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runicloreTime to make myself feel better. Chapter one isn't actually finished yet, but I wrote most of this scene six months ago, and finished it last night. Really, this is proof I AM following through on my plan to write the story.
Fall was a mild season in the Artolian countryside, which some considered merely an offshoot of summer, nature's last hurrah before hibernating beneath the snowdrifts. The central plain was painted with the colors of harvest, and the vivid reds and yellows of trees shedding their leaves. The grasses would sway and dance in winds that brought just a breath of ice from the colder climes to the north and east, and it seemed to Raeger when she stared out her window that summer hadn't ended after all, and that it never would.
That, of course, was only wishful thinking on her part. The harvest brought change to the manor as well as it did to their land; once domestic interests were taken care of at the house, they would move to the city for the winter, and the manor would be run by a skeleton crew of servants. The housekeeper, the chamberlain, their handpicked helpers - all would stay behind, while the family took their personal servants to Artolia proper. Her father even purchased a slave, probably at mother's urging. They couldn't go without one, not when everyone else in the city benefited from the influx of Japanese prisoners to the mainland.
It was some kind of war, Melissa wrote in her last letter. They - the Japanese - were from an island called Hilan, or something to the effect that she couldn't pronounce, and they were at war with a sea-faring nation. Well-bred girls didn't know about wars, maybe, but rumors flooded the docks, and if there was one thing the servants were good for, in Melissa's estimation, it was gossip.
Of the circle of friends Raeger formed at her countryside home, Melissa was the one she'd bid good-bye to almost happily. But Melissa knew what was going on in Gerabellum, and that was a connection worth keeping. It was a place outside of Artolia, one Raeger would never see, but she could hear about it from others and imagine the rest.
She'd once read that a good imagination was worth a thousand miles on the road. Though she didn't believe that for a minute, her own mind was all she had - and perhaps a few books, here and there. It seemed as though the library was shrinking. The number of books she had read was greater than the number left that she hadn't. The one good thing about their yearly migration to the city was her access to the palace and university libraries, which she plundered every year for novels, travel logs, and history papers to make her time worthwhile.
Raeger was standing at her habitual place by the northern window of her bedchamber to watch the road on the first day of November, though the date was nothing of importance to her. Marie would arrive on the morrow to finalize Raeger's part in the wedding, and then be off again for the city, where the rest of her family was overseeing the event. The Lords Millais would then arrive to accompany them to Artolia, and she would have to say good bye to her last good friend.
Marie would be moving north with her new husband to Villnore. It made Raeger's throat clench to think about it, no matter how safe it was supposed to be up there. She chewed at her lip as she watched for signs that her friend would arrive early.
More likely she'd arrive late, and Raeger would stand there with her stomach churning and twisting into knots every extra minute she had to wait. That was Marie, after all. That was the way it always happened.
The sound of her door opening and closing finally persuaded Raeger to let the curtain slide closed and turn away from the window. Bertha and Maiya, the new Japanese girl, rested armfulls of quilted dresses on the foot of the bed.
"This is the last of them," Bertha said without preamble as she straightened, pushing her hair back into place. "Most of these should still fit you, but the others have to be put in storage for Elise. You're filling out too much for them."
Raeger's cheeks warmed. "I'm not that bad."
"No, you're thin as a rail except for that," her nursemaid said sourly with a gesture toward her chest. "If you don't eat more, you'll start to look unbalanced." Maiya giggled and choked it back immediately, fussing with the first gown on the heap when Bertha twisted around to glare at her. "Your mother sent an order to the seamstress, and you're to be re-measured when we get to the capitol."
"Right." Raeger sighed and turned away, reaching back to unbutton her dress.
Bertha brushed her hands away, and Raeger stood obediently while her nursemaid took care of the task and the new girl prepared the first of her winter clothes. Most of them fit, more or less, though some were too tight across the chest and one wouldn't quite button all the way. The dresses were too warm for the fall; one of them was double-lined and meant for riding or travel, and she sweltered while her nursemaid did whatever it was she had to do for marking where to let seams out and how to alter the dress to fit Raeger for another winter.
