24 . 9 . 16

"Come along, Samuel. Don't stop now, or you'll not be getting any dinner."

The horse looked up at his rider plaintively, but the young woman only raised her eyebrows.

"Do I look like I'm made of oats?"

Samuel sniffed hopefully at the air, but there was no scent of oats nearby. Charlotta laughed at him and patted his neck.

"I'm not," she said. "But it's only a few more miles to the next town. Come on."

With a huge sigh, the horse began plodding forward once more, but his lazy stride and constant ear-flicks informed the girl that he was not at all pleased with the situation. The girl was more than used to the horse's ornery-ness after months of traveling on him. Though she had originally stolen the horse without giving him a second thought, during her flight from the castle with Amethyst, she had grown close to the creature. She didn't know what his name had been originally, but she had christened him Samuel shortly after embarking on her journey to the coast, and the name seemed to suit him well enough. (His name, incidentally, was Licorice. But he had never liked that name, so he didn't much mind the change.)

They made it to the town soon enough, and Charlotta ensured that Samuel was well taken care of before she accepted the invitation to dinner from the dirty urchin running around in circles.

"I'm coming, alright?" she said, tugging the little girl's dusty braid. "Go tell Mam I'll be there soon."

"Owwww!" the girl whined, rubbing her head with an equally dusty hand before continuing: "She told me not to come back without you, Char!"

"The clever devil," Charlotta said good-naturedly, rubbing Samuel's sweaty side one last time before walking toward the stable door.

The girl's mother, Susan, had decided to take Charlotta under her wing by providing her with food and clothes whenever she rode through town, and the only thing she asked in return was that Charlotta spend an evening at the dinner table with the rest of the family every once in a while, instead of lurking around the stable or the coastline until after dark and sneaking a roll in the middle of the night. Charlotta was terribly fond of Susan's boisterous family, but there were only so many renditions of the same story she could take before she felt the sudden need to be somewhere alone.

Susan had also christened her "Char," a nickname which had taken alarming hold with her entire family. Although Charlotta did not enjoy her full name overmuch, neither did she particularly care for that particular shortening. But, her protests were lost somewhere underneath the laughter and shouting, so Charlotta resigned herself to the nickname with regret. (However, after being given a name that she did not enjoy, her mind began to wander of its own accord to a name she would prefer. This action would have some significance, but she wouldn't know it until later.)

"What did you just call her?" the girl said, her voice accusatory as she lagged behind Charlotta. "Did you call her a devil?"

"Never mind, Fennel," Charlotta said. "What did Mam make for dinner?"

"Fish stew," the girl said with a huge, dramatic sigh. "Again."

"Be thankful you have fish," Charlotta said, poking the girl in the ribs and making her squeal. "Not everyone is so lucky. Where I came from, we only had fish once a year, and it wasn't half as good as the fish you have here."

"I bet it was better there," Fennel said stubbornly. Her excited skipping at Charlotta's arrival had turned to sad plodding when she remembered what was being served for dinner; Charlotta thought she was doing a very good impression of Samuel when he was annoyed, but she didn't say that.

"It was much more dull," Charlotta said. "Flat lands, fields, and lots of bread. So much bread that I wanted to throw it out the window sometimes."

"I like bread!" Fennel cried, wrinkling her nose at Charlotta's evident bad taste. (Clearly, Char didn't know what was good in life.)

"You wouldn't anymore if that's all you had to eat for three days straight," Charlotta said, recalling the time the supply wagon had been delayed when she was younger. "Not even milk or fruit to spice it up."

"I could eat it plain, every day for the rest of my life!" Fennel said, spinning around in circles with her hands uplifted at the thought of such wondrous meals.

"Alright, Fen," Charlotta said, giving up on the life lesson she had been trying to get across and simply focusing on keeping the girl from running into anyone.

The house they were approaching was on the edge of town, near the stable she had just put Samuel in for the night. Susan's family didn't own the stable, but they leased a few stalls from the innkeeper for their horses, and Charlotta was usually able to put Samuel in one of the stalls that wasn't being used. Susan's husband was usually off traveling, delivering various wares up and down the coastline. Geri was actually the reason Charlotta had gotten to know the family — she saw a lot of him as she worked to unload ships and sell the goods from them, because he often bought something from every ship that came to port on the northern coast of Berensia. He'd invited her to dinner with his family once, and Susan had taken a fancy to the calm, level headed girl. (Probably because she was so unlike herself, and any of her children or nieces and nephews.)

