Author's Note: Reviews, reviews, reviews! How I love them! The more I get, the more I write, the better I write! (Yes, I am blackmailing you.)
She was eleven. He was nine. And he was hopelessly in love with her.
It was a muggy and miserable day at the Baron's cousin's summer estates. Kaigan was watching her again, the Baron's cousin's daughter. Aislinn was laughing to rival the sun, as she played with her toys on the grass.
And such toys they were. A ball made of pure gold; too heavy to throw, she had to roll it about. Fine silks from the rich East, tied together carelessly to make a jumping-rope. A half-thousand jewels of birds that shimmered in their rainbow plumage every time they took flight.
It was these birds that Kaigan was supposed to be tending, but he was not. He was watching Aislinn.
Eventually, growing bored with her fine playthings, she wandered over to the pond at the center of the greenhouse. There she sat, idly picking rosebuds off of the bushes around her and tossing them into the water, watching them soak and sink with morbid fascination. Kaigan pretended a need to clean the fountain in order to perch in the bushes across from her.
It was just his luck. One of the roses had not sunk, but had circled with the current in a leisurely manner. It sailed along towards him just as merrily as a real boat – though not nearly as pink and lovely, in Kaigan's eyes, as Aislinn herself. He made a snatch for it, missed. The rustle in the shrubbery caught Aislinn's interest, and she looked up.
Kaigan, freezing, refused to breathe until her attention wandered back to the pond beneath her. It was quite some time before he risked another grab. But by that time, the rose had floated out too far. He reached farther, and farther, and farther for it, willing Aislinn not to look up from her study of the water's surface and her reflection. Farther, farther, and still farther – he managed to touch just the edge of the petal with his finger, and then it happened.
Treacherous mud. Treacherous, treacherous, mud. It slid out from beneath him, and his wild clawings of the air were useless, for gravity took over from there and he fell into the pond with a thunderous splash.
It was apparent that Aislinn had first contemplated to scream. But when she saw the perpetrator as he burst to the surface, she could not help but laugh. And laugh she did, until she had to hold her sides to keep from ripping her silk dress. There was nothing left for Kaigan to do but crawl up on the bank and slink away, still dripping wet, still wishing the pond had been deep enough to drown in.
But he did not go away empty-handed. Clutched in his hand was a soiled, crushed, and very wet rosebud.
Kaigan found a cracked yet still serviceable pot for the rosebud even before he changed out of his sodden clothes. After patting it lovingly into the pot, full of rich loam stolen from the flower gardens, he watched it for any signs of life until the warmth of the sun on his cold, wet back lulled him to sleep.
Over the next few months, he split his free time between watching Aislinn and watching the pot. Frequently he would do both, bringing it along with him to whisper to it about her – about how she would kick her golden ball about the grass (He never wondered why the ball never rolled faster, as a ball was supposed to do. It was only natural that something like it would want to stay in her company as long as possible.); about how, when she stubbed her tender toes on the gold through the silk material of her shoe, she would cry real tears, better than any one else could. And such shoes they were. Made out of goldcloth, with diamonds stitched about the ankle, they complemented the focal point – laces of real unicorn hair.
Nights, he would lie awake on his cot in the servants' quarters and imagine a jaunty red cap for himself, with a real phoenix feather stuck in the brim. Maybe she would see him then, he reasoned. Maybe he would be able to say something intelligent and gallant to her, instead of stuttering half-voiced Your Graces when he took her the afternoon tea.
The rose bud sympathized with him, he was sure. It had begun to develop at an alarming rate, against all natural possibility, as if it had not the heart to disappoint the lovesick little boy. The plant grew thick and strong, a myriad of finger-thick stems that formed a formidable bush in his small pot. He could not wait until the first bud formed. It would snake up the stems until it reached the top, he knew, and then unfurl just slowly enough to release more of its giddying scent each day, until it bloomed in all its rosy wonder as a finale.
It was this image of the blushing face of the future flower that inspired him to whisper to it every day more details of Aislinn's own face. He had started at the red-gold hair, worked his way down to the forehead, and had just begun on those lively green eyes when he had the Idea.
It was less an idea than it was a puzzling urge to pick up bundles of the straw that laid about the barn and bind them together in shapely arms, legs, and a torso. The dress he sacrificed two of his best tunics for.
When the stitching of the dress was finished, he considered the medley of green and red patches to be the finest garment ever made. He placed it on the scarecrow with pride and let the birds go hungry for a day to stick it next to the rose pot in the neglected and overgrown corner of the flower garden.
The corner had been left to itself ever since some specie of exotic fruit tree had been tried there, and died there. The corner was all his now,now and he would sneak there between jobs – and sometimes in the middle of them – to monologue with Straw Aislinn and the sprouting rose.
"I know you love me, too, Aislinn," he would tell the sympathetic scarecrow with a sober face. "You can tell me any time, now."
Straw Aislinn had no head, yet, but Kaigan planned to fix that as soon as the baby of his flowerpot blossomed in all its blooming beauty. (For only on a rose bush, he reasoned, could a suitable match be found.)Thus, much of his talk to the rose was of still more details of Aislinn's face, so it could take note of what it was supposed to look like when it finally revealed itself.
But Aislinn's twelfth birthday came, and the rose still had not bloomed.