1st Draft Fridays - A Fistful of ... (#6)

Grehafen

winter: Year 253 of the Bynding

The frustrated scream carries down the hall, to where Aidan Jarvim, consort of the queen for this realm and prince of another, is sipping seasoned hot water with a cousin and his wife. Both guests frown towards the sound.

His cousin's wife hesitates, the heritage behind her reddish skin meaning she's unfamiliar with much local etiquette, never mind the quirks that ensue from the fact that Evonalé's far less human than she 'should' be, considering only one of her three grandparents wasn't.

Kitra's dark eyes are shadowed, and the way she tilts her head causes her chin-short hair, so black as to shine with blue, to mask her expression. "Should we--"

"No," Ferrel interrupts before Kitra finishes offering to leave, then has a little pause as his blind eyes focus on the probabilities only he sees--and that are all he can see, since his blinding. He has the pale skin, ginger hair, and hazel eyes that are common in the family, shared by his sisters, but he was spared the size he could have ended up with from his mother's giant ancestry. They weren't.

"Thank you, but it won't help," Aidan says outright, keeping his voice light and kind despite the itch growing inside his skull, in the back of his head. "She wouldn't have invited you, if she minded your presences."

More likely, Evonalé invited them intentionally, for the distraction they will provide once she returns from the water closet. His wife's moontime is as predictable as her court's reaction is going to be, at her latest failure to conceive.

They've had four years of failing--not nearly long enough for the whispers that rumble behind his wife's back but not out of her hearing. She'll be twenty-one as the year turns. If the Creator wills for them to have children, there's plenty of time for it to happen yet.

Kitra stares at her own cup, which holds a blend of herbs that forces her own body to prevent what Evonalé so desperately seeks. The tisane is a condition of Ferrel's comparative freedom, for a ward of the Association for the Magically Creative--AMaC is as much insane asylum as it is a government, and his cousin's ability to See cost him his sanity when they were young. He's essentially recovered, but AMaC will never allow him to sire a child. Apparently adoption is off the table, too, but Aidan has never asked why. With what little he knows about how Ferrell improved from permanent ward to a managed one, he has a few guesses, and none are anything you ask someone about.

"I can order something else," Kitra says quietly. "It's not as if I like this blend."

"If that's what you want," Aidan replies, with a gesture to the server discreetly standing by the door, out of earshot, that he would like a refill of his own beverage, himself. The tarry drink is strong and unpleasantly bitter, but he falls asleep far too easily without it.

The server is female, as is the norm for Grehafen, and she fits the classic brunette coloring of the locals. The brown of her hair has blond undertones, though, unlike the red in Aidan's.

She's small in a way that makes her look younger than he knows she is. That impression is reinforced by the pinafore--something only worn by children, back in his native realm--and it's disconcerting. She looks far too young for that child swelling her belly, even as she easily navigates the four pots on her tray, her wool skirts brushing her ankles.

He wants to ask who fathered that child, to confirm that it was consensual, but the mores normalized by Evonalé's father mean that she wouldn't dare answer that honestly. As far as she knows, Aidan might kill a lover, as part of pulling her into his own bed, or invite a rapist to share.