hardly wearing the elaborate layers of a formal dress. He could even mentally figure that she was right handed by the fact that she had two piercings in her left ear. But he felt every inch a pirate's son, confronted with a ruling princess.
She didn't even have a hair out of place, which was more than he could say of himself. He still needed to find someone down on the docks who didn't know his name and face yet to give him a haircut, and the wind had ruffled his hair into what felt like a halo around his head.
"Not . . really?" he replied, then gave up and took the two steps to the side that let him reach up and yank his pencil back out of the doorframe. It left its point behind in the wood, and he scowled at the mess, then flipped it absently through his fingers a couple of times. "I'd been trying to get a breeze," he added, "but it wasn't working, I got frustrated, and then--"
"Voila, attack thesaurus?" she offered, and he blinked down at her.
"Breathe, Ulysse," she commanded, mouth quirking up into a conspiratorial smile. "My baby brother threw a fireball at me more than one morning. You're not even in the running yet."
" . . A fireball?"
"Oui," she said absently as she was sending the books back to where they'd been ripped off their shelves. "I think he was actually aiming for Mamán the first time, but it was me who had the joy of catching it. May I?" she asked, indicating the table and the papers she'd returned to it. He blinked; he'd gotten distracted watching the paths of the books, instead of seeing the whole room.
Then he moved to pull the other chair at the table out for her, which she let him do. As she sat down, he was reminded again that she was a mage, not just a princess, when she adjusted her seat minutely without ever scraping the chair over the floor.
She hadn't even particularly been paying attention to the adjustment, focused on glancing over his notes. After a moment, she nodded. "Your math's right--which I'm sure you know," she added, just impishly enough he didn't bristle as he sat down again opposite her. His chair creaked doing it.
"Which leaves either getting the physical gesture wrong--" she began, sketching in the air with her fingertips.
"I don't think that's it," he interrupted, demonstrating the motion he'd been taught and practiced, and she nodded again.
"In which case, you're probably overthinking it."
He stared. After a second, when she didn't expand her thought, he said "What?"
She raised her hand quickly to hide her mouth, bit her lip, then lowered her hand again. "Well, if you're focusing very hard on the form of a spell, the underlying math and the structure of it, it's hard to remember what you're doing. Which is calling up a breeze--" she flicked her index finger gently towards him, and an ash-scented tiny whirlwind crossed the table between them, dissipating as it brushed the rope scar in the webbing of his right thumb. "Much of a spell is intent," she told him, "Mattieu has a terrible habit of doing spells that are really nothing but intent, and the details and framework can go dangle in the breeze for all he cares." She pulled an eloquent face that all but shouted her opinion of that practice. "But if you've gotten bogged down in the details and the framework--"
"It's not really a surprise that I accidentally called up a wind that wasn't what I was trying to do."
She nodded.
"Huh," he said, thoughtfully, then flicked his index finger at her in a deliberate imitation of her gesture.
The scent of drying salty seaweed filled the room, and the papers between them ruffled gently.
He couldn't help grinning at her, and she grinned back.
---
Almost three months later, having finally gotten his hair cut--and made a few connections in the process--he'd gotten a line on a boat that didn't involve uncle Iarlaith raising his eyebrows in a rather pointed way. There was something immensely pleasurable about taking a two-man ship out, even on fresh water, and the feeling wasn't lessened by the fact that he no longer needed a second pair of hands to work the lines.
The Queen had been right; magic was worth learning. Her daughter'd been right, too, though--intent counted.
Which was what brought him up the stairs in search of his sister, on a lovely summer morning, in weather that he didn't even need to summon himself a breeze in order to take a boat out on the river.
He found her lazing in one of the smaller studies off the library, not by calling her name but by tracing the echoes of her presence--another new trick, and one that he hadn't been taught--and leaned his shoulder against the edge of the doorway. "Hey, Arianhrod?"
"Mm?" she replied around the rim of a mug of tea. Unless he missed his guess she'd borrowed the cup from her mother, and the possessive way she was cradling it in her palms implied she wasn't planning to return it.
He didn't blame her. Her majesty had really nice mugs, and many of them. "I was wondering if you'd come sailing with me today."
She blinked at him. Blinked again, and he slouched further, faking an easy nonchalance he didn't really feel, smiling at her.
"I don't do water," she said, slowly, like she suspected he might have been hit on the head with something.
"That's okay," he replied, felt his smile grow a little as he watched her notice the colloquialism, "I do."
"Ulysse," she started, then bit her lip for a second, visibly altering her tone. "I really don't do water."
He thought about that. Thought about trying to guilt-trip her by telling her the half-truth that he didn't really have anyone else to ask--he certainly wasn't going to ask her mother--then mentally shrugged. Just said "Please?", as neutrally as he could.
She mock-scowled up at him. "If you tip me into the water I reserve the right to light your Winter-kissed boat on fire."
He grinned. "Okay."