Fic: Bridges Gilt in Gold, Septimus Heap
Title: Bridges Gilt in Gold
Fandom: Septimus Heap
Characters/Pairings: Jenna/Septimus, ensemble
Word Count: 1,600
Done for the " 30 ficlets for 30 fabulous women" challenge, number 19: Jenna.
Jenna is a queen of gold and lapis lazuli.
She is queen of Septimus Heap.
She is queen of the twisting paths in Wizard Way, of the badlands stretched thin like dough into the soft colors of dawn, of the Dragon Boat resting in its moor and the Wizard Tower rising like a exclamation point into the sky. She is queen of the bloodstains above Alther's heart and the little bound book of Jillie Djinn's calculations and of the Boggart and of Spit Fyre. She is queen of Etheldredda's portrait and the slumbering ghosts in moth-bitten armchairs.
Jenna does a lot of worrying for all the little things.
She's queen of them, too.
"Oh, Jenna," her mother sighs around the bobby pins that stick out of her teeth like reeds. She spits one into her palm and sticks it, hard, along Jenna's scalp. "Won't you at least listen to what they have to say?"
"I already know what they have to say," Jenna replies, lifting her hands to straighten her thin golden circlet so it sat evenly across her forehead. She keeps her voice level and sensible, to remind Sarah Heap that although she is the youngest of eight, she's old enough by now to make her own decisions. "Do you think they change material every hundred years or so? Once I have heard one, I have heard them all. All that changes are the accents. I have better things to do with my time."
Her mother spares her a sad look in the mirror. "I just don't want to see you settle. You should meet other people."
"There is nothing wrong with the people I know." Jenna lifts her chin defiantly and meets Sarah's eyes.
Sarah knows.
Jenna is late to her own coronation.
When she arrives, the ribbons are trailing loose from her dark hair and her cheeks are flushed a bright rosy red like the color of dawn as if she had ran the entire way. Somewhere, Sarah Heap makes a sound like she is in pain, and Snorri pretends to inspect the whites of her nails to hide her smile. The laces along the back of the Princess's bodice are done up improperly, as if they'd been done in a hurry by someone who didn't have a lot of experience with the complicated weaves that make up a queen's ceremonial gown.
"Where on earth have you been?" hisses Marcia, as venemous and pointed as her shoes, as Septimus hastily took the seat next to her, fifteen minutes late and sneaking in the back way.
Septimus just smiles at her with bee-stung lips, straightening his the collar of his robes and twisting the Dragon Ring on his finger: quarter-turn, half-turn, like a key in a lock.
Marcia is almost used to her Apprentice keeping secrets by now.
When a young Queen starts courting, it is a national affair. There are balls held at the Castle, and parades down the streets of Port. Gossip becomes the highest-paying job on the market, and nothing is too small a gesture, too small a token, too small to be news.
When Jenna, youngest of the seven Heaps, starts courting, the only one who knows is Marcellus Pye, who grumbles away in slow, old-fashioned speech about having the privacy of his home invaded by hot, young blood that can't leave an old alchemist in peace.
The kingdom waits with hopeful breath as the first good-will ambassadors begin to arrive with banners waving glossy in the sunlight.
Suitors line up outside her door and Sarah greets them one-by-one, a duck in a waistcoat clucking helpfully at her ankles. Inside Marcellus's tiny house, Jenna nestles into the rug next to the armchair, and lifts her laughing face to Septimus, whose eyes dance with fire light as he leans down to her.
Down in the harbor, Nicko breaks a loaf of bread, the crust thin and flaky and tasting of sea salt. It's a recipe he picked up from what he tells Sally Martin was a long journey to an incredibly old-fashioned place, where everyone wore shoes with coiled toes like smoke coming from a chimney. She laughs at him and comments to herself that she hadn't thought of Nicko as being the story-teller of the bunch.
He offers a chunk to Jenna's father, who sets his spoon down next to his saucer and accepts, his face cragged and unreadable. Nicko doesn't take it to mean he's unfriendly -- most sailors look like that. He bites into the white underbelly of dough, and gratitude flashes across his eyes, for nothing is more dear to a sailor that the sight of a long-missed land and the taste of fresh-baked bread.
"How is she?" is the first thing he asks upon swallowing. "Does she ... does she show any favorites?"
