“Oh, of course. Mares. I suppose that’s what he was on about when we were on the other side of the lake, as well?” her words were muttered, half-comprehensible under her breath, but she stopped when she met the night-dark beast’s eyes. He looked...well, almost sheepish. She stiffened, the brush in her hand frozen mid-air. “Ugh. Maybe I should name you Tarquin,” she scoffed, replacing the brush on the shelf and picking up a bucket instead, to begin spongeing the frothy sweat from the stallion’s chest and forelegs. Her hands were as busy as her mind, working rapidly over the problem before her, but her mouth was a tight line as Tristan regaled her with accusations. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she hissed at one point, but he went right along, increasingly hostile.
“Will you please stop being difficult, and just tell me?”
Alethea’s hands slowed to a stop. Mercifully, the horse’s body was between her and the prince – he could not see her face as it tried on several emotions, finally settling on a tense frown. “I am not being difficult,” she began, her brush strokes becoming languid, methodical, but her sentences ran together in a low rush “and I don’t think I have treated you so badly that I deserve such an upbraiding. I was perfectly polite to you and your friends. I only raised my voice when you got under the Black’s feet. I have been perfectly nice, and understanding, despite being hurt...” her voice trailed off tightly. She closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against the horse’s warm shoulder. “Despite being hurt that I didn’t get to spend so much as five minutes with you at your birthday. Every time I looked, you were off with those...other children, or dancing with Megan. Your present is still sitting on my desk.” She paused, listening to the great breaths echoing beneath her ear, and the silence growing beyond it. “But like I said, I understand. You have many friends, and only so much time to spend with them.”
He did not have many friends, but Alethea did not feel inclined to tell him so. What good would it do to point out that those girls fawned over any boy with noble blood that gave them a second look, or that those boys enjoyed the status of his company, but had no loyalty, and no real interest in his happiness? Tristan was too young to understand such things. She had only learned by watching others, an objective observer, in her fifteen long years of life.
And besides, it was not her place to tell him. They were maybe not as good friends as she had initially thought, and he certainly did not care for her the way she had come to care for him. Even if she did feel this way quite accidentally. Alethea would just have to find a way to chase those feelings off the way they had come – through a window or a crack in the door, to settle over her heart like a sickness in winter. Unbelievable, that the summer could go on as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
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