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“She what?!” Bado wrenched his neck in his hurry to turn and stare at Forte, blinking blankly into her bright blue eyes, his dark, unruly hair now tousled thoroughly from the sudden movement. The young woman blinked back up at him. Her straw-blond hair tied up in a tall ponytail came only up to his collarbone, though she was not by any means short, but his was a height unmatched by anyone in Selphia. The lady knight raised an eyebrow at him, giving a condescending stare at his abruptly lively energy. It rankled him. He was still her guardian, even if she never really treated him as such, and he still wanted some level of respect from her, despite all precedence of sheer refusal on her part.
“Well that put some life into you.” She said with a slow, mocking tone. Perhaps she saw him more as an elder brother or a cousin, despite being merely half his age, but that still didn’t warrant this level of disdain. “I thought you were too tired to do any work today, hm?”
“You gonna tell me what happened or do I have to go find out myself, huh?” He sighed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and running a hand through his hair. Far from taming it, the gesture only seemed to make it stand up and fall down in entirely new and arbitrary directions
“Perhaps you should.” She replied tartly, adjusting a shoulder strap of her tight fitting half-plate armor. “At least it would get you up off your butt and moving around.”
“Hmph.” He exhaled an impatient puff of air in reply to this impertinent jibe and stepped around her, heading for the door. As he passed the register counter and made to exit the little blacksmith shop full of eccentric curiosities on every shelf, she followed his back with her eyes full of incredulity.
“Aren’t you going to get someone to mind the shop or at least put up a sign?” She called sharply. He reached out a big, angular gloved hand and swung the heavy door open on its creaking iron hinges, shooting a mischievous smile full of his own defiance back over his shoulder at his foster daughter.
“Nope!” And with that he was outside, the door thudding shut behind him. He drew in a long draught of fresh, cold spring air through his nose and smiled up at the clear blue sky with eyes squinted against the sun. Somewhere behind him through the heavy oak door he could hear some muffled curses in Forte’s voice, but it only made him chuckle. He hooked his thumbs in his pockets and strode off down the street toward the center of town.
The bite in the air of this new year’s day turned his pointed dwarf ears pink and cold at the tips and his breath came out in delicate puffs of vapor in front of his mouth. The short, dark beard lining his jaw but strikingly absent of moustache upon his upper lip made a curious contrast between the parts of his face that were still warm and the parts that went unshielded against the last frost of winter in its reluctance to make way for spring.
‘Lady Ventuswill had a person fall on her head through the castle skylight this morning.’ That was what Forte had said to the immediate effect of startling him out of his boredom and lethargy. He’d nearly overbalanced the chair he was leaning back on and fallen over when he heard her. At very least, it was an amusing joke of a thing, and at best it was a singularly curious event in the decade and more he’d lived in the castle town of Selphia. Perhaps it was merely a bit of hyperbolic gossip spread by his other foster kid, Kiel, who was singlehandedly the curator on high of the entire town’s rumor mill. But… if it were true, he’d just have to tease the old lizard about it some, and shake the hand of the person who had singlehandedly made the divine dragon of wind into a comedy act in his imaginings. Now that was something to be praised.
His big feet in big, thick-soled boots thumped along the cobblestone road in between crystal-blue canals full of lively coldwater fish coming in from upstream into the carefully arranged tributaries leading into and through Selphia. The residents here didn’t have to go far for a virtually unlimited food source. He eyed a glimmering flash of pink scales beneath the water and smiled to himself with one corner of his mouth.
‘Ah, a good omen.’ He thought. ‘Seeing a lover’s snapper on new year’s day… well, there’s no way that’s not a love fortune of some kind.’ He shook his head and laughed a self-mocking chuckle. That kind of fairytale nonsense—meeting a beautiful woman and falling madly and mutually in love at first sight—was just that: nonsense. And not even the kind of nonsense that would be likely to befall a character like him, even in a fairytale. He walked on, musing to himself that the omen must have been for some other poor fool and he’d inadvertently denied some younger, more naïve man meeting his true love before next year. ‘Ah well,’ He thought, shrugging a little for only his own benefit, ‘don’t I know all too well not every guy is a prince, and not every prince meets his princess…’
It wasn’t a melancholy thought, by any means, but merely an amused sort of observance a spectator would make, smiling to himself at how much more he knew than the hapless subject of whatever narrative he was viewing. Selphia’s dwarven blacksmith merely walked on and hummed a tune in his deep, richly timbered voice, pleasantly oblivious to the irony of treating his own life as a story he was merely reading to himself.