She divested herself of the dress as soon as she thought Bertha was finished, and pulled her summer smock on quickly, managing half the buttons herself before the other woman came to her rescue.
"What about the reception gown?" she asked when she turned around, glancing at the heap of dresses on her trunk. "Will it be finished in time?"
"No need to worry about that," Bertha said. "We'll have it done first, of course. You'll be able to wear your summer clothes for a while yet." She nodded to the gowns Maiya was folding. "Most of those will fit without much modification if you make use of that corset."
Raeger grimaced. "Can't you just let a few seams out?"
Her nursemaid snorted. "You'll have to get used to it anyway, my lady." Maiya handed an armfull of dresses to her, ready to be taken back to storage, and Bertha said over her shoulder, "My lord Millais will not want to be ashamed of the wife he has to return to from campaigns, I'll wager."
Raeger sighed and went back to the window, peering through a crack in the curtains instead of pulling them aside. They didn't know what 'Lord Millais' would want at all, since they hadn't met him yet. He was a soldier, not a courtier; she knew that much about him, at least. He had a reputation for being a kind and fair-handed commander, and his family was only barely nobility, counted among the peers because of their fortune instead of birthright. Their reputation of valor was noble enough: his father had retaken the mountain territory, the area around Camille, and a great swath of the border with Crell Monferaigne. Lawfer himself had kept that border safe for over a year now, equally unyielding against enemy soldiers and demons from the mountainside.
Would a family deep in the art of war care if she painted her face and tortured her hair into ringlets? Bertha's assessment might be wrong. Yet it was also possible they would be strict about appearances to put their best foot forward among their new peers.
Melissa hadn't bothered with cosmetics until her marriage, and Marie still didn't. Nobody ran in the fields at the height of summer and worried about make-up, or slimming their waist to size. Raeger had never learned the skills, and had a sinking feeling her mother would sit her down to remedy that as soon as they reached the capitol and there was nowhere left to run.
"Maiya," she called softly. "Come here."
It was growing dark outside. The sun had set behind the trees to leave behind a violet sky streaked with orange and crimson clouds, lined with gold. The road remained empty, as far as Raeger could see, which wasn't very far in the gathering dusk. Someone lit the lamps at the gate, but her own room was still shadowed, and she considered leaving orders to keep it that way. Her mother would hear of it and be annoyed, she was positive.
"My lady?" The girl's accent was thick and still strange to the ear. It sounded as if she tried to roll the L sound into something else, and she spoke even the simplest sentences slowly, though it never appeared that she was confused when asked to do something. She'd learned quickly - learning a language required practice, which she had plenty of when being ordered around by the housekeeper. Raeger once attempted Egyptian hierglyphs, much to her tutor's amusement, but never read enough or tried hard enough to truly grasp the meaning of the old texts. That was a task better left to scholars, whose livelihood revolved around deciphering dead languages. Would Lord Millais care if his wife knew hieroglyphs? Bertha had asked skeptically. Raeger had to admit the answer was probably 'no.'
She twitched the curtain aside, but it was well and truly dark, and the road beyond the gate curved into the trees not far out. "Let me know if there are any visitors. Or send someone to else if you cannot. Just tell them I gave you an order if anyone causes trouble."
Maiya clasped her hands and bowed deeply, her long rope of a black braid sliding over her shoulder. "As you wish, my lady."
Raeger waited for the maid to leave, then wiggled her feet into a pair of slippers and ventured out of her bedroom for the first time since dinner. A folio of music was waiting on the writing desk. Her invitation to Marie's farewell party, folded into a thick cream envelope, glittered at the edges where it was decorated with gold leaf, and a tiny gold bell was knotted onto the end of the ribbon that tinkled when she nudged it with her finger. Marie delivered it herself on her way to the capitol, and Raeger was in a way glad she hadn't received it unawares. The party was for a happy occasion, and she was indeed happy for her friend - her husband seemed especially nice considering he was from up north, and wintering in a big city like Villnore would surely be more interesting than staying isolated with her father in their manor.
