OP: Sorry, this will have to be four parts, since I always forget about the word count limit on posts. Thank you for enjoying it so far.
…
In every obligatory small-talk conversation, there comes a critical moment wherein the frontal lobe and cerebral cortex – in an understandable effort to save themselves from rapid mortification – both disengage at once like the pole-pin of a wagon springing loose. Responsibility for any subsequent discourse then falls to the reptilian basal ganglia, which in our species has not been on the social up-and-up for something in excess of two million years.
“Oh, yes,” Poe responded, to a question he could not remember five seconds after the fact, “I believe our three-decker dragoons are trained in the caracole maneuver.”
The guest he was trapped in discussion with – an orange-haired, rigid-backed man in black, beside a taller black-haired man who had loomed in seething silence all the while – did not seem much bothered by his amphibious mixing of military tactics.
(Hux had been superbly apathetic about this whole venture until approximately an hour ago, when he first clapped eyes on the palace’s limestone-white walls and its barbican gates and the soaring, spired towers from which one could take in the whole countryside at a glance. The lush red-currant wine they served here certainly didn’t hurt.
Phasma was circling the crowd, laughing affectedly behind a peacock-feather fan.)
Poe looked about once more, surveyed the milling faces and swirling colors of the ballroom to be sure he hadn’t missed anyone. His mother sat on the dais, in a posture of ascendant repose as always, a silver-brown braid coiled about her head in a fashion that required no accompanying crown.
She perked her eyebrows at him.
Their shaggy old boarhound – Bacca, which was short for something nobody could pronounce – sat beside her, at stolid attention like an infantry guard. He was pondering who amongst this assembled company he most wanted to bite in the arse-end next.
Poe turned away again. The golden half-mask displayed his lips as they pursed in irritation.
“But the army really ought to have its own branch of architects and engineers, I believe,” Hux bored on, with the single-mindedness of someone turning an auger. “Siegecraft is no longer the fashion in warfare, but according to Aristobulus of Cassandreia –”
We will never discover what sage wisdom Aristobulus of Cassandreia might have imparted across the span of so many centuries, although he certainly had many valuable and worthwhile things to say, because this was when the man in white walked in.
He had arrived late, pausing to hang up his thousand-falcon-feather cloak despite a baffled footmen’s offer, but if the massive doors opening to admit this one last guest had not drawn everybody’s attention they would have no doubt all stared anyway. He carried a sort of faint, peculiar iridescence about his person, like the moonlit edge of a cloud, which did not seem wholly attributable to either the ballroom’s crystal chandelier or the late-stage effects of intoxication. An officer’s sabre clanked at his side. The crimson marking on his mask traveled the whole length of the hall to where the prince stood, in a single instant, its impact as stunning as a fired musket-shot.
Then the man took a humbled step forward into the room, as someone would while approaching a skittish horse to offer it an apple, and Poe knew precisely who he really was.
(He wasn’t an imbecile, after all, and here before him was the tacit purpose for which he had arranged this whole event in the first place. On the behalf of his future subjects, we should be glad for his perspicacity. Princes in fairy tales lack it so very often.)
Poe shouldered his way through the crowd without another word to the two men in black, chewing the inside of his cheek. All right, then, it appeared Finn had come wearing a mask to cover his whole face, which indicated that he did not want to be recognized. Or, not yet – perhaps that meant Poe was being invited to play along with a charade, towards some climactic reveal.
Finn stared at the prince, standing there in brushed golden and brown velvet – it was a bit hard to see through this mask, though, so it could've been satin – and said the first thing that came into his head.
“—Can you dance the twin-imperial écarté?” Finn asked. “I apologize, your majesty, but that’s only style I know.”
Poe stopped.
His station in life had left him unaccustomed to being caught off-guard, or interrupted for any reason, but now this odd-named blacksmith with the apple had done it twice is as many encounters. A giddiness tripped quickly down his spine.
