"Well now, that sword hilt must really be fascinating."
Zelgius jumped a little, startled out of a blank reverie. He turned to acknowledge the woman who'd called to him, trying not to meet her eyes as he did so. "L-Lady Elena," he stammered, the words heavy in his mouth. Heavy, but embarrassingly, shamefully sweet. He forced himself to rest his gaze on her hair instead of her eyes, studying the ridged line where her hair curved out and away from her forehead in dark, wispy bangs.
His teacher's wife seemed to him like a little blue bird cutting through a night sky. Her blue hair, framing her face – her pale blue clerical dress, lined with a darker blue, and the blue scarf that she always wore draped around her neck, trailing behind her and nearly brushing the ground. The color blue melted softly all over her willowy form, so that the white of her face and hands shone like the moon and stars from it.
All of this flickered through Zelgius' mind, as it always did, for only half a second, more perhaps as sensation than as conscious thought. In that half-second Elena had begun to laugh at him.
"There you go with all that 'Lady' nonsense again. I do believe I asked you to call me 'Elena'."
Zelgius blushed furiously, biting at his lower lip before responding. "It would not be - proper."
Elena tilted her head to one side, and again Zelgius was reminded of the blue bird he always carried in his mind. "We are of the same age," she reminded him, smiling. "Remember?"
"You and I are the only ones who know that," he reminded her quietly. "To everyone else, I am hardly more than a child - barely into my later teens."
Elena seemed to ponder this for a moment. When she was not smiling, her face, with its heavy-lidded eyes, took on a look of dreamy melancholy. Zelgius always marveled over how that belied the cheer and mischievousness of her nature. "Well then," she finally said, "Perhaps I must be 'Lady Elena' with 'everyone else', if that would make you more comfortable. But really, when it is only you and I, there is no need for you to refer to me by a title."
At that Zelgius' blush deepened. "The - the general might not like it."
Elena smiled at him and took a step forward. "Gawain," she said softly, "does not have to know."