FSW Chapter 5

Red

She couldn't be certain—his eyes had dropped the moment theirs met—but she was probably right.

Nishina pursued those misdirected eyes with dogged persistence, ducking and tilting her head to match whichever angle he chose. She even bent at the waist to catch his gaze head-on. When their eyes connected a second time, he flinched visibly and turned his head away.

All this evasion was starting to make her stubborn.

There were very few people who could hold a conversation with someone of imperial blood and meet their eyes doing it, but this had nothing to do with rank. This man would be exactly the same way in front of anyone else; she was certain of it.

Beyond that, Nishina had no particular interest in learning from the top of her instructor's head. Proper communication and teaching were supposed to happen eye to eye.

Dissatisfied, she moved to match whatever direction he'd turned and met his gaze again. When his startled eyes darted to the opposite side, she followed and held them there. She repeated this several times. He seemed to have understood at last that there was no escaping her, because he stopped turning his head altogether. Instead he simply closed his eyes.

Nishina swallowed the sigh that threatened to escape and finally opened her mouth.

"Could you speak to me with your eyes open? I'd appreciate it."

"...It would not be uncomfortable for you?"

Concern ran underneath the quiet voice. It was obvious enough without asking why he would worry about something as ordinary as making eye contact. He'd been told his eyes were a curse on others—told it long enough and often enough that keeping them permanently cast down had become reflex.

The color of an iris was just pigment. Not a commonly accepted truth within the empire, but anyone with any training in physiology would know it. And yet no one had said it to him.

To be persecuted simply because the color of one's iris was unusual was unjust. A rare color—one that happened also to be beautiful—ought to be praised, not condemned.

"Uncomfortable? They look just like camellia flowers. They're beautiful."

The saturated red against the neutral of his silver hair was genuinely lovely. Sometimes she wondered, seriously, if "the color of a demon" was just what people said when confronted with something too beautiful to account for in any other way.

"I nearly said it aloud the first time I saw you."

She paused.

"You might have heard."

When she said it with a smile, his head finally came up. As if he'd forgotten himself entirely, he met her eyes in a daze. Nishina held those wavering red irises and didn't look away. They reminded her of the camellia she kept in her rooms—the way it moved in the wind—and something light and pleased settled in her chest.

Under her unhurried but relentless gaze, he eventually dropped his eyes again. This time, though, what pressed his head down wasn't habitual resignation. It was something else. Something more like being caught.

His lips pressed shut. He turned away sharply.

"...Allow me to demonstrate first."

You didn't need a demonstration for running. Through the bright strands of his hair, she caught a glimpse of what might have been the flush of his ears.

Nishina smiled to herself and followed him at an easy pace.

Red suited him remarkably well, all things considered.

Gravity was supposed to be proportional to mass. Apparently it had decided to make an exception.

Nishina collapsed onto her bed with the full weight of someone who had personally offended the laws of physics. Her whole body was caked in soil and sweat, and she couldn't have been persuaded to move for any amount of money. If she lay down without washing, Joy would scold her. She knew this. She buried her face in the sheets anyway, and Joy launched into her complaints, as if she'd been waiting for exactly this. 

"Your Highness! You have to wash before you lie down! Doesn't it bother you?"

"Joy. Ah—just a moment, just one moment. The ground is pulling at me with ten times its usual strength. If I stand up I may be flattened entirely."

"Was training really that difficult?"

"...I thought I was going to die."

She had walked to the training ground feeling pleasantly composed. The moment she completed the first lap of the yard, she understood the situation. Ten laps was absolutely, physically impossible.

She had tried not to disappoint him on the first day. She truly had. Two laps was her absolute ceiling. He'd noticed her nearly expiring behind him, turned back in alarm, and cancelled the session immediately—but by then, Nishina's body had already made its opinion on the whole affair quite clear.

Even now she could almost hear it registering its protest.

"A soak should help. Come on, up."

"All right, all right..."

She crawled toward the bathroom rather than walked. She peeled off the clothes stuck unpleasantly to her skin and sank into the prepared bath. There were dried rose petals floating in it. She lacked the energy to appreciate them.

A low, involuntary sound escaped her as the warmth closed over her body. She could feel the accumulated weight of the afternoon dissolving—slowly, the way ice cream gives way in heat. The muscles were still rigid with shock; she would certainly be sore by morning. She worked at her calf with fingers that had no strength left in them and gave up almost immediately.

"Joy, could you raise the temperature a little?"

"Won't it be too hot?"

"Please."

Joy poured in the warmer water. The heat did what her hands couldn't—worked at the tightness in slow, steady degrees.

She'd been leaning there for some time when the pale skin of her arms began to flush faintly red. She stared at it, blank-minded.