“I can dance anything,” he offered in response, “but since you happen to be the present expert, I must invite you to take the lead.”
“All right.” They stepped closer to one another, arranged their arms. “Uh. Shall we?”
“Of course.”
Finn had only ever practiced this around the smithy, on rainy days when there were no customers, or up in the swept hayloft where nobody could hear him. Dancing it on a marble floor to a hundred-piece orchestra was something else entirely, and he made a mistake every fifth step or so. His fairy whatever-she-was had given him riding gloves, fortunately, which disguised both his calluses and the present clamminess of his palms, but even so the prince’s back felt woodstove-warm beneath his hand.
Poe made no comment about the frequent blunders, not even when his toes got trodden on, although he himself moved in perfect spring-heeled time to every note. Quite the contrary, he had to bite his lip once or twice to keep from smiling.
Finn decided this was very gracious of him.
And ah, he considered, level-headedly, the prince did not seem to have recognized him, although with the mask it could hardly be considered Poe's fault. It had been ridiculous and conceited of Finn to expect anything different, hadn’t it?
Oh well.
The tenth and eleventh hours chimed by.
At the ballroom’s far end, Ben – we will call him that, for now, since he was hiding behind a proper mask and did not need the added false title – squinted at the dancing pair with semi-professional admiration and envy. There was a charmed air around the stranger that seemed to waver as he moved, distorting the colors seen through it like sheets of rain on glass, the handiwork of a talented beginner in which Ben's evaluation could find no flaws or chinks.
Not a trick he himself could ever hope to manage, in other words. Every time he tried to look any harder, to see what lay beneath the illusion, a pain stung him between the eyes.
“That’s fey magic,” he declared. “Someone’s cast a glamour on that man.”
“Be silent, you stampeding ignoramus,” Hux said, standing beside him. His eyes were closed. “I am composing my coronation speech.”
(And through the ballroom’s high-arched eastern window, one could see a rising quarter-moon and the capitol city’s great clock tower. Its chimes were be heard for miles, each toll striding out over pastures and hay fields like the footfalls of a giant.)
“Have you enjoyed the evening?” Finn asked, after another song wound to its finish. “I’m sure everyone is wondering if you’ve made your – selection doesn’t seem to be the right word. Your choice. Have you?”
“With my mother wondering more than the rest put together, I’m sure.” They had stopped dancing, but Poe did not release his partner’s hand or arm. “But I’m nearing a decision. The council won’t like it, though – they’ve said they would prefer someone from Jakku or D’Qar, to maintain our trade agreements. What would you tell them, sir, if you were in my place?”
“There’s not much risk of that, your majesty. So I shouldn’t pretend I could speak for you.” Finn tilted his head. The red of his mask gleamed. “Nobody should, though. A king’s duty is to do the right thing, whatever his advisers try and tell him. Does that sound reasonable?”
“Quite. And you misprize yourself, sir.” Poe tipped his chin up, slightly, indicating the gilded-iron circlet that he wore balanced on his head. “I think this crown would suit you well.”
“That one there?” Finn gave it a craftsman’s critical glance. “I’d have to make several changes first, your majesty, if you’ll excuse me for saying so. The sunstones are set crooked.”
Poe laughed – which, if you will remember, was the thing Finn had come to hear – and began leading him towards the dais where Queen Leia sat.
But then the midnight hour began its strikes, a first and a second and a third toll, and Finn felt both his knees lock up.
What had he been wearing, before the enchantment? He tried to remember. Rough trousers, mud-caked boots, a woolen shirt that had been the victim of countless mendings, a neck-scarf he used to either clean the sweat off his face as he stood before the burning forge or to wipe his nose when it ran on the chilled-damp mornings.
A nobody, Phasma had reminded him. A nobody.
Well, frankly speaking, it was true.
There was a fourth, fifth, sixth toll. The prince turned back towards him, wearing a perplexed frown, and gave another slight tug on Finn’s arm. One of the abalone buttons on his enchanted white jacket suddenly winked out of existence like a firefly.