That place never seemed to be warm during the winter. There were so few people there that she supposed they didn't light all the fires. She remembered spending nights sneaking down to the kitchen for snacks and a little warmth. Marie wrote notes often while huddling under the covers, and her lines were always unevenly spaced, as if she couldn't see well enough to write a proper letter.
She left the envelope and picked up the folio instead. The air in her room was warm, and spilled into her second and kept it tolerable, but the hallway outside was chilly, enough that she could have sworn she saw her own breath mist in the meager light. Lamps were lit only on the bottom floor, where the rooms were still lively past dark; here there were candles, two to a mirror, and spaced far enough apart that she wouldn't have been able to read her music, had she stopped to look at it. Cold welled through through the carpet like a faint breeze, and her long strides let the draft in under her skirt so her legs were chilled. When she reached the small sitting room her father had converted into a little library, she immediately went to the fireplace and kindled the flames herself instead of waiting for a maid to do it.
If only you were as adept at sewing, her mother would sigh, if she were there. Sometimes Raeger felt the same way. Being good with a needle wouldn't warm her toes, however. She lingered while the flames took hold, hefting a good-sized slab of wood onto the smaller ones, and only left the hearth when she could move her fingers with ease.
The harpsicord, her reason for braving the cold hallway and the possibility of running into somebody, took up the entire back corner of the room. It had a single bed of keys polished black, and a ridge for her music, which she pulled out of the folio and arranged with care, so it wouldn't slip off while she played. They had a better one in the city, reserved for parties and private recitals, and she remembered dimly that her father argued for days with his wife about buying another for the manor, reluctant enough that she gathered, even at that early age, how valuable they must be. She didn't know what price was paid for the one she sat before now, but it was the instrument she first learned to play on, and she knew the loose, hollow keys, and the peeling varnish like the back of her hand. It didn't matter how hard she banged the keys, whether she slammed the lid down or kicked the legs as she used to do when idle.
Now she sat and stared at the music, her hands still in her lap. The bench was cold, even with her skirt tucked around her legs and the fire finally warming the room up. She'd picked a nocturne, and a slow one that she wasn't particularly fond of. It didn't even have a name. Number twenty-eight was written where the title should be, and she thought her father had acquired it from the university in Artolia proper.
A waste then, she thought, flipping through the folder for something better. She settled on an Ingild fantasia and put it up instead, playing at the fingerings in the air above the keys before starting in earnest. The hour was late for practice, but she didn't hear Elise anywhere nearby, and she wouldn't go to sleep for hours yet, if her recent habits were anything to gauge by.
The piece she'd chosen was meant to accompany other instruments, so Raeger imagined what she could as she played. Full orchestral performances were rare in Artolia, and she'd only seen one once as a child, during a trip to Flenceburg with her real mother. She'd had family there, and supposed that was still true, but her father refused to fund a trip there. Too close to the border with Crell Monferaigne, he said. Too expensive. Lucy wouldn't want to go - 'Lucy,' the one Raeger had called Mother since five. She preferred it when Father didn't name her at all.
Raeger played until she hit a snag, then went back to play the part she missed again, and then again. Ingild had loved writing long, difficult passages, and she wasn't so good at keeping up with them sometimes. It was easy to loathe the creation of the thirty-second note and everything that lay beyond, which she most certainly did, but she went over it until she began to get it right, until the wood feeding the fire crumbled to ashes and the flames flared for a moment before shrinking. She was up to throw another chunk of wood in before she thought, and only paused when there was a sharp, staccato knock at the door.
'Come in,' was on the tip of her tongue, but the door opened before Raeger could utter a word, and Elise came bounding in quickly, and leaned back against the door to shut it. Her shiver spoke volumes, but not as sharply as the draft that came in after her.