Before long he was standing before the gates of the great dragon hall and reaching out one of his sturdy arms to push open the great wood and iron door, burning with curiosity at finding out what truth might be found in the rumor Forte had told him not an hour ago. The echoing creak of the huge door bounced around the tall, bare marble walls of the dragon altar. Upon it a huge serpentine silhouette crested with red, green, and gold plumage bristled with barely mediated temper. Bado blinked in the face of the bright sunlight streaming in from directly above through the gaping, open ceiling, made so to convenience Ventuswill’s comings and goings by flight.
“And I suppose you’ve come to gawk too, knight?” She hissed irritably, her illustrious plumage rising on end to amplify the broadcasting of her displeasure. He chuckled as his eyes adjusted and she came into view. Two or three of the plumes on the very top of her crested head were snapped at the shaft and bent comically out of alignment. Her dark, glossy, fathomless eyes narrowed dangerously at him as she understood where his gaze had settled. “Well you may take yourself away again and leave me be. I’ve suffered enough indignity for one day without your playing jester remarks! Off with you!”
“Easy, milady. I ain’t been a knight for you to order around for a good ten years or so, ya know.” He gestured placating with open palms raised to the gigantic dragon mantling in front of him. “But you’re in a pretty high temper over a simple rumor, aren’t ya?”
“Oh! That familiar tone! Do you really think it’s appropriate for you to address a divine dragon—a god, thusly?” She let a guttural, hissing growl escape her toothy jaws, flaring her crest of feathers again.
“S’nothing personal, ya know.” He folded his arms and tilted his head wryly up at her. “I ain’t been one for formal talk for a long time, now, and you’re no exception.” He blinked suddenly, looking again at her bent and broken feathers atop her head. “Wait a sec, are you gonna tell me that silly bit of gossip is true?!” He felt a remarkably silly grin spreading across his mouth, creasing the smile lines embedded in his cheeks.
“Hmph!” The dragon fumed. “I say again, knave, if you’ve come to gawk and laugh you may take yourself elsewhere! Go and laugh at the little fool who fell on me, why don’t you?!” Bado laughed a bright, clear laugh, only frayed at the very edges by his many years of hardship and trials.
“Sounds fine to me! Where is this little walking miracle?” he leaned to one side and tilted his head as if he’d find the remarkable person that had fallen out of the sky onto a dragon’s head tucked neatly under one of the great beast’s wings. Ventuswill ruffled her feathers once more and flicked her head toward the large open doorway to the north leading to the fields of farmland belonging to the castle and its residents.
“Out there.” She grumbled, watching him stroll around her and out the door with her horned and pointed snout aimed directly at him. He, for his part, did not so much as glance twice at the huge dragon god towering above him. Call him an old dog if they might, but there was nothing shocking about a dragon once you’d been a dragon knight for some number of years. Ventuswill was nothing more than a very regal, very vain person with a good deal more weight, claws, teeth, and feathers than most the folks he knew around town.
Picking up the tune he’d been humming again, Bado shaded his eyes with one wide palm as he looked about the large open fields. Where was this rascally young fool? In the distance he spotted a trim little figure swinging a hoe at the hard, partly frozen earth. At this distance it was impossible to tell anything other than that it was probably a young person by the slender quality of the silhouetted limbs arcing through the air with the hoe, and probably a very naïve person by the fact that they were trying to till the hard packed earth by hand in the first place. A sly grin and a knowing quirk of his eyebrows announced themselves upon Bado’s features as he strode closer. A person foolhardy enough to be out here tilling on new year’s was probably also an easy mark for even the most feeble sales pitch he could manage. He walked closer, feeling almost like a cat readying to pounce on a mouse. Young people needed someone to teach them not to be so gullible, after all.
As the figure grew closer, he tilted his head and frowned slightly. A long slender pair of legs leading seamlessly up into a curvy combination of thighs, hips, waist, and chest, combined with two long swaying pigtails announced to his eyes that this person was in fact, a woman. Well, it was one thing for reckless young man to fall from the sky, bounce off a dragon’s head and immediately take up farming on the castle grounds in the still frozen air of winter, but for a girl to do all these things was downright outlandish. Even Forte in her loophole assumption of the role of dragon knight had kicked up quite a storm of protestations from the knights’ council in the capitol city. Norad wasn’t so egalitarian as to assume young women could step directly into the shoes of any able bodied young man. The prowling curiosity in his chest only grew at this revelation, and he stepped closer, piecing together the view of this peculiar young woman as he turned and walked around her via one of the rows between the tilled earth.
