FSW Chapter 6

Failure

"Sir Russell."

"I present myself to Your Highness."

"I'm sorry for being late. Walking was a little—that is, my lesson ran over. Were you waiting long?"

"Not at all."

He shook his head, and his eyes were still downward—but Nishina had already noticed the difference. He was making an effort. He hadn't folded himself into the rigid low bow of their first meeting. And when he answered her, brief as it was, he met her eyes.

His small effort was genuinely lovely to see. It was enough to lighten her mood in a single stroke—the stress from Carlos's lesson, the persistent ache in her legs, both of them reduced just slightly.

Only in mood, of course. The legs remained what they were.

"I'm glad."

"...We will begin with stretching."

He looked away quickly when she smiled, and Lavis Russell moved to begin the leg stretches. She watched him extend one leg and pull the toe upward, then mirrored him—and mirrored him with perhaps more commitment than her current condition justified.

"Ah!"

She had meant to go through the motions. That had clearly been the wiser plan.

She clapped a hand over her mouth, but the sound had already escaped. She found herself looking directly into wide red eyes. He was staring at her, startled.

'He'll be disappointed if he figures out I have no stamina. The whole plan falls apart.'

She rolled her shoulders as if nothing had happened and continued the stretch. Each movement felt like a small negotiation with muscles that did not want to participate, but she summoned an extraordinary amount of willpower and made it through to the end.

The problem was that now the stretching was over.

She hadn't even begun and she was already spent. She was keeping up appearances—but her legs were shaking badly enough to be obvious. He noticed.

"Your Highness. Are you all right?"

"What? Of course. What would I have to be not all right about?"

His flat eyes rested on her trembling legs. The moment she felt the weight of his gaze there, she locked her knees and held on with everything she had. It didn't help. He was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke, his face contained not even a scrap of confidence in her answer.

"...Then today—ten laps. No—two laps. One lap."

"...Yes."

She couldn't bring herself to say "let's try for two again." Her body was simply not in a position to survive that particular kind of optimism.

'I can hear the second plan crumbling into dust, but I'll assume that's just my imagination.'

She followed his turned back at a careful jog. And regretted it immediately. She should have simply let herself seem lazy. Whatever impression that would have made—it had to be better than this. She could see the gap between them widening despite his deliberately reduced pace, and she pushed herself through it until the ground rose to meet her with a rather loud thud.

He was at her side before she'd finished registering what had happened.

"Are you all right?"

She nodded, vigorously and without any truth behind it. Her knee was scraped and her eyes were stinging—but the embarrassment was roughly twice the size of the pain. He retrieved her shoe, which had slid off somewhere in the fall, and crouched down beside her.

The shoe she was now looking at—held in his hands and obviously a disaster—made the embarrassment triple.

"We'll need to fit you with proper shoes," he said, matter-of-factly, looking at what was unmistakably not running footwear.

She had no running footwear. It had simply never come up. These shoes weren't high-heeled, exactly, but they weren't soldier's boots either.

He knocked the soil off them and set to fitting the shoe back onto her foot. With the extreme care of someone handling something made of fine glasswork.

His care, however, could not protect her foot from itself. The skin was a mess from the rubbing—scraped in several places—and when his fingers made contact with it, she couldn't entirely suppress the sound.

"Ngh."

"Ah—forgive me."

His hands pulled back as though burned. They hovered, uncertain, and then landed quietly at his sides. To any observer, the picture would have looked completely backwards—he hadn't hurt her; he was not the one who needed to apologize. She forced a smile.

"I'm fine!"

She attempted to demonstrate by putting weight on the foot. This also failed. Whether from a cramp or simply exhausted muscle, she couldn't put any strength into her legs at all. 

His expression darkened by one degree.

You really do manage every kind of disaster, she thought. 

"Your Highness. Allow me a moment."

He had resolved on something. The hesitation left his face, and his hands found her leg—carefully, with full professional seriousness.

"Forgive the imposition."

"Ugh —!"

It was not a gentle treatment. His hands were not gentle. Every press—repeated, deliberate—drew something involuntary from her spine. She nearly resented him for a moment. But his hands were paying such precise attention to what they were doing—she couldn't make herself pull away.

The effect was immediate and real. The pain unwound faster than she would have thought possible. When it was gone and left only the ordinary soreness beneath, she became aware of the embarrassment returning in full force.

She had been late. She had collapsed during stretches. She had fallen. She had then made things complicated for him. All in one afternoon.

'I'm not going to earn sympathy at this rate. I'm going to earn something worse.'

She imagined him sharpening a blade with genuine goodwill toward the task and shook her head.

She still had the almond cookies in her pocket. She drew her leg back carefully and got upright.

