“Do, please, come to supper this evening, then, Prince Aethelbald,”
King Fidel said. With these and a few more polite words, king and Prince made what arrangements were necessary. Then Fidel signaled his guard, bade his children mount their horses, and Una found herself riding back up the King’s Way in a numb daze.
Felix urged his horse up beside hers. “Applebald!” he whispered.
She took a swipe at him with her riding crop, not caring if the guardsmen thought her common.
–––––––
“I so dislike the name Aethelbald!”
Nurse, busily tying Una’s hair into an awesome if precarious tower on top of her head, clucked without sympathy.
A buzz of activity percolated through Oriana Palace as hasty preparations were made to feast the Prince of Farthestshore and his entourage, due to arrive at sundown. The best silver was polished, the chandelier was refitted with new candles, and even the great tapestry in the King’s Hall was taken out into the courtyard and beaten until the guardsmen standing at their posts were coughing and filmed over with dust. To crown it all, Princess Una had been stuffed into her best dress, a much-hated creation consisting of three layers of silk, two layers of chiffon, and wire structures beneath that made things stick out in odd but highly fashionable places. Then Nurse had sat Una down before her vanity, and the real work, the task of taming the princess’s flyaway hair, had begun.
“I mean it!” Una said, shaking her head so that her hairstyle fell in a long flop down one side of her face. Nurse growled, cracked her knuckles, and firmly twisted her princess’s chin straight again. She set to with her brush more vigorously than ever.
“It sounds stodgy,” Una said.
“Stodgy, Miss Princess?” Nurse took a pin from between her teeth and rammed it into place with more force than efficiency.
“You know.” Una frowned. “Pudgy and flat-footed. Heavy. Hard to digest.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Nurse plucked another pin from her mouth and took aim. “This Prince Aethel-whatsit. He’s stodgy, is he?”
“Ow! Prince Aethelbald is nothing if not stodgy.”
“Is he heavy?”
“Well . . . no.”
“Flat-footed?”
“Not exactly.”
“Hard to digest?”
“Stodginess is as much a state of mind as anything, Nurse.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t see! Ouch. Are you trying to draw blood?” Una sighed as she watched Nurse in the mirror, fixing a twist of fake, honey-colored curl in place so that it dangled, as the Parumvir fashion experts put it, “fetchingly” down the side of her face. “Stodgy princes,” she said, “have no sense of romance. They sit around making practical decisions about economics and trade and things.”
“Sounds worthy in a man who’ll one day rule a kingdom,” Nurse said, closing one eye as she inspected her work. Nurse was a practical woman to whom a romantic gesture equated picking up one’s own dirty socks and washing one’s hands before dinner. And while there was perhaps a certain romance in these, Una failed to appreciate it.
“Stodgy princes,” Una said, pulling at the fake curl until it sprang back into place, “wouldn’t know the first thing about poetry and next to nothing about music.”
“The poor souls.” Nurse selected a large white feather from an assortment of accessories, held it up for effect, and then tossed it aside in exchange for a larger purple one.
“They wouldn’t recognize moonlight if it hit them between the eyes, and they never notice the stars.”
“Blind too, eh?”
Una slumped with her chin resting on her other hand, her eyes crossing to watch a spruff of feather gently wafting down to land on the vanity. Monster sprang into her lap, purring and flicking his tail under her nose. Absently, she ran her knuckles down his head and back. “Stodgy princes don’t stand under a lady’s window in the dusk of evening and sing songs about her virtues, comparing her beauty to summer days and their love to the high seas.”
“I should hope not!” Nurse stuck in a final few pins, twisting them to be certain they held. “A real prince – stodgy, pudgy, or otherwise – wouldn’t be caught dead standing under a lady’s window after dark!” She sniffed. “And Aethelbald seems as good a name as any to me. Names are just as good as the folks what bear them. I had an Uncle Balbo who was teased like nothing else ’bout his name, yet he was the finest pig-keeper in all the country. Why, he had an old boar that weighed twice as much as I!”