He slid his hands free, dropping a harried bow.
“Thank you for the dance, your majesty,” he said. “And for the conversation. We’ll all be very fortunate to call you our king.”
And, in sight of everyone, to the tune of seven-eight-nine, Finn straightened up and ran.
He knocked several guests down in the process, too, hollering back his sincerest apologies as the sword and the sash alike vanished from his waist. Poe dashed after him, although not fast enough – a more plausible scenario for two men in flat-heeled shoes, you would imagine, than if one of them had been in, say, slippers made from spun glass.
“Poor young fellow, whoever he is.” Phasma had rejoined her sons and was sipping the sweet red wine. “Always a pesky expiration on those sorts of short-term seelie charms – if you require a comparison, dealings with the devil will give you a seven-year lease at the very minimum.”
“The joke would be on poor Lucifer himself, then, Mother,” Hux said, jauntily. Ben was staring at the glamour’s lingering afterimage. “When the time came he would discover that you have no soul to collect.”
“Quite true.”
Finn’s coat was turning its old woad-dyed blue again when he snatched his falcon-feather cloak from the hands of a waiting attendant. He swung it around his shoulders as the tenth, eleventh notes struck, as he careened through the palace doors, but just before the night air snatched him up he half-thought he heard someone calling his name.
The red and white mask fell from his face to land on the front steps. A hairline crack appeared across its front.
“Phineas – Finn, Finn, wait – ”
Then his feet struck creaking wooden floorboards. Something knocked against his shin. Finn was pitched headlong over a footstool, landed hard on his knees, and found himself staring at the faultlessly-repaired stone wall of his own kitchen at home, far from anything resembling orchestra music or crystal chandeliers or brushed golden velvet.
He picked himself up.
And so Finn also noticed that the hearth-fire’s embers had at last burned out, that a cold bowl of untouched lentil stew still sat waiting for him on the table.
Fill - At the Stroke of Twelve (3/4)
…
In every obligatory small-talk conversation, there comes a critical moment wherein the frontal lobe and cerebral cortex – in an understandable effort to save themselves from rapid mortification – both disengage at once like the pole-pin of a wagon springing loose. Responsibility for any subsequent discourse then falls to the reptilian basal ganglia, which in our species has not been on the social up-and-up for something in excess of two million years.
“Oh, yes,” Poe responded, to a question he could not remember five seconds after the fact, “I believe our three-decker dragoons are trained in the caracole maneuver.”
The guest he was trapped in discussion with – an orange-haired, rigid-backed man in black, beside a taller black-haired man who had loomed in seething silence all the while – did not seem much bothered by his amphibious mixing of military tactics.
(Hux had been superbly apathetic about this whole venture until approximately an hour ago, when he first clapped eyes on the palace’s limestone-white walls and its barbican gates and the soaring, spired towers from which one could take in the whole countryside at a glance. The lush red-currant wine they served here certainly didn’t hurt.
Phasma was circling the crowd, laughing affectedly behind a peacock-feather fan.)
Poe looked about once more, surveyed the milling faces and swirling colors of the ballroom to be sure he hadn’t missed anyone. His mother sat on the dais, in a posture of ascendant repose as always, a silver-brown braid coiled about her head in a fashion that required no accompanying crown.
She perked her eyebrows at him.
Their shaggy old boarhound – Bacca, which was short for something nobody could pronounce – sat beside her, at stolid attention like an infantry guard. He was pondering who amongst this assembled company he most wanted to bite in the arse-end next.
Poe turned away again. The golden half-mask displayed his lips as they pursed in irritation.
“But the army really ought to have its own branch of architects and engineers, I believe,” Hux bored on, with the single-mindedness of someone turning an auger. “Siegecraft is no longer the fashion in warfare, but according to Aristobulus of Cassandreia –”
We will never discover what sage wisdom Aristobulus of Cassandreia might have imparted across the span of so many centuries, although he certainly had many valuable and worthwhile things to say, because this was when the man in white walked in.