"That's much better. Thank you."

"Not at all."

"Shall we try the lap again?"

Looking at the remaining distance, she swallowed a slow, quiet breath.

Honestly, with this foot, she might not make it back to the palace at all.

"No. I think we should stop for today."

"...You think so?"

She agreed too easily, but the image wasn't going to get any worse than it already was. There was no point being heroic about a quarter of a lap.

"Then let's end here for today?"

She asked it somewhat sheepishly. He didn't answer immediately. Something was being considered; his eyes had settled on her foot and stayed there.

"Sir Russell?"

"Your Highness. Would you permit me one further imposition?"

"What? Oh—wait—"

The answer came as her feet left the ground. The fact of being lifted was startling enough. The manner of it was more so. She was being carried like—well, like a princess, which she was, but Hilton had done this before and this felt different somehow. Her mind helpfully offered the detail that in the novel, he had been one year older than Aiden—which made him one year older than her. A fifteen-year-old boy. His height was no more than the width of a finger above her own. And here she was, being carried by him. 

She grabbed at the fabric of his sleeve. And then, once she'd established he was not going to drop her, made herself let go of it.

"You don't—I can walk, really—"

"Can you walk, Your Highness?"

He asked it with complete reasonableness. The honest answer was no. She had been planning to send him ahead and wait for Hilton to come looking for her eventually.

"Not exactly, but—"

"If you will permit me, I'll see you back to the palace."

His consideration was genuine. She was aware of it and simultaneously worried about it. Was this the kind of care that attracted a dead flag? She considered whether she could bleed her way back step by step if it would help, and her hand found the edge of her pocket.

The rustle of a paper bag.

"Then—please," she said, in a voice just barely above a murmur.

A way to reduce one's body weight in real time—not over days or weeks, but in seconds. Could that exist?

She was, she was aware, occupying herself with a thoroughly useless concern as she was carried back toward the palace. If she couldn't reduce the weight, perhaps she could distribute it differently. She considered looping her arms around his neck and immediately abandoned the idea.

Even setting aside the strangeness of it, any shift on her part would only make things harder for him. She locked herself into stillness and let her eyes move cautiously around them instead. The palace entrance was not yet in sight. This was, she reflected, entirely the fault of the imperial grounds being aggressively large.

'At least five more minutes. Should I ask to be put down now?'

With every step, guilt compounded. She studied him with careful sideways attention. No sign of strain. The same quiet, absent expression. Though 'no sign of strain' in someone this composed might not mean much.

"Excuse me."

She said it quietly, and the gaze that had been fixed forward angled down toward her.

This close—actually this close, two hand-spans at most—she realized she'd never properly looked at his face.

His eyes were so striking that she had never gotten around to the rest of it. But this angle, at this distance, with the light falling the way it was—his features were genuinely exceptional. The novel had called his appearance beautiful, in a general way, and she had taken that at face value and moved on. The novel really could have been more specific.

He wasn't sharp-featured yet—fifteen, still some of the softness of youth remaining—but there wasn't a single element that wasn't in its right place. His eyelashes in particular, the same color as his hair, were the loveliest thing about him. Every time he blinked, it was like watching a white butterfly settle onto a petal.

She stared. Knowing it was impolite and staring anyway, until his eyelids gave a small tremor under the attention.

"...Your Highness?"

"Oh—I'm sorry. It's just that Sir Russell is so very—"

His arm gave a single involuntary flinch.

She tensed instinctively, bracing—but he didn't drop her. He fixed his gaze rigidly on some point ahead and kept walking in absolute silence.

It wasn't the response she'd been looking for, exactly. She hadn't been seeking a response, really. But that didn't mean she'd said something so unremarkable as to deserve complete silence.

What she did not see, because she had let her attention drift down in mild dejection: the deep, thorough crimson of his ears.

She pulled the cookie bag from her pocket. Unwrapped it herself, carefully, with one hand. And held it out toward him.

"Would you like one?"

Carrying me is tiring = energy is needed = cookies contain sugar = therefore cookies are medically indicated. A perfectly sound chain of reasoning.

He had stopped walking. He wasn't accepting. He wasn't refusing. He was making a third, unclear expression.

She tilted her head—and slipped the cookie into the small gap his lips had made.

He closed his mouth. And then didn't move for quite a long moment.

I thought the stopping meant he wanted one. Was I wrong?

Her fingers fretted quietly together. Then, slowly, his jaw began to move.

In the strange stillness, the sound of almond being chewed carried clearly and without ceremony between them.

The anxiety resolved. She let out a breath and smiled.

She was privately, thoroughly pleased with herself. The bribe had been delivered.