"I thought I heard you in here." Shaking her ringlets out and tucking a silk ribbon into her sleeve, Elise hurried over to the harpsicord bench and dropped onto the bench without a scrap of grace, shivering again. "Ingild? Ugh." She gathered the music in a messy stack and dropped them onto the table, rifling through the folio. "Let me see..."
Raeger tossed the wood onto the fire and let the sparks fly, moving forward. "Hey--"
"What?" The momentary sweetness of relief on the girl's face melted into a frown. "You've been here all day, haven't you? I need to practice too."
She pressed her lips together silently, hoping to faze Elise at least a little with a cold stare, but the little brat went back to her search and pulled out a shorter piece Raeger knew very well, and didn't much like. "I didn't see you trying to get in earlier," she muttered when it was clear the other wasn't paying attention.
"Fittings," came the sing-song reply. "Stop frowning like that, it's ugly. At least you get new clothes. All I get is your leftovers."
Raeger sighed sharply, the sound lost in music as her sister started to play. Elise would win if they took the argument to Mother, and Raeger wasn't angry enough to put up with the inevitable shouting match if she did that. The brat really did need practice, she'd get no argument there - she was months behind on music after spending the entire summer playing, still stumbling on chords and notations that had become second nature to the eldest and, for that matter, anyone with a passing competance in playing.
She stood a moment longer, until Elise made her first error, before resigning herself to a night cooped up in her room, and grabbed a book from the table before she left. In the dim illumination of the hall she could just make out the glint of a title she knew well: Tales From the Ancients.
The night passed with tales of children born from lotus blossoms and the long battle against the god of storms. Her dreams were filled with endless sands, shifting in time to Elise's music. Daylight, as always, came too quickly.
............................
Fuck, I feel awful. :P
Also: while I can play music, my knowledge of the various terms (nocturne, toccata, fugue, etc.) for types of compositions is crap. 'Nocturne' is what came to mind, but if you can think of something better, go ahead and say so, and I will be grateful.
Fall was a mild season in the Artolian countryside, which some considered merely an offshoot of summer, nature's last hurrah before hibernating beneath the snowdrifts. The central plain was painted with the colors of harvest, and the vivid reds and yellows of trees shedding their leaves. The grasses would sway and dance in winds that brought just a breath of ice from the colder climes to the north and east, and it seemed to Raeger when she stared out her window that summer hadn't ended after all, and that it never would.
That, of course, was only wishful thinking on her part. The harvest brought change to the manor as well as it did to their land; once domestic interests were taken care of at the house, they would move to the city for the winter, and the manor would be run by a skeleton crew of servants. The housekeeper, the chamberlain, their handpicked helpers - all would stay behind, while the family took their personal servants to Artolia proper. Her father even purchased a slave, probably at mother's urging. They couldn't go without one, not when everyone else in the city benefited from the influx of Japanese prisoners to the mainland.
It was some kind of war, Melissa wrote in her last letter. They - the Japanese - were from an island called Hilan, or something to the effect that she couldn't pronounce, and they were at war with a sea-faring nation. Well-bred girls didn't know about wars, maybe, but rumors flooded the docks, and if there was one thing the servants were good for, in Melissa's estimation, it was gossip.
Of the circle of friends Raeger formed at her countryside home, Melissa was the one she'd bid good-bye to almost happily. But Melissa knew what was going on in Gerabellum, and that was a connection worth keeping. It was a place outside of Artolia, one Raeger would never see, but she could hear about it from others and imagine the rest.
She'd once read that a good imagination was worth a thousand miles on the road. Though she didn't believe that for a minute, her own mind was all she had - and perhaps a few books, here and there. It seemed as though the library was shrinking. The number of books she had read was greater than the number left that she hadn't. The one good thing about their yearly migration to the city was her access to the palace and university libraries, which she plundered every year for novels, travel logs, and history papers to make her time worthwhile.
