Ch. 6: The Tour

"And I should see my horse again. Hopefully, he hasn't tried to break out of the stable and come looking for me." He paused, licked his lips, and lowered his voice once again. "Or tried to get to know any of the mares. He can be rather... randy... and I'd hate for you to end up with a generation of strong, stubborn, and nearly untrainable... horses." There was a playful twinkle in his eye. He was clearly talking about the horse, but he might have been talking about someone else as well.

"Yes, we will make sure to check on your horse, though I do promise, if he got too feisty... he's in a stall. So for his sake I hope he could keep it in his pants..." she thought about the sentence and rephrased, "metaphorical pants... I wouldn't want to be caged up when everyone else was running free..." that also had a deeper meaning than just horses, but she left it alone and kept talking.

"Anyway... I think we will start down and work our way back up because... then at least you can check on your horse," she laughed, motioning him to follow her down the staircase. "You're already acquainted with the great hall and the foyer..." she sort of breezed through and out the front doors once more.

Hayward filed away what she said about her father for later and followed her out of the castle. He was pleased—even impressed—with how quickly she moved now that she wasn't restrained by a dress. The great hall and foyer still impressed him, even the doors themselves, and he wondering briefly how the elves acquired so many precious gems that they could use them the way Aasleaghans used glass and crystal. Mining? Trade? Magic?

He instinctively turned his face up toward the sun once more as they stepped outside, spreading his arms briefly to soak up its rays. "You know, back home we spend much of the day hiding from the sun. Up here, I think I'm going to have to seek it out just to keep warm."

Elissa motioned, "Stables are off to the left here." Before them was an expansive pasture with stables large enough for fifty horses to be housed. However, there were only about a dozen out grazing at the moment, his among them. "Look at that... he could behave himself..." she laughed.

As they approached the grazing grounds, he smiled. "Well, well. It seems we've both stayed out of trouble so far. I'm impressed." He whistled sharply as they approached the fence. Several of the Aasleaghan horses looked up at him, but only his trotted over. The prince hopped lightly up onto the fence and sat on the top of it, turning to face the princess with his back to the pasture. "Nostro is not the most well-behaved creature, but we have come to a sort of... agreement. I may have had to beat him in a tug-of-war first." He held out one arm to the side for the horse to come and rub up against his hand.

Nostro had other ideas, walking right up behind the prince and rubbing his long nose firmly against the man's back, knocking him off the fence. Hayward landed nimbly, dropping into a crouch with one hand on the ground, then sprang back up. "Really? You can't be that mad at me. It was just one night!" he protested, climbing back onto the fence to rub the horse's nose. "Oh, you're just feeling ornery after spending an entire day climbing the mountains." He gave the horse a scratch behind the ears and down his neck. "Now, if you can behave, I can introduce you to Princess Elissiana. You remember her from yesterday, right?" He looked the horse in the eye while pointing to the elf.

Nostro blinked at him a few times before leaning over and sniffing her hair. Then he swung his big head back at the prince. This time Hayward was ready for it, using his legs to brace himself against the fence, and he hardly gave way to the impact. "Oof. Alright, you big oaf, I get it. Go eat." He patted the horse on the nose again and hopped down off the fence. "Stubborn creature, but I love him," he said to the princess.

She laughed at the exchange. "You can call me Elissa if you like...it's easier to say..." she responded, still laughing at the creature. "You'll have to meet Sasha. She's just as stubborn. Wouldn't let me go to sleep last night because she insisted I pet her..." she shook her head, motioning for him to continue following her.

"Elissa," he repeated, as if trying it out. "It is a little easier. Do you like it better?" He ran it through his head a few times.

Elissa. Still an elven name, but it feels less alien. I think I like it.

He chuckled at her description of the big cat. "That sound adorable. And obnoxious. I'd probably threaten to make a rug out of her if it happened too often." He pursed his lips. "I wouldn't actually do it, of course, just threaten it occasionally."