Nicko stirs his tea absent-mindedly. "If anything, she disdains them all. Jenna's always played things very close to the vest, though."
"So what you are saying is that my daughter, the queen, will surprise us?"
He hides his smile. "That's exactly it."
There were some things Septimus never forgot about growing up in the Young Army.
One was that he was used to always getting someone else's castoffs.
Septimus Heap, seventh son of a seventh son, is going to be ExtraOrdinary Wizard, come rain, shine, Dom Daniel or Simon's tantrums. Magic turned his eyes the bright green of the underside of a mossy stone, so startling as to be almost phosphorescent. He even has a dragon. And he's in love with Queen Jenna, who for the first eleven years of her life believed herself to be the youngest and strangest of the Heaps, and lived the childhood that was supposed to be Septimus's.
In the winter, Jenna wears a cloak clasped with a trinket that Nicko had given her, nestled in the space directly above her heart and warm as her own heartbeat. It's one of the things she's never parted from.
Septimus might be a wizard, but he never forgets being Boy 412, and he never forgets that anything Jenna does, she goes first to Nicko, who'd always been her closest playmate and the one most willing to teach her whatever she wanted to know.
"Have you ever wondered where this came from?" she asks him, one afternoon when he's supposed to be studying on the advanced calculations that come with the higher-level arithmacy courses. Instead, he has Jenna's fingers, curling over his own as he fumbles with the hem of his tunic. She helps him slip it up over his head, sending his riot of blonde hair crackling with static. The laughter dances in her eyes and he has an urge to kiss her, so he does: her mouth unfolds under his, familiar as rhyme.
"Hmmm?" he says, distracted by the feeling of the world tipping out from under him at the pull of Jenna's lips on his.
She keeps talking through the kiss. "I mean, us. This. We didn't just wake up --" his fingers weave into her hair, scattering a few of the pins Sarah had placed there earlier. "-- one day, thinking, 'you know what, today I'm going to fall in love with Septimus.' Even a year ago, I would have laughed if you'd told me we'd be up to this --" her fingertips trail with a butterfly touch down his chest, and he wonders, helplessly, if Nicko taught her to do that. "By now. What happened?"
He takes her face between his palms, thumbs brushing along her cheekbones and fingertips poised at her pulse, which races against him. He kisses her slowly, without hurry; she melds into him, her hips thin and sharp in the cradle of his, her back arching up into him.
"I was always worried ...." Another kiss, and this time, their fingers fumble together with the laces of her dress. "That Beetle ... everything you did was the sun and the moon to him. I was always afraid you'd break his heart and that I'd be forced to choose one of you, and I'm selfish enough to not want to give either of you up."
She blinks, her eyes so close to his that they look like one big eye. "Beetle?" she echoes, and laughs scatteringly. "No. No, I never liked Beetle like that."
"Don't tell him that. That's exactly what's going to break his heart."
A long time ago, when the Marsh snake was frozen beneath layers of ice and Aunt Zelda still liked cabbage sandwiches with nauseating regularity, a straw-haired boy went on an adventure with a purple-eyed girl and he promised himself that he'd never leave her side.
Queens and ExtraOrdinary Wizards are never supposed to see eye-to-eye on things, but Jenna is one and Septimus is the other and he isn't going to break that promise anytime soon.
It -- she -- means more to him than all the magic in the world.
"Isn't it sick?" says Merrin once, his voice a long, oily sneer, as Septimus stops Jenna just inside the palace gates on the pretense of redoing the clasp of her cloak. His fingers brush casually along the curve of her jaw and the pale lines of her throat, as accidental as grasshopper legs, and she smiles at him with eyes as soft as melted butter. "They think they're getting away with it."
Nicko doesn't even try to stop Beetle when he pounces, wrestling Merrin into the mud with no more presence of mind than a child. He merely smiles to himself, watching the Princess and the youngest of the Heap clan from underneath his multitude of tiny sailor's braids.
It doesn't matter, he thinks. It doesn't matter: Aunt Zelda, the Dragon Boat, the Marshes, Etheldredda and the Queen's Room, Psysik and Marcellus Pye, the House of Foryx -- Jenna's passions were as short-lived as the bite of a mosquito.