Raeger was standing at her habitual place by the northern window of her bedchamber to watch the road on the first day of November, though the date was nothing of importance to her. Marie would arrive on the morrow to finalize Raeger's part in the wedding, and then be off again for the city, where the rest of her family was overseeing the event. The Lords Millais would then arrive to accompany them to Artolia, and she would have to say good bye to her last good friend.
Marie would be moving north with her new husband to Villnore. It made Raeger's throat clench to think about it, no matter how safe it was supposed to be up there. She chewed at her lip as she watched for signs that her friend would arrive early.
More likely she'd arrive late, and Raeger would stand there with her stomach churning and twisting into knots every extra minute she had to wait. That was Marie, after all. That was the way it always happened.
The sound of her door opening and closing finally persuaded Raeger to let the curtain slide closed and turn away from the window. Bertha and Maiya, the new Japanese girl, rested armfulls of quilted dresses on the foot of the bed.
"This is the last of them," Bertha said without preamble as she straightened, pushing her hair back into place. "Most of these should still fit you, but the others have to be put in storage for Elise. You're filling out too much for them."
Raeger's cheeks warmed. "I'm not that bad."
"No, you're thin as a rail except for that," her nursemaid said sourly with a gesture toward her chest. "If you don't eat more, you'll start to look unbalanced." Maiya giggled and choked it back immediately, fussing with the first gown on the heap when Bertha twisted around to glare at her. "Your mother sent an order to the seamstress, and you're to be re-measured when we get to the capitol."
"Right." Raeger sighed and turned away, reaching back to unbutton her dress.
Bertha brushed her hands away, and Raeger stood obediently while her nursemaid took care of the task and the new girl prepared the first of her winter clothes. Most of them fit, more or less, though some were too tight across the chest and one wouldn't quite button all the way. The dresses were too warm for the fall; one of them was double-lined and meant for riding or travel, and she sweltered while her nursemaid did whatever it was she had to do for marking where to let seams out and how to alter the dress to fit Raeger for another winter.
She divested herself of the dress as soon as she thought Bertha was finished, and pulled her summer smock on quickly, managing half the buttons herself before the other woman came to her rescue.
"What about the reception gown?" she asked when she turned around, glancing at the heap of dresses on her trunk. "Will it be finished in time?"
"No need to worry about that," Bertha said. "We'll have it done first, of course. You'll be able to wear your summer clothes for a while yet." She nodded to the gowns Maiya was folding. "Most of those will fit without much modification if you make use of that corset."
Raeger grimaced. "Can't you just let a few seams out?"
Her nursemaid snorted. "You'll have to get used to it anyway, my lady." Maiya handed an armfull of dresses to her, ready to be taken back to storage, and Bertha said over her shoulder, "My lord Millais will not want to be ashamed of the wife he has to return to from campaigns, I'll wager."
Raeger sighed and went back to the window, peering through a crack in the curtains instead of pulling them aside. They didn't know what 'Lord Millais' would want at all, since they hadn't met him yet. He was a soldier, not a courtier; she knew that much about him, at least. He had a reputation for being a kind and fair-handed commander, and his family was only barely nobility, counted among the peers because of their fortune instead of birthright. Their reputation of valor was noble enough: his father had retaken the mountain territory, the area around Camille, and a great swath of the border with Crell Monferaigne. Lawfer himself had kept that border safe for over a year now, equally unyielding against enemy soldiers and demons from the mountainside.
Would a family deep in the art of war care if she painted her face and tortured her hair into ringlets? Bertha's assessment might be wrong. Yet it was also possible they would be strict about appearances to put their best foot forward among their new peers.
Melissa hadn't bothered with cosmetics until her marriage, and Marie still didn't. Nobody ran in the fields at the height of summer and worried about make-up, or slimming their waist to size. Raeger had never learned the skills, and had a sinking feeling her mother would sit her down to remedy that as soon as they reached the capitol and there was nowhere left to run.
"Maiya," she called softly. "Come here."