"Back here are the gardens...you could get lost in them for hours. A lot of flowers and decorative things, but we have an orchard and vegetables as well..." she sort of gestured to them. "If you'd like to go in, we can. But...you won't get lunch until nightfall that way..." she laughed, eyeing him for a response.

He raised his eyebrows a little as she motioned toward the gardens. Flowers always appealed to him, splashes of color that were so rare in the desert. Then the sly smile returned. "You mean to tell me we could hide from your parents all day while simply claiming that you were 'giving me the full tour'?" He tried to keep the last phrase from sounding too suggestive, but it couldn't be entirely helped. "Perhaps we'll come back here at the end," he decided. "See how hungry we are, and how determined to avoid our other responsibilities."

"I mean just picking fruit off the trees and eating it is also an option, but if you want proper food, you'll have to face other people..." she laughed. She liked him. A lot. Probably more than was good. He had a similar antisocial tendency. That really probably shouldn't be something to like about someone, but...it was in her book.

"So looping around, we can go in the back way..." she said, opening a door that if you weren't looking for, could be mistaken as just part of the wall. "Super heavy..." she said, grunting a little as she held it open for him to walk past. "And you're in servant quarters..." The rooms were small, most of them open. Beds were neatly made, fires extinguished, and closets were closed.

"Through here..." she said, pointing to a stone door. "Is cold storage...you might freeze to death if you went in there. There are marble walls with ice walls on top. Yes, part of its magic. No, I don't know how it works. I just know the one time I went in as a child I almost died, and if my mother hadn't been so frightened I was going to, she would've beaten me..."

Heartwarming story, Elissa. Sure everyone wants to hear about how you were a little shit even then.

Hayward raised an eyebrow slightly as she pulled open the heavy stone door. His immediate impulse was to help, to lend his own strength to the effort, but he caught himself before acting on it. Instead, he watched her work, watched as the muscles of her legs, back, shoulders and arms worked together to move the hefty door. He couldn't help being impressed once again. Where he was from, princesses were frequently coddled, helped with every challenging task, and spared anything even vaguely resembling labor. The inevitable result was soft and plump, which was how his people liked it. And here she was, a near complete contrast-- and yet still beautiful, shapely in all the right ways despite her strength.

She's still an elf, I shouldn't get carried away... but... damn.

"Cold... storage," he repeated quietly. So cold she could freeze to death? Magic ice walls? The very idea made him shiver. The closest they had to such a thing back in the desert was a deep cellar, but that wasn't nearly cold enough to freeze anything, merely keep it from baking in the heat. Her mere mention of magic made him slightly uneasy, but he did his best not to show it. It was a leftover from his upbringing; he might have been more comfortable with the idea than most of his people, but that still left plenty of room to be unsettled.

"And, moving on..." she said, pointing to the next door. "You guessed it, kitchen." There were servants bustling around, preparing the midday meal. There had to be no less than a dozen of them just prepping. The room was almost as big as the great hall and stretched half the length of the back of the castle. There were several large brick ovens, some wood-burning stoves, and an area to the far right that had a large marble countertop and seemed to be just sitting there alone.

The kitchen was impressive to Hayward. So many indoor ovens would've been untenable back in Aasleagh, as they would end up baking the cooks themselves with their combined heat. He started to understand how they could have prepared the variety of food that had appeared at last night's feast. He followed her curiously toward the solitary stone counter.

"Ok, I have to show you this, because I guarantee you've never seen it..." she waved toward the area, hoping no one yelled at her for being in the kitchen. Underneath the countertop, she pulled out what looked like a pitcher of milk. "You can put other stuff in it, but I'm not as good at mixing it...so I'll just give it to you straight..." she poured the liquid from the pitcher onto the countertop, and almost instantly it turned into a semi-solid form. She placed the pitcher back down underneath and picked up what looked like two metal spatulas that were hanging beside it. She moved the not so liquid substance around until it formed a semi-hard ball of...something.

"Damn, I don't have anything to put it in..." she said, twisting her mouth from one side to the other before dashing across the kitchen and grabbing a bowl and two spoons. She quickly used one of the metal spatulas to scoop it up and put it into the bowl and handed him a spoon.

