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Prompt: Uprooted, Agnieszka (/Sarkan), she didn’t mean to set it on fire, really
I could tell from the way he looked at me, lips so thin they’d all but disappeared into his face, that Sarkan had no intention of believing me, however true my words had been.
“Perhaps it wanted to die,” I said mutinously, stirring the blackened ashes of his formerly third-finest coat with my toe; it had been a dour thing, with ghastly embroidery some brave girl with more willpower than skill who shall not be named had added, trying without success to brighten it up.
“Your stitching does tend to inspire that,” he said, but I could see the twitch of his lips as he fought back laughter, and so held back my last weapon for later use, the truest of my thoughts: you look better without it, anyhow.
Prompt: Uprooted, Agnieszka/Sarkan, meeting her parents
My mother didn’t know what to do with herself, the first time I introduced Sarkan to her, the fear that surrounded him still too ingrained in her, but since he hadn’t known what to do with himself either, that was all right.
The second time, he came into the house I’d grown up and lived my whole life within, until he’d stolen me away into his world, came and sat down at the scarred old table and ate my mother’s food and proclaimed it better than anything I’d ever made, which earned him a click of her tongue and a murmured, “Get on with you,” her eyes only widening a little bit afterwards as she noted who she’d spoken to.
The third time, I dragged him through the doorway with my hair more mussed than usual and a spot of color in his pale cheeks, something like a smile hovering at the corners of his mouth; whatever it was, it prompted her to look up from her knitting as we tumbled in and say, serene as the summer sun, “So when will you be marrying our Agnieszka, my lord?” and laugh alongside me when he paled once more.
Prompt: Uprooted, Agnieszka/Sarkan, disastrous marriage proposal(s)
“Agnieszka, I wonder if you might–” he said, and coughed uncomfortably, like a man with something unpleasant caught in his throat, so that my hand spasmed, fingers clenched as if to clear it, knocking a bottle from the table beside me, and in the shouting and chaos and profusion of flowering vines growing up around us, he never did finish his question.
“Perhaps we might as well simply–” he said on another night before hesitating on a sigh, like a breath of wind out of the Wood, heavy with the potential for poison and enchantment and loss, so that I kissed him instead, swallowing that sigh and turning it to many more, until he forgot it under the torn shirts and scattered buttons, snapped laces and pulled hair.
“Marry me,” I found the courage to whisper to him where we sat alone in the village green, the festival bonfire burning in the distance, my people whirling around it, because this I knew – that it must come from me, the offer and the question, for the sacrifice would be his, the roots he would lay down in me, the fixed point of his life forevermore, and: “Yes,” he said, and no more, embers swirling up into the darkness, free until they winked out.