It was growing dark outside. The sun had set behind the trees to leave behind a violet sky streaked with orange and crimson clouds, lined with gold. The road remained empty, as far as Raeger could see, which wasn't very far in the gathering dusk. Someone lit the lamps at the gate, but her own room was still shadowed, and she considered leaving orders to keep it that way. Her mother would hear of it and be annoyed, she was positive.
"My lady?" The girl's accent was thick and still strange to the ear. It sounded as if she tried to roll the L sound into something else, and she spoke even the simplest sentences slowly, though it never appeared that she was confused when asked to do something. She'd learned quickly - learning a language required practice, which she had plenty of when being ordered around by the housekeeper. Raeger once attempted Egyptian hierglyphs, much to her tutor's amusement, but never read enough or tried hard enough to truly grasp the meaning of the old texts. That was a task better left to scholars, whose livelihood revolved around deciphering dead languages. Would Lord Millais care if his wife knew hieroglyphs? Bertha had asked skeptically. Raeger had to admit the answer was probably 'no.'
She twitched the curtain aside, but it was well and truly dark, and the road beyond the gate curved into the trees not far out. "Let me know if there are any visitors. Or send someone to else if you cannot. Just tell them I gave you an order if anyone causes trouble."
Maiya clasped her hands and bowed deeply, her long rope of a black braid sliding over her shoulder. "As you wish, my lady."
Raeger waited for the maid to leave, then wiggled her feet into a pair of slippers and ventured out of her bedroom for the first time since dinner. A folio of music was waiting on the writing desk. Her invitation to Marie's farewell party, folded into a thick cream envelope, glittered at the edges where it was decorated with gold leaf, and a tiny gold bell was knotted onto the end of the ribbon that tinkled when she nudged it with her finger. Marie delivered it herself on her way to the capitol, and Raeger was in a way glad she hadn't received it unawares. The party was for a happy occasion, and she was indeed happy for her friend - her husband seemed especially nice considering he was from up north, and wintering in a big city like Villnore would surely be more interesting than staying isolated with her father in their manor.
That place never seemed to be warm during the winter. There were so few people there that she supposed they didn't light all the fires. She remembered spending nights sneaking down to the kitchen for snacks and a little warmth. Marie wrote notes often while huddling under the covers, and her lines were always unevenly spaced, as if she couldn't see well enough to write a proper letter.
She left the envelope and picked up the folio instead. The air in her room was warm, and spilled into her second and kept it tolerable, but the hallway outside was chilly, enough that she could have sworn she saw her own breath mist in the meager light. Lamps were lit only on the bottom floor, where the rooms were still lively past dark; here there were candles, two to a mirror, and spaced far enough apart that she wouldn't have been able to read her music, had she stopped to look at it. Cold welled through through the carpet like a faint breeze, and her long strides let the draft in under her skirt so her legs were chilled. When she reached the small sitting room her father had converted into a little library, she immediately went to the fireplace and kindled the flames herself instead of waiting for a maid to do it.
If only you were as adept at sewing, her mother would sigh, if she were there. Sometimes Raeger felt the same way. Being good with a needle wouldn't warm her toes, however. She lingered while the flames took hold, hefting a good-sized slab of wood onto the smaller ones, and only left the hearth when she could move her fingers with ease.
The harpsicord, her reason for braving the cold hallway and the possibility of running into somebody, took up the entire back corner of the room. It had a single bed of keys polished black, and a ridge for her music, which she pulled out of the folio and arranged with care, so it wouldn't slip off while she played. They had a better one in the city, reserved for parties and private recitals, and she remembered dimly that her father argued for days with his wife about buying another for the manor, reluctant enough that she gathered, even at that early age, how valuable they must be. She didn't know what price was paid for the one she sat before now, but it was the instrument she first learned to play on, and she knew the loose, hollow keys, and the peeling varnish like the back of her hand. It didn't matter how hard she banged the keys, whether she slammed the lid down or kicked the legs as she used to do when idle.