The figure was entirely oblivious to him as he approached, though his heavy boots crunched over the frozen ground perfectly audibly. The closer he got and the more he saw, the more curious and mystified he became. The long, shining hair that cascaded down in twin tails of shimmering pale green from above her ears where two white butterfly bows tied them mesmerized him nearly as much as the breathy ‘huh’ she exhaled with every stroke of the farm tool in her delicate gloved hands. Judging by the fluidity of her movements and the continually unbroken focus with which she set about her task, it seemed there was nothing in the world more natural to this young woman than manual labor. But what kind of woman would that possibly describe? Not even Forte, with her stiff imitation of masculinity as she walked, ran, fought, and barked orders, could have boasted the seamlessness of the strength that powered this young lady’s efforts poured presently into the gritty, rough business of hard labor on a farm. He stood watching her for several moments, not ten feet away and clearly still unnoticed by the girl, before his curiosity finally drove him to announce himself.
“Don’t overdo it kid.” He called in an ambivalent tone, “Falling from the sky is one thing, but working yourself into the ground your first day here is bound to be bad for your health.”
The little woman spun around, whirling the hoe once in an arc about her with deftly twirling fingertips before it snapped into an aggressive gesture aimed at his chest and gripped between both her palms. Her feet were planted shoulder width apart and her strength was plain to see in the firmly grounded stance. His own back stiffened and his feet shifted, scraping over the dirt automatically into his a shadow of his own battle stance, not quite aggressive but ready to defend himself nonetheless. The martial artist in him recognized a fellow fighter in her, even though he’d not held a sword or raised a hand in combat in a dog’s age. He blinked, half surprised, and half disbelieving. The ferocity that had spurred his body into muscle-memory driven preparedness evaporated from her in an instant as she blinked and shook her head, letting the hoe droop in her grip and stepping back, uncertain. Confusion, palpable and unmistakable emanated from her.
Bado raised his hands both in a gesture of peaceful surrender and shifted his weight into a lazy, crooked stance he hoped would be disarming.
“Whoa, hey, take it easy, scamp. I didn’t come to fight.” He called jovially. She brought a closed hand up to her chest nervously and one of her feet shifted behind her, angling her body half away from him as if she might consider bolting.
“I-I’m sorry.” She called back. “You just startled me is all…”
“Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to make you jump. You’re the new girl right? The one that dropped in on Ventuswill?” She nodded uncertainly. He set his hands on his hips and shook his head. “Well I’ll be damned. To think someone as little and cute as you could overturn all her vanity in one stroke!” He tilted his head back and laughed at the dragon god’s expense. Then he took a step toward her and put out a hand.
“My name’s Bado. I operate the blacksmith shop ‘Meanderer’ in the residential district, but I also sell all sorts of stuff in my shop, so stop by often and spend a lot, okay?” He winked at her with a playful smirk. She didn’t take up his joking tone, however. She reached out with one hand and grasped his, her slender fingers enveloped in his large, thick ones. This little woman barely came up to his chest, and her head tilted forward and then back as she looked down all the way to his toes and then her eyes climbed back up him bit by bit until they captured his and he froze.
Green was a color that his and everyone else’s eyes were very familiar with, in many hundreds of exactly individual hues, tints and shades. Green is entirely too commonplace in a world full of foliage and growing things to be considered remarkable… except when found outside of leaves and grass in an unexpected place and every bit as vibrant and lively as the fresh bloom of life in the returning warmth of spring. The green of her eyes stopped Bado’s breath in his throat and made something in his chest flicker in a manner not altogether comfortable and not at all familiar. Was this, he wondered, what all the flowery language of fairy tales and love songs referred to as a heart skipping a beat? They were not quite the glossy green of emeralds and not quite the fiery green of the first blazing turn of foliage in thin wintery sunlight. Those verdant pools of sapient, uniquely distinct green shone with a curious innocence and a burning spirit unprecedented in his long life and multitude of different experiences up to now. What did it mean for a pair of eyes to render a nearly forty-year-old man as dumbstruck and wonder-lost as a boy beholding the ocean or a blazing aurora in a night sky strewn with bands of countless stars for the first time?
