I've been working on this chapter for the last few weeks, and I know, it's very short, but I've been very busy. Busier than ever before, actually. So I'm posting it at a cut-off point- it was meant to be longer, but I suppose I really should just post what I have and update later.

For all readers of The Keener: Kit and Jack will be back soon- they might take a few days more because drama has become the ruthless dictator of my every waking minute!

Oh, BTW, our play Zephyr and it's cast won three awards at the Sears Festival- Best Ensemble, Best Original Song, and Best Actress. Anyway, thanks for your patience, love you all to bits,

-SQ

Over the next two weeks, Aletté and Will found themselves caught in the updraft of a wedding air-front. Indeed, it seemed to Aletté that many nights, by the time her head finally laid itself down upon her pillow, her breath would be coming so thinly and raspily that she barely had a moment to enjoy the silence before her eyes drooped shut and opened again to a full chamber flooded with daylight. The energetic hum of maidservant's chatter buzzed about her ears as if her poor blonde head was perpetually caught in a hornet's nest.

The same, or similar, could be said for poor Will. He was growing accustomed to the erogenous glances he was constantly fending off from a particular young courtier, Lady Corelina, who requested of Will (and only Will) that he simply call her Cori. It was Cori and Cori alone who intrigued Will- she seemed, unlike the others, to have a little more wit, a little more brains, and a little less gossip filling her head and spewing from her rosy painted mouth. This was not to suggest in the least that our dear Will felt the slightest bit of attraction to her; on the contrary, when compared with Aletté, Cori seemed rather repulsive. And as always, the image of Aletté was constantly entrained in his mind's eye, so that any lady he met was immediately compared to she, the goddess in his thoughts, and immediately dismissed as little more than an acquaintance, or on the rare occasion, a friend.

But something about Cori made Will look twice- in a purely platonic manner, you understand. She was, like the other ladies, perpetually masked in a thick veil of rouge, powders, and paints. Her eyes were smudged from lid to lid with ebony charcoal, her straight black hair interwoven with strands of pearls. She was just like the others... but different. He tried to put his finger on it- she was almost... needy. Was that it? No. Not quite. But definitely different.

Almost as though he felt bad rejecting her advances, this being, must it be explained, a pure instinct of empathy, of not wanting to hurt another human being. Especially one as remarkable as Cori, though the source of her bewitching qualities was a mystery to poor Will.

With one week until the wedding day, and Aletté spending the day in perpetual hemming and tucking for her gigantic mass of white fabric she called her dress, Will was free to lounge the gardens outside his temporary apartments, trying to bight off the heat by sitting under an ancient spreading oak that sat at a cool, mossy corner of the yard. He lay down on the damp, pungent turf and closed his eyes peacefully.

"You shouldn't lie on the ground, Lord Turner." The voice was strange- ringing, playful, mocking, breathy... was there no word to express the way it fell like a bead of rain into a drainpipe puddle? "The fire ants will be over you like the ladies of the court."

He sat up and glanced at her. She was buried in another one of her enormous emerald satin gowns, her eyes painted to match her hair, her true skin tone indecipherable underneath what was at least five layers of ivory-toned powder. Her while gloved hand clutched at the handle of a lacy parasol, fingers resting lightly on the inlaid mother-of-pearl that graced its grasp. Her painted lips drew themselves into a smile that rang out somehow from beneath the mask of false beauty.

"Fire ants?" Will asked, stumbling to his feet.

A girlish laugh escaped her lips, the sort of laugh one would expect to hear from a child of five or so years. Immediately she covered her mouth lowered her eyes, stifling the laughter as if it were a crime to human ears. She cleared her throat. "Yes, fire ants. Dreadful things, Lord Turner. Give you an awful rash."

He nodded. "Thanks, I'll try to remember that."

Cori peered at him with another of her erotic, sideways glances and asked suddenly, "Where's Lady Malycho?"

"Aletté?" He still wasn't used to hearing her addressed by her formal title. "She's being fitted for her dress. It's taken three days and still not done."

"King Rico's spending more on this wedding than he's spent on the entire palace." She remarked, and Will wondered if he heard a note of bitterness in her breathy, sing-song voice. "When he married me off to that hideous old bat from Vienna he didn't pay a cent and I didn't get a choice at all." Definitely bitterness. "Put my family in awful debt, that did, and the old man died six months later."

"Oh." Will wasn't sure how to respond.

"Didn't stop Rico, though, oh no!" She went on as though Will wasn't there at all. "Married me again, he did! Four times, and none lasting longer than eight months."

"Oh." He said again. "They all died?"

"All except my last husband- he divorced me. Bloody Englishmen, he was. And just because I married the bastard doesn't mean I'll go to bed with him, no sir, I'll choose that for myself. But no, he thinks that's blasphemy. I'll show him blasphemy! The bastard, he said I-" Again her hand clapped over her mouth, and Will swore he could see colour rising in her powdered cheeks. "Oh, please don't tell them I said that."

Will nodded. "No problem." Though he was not quite sure who 'they' were exactly, he was sure this conversation would count for practically nothing in the grand political spectrum.

"Besides that-" Cori continued fearlessly. "-this wedding is completely off-the-top. Superfluous, if you ask me." Will began to wonder if she even knew he was the groom. "And Lady Malycho- Lord, what a beauty! At the ball she made us all look like little girls in party dresses- imagine what she'll look like in a wedding gown!"

"She is something." Will remarked quietly.

He noticed Cori's gloved fingers nervously picking at the inlaid mother-of-pearl on the handle of her parasol. "Then there's you- did you know every woman in the court's been swooning over you? Even the married ones?"

She said it so cheerfully, so bluntly. Will was taken aback by her forward manner. "Well, I-"

"Who's that pretty gentleman from over the sea that you brought with you?"

"Who, Jack?" This conversation was darting this way and that so fast it was hard for Will to keep tabs on their topic. "He's from the Caribbean."

"He's quite a pretty man, he is. His eyes are very intoxicating."

Will snickered. "So is his rum."

Again the girlish laugh, and again she stifled it as quickly as it had come. Cori cleared her throat and continued. "You're quite a fine-looking man yourself, Lord Turner. Your eyes are very dark."

Will looked at his shoes. He had grown accustomed to being pointed at and whispered about, but Cori's manner was noting short of embarrassing. "You're... quite pretty yourself." Was all he could manage to shift the spotlight over a little.

Cori seemed absolutely delighted. She spun around on her heel like a five-year-old and then paused to gaze at Will a moment, leaning flirtatious on her parasol. "I think I should go." And she turned and flounced out of the garden, only stopping at the wrought-iron gates to the palace, within perfect earshot of poor, embarrassed Will to remark in a very sprightly manner, "You know, Lord Turner, I think I might be a bit swoony over you."

He blinked once and she was gone.