"Again... magic and ice... but it's iced cream. Well, and sugar. Basically iced cream and sugar. But it's easier just to say Ice cream.." she smiled, taking a bite and waiting for him to take one of his own. She was sure this was going to absolutely blow his mind.

What had been mild unease at the thought of the cold room turned into more visible disbelief when the cream suddenly froze on the countertop. His eyes went wide, his brows knit together, and his lips pursed tightly. He was less likely to accuse her of witchcraft if his lips were sealed. When she dashed away, he briefly reached down and touched the counter, quickly yanking his hand away; he had never felt anything so cold in his life. "What on earth," he muttered under his breath.

Hayward straightened up and tried to regain his composure when she returned with the bowl and spoons. He watched intently as she took a bite of the creamy mystery and appeared somehow unbothered by it.

Ok. It's fine, see? Just... strange. But, I can try anything. I am... a hard man to kill. This won't do it.

He reached out tentatively with the spoon and scooped up a small bit of the ice cream, looking at it closely as it softened in the spoon. Then he put it in his mouth and sucked the spoon clean. His entire body shivered again, and he squeezed his eyes shut. It took a few moments for him to recover.

He opened his eyes to look at her again. "That... is the coldest thing I have ever eaten. I'm not even sure... it just... so it... froze? And then it melts again?" The truth was, his experience with anything freezing was limited to the occasional frost they might get in the deepest winter, and even that had only ever happened a handful of times in his life.

He glanced at the bowl again, and then at the counter. "So... the counter is cold, and magical or something... but the... iced cream?... that's not magical. Just... really cold. Right?" He touched the counter again with just the tip of his finger, and goosebumps raced up his arm past his elbow. "That is... very... strange." He tentatively took a little more of it with his spoon. "Very... strange," he repeated, and put the spoon in his mouth again. The resulting shiver was far less pronounced, but it was still quite apparent how little tolerance he had for the cold.

She was trying desperately not to laugh at him, at the way he was reacting to the ice cream. She was unaware of just how sheltered from any form of cold he had been. Even in the summer, it was a crisp and comfortable temperature. Only a few weeks out of the year when the rains hit did the humidity kick up and make it hot. Or what she would call hot. They had snow for months at a time. In the winter they made snow cream which was much the same just adding the cream and sugar to fresh fallen snow. It was clearly icier, but it was still good.

"No...the ice cream isn't actually magic...it's just cold..." she couldn't stifle the laughter in her voice. "And there's not really that much magic to the stone, either. Well... the ice underneath is unmeltable. So I guess that's magic, but if we had normal ice, it would work the same. It merely freezes the stone cold enough to freeze the cream as it hits it. Freezing things isn't magic at all... just... making frozen things unmeltable is..." she laughed. She couldn't help it anymore. She laughed. Hard.

"Sorry," she apologized, regaining her composure. "I'm sure if I went to where you were from, there would be plenty of things that completely blew my mind. I didn't expect this would be one of those for you, but it is pretty cool...both figuratively and literally. So. I had to make it part of the tour." She took one more bite of the ice cream before setting it down on the counter on her way out.

Hayward shrugged. "Freezing things might as well be magic," he said with a chuckle. "I can count on one hand the number of times I've even seen frost on the ground, and it never lasts much past sunrise. Actual ice? Frozen cream?" He shook his head. "Even if I leave out how you do it, they'd call it witchcraft back home." He smirked a bit at himself. "There's a reason I'm here in late spring rather than, say, late fall. And it still feels chilly."

"So, now that I've shown you everything of interest down here, we climb." She pointed to a stairwell that was in the back of the castle for servant access. As they climbed, she passed over the first doorway up the winding spiral. "That's the second floor. Which, you've already been on. Bedrooms. Guest rooms. There's one sitting room there, but it looks like all the other sitting rooms..." they climbed another flight and she dipped into this arched entryway.