He had arrived late, pausing to hang up his thousand-falcon-feather cloak despite a baffled footmen’s offer, but if the massive doors opening to admit this one last guest had not drawn everybody’s attention they would have no doubt all stared anyway. He carried a sort of faint, peculiar iridescence about his person, like the moonlit edge of a cloud, which did not seem wholly attributable to either the ballroom’s crystal chandelier or the late-stage effects of intoxication. An officer’s sabre clanked at his side. The crimson marking on his mask traveled the whole length of the hall to where the prince stood, in a single instant, its impact as stunning as a fired musket-shot.
Then the man took a humbled step forward into the room, as someone would while approaching a skittish horse to offer it an apple, and Poe knew precisely who he really was.
(He wasn’t an imbecile, after all, and here before him was the tacit purpose for which he had arranged this whole event in the first place.
On the behalf of his future subjects, we should be glad for his perspicacity. Princes in fairy tales lack it so very often.)
Poe shouldered his way through the crowd without another word to the two men in black, chewing the inside of his cheek. All right, then, it appeared Finn had come wearing a mask to cover his whole face, which indicated that he did not want to be recognized. Or, not yet – perhaps that meant Poe was being invited to play along with a charade, towards some climactic reveal.
That suited him just fine.
“A well-planned entrance, sir,” Poe said. “I hear tardiness is –”
Finn stared at the prince, standing there in brushed golden and brown velvet – it was a bit hard to see through this mask, though, so it could've been satin – and said the first thing that came into his head.
“—Can you dance the twin-imperial écarté?” Finn asked. “I apologize, your majesty, but that’s only style I know.”
Poe stopped.
His station in life had left him unaccustomed to being caught off-guard, or interrupted for any reason, but now this odd-named blacksmith with the apple had done it twice is as many encounters. A giddiness tripped quickly down his spine.
“I can dance anything,” he offered in response, “but since you happen to be the present expert, I must invite you to take the lead.”
“All right.” They stepped closer to one another, arranged their arms. “Uh. Shall we?”
“Of course.”
Finn had only ever practiced this around the smithy, on rainy days when there were no customers, or up in the swept hayloft where nobody could hear him. Dancing it on a marble floor to a hundred-piece orchestra was something else entirely, and he made a mistake every fifth step or so. His fairy whatever-she-was had given him riding gloves, fortunately, which disguised both his calluses and the present clamminess of his palms, but even so the prince’s back felt woodstove-warm beneath his hand.
Poe made no comment about the frequent blunders, not even when his toes got trodden on, although he himself moved in perfect spring-heeled time to every note. Quite the contrary, he had to bite his lip once or twice to keep from smiling.
Finn decided this was very gracious of him.
And ah, he considered, level-headedly, the prince did not seem to have recognized him, although with the mask it could hardly be considered Poe's fault. It had been ridiculous and conceited of Finn to expect anything different, hadn’t it?
Oh well.
The tenth and eleventh hours chimed by.
At the ballroom’s far end, Ben – we will call him that, for now, since he was hiding behind a proper mask and did not need the added false title – squinted at the dancing pair with semi-professional admiration and envy. There was a charmed air around the stranger that seemed to waver as he moved, distorting the colors seen through it like sheets of rain on glass, the handiwork of a talented beginner in which Ben's evaluation could find no flaws or chinks.
Not a trick he himself could ever hope to manage, in other words. Every time he tried to look any harder, to see what lay beneath the illusion, a pain stung him between the eyes.
“That’s fey magic,” he declared. “Someone’s cast a glamour on that man.”
“Be silent, you stampeding ignoramus,” Hux said, standing beside him. His eyes were closed. “I am composing my coronation speech.”
(And through the ballroom’s high-arched eastern window, one could see a rising quarter-moon and the capitol city’s great clock tower. Its chimes were be heard for miles, each toll striding out over pastures and hay fields like the footfalls of a giant.)