“I’m Frey… I think.” She replied in an uncertain voice. He blinked.
“S’cuse me?” he faltered, shaking himself out of the frozen stare he’d been fixing her with.
“I said my name is Frey… or at least I think it is.” She repeated, releasing his hand and rubbing at her left arm with her right hand. The hoe hung at her left side and she stared up at him, apparently equally dumbfounded as she looked at him as he was upon seeing her up close. Her eyes shifted and flicked back and forth from a point immediately to the right and then left of his head. He turned his head ever so slightly out of reflex to find what she was looking at, but he couldn’t force his own blue-gray eyes to release their fixated hold on her face. “Are you… a dwarf?” She asked, tilting her head curiously and looking at his pointed ears again. He blinked again, finding his tongue clumsy suddenly.
“I—uh—yeah… I am.” He fumbled, feeling a warm embarrassed rush of blood go to his face. “But, did you just say you think your name is Frey?” She nodded. He raised a hand and rubbed the back of his neck, fretting slightly with his brows and the corner of his mouth. “So… how does that work?” He asked in a puzzled voice.
“I don’t remember anything from before this morning.” She said with baffling calmness, never letting her vivid green eyes off their determined searching of his person. He stared at her dumbly for another breath or two. “Aren’t you… a little big for a dwarf?” She ventured in the aggravatingly innocent manner of a child who has no notion of how staggeringly rude this question, put to a stranger, actually was. Before he had any notion of containing it, a wild giggle fluttered up from his chest and escaped his mouth in a short burst of surprised, hapless laughter. He clapped his mouth shut in its wake, wide-eyed with surprise at his own involuntary outburst. Recovering as quickly as possible, he tried to look amused at her.
“Well, yeah, I suppose I am. Aren’t you a little small for a farmer?” He returned in kind. She blinked at him and then smiled like a kid who is tickled to find a grownup more ignorant than herself.
“I’m an Earthmate. Size doesn’t come into it.” She said confidently. He raised his eyebrows at her.
“Earthmate, huh? Well I’ve never seen one of those. Knights used to say there weren’t any left, what with the empire’s agents combing the country looking for ‘em.” She tweaked a corner of her mouth into a slightly mistrusting expression at him. “But, since I don’t know any different, if you say you’re an Earthmate then I suppose I ain’t in any position to deny it.” He shrugged, trying his best to sound casual. Then a stroke of inspiration hit him. “But hey, if you don’t remember anything that means you have amnesia, right?” She nodded slowly.
“That’s what Venti—uswill,” she slipped the pronunciation of the dragon’s name and recovered it in a hurry, “and prince Arthur called it, yeah.”
“Aah…” He went on knowingly, “Well, today’s you’re lucky day, kid. I just so happen to have just what you need right here!” He reached into one of the many little pockets of his curious vest with its wide straps and buckles and the white furred collar around his neck and pulled out a small cobalt blue vial of perfectly ordinary spring water with a perplexing combination of three drops of hot cinnamon oil and two drops of menthol added to it. The mysterious vessel was capped with an eyedropper screwed tightly shut and the bottle itself was about the size of an acorn and unlabeled. He held it out in front of her face and she leaned forward to inspect it, her eyes crossing as her nose almost touched the thing. He held down another wild little laugh.
“What is it?” She asked in a tone of feverish curiosity.
“Memory restoration potion, of course!” He answered as if this were perfectly obvious. Her eyes widened instantly and snapped up to look at his face.
“Really?!” She gasped. “How much?!” Those blazing green eyes shimmered with uncontrollable excitement and elated anticipation as they locked onto his own tired eyes. The crow’s feet creased at their corners loosened and the smile slipped from his face as his expression shifted instantly into a frown of concern.
“Uh… That’s a whole lot of happy expectation in your eyes there, kid… sorry.” He sighed, tucking the vial back into his pocket. Frey’s eyes followed it anxiously for a beat and then returned to his face, confused and pouting.
“What?”
“Listen here, Frey,” He assumed a blend of apology and amusement in his posture and his voice, “I just wanna make a pile of money without really workin’ for it, see? But I’ve never been one for takin’ advantage of people, either.” She blinked at him and frowned in utter bewildered confusion. “So,” He continued, “Don’t go fallin’ for deals that are too good to be true, ‘kay?” He smiled at her, half mocking, half sheepish. Understanding dawned on her face finally and she flushed instantly bright red with all the indignant humiliation of being utterly taken in by his trick. He laughed behind deliberately closed lips. Her furious gaze amid all that blushing young feminine face was a little too cute not to be delightful, no matter how cross with him she might actually be.