"This...is where all the boring diplomatic stuff happens!" She said with false enthusiasm. "There's another sitting room..." she gestured to a room set with two couches, two chairs, a small table in the middle and a fireplace built into the side of the wall. There was a tea set on the table so that tea could be made at any point there. Though rarely was tea ever made because seldom were the rooms ever used.

"And to our right.." she said, swerving that direction. "Is a deliberation room. Which is the room off of the main throne room where people can either wait or go yell at each other about... whatever reason they came here..." it was a terribly plain room with two chairs and a table, like the tiniest dining room that ever existed.

"So that means next door is..." she looked to him for an answer but didn't actually wait for it. "Ding ding! The throne room!" It was currently vacant and just looked like a ridiculously large space. There were stained glass windows on one side with pictures of her ancestors and a golden chandelier with crystals hanging from it that was about ten times her size, hanging in the very middle. The middle of the room was carpeted by a lush red rug that ran from the entryway to the small platform that had two thrones upon it: her mother's and her father's. Both were gold with rubies, making the capped posts of the back that shone out on either side of their faces when sitting. Etched into the gold on each throne were names...each king and queen who had ever sat in them had their names meticulously engraved, creating a beautiful pattern on the backs of the seats. They were rather breathtaking. Behind them hung a tapestry of her mother and father the day they were crowned. She paused a moment to let him take it in.

He followed her quietly through the castle, doing his best to build a mental map of the structure, the different ways in and out. Knowing about the servant's stair would be helpful. All the standard rooms were there, places to sit, places to talk, places to drink tea. The aesthetics were different, but form had to follow function, and so they all felt familiar. Still, his father's castle was a fortress, where this one was clearly less martial in its design. He rather liked it.

The throne room was a different matter. He followed her into the room and then stopped in his tracks. For a moment, the sheer number of things to look at tickled his fight-or-flight instincts, and he had to keep himself from turning and running back out the door.

There's no one here. There's no threat. There's just a lot of shiny things.

Shiny things were a distraction, and so many distractions felt like the setup for an ambush. He tried to put the thought out of his mind and simply look.

"Well, this is... incredible," he said simply as his eyes moved from one thing to the next. "I've seen stained glass, but never so large or intricate. I'm pretty sure there's as much gold in that chandelier as in my father's entire castle." He fell silent again, forcing himself to look around and not let his eyes get trapped on any one thing. "The rug is probably the least impressive thing in this room, and it's still gorgeous. I'm not sure it would survive in my home, though; sand wears carpets out in a hurry."

He pursed his lips as he looked around, and eventually his eyes fell on the princess again. Eh, I've been behaving myself for too long. "Well," he started, the sly smile returning to his lips. "I think I've finally seen something that does not pale in comparison to your beauty, Elissa."

She knew he would find the throne room impressive. Everyone did. It was hard not to find it overwhelming, but she enjoyed watching his eyes light up as he looked around and commented on the pieces in the room. And then he had to compliment her. She blushed.

Gods, damn it. My face is betraying me. He's just playing nicely. He doesn't actually think anything about you. Get over yourself. And yet she couldn't help taking it to heart.

She'd never wanted to kiss anyone more in her life than him, his eyes grazing over her as he fed her compliments. He was too smooth, and it was too close to what her mother wanted to be content giving into her feelings, though.

"Oh? And how much did my mother pay you to say that?" She shot back with a healthy dose of sarcasm. Her only shot in hell from not looking starry-eyed at him was to deflect. She didn't enjoy feeling this way. It made her feel careless. It made her drop her guard.

She walked away from him to look around the room over once more before glancing over her shoulder. "And if you've taken in all the beauty, you can handle for a bit, I'll show you the rooms that don't exist..." she teased, moving back toward the staircase. "Of course they exist, but I'm technically not supposed to show them to you because they don't...at least...as far as the general population knows..."

Hayward chuckled at her deflection and simply smiled. He playfully ran his eyes over her again. "I can't say I've quite had my fill... oh, you meant the throne room. Of course. Lead on." He took another quick look around the room and resolved to return later to look at it more closely.