Whatever -- whoever -- it was, she'd grow out of it.
Fandom: Septimus Heap
Characters/Pairings: Jenna/Septimus, ensemble
Word Count: 1,600
Done for the " 30 ficlets for 30 fabulous women" challenge, number 19: Jenna.
Jenna is a queen of gold and lapis lazuli.
She is queen of Septimus Heap.
She is queen of the twisting paths in Wizard Way, of the badlands stretched thin like dough into the soft colors of dawn, of the Dragon Boat resting in its moor and the Wizard Tower rising like a exclamation point into the sky. She is queen of the bloodstains above Alther's heart and the little bound book of Jillie Djinn's calculations and of the Boggart and of Spit Fyre. She is queen of Etheldredda's portrait and the slumbering ghosts in moth-bitten armchairs.
Jenna does a lot of worrying for all the little things.
She's queen of them, too.
"Oh, Jenna," her mother sighs around the bobby pins that stick out of her teeth like reeds. She spits one into her palm and sticks it, hard, along Jenna's scalp. "Won't you at least listen to what they have to say?"
"I already know what they have to say," Jenna replies, lifting her hands to straighten her thin golden circlet so it sat evenly across her forehead. She keeps her voice level and sensible, to remind Sarah Heap that although she is the youngest of eight, she's old enough by now to make her own decisions. "Do you think they change material every hundred years or so? Once I have heard one, I have heard them all. All that changes are the accents. I have better things to do with my time."
Her mother spares her a sad look in the mirror. "I just don't want to see you settle. You should meet other people."
"There is nothing wrong with the people I know." Jenna lifts her chin defiantly and meets Sarah's eyes.
Sarah knows.
Jenna is late to her own coronation.
When she arrives, the ribbons are trailing loose from her dark hair and her cheeks are flushed a bright rosy red like the color of dawn as if she had ran the entire way. Somewhere, Sarah Heap makes a sound like she is in pain, and Snorri pretends to inspect the whites of her nails to hide her smile. The laces along the back of the Princess's bodice are done up improperly, as if they'd been done in a hurry by someone who didn't have a lot of experience with the complicated weaves that make up a queen's ceremonial gown.
"Where on earth have you been?" hisses Marcia, as venemous and pointed as her shoes, as Septimus hastily took the seat next to her, fifteen minutes late and sneaking in the back way.
Septimus just smiles at her with bee-stung lips, straightening his the collar of his robes and twisting the Dragon Ring on his finger: quarter-turn, half-turn, like a key in a lock.
Marcia is almost used to her Apprentice keeping secrets by now.
When a young Queen starts courting, it is a national affair. There are balls held at the Castle, and parades down the streets of Port. Gossip becomes the highest-paying job on the market, and nothing is too small a gesture, too small a token, too small to be news.
When Jenna, youngest of the seven Heaps, starts courting, the only one who knows is Marcellus Pye, who grumbles away in slow, old-fashioned speech about having the privacy of his home invaded by hot, young blood that can't leave an old alchemist in peace.
The kingdom waits with hopeful breath as the first good-will ambassadors begin to arrive with banners waving glossy in the sunlight.
Suitors line up outside her door and Sarah greets them one-by-one, a duck in a waistcoat clucking helpfully at her ankles. Inside Marcellus's tiny house, Jenna nestles into the rug next to the armchair, and lifts her laughing face to Septimus, whose eyes dance with fire light as he leans down to her.
Down in the harbor, Nicko breaks a loaf of bread, the crust thin and flaky and tasting of sea salt. It's a recipe he picked up from what he tells Sally Martin was a long journey to an incredibly old-fashioned place, where everyone wore shoes with coiled toes like smoke coming from a chimney. She laughs at him and comments to herself that she hadn't thought of Nicko as being the story-teller of the bunch.
He offers a chunk to Jenna's father, who sets his spoon down next to his saucer and accepts, his face cragged and unreadable. Nicko doesn't take it to mean he's unfriendly -- most sailors look like that. He bites into the white underbelly of dough, and gratitude flashes across his eyes, for nothing is more dear to a sailor that the sight of a long-missed land and the taste of fresh-baked bread.
"How is she?" is the first thing he asks upon swallowing. "Does she ... does she show any favorites?"