"Char! I knew you'd be coming through today!"

The tired-looking woman greeted Charlotta warmly, waving through the window and shouting over the noise inside the kitchen.

"I've got to start paying Geri to keep quiet," Charlotta shouted back, opening the back door and entering the chaos.

"He's more scared of me than you, love," Susan said, hugging the girl tightly. "You know that. How are you? It's been a little while."

"Same as always," Charlotta said, stepping out of the way of a child carrying a dangerously-full bucket of dishwater. "Nothing to complain about. Especially not with fish stew on the menu, if Fennel told me right."

"Wouldn't have anything else," Susan said. "Not at this time of year. Too much fish to eat anything else!"

"Char said they used to eat nothing but bread for dayyyys where she's from," Fennel whined, pouting up at her mother.

"I was trying to tell her that it was terrible," Charlotta said apologetically. "But somehow she didn't hear that part of the story."

"All of my children are excellent at picking and choosing which parts of stories they want to hear," Susan said, rubbing her fist against the top of Fennel's head and mussing the girl's braids. "The dears."

"Why can't we have more bread?" Fennel complained, trying vainly to smooth her hair back down again.

"You get me the flour and oil, and I'll see what I can do," Susan said. "But for now, run along — or I'll put you to work."

The girl vanished almost before her mother had finished speaking, making both Susan and Charlotta chuckle. Unlike Fennel, Charlotta didn't mind helping with the last-minute preparations for dinner. She aided in chopping up some fresh vegetables for the salad that would accompany the soup, and before long, Susan was hollering for everyone to gather around the table.

The dining room housed a very long table with equally long benches on either side of it. While the furniture itself was plain, it housed some of the most interesting and colorful interactions to be found in the small coastal town of Ferengo. Most people came to this table for parties or announcements; it almost seemed to grow with the number of guests. (This was because the benched seating allowed for as many or as few people as would squeeze in, but the children preferred to ascribe to the table magical qualities; they shan't be blamed for their imaginations.)

The table and benches had been salvaged from a ship that had been too damaged in a storm to be worth saving, and Geri had bought it for next to nothing, wisely thinking that their third child — who had just entered the world two months previously — would likely not be their last. Fennel was the youngest of five, in fact, though her cousins were over often enough to make it seem like she was the youngest of twelve.

Charlotta liked the table; she could still smell the salt spray under the lingering aromas of dinners past that had never quite been scrubbed away.

Dinner was served and eaten loudly, everyone pestering their favorite Char for stories and recounting stories of their own in order to entice some from their reluctant guest. She finally relented, as she always did, and told them the story of the girl who was locked in a tower and had hair that was longer than three houses were tall. (She didn't mention that she was the witch that had locked the girl in the tower — there was no need to confuse the excited sparkles in their eyes.) She, in return, heard the story of King Thomas The Frog for the third time; this time, it seemed he had nearly gotten crushed by four carriages on his way to apologize to Gloria instead of the uneventful return she had heard about last time.

It was somewhere in the middle of this story that she suddenly saw Tyrillius in her mind's eye. He was alone with Amethyst, and he seemed to be telling her something very important. And then she was nodding and taking his hand — a proposal, it had to be. They had been supposed to get married, hadn't they? It was odd to think that Amethyst was still alive and living the life she never should have had.

It just seemed wrong, that Amethyst would marry Tyrillius. Not, Charlotta supposed, that she would really know anything about it. But something about it unsettled a part of her she couldn't quite identify. It seemed like a mix of jealousy and foreboding — but neither of those feelings really made sense. She'd only known Tyrillius for a few days, because she (of course) was not counting the glimpses she'd gotten of his life in the preceding weeks. It was ridiculous. (And the foreboding feeling — well. That has it's own story, as I'm sure you've already guessed.)

Fennel's sharp laugh brought Charlotta's attention back to the story, and she tried not to think any more about that smiling, hesitant face that consistently appeared in her mind — and always just when she had been thinking about him for some reason.