“Have you enjoyed the evening?” Finn asked, after another song wound to its finish. “I’m sure everyone is wondering if you’ve made your – selection doesn’t seem to be the right word. Your choice. Have you?”
“With my mother wondering more than the rest put together, I’m sure.” They had stopped dancing, but Poe did not release his partner’s hand or arm. “But I’m nearing a decision. The council won’t like it, though – they’ve said they would prefer someone from Jakku or D’Qar, to maintain our trade agreements. What would you tell them, sir, if you were in my place?”
“There’s not much risk of that, your majesty. So I shouldn’t pretend I could speak for you.” Finn tilted his head. The red of his mask gleamed. “Nobody should, though. A king’s duty is to do the right thing, whatever his advisers try and tell him. Does that sound reasonable?”
“Quite. And you misprize yourself, sir.” Poe tipped his chin up, slightly, indicating the gilded-iron circlet that he wore balanced on his head. “I think this crown would suit you well.”
“That one there?” Finn gave it a craftsman’s critical glance. “I’d have to make several changes first, your majesty, if you’ll excuse me for saying so. The sunstones are set crooked.”
Poe laughed – which, if you will remember, was the thing Finn had come to hear – and began leading him towards the dais where Queen Leia sat.
But then the midnight hour began its strikes, a first and a second and a third toll, and Finn felt both his knees lock up.
What had he been wearing, before the enchantment? He tried to remember. Rough trousers, mud-caked boots, a woolen shirt that had been the victim of countless mendings, a neck-scarf he used to either clean the sweat off his face as he stood before the burning forge or to wipe his nose when it ran on the chilled-damp mornings.
A nobody, Phasma had reminded him. A nobody.
Well, frankly speaking, it was true.
There was a fourth, fifth, sixth toll. The prince turned back towards him, wearing a perplexed frown, and gave another slight tug on Finn’s arm. One of the abalone buttons on his enchanted white jacket suddenly winked out of existence like a firefly.
He slid his hands free, dropping a harried bow.
“Thank you for the dance, your majesty,” he said. “And for the conversation. We’ll all be very fortunate to call you our king.”
And, in sight of everyone, to the tune of seven-eight-nine, Finn straightened up and ran.
He knocked several guests down in the process, too, hollering back his sincerest apologies as the sword and the sash alike vanished from his waist. Poe dashed after him, although not fast enough – a more plausible scenario for two men in flat-heeled shoes, you would imagine, than if one of them had been in, say, slippers made from spun glass.
“Poor young fellow, whoever he is.” Phasma had rejoined her sons and was sipping the sweet red wine. “Always a pesky expiration on those sorts of short-term seelie charms – if you require a comparison, dealings with the devil will give you a seven-year lease at the very minimum.”
“The joke would be on poor Lucifer himself, then, Mother,” Hux said, jauntily. Ben was staring at the glamour’s lingering afterimage. “When the time came he would discover that you have no soul to collect.”
“Quite true.”
Finn’s coat was turning its old woad-dyed blue again when he snatched his falcon-feather cloak from the hands of a waiting attendant. He swung it around his shoulders as the tenth, eleventh notes struck, as he careened through the palace doors, but just before the night air snatched him up he half-thought he heard someone calling his name.
The red and white mask fell from his face to land on the front steps. A hairline crack appeared across its front.
“Phineas – Finn, Finn, wait – ”
Then his feet struck creaking wooden floorboards. Something knocked against his shin. Finn was pitched headlong over a footstool, landed hard on his knees, and found himself staring at the faultlessly-repaired stone wall of his own kitchen at home, far from anything resembling orchestra music or crystal chandeliers or brushed golden velvet.
He picked himself up.
And so Finn also noticed that the hearth-fire’s embers had at last burned out, that a cold bowl of untouched lentil stew still sat waiting for him on the table.
…