Nicko stirs his tea absent-mindedly. "If anything, she disdains them all. Jenna's always played things very close to the vest, though."
"So what you are saying is that my daughter, the queen, will surprise us?"
He hides his smile. "That's exactly it."
There were some things Septimus never forgot about growing up in the Young Army.
One was that he was used to always getting someone else's castoffs.
Septimus Heap, seventh son of a seventh son, is going to be ExtraOrdinary Wizard, come rain, shine, Dom Daniel or Simon's tantrums. Magic turned his eyes the bright green of the underside of a mossy stone, so startling as to be almost phosphorescent. He even has a dragon. And he's in love with Queen Jenna, who for the first eleven years of her life believed herself to be the youngest and strangest of the Heaps, and lived the childhood that was supposed to be Septimus's.
In the winter, Jenna wears a cloak clasped with a trinket that Nicko had given her, nestled in the space directly above her heart and warm as her own heartbeat. It's one of the things she's never parted from.
Septimus might be a wizard, but he never forgets being Boy 412, and he never forgets that anything Jenna does, she goes first to Nicko, who'd always been her closest playmate and the one most willing to teach her whatever she wanted to know.
"Have you ever wondered where this came from?" she asks him, one afternoon when he's supposed to be studying on the advanced calculations that come with the higher-level arithmacy courses. Instead, he has Jenna's fingers, curling over his own as he fumbles with the hem of his tunic. She helps him slip it up over his head, sending his riot of blonde hair crackling with static. The laughter dances in her eyes and he has an urge to kiss her, so he does: her mouth unfolds under his, familiar as rhyme.
"Hmmm?" he says, distracted by the feeling of the world tipping out from under him at the pull of Jenna's lips on his.
She keeps talking through the kiss. "I mean, us. This. We didn't just wake up --" his fingers weave into her hair, scattering a few of the pins Sarah had placed there earlier. "-- one day, thinking, 'you know what, today I'm going to fall in love with Septimus.' Even a year ago, I would have laughed if you'd told me we'd be up to this --" her fingertips trail with a butterfly touch down his chest, and he wonders, helplessly, if Nicko taught her to do that. "By now. What happened?"
He takes her face between his palms, thumbs brushing along her cheekbones and fingertips poised at her pulse, which races against him. He kisses her slowly, without hurry; she melds into him, her hips thin and sharp in the cradle of his, her back arching up into him.
"I was always worried ...." Another kiss, and this time, their fingers fumble together with the laces of her dress. "That Beetle ... everything you did was the sun and the moon to him. I was always afraid you'd break his heart and that I'd be forced to choose one of you, and I'm selfish enough to not want to give either of you up."
She blinks, her eyes so close to his that they look like one big eye. "Beetle?" she echoes, and laughs scatteringly. "No. No, I never liked Beetle like that."
"Don't tell him that. That's exactly what's going to break his heart."
A long time ago, when the Marsh snake was frozen beneath layers of ice and Aunt Zelda still liked cabbage sandwiches with nauseating regularity, a straw-haired boy went on an adventure with a purple-eyed girl and he promised himself that he'd never leave her side.
Queens and ExtraOrdinary Wizards are never supposed to see eye-to-eye on things, but Jenna is one and Septimus is the other and he isn't going to break that promise anytime soon.
It -- she -- means more to him than all the magic in the world.
"Isn't it sick?" says Merrin once, his voice a long, oily sneer, as Septimus stops Jenna just inside the palace gates on the pretense of redoing the clasp of her cloak. His fingers brush casually along the curve of her jaw and the pale lines of her throat, as accidental as grasshopper legs, and she smiles at him with eyes as soft as melted butter. "They think they're getting away with it."
Nicko doesn't even try to stop Beetle when he pounces, wrestling Merrin into the mud with no more presence of mind than a child. He merely smiles to himself, watching the Princess and the youngest of the Heap clan from underneath his multitude of tiny sailor's braids.
It doesn't matter, he thinks. It doesn't matter: Aunt Zelda, the Dragon Boat, the Marshes, Etheldredda and the Queen's Room, Psysik and Marcellus Pye, the House of Foryx -- Jenna's passions were as short-lived as the bite of a mosquito.
Whatever -- whoever -- it was, she'd grow out of it.