Page 47 of Fated Flames: Volume Two
“Oh, Serah,” Tilly says, taking my arm and walking me toward the chair she sprang up from. “I’m so sorry.”
I allow myself to be escorted and seated like an invalid. In truth, plummeting to the ground like that was…well, an experience. “It’s all right. He was frightened, that’s all.”
She rolls her eyes. “He was ridiculous.”
A smile twitches at my lips, but I manage to restrain it.
“Let me find you some cloths,” Tilly says, and with a gentle touch to my shoulder, she then bustles over to a cabinet of drawers and begins rifling within, filling the tent with the sweet and sharp scent of dried herbs.
And also leaving me alone with a silent Princess Rosa.
I sneak a glimpse at her. Her undergarments, all silk and pink frills, leave little to the imagination. She’s tall and willowy, yet somehow still full-figured. Next to her, I feel a bit like a stunted plant. She’s staring at the tent entrancewith a sort of rapt desperation that’s beginning to grate on me.
I clear my throat. “I apologize for interrupting your visit with the physician. I do hope you’re feeling well.”
“I was feeling terribly lightheaded at the palace,” she says, not bothering to look at me. “It can be so stuffy in there, you know.”
Soren’s palace is hardly my home yet, but I struggle not to bristle at this. There’s nothing stuffy about it.
“I’m sorry to hear you were uncomfortable,” I say. “Are you feeling better now?”
“Much. Desert air has always agreed with me. It reminds me of the tundra.” She turns to look me up and down. “I don’t suppose you know what that is, do you?”
For a moment, I’m too taken aback to be offended. “The tundra?”
“Yes,” she says, returning her attention to the tent opening. “Didn’t Tilly say you were from one of those little islands? I can’t imagine you travel much.”
Indignation flares up in me, and I can’t help darting a glance at Tilly to see what she makes of this. To my surprise, she doesn’t seem to have heard any of it. She’s scowling and muttering to herself as she jerks open drawer after drawer.
“…bergamot, willow bark, foxglove? Why is this so disorganized?”
I lace my fingers together in my lap. “One doesn’t need to travel to a place to know what and where it is.”
Princess Rosa flicks her eyes over me once more. “But it’s rather hard to understand a place, to trulybelongthere, when you haven’t, isn’t it?”
I bite back my anger and instead grace her with a benign smile. “Indeed. I still have so much to learn. How fortunate that I’ve been given such a dedicated teacher in my betrothed.”
Her lips tighten, and she looks to be readying some haughty retort when a woman—a tiny woman with a braid down to her waist and an enormous emerald bouncing at her chest—bursts into the tent, startling both Princess Rosa and me.
“I told him,” she says, shaking her head and storming her way toward Tilly, “I told him exactly what would happen, and still, here we are.”
The woman takes in Tilly, and the tables, and the drawers all in one glance, and says, “Did you find anything?”
“No,” Tilly says with exasperation.
“Of course not.” She looks over her shoulder at me. “Dragons don’t have menses. It’s why Bindley doesn’t have anything useful.”
The woman strides her way to me, still fuming. “First all these challenges and now this. Doesn’t he know that you’re a proper lady? That you’re aprincess?”
Shoving her hands onto her hips, she glares down at me. I blink back.
“Oh,” she says, her face softening. “You’re as beautiful as he said you were.”
She doesn’t look all that older than me, perhaps thirty years of age, but there’s a matronly, almost comforting quality to her brusqueness. I find myself smiling.
“You’re too kind,” I say with the full knowledge she’s being overly generous.
She waves this off. “I’m forgetting my own manners.” Though she’s currently in pants, she sweeps a foot backand lifts her hands in an immaculate curtsy. “I’m Marta. Rally’s wife.”