Now she sat and stared at the music, her hands still in her lap. The bench was cold, even with her skirt tucked around her legs and the fire finally warming the room up. She'd picked a nocturne, and a slow one that she wasn't particularly fond of. It didn't even have a name. Number twenty-eight was written where the title should be, and she thought her father had acquired it from the university in Artolia proper.
A waste then, she thought, flipping through the folder for something better. She settled on an Ingild fantasia and put it up instead, playing at the fingerings in the air above the keys before starting in earnest. The hour was late for practice, but she didn't hear Elise anywhere nearby, and she wouldn't go to sleep for hours yet, if her recent habits were anything to gauge by.
The piece she'd chosen was meant to accompany other instruments, so Raeger imagined what she could as she played. Full orchestral performances were rare in Artolia, and she'd only seen one once as a child, during a trip to Flenceburg with her real mother. She'd had family there, and supposed that was still true, but her father refused to fund a trip there. Too close to the border with Crell Monferaigne, he said. Too expensive. Lucy wouldn't want to go - 'Lucy,' the one Raeger had called Mother since five. She preferred it when Father didn't name her at all.
Raeger played until she hit a snag, then went back to play the part she missed again, and then again. Ingild had loved writing long, difficult passages, and she wasn't so good at keeping up with them sometimes. It was easy to loathe the creation of the thirty-second note and everything that lay beyond, which she most certainly did, but she went over it until she began to get it right, until the wood feeding the fire crumbled to ashes and the flames flared for a moment before shrinking. She was up to throw another chunk of wood in before she thought, and only paused when there was a sharp, staccato knock at the door.
'Come in,' was on the tip of her tongue, but the door opened before Raeger could utter a word, and Elise came bounding in quickly, and leaned back against the door to shut it. Her shiver spoke volumes, but not as sharply as the draft that came in after her.
"I thought I heard you in here." Shaking her ringlets out and tucking a silk ribbon into her sleeve, Elise hurried over to the harpsicord bench and dropped onto the bench without a scrap of grace, shivering again. "Ingild? Ugh." She gathered the music in a messy stack and dropped them onto the table, rifling through the folio. "Let me see..."
Raeger tossed the wood onto the fire and let the sparks fly, moving forward. "Hey--"
"What?" The momentary sweetness of relief on the girl's face melted into a frown. "You've been here all day, haven't you? I need to practice too."
She pressed her lips together silently, hoping to faze Elise at least a little with a cold stare, but the little brat went back to her search and pulled out a shorter piece Raeger knew very well, and didn't much like. "I didn't see you trying to get in earlier," she muttered when it was clear the other wasn't paying attention.
"Fittings," came the sing-song reply. "Stop frowning like that, it's ugly. At least you get new clothes. All I get is your leftovers."
Raeger sighed sharply, the sound lost in music as her sister started to play. Elise would win if they took the argument to Mother, and Raeger wasn't angry enough to put up with the inevitable shouting match if she did that. The brat really did need practice, she'd get no argument there - she was months behind on music after spending the entire summer playing, still stumbling on chords and notations that had become second nature to the eldest and, for that matter, anyone with a passing competance in playing.
She stood a moment longer, until Elise made her first error, before resigning herself to a night cooped up in her room, and grabbed a book from the table before she left. In the dim illumination of the hall she could just make out the glint of a title she knew well: Tales From the Ancients.
The night passed with tales of children born from lotus blossoms and the long battle against the god of storms. Her dreams were filled with endless sands, shifting in time to Elise's music. Daylight, as always, came too quickly.
............................
Fuck, I feel awful. :P
Also: while I can play music, my knowledge of the various terms (nocturne, toccata, fugue, etc.) for types of compositions is crap. 'Nocturne' is what came to mind, but if you can think of something better, go ahead and say so, and I will be grateful.
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Date: 2007-02-05 02:35 am (UTC)Either way, writing makes me happy. ♥ But like I said, the anticipation kills. xD
YAY CURSED STALKERS. :D :D :D