“Sorry.” He repeated, still smiling. She turned her head and glared off to the side at some unfortunate patch of dirt, diffusing her sudden embarrassment and irritation on the hapless frozen earth. “But hey, your memories are in your head somewhere, right? So, I can’t help you dig ‘em up.” The frown across her mouth grew tighter and tension lined every contour of her face as she continued to look very deliberately away from him. With a pang he realized he might have driven her close to tears and guilt bubbled up, hot and nauseating in his stomach. He hurried to correct his misstep. “But…” He added, putting a hopeful tone into his voice, now, “Maybe I can help some other way… so you don’t have to carry the burden all by yourself, okay?” He raised his brows and quirked an entreating smile at her, dropping the mocking, sly character from earlier.
She raised her eyes to his reluctantly without turning her head toward him. He kept smiling at her and felt his eyes soften. She really was cute… the slight pout of her lips and the delicate profile of her softly feminine face as pale as porcelain pulled at him somewhere in his chest. Finally, she relaxed a little and reluctantly allowed a little smile to tug on her pink lips. The hardened mistrust in her eyes dissolved and she turned and brightened at him, reflecting his earnest desire to make friends readily. His heart jumped again.
“Okay.” She nodded.
“That’s it.” He exhaled quietly, realizing belatedly that he had been holding his breath a little. Then he said a little louder and clearer: “Settle in and build your life here. That’s what I did when I left my old life behind. Let your memories come back at their own pace. But… even if they don’t, you’ll have made new ones and that’s a fine thing, too.” He nodded approvingly at the end of this speech, smiling warmly at her. She returned the smile with a simple, happy gratitude.
“Thanks, Bado.” She chirped, sending another little jolt through him as he heard his name in her voice for the first time. A warm rush followed the initial pang and he couldn’t help smiling as a suddenly buoyant mood floated up inside his chest.
They beamed at each other a moment or two longer before he felt his face growing hot again and he cleared his throat and looked about him for some other topic of conversation. Then he stopped suddenly in surprise and blinked. Every foot of soil from where she was standing northward all the way back fifty yards or so to the back of the castle farmland was perfectly tilled in neat rows, the soil fluffy and dark where it had been turned out of the cold winter earth. He stared for two long breaths and then turned back to the little Earthmate girl in plain-faced shock.
“You said you just got here today?” He asked, mystified. Short of himself, he didn’t know of anyone in Selphia who could have broken and tilled so much rock-hard frozen earth in such a short space of time and he could scarcely have done it so expertly, relying merely on his size and strength rather than any knowledge of or instinct for cultivating farmland.
“Uh huh.” She replied unassumingly, nodding. He looked back out over the field and she stepped closer beside him and followed his gaze, trying to find the thing he was looking so amazed by.
“Well I’ll be damned.” He breathed quietly. “You’re not what you look, little lady.” He bent a crooked grin at her. She tilted her head up at him, uncomprehending. The cuteness of this expression pulled another chuckle from his mouth as he turned and left her staring at his back as he strolled away smiling.
“I’ll be seeing you around, Frey.” He called back over his shoulder. “Count on it. Seems like someone’s got to teach you about not working too hard, and I’m just the guy to do it.”
“Okay!” She called in an obliviously cheerful voice back at him, raising a hand to wave goodbye.
He returned the wave, smiling at her once more before he tucked his hands in his pockets and made his way back home. A chilly breeze swirled around him, stirring his hair and stealing some of the breath from his lungs as it came, but it had no bearing on the warm glow in his face and ears. He smiled and smiled in spite of himself, walking back through the cobblestone roads of Selphia to the residential district and his own little home and shop.
“What on earth?” He laughed to himself, shaking his head to express the wonder and disbelief and amusement, but not quite hard enough to dislodge the image from his mind of green eyes, pale skin, and pink lips smiling up at him. ‘Who’s fairytale have I blundered into today?’ he wondered vaguely.
Off to his left there was a flash of movement and a splash. He turned his head just in time to see a shining rosy-pink fish, brilliant and vibrant as any flower leap clear of the water and splash back down beneath the surface an instant later. He stared at the spot where the lover’s snapper had breached the water a moment longer and the smile playing about his mouth widened slightly.
‘Mine, I guess.’