Come to think of it—and she almost laughed at herself for only thinking of it now—hadn't she been paying attention to the wrong details for years? She'd had the novel, and she'd been reading the novel for the plot. A figure like winter. Cold eyes, hard mouth. All of that had been there in the text.

What the text had not described was eyes that went round with genuine surprise. Ears that colored.

A madeleine accepted without refusal.

'I might actually be able to earn some sympathy eventually,' she thought. 'Though the odds of him apologizing while he kills me are still about a hundred times higher.' Regardless.

Tomorrow she would ask the kitchen to make almond cookies. She didn't know how much good it would do. But "there are no bad people among those who give you food" was going to be her operating principle, and a diligent and excellent student besides—if she could get this wretched body to cooperate.

She yawned until her jaw ached.

Her mind was too soft with fatigue to build any more specific plans. She let Joy's careful hands take over, and knew, with more certainty than anything else, that tonight she would sleep very well.

'I should have asked Joy to arrange a massage. The warm water and good intentions have clearly accomplished nothing.'

She swallowed the sound her body wanted to make and staggered forward like a newborn foal. Was this what the Little Mermaid had felt, walking on legs that had replaced her tail? The scale of the suffering seemed comparable. Only the location differed.

Where the Little Mermaid had felt her feet splitting with every step, Nishina was dealing with her entire lower half. A sound of distress escaped her with each footfall. The imperial physician had suggested she keep moving—that it would resolve the soreness faster—which was why she'd refused Sir Hilton's offered arm. He hovered anxiously, unable to quite watch but unable to look away, while she made her unsteady progress down the corridor.

Carlos—the Imperial Studies tutor, who was exacting about most things and implacable about one—hated tardiness above all else.

'He already thinks poorly of me. I don't need to make it worse.'

She arrived at the private study one minute before the hour and pushed the door open.

Safely on time.

She sat down feeling vindicated. Carlos did not look vindicated. If anything, the upward tilt of his eyes had grown more severe, and his words came out sharper for it.

"How unusual of you to arrive on time."

"Oh—if I could have come a little later, I might have done. I went for my first proper exercise yesterday, and I'm afraid I'm rather—"

"Your Highness!"

"I'm joking. Joking."

She wasn't, in the slightest, but she retracted it for the sake of Carlos, who had gone through several shades of pink and red in rapid succession. He straightened with a small, pained throat-clear and flipped open his book.

"Today we will continue the lesson on statecraft that we did not finish last time."

"Ah..."

She'd known it was coming. She still wished it hadn't.

Of all the texts Carlos taught, this was the one she liked least. Her brow scrunched before she could stop it. He noticed and proceeded anyway.

"A ruler need not adhere to what others consider virtuous. A strong state requires a strong ruler, and a strong ruler must sometimes act against benevolence in order to assert authority."

"...Surely benevolence is among the qualities a great ruler ought to have."

"What is required is not benevolence—but the appearance of benevolence. What a ruler truly needs is not mercy or fairness or restraint. It is calculation. It is practical sense."

Her mouth closed.

She had never been under any illusion about what those in power were. But every time calculation was held up to her as a lesson, she was reminded of it again: she was genuinely unsuited for this position.

She was not someone who could withhold forgiveness. She was not someone who could resist sympathy. She had understood too readily, for as long as she could remember—felt other people's pain land in her before she could raise any defense against it. The moment she understood, she had already forgiven.

That was why, knowing what she knew—knowing the future he would authorize, the order he would give—she could not find it in her to hate Aiden. She understood his wounds. Even if he despised her, took everything from her, and in the end gave the order for her death: she could not resent him.

And him as well. The silver-haired apprentice knight—the hunter. Had she not read the novel, she might have been clever about it, strategic. But she had read it. She knew the shape of his suffering, better than most. She could only feel for him.

Even if it was his hands that would eventually close around her.

Someone who wished happiness for both the man who would command her death and the man who would carry it out could not, in all honesty, be material for a ruler.

Paradoxically, the more she learned how to become one, the more clearly she understood that she never could.

"Your Highness, I really do think for today—"

"No."

"But—"

"I'm going to training. Stop following me."

She said it firmly and pressed her hands into Sir Hilton's back, pushing him away until he retreated to a worried distance and turned—reluctantly, with one more look back—in the other direction.

When he'd disappeared from sight, she started walking.

The training ground was where she needed to be. She couldn't have trained even under normal circumstances—never mind the state her body was in—but she couldn't skip. She could only meet with him for one hour each afternoon, and a day of friendship could not simply be discarded. Worse, if she showed up on the second meeting having missed the first, she might come across as indolent. Someone who'd enrolled on a whim and already wasn't committed.

She was slower than usual, and she arrived late—but she arrived. She spotted the silver head across the training ground and made her way over quickly.