Of Secrets and Locked Drawers
Alanna glanced around surreptitiously, checking no one was around. Especially not the annoying, smart-mouthed healer that she'd taken on as her squire.
The corridor was empty. Well that was to be expected: Neal and the rest of the squires would be at dinner, and they were the only ones to constantly frequent this wing. Alanna slipped quietly into her squire's room.
Once inside, she hesitated. She shouldn't be doing this. She really shouldn't, she had no right to go through Neal's things. But sometimes curiosity got the better of her, and this was one of those times. Or maybe George's sneaky habits were catching after all.
In the five or so months of having Neal has her squire, they had managed to build a tentative friendship. When she didn't want to tie that sarcastic tongue of his up in a knot that is. It hadn't escaped her notice that he'd just sit some nights, writing what suspiciously looked like poems. No surprise really, not when you consider that he was five years older than his yearmates.
But it wasn't that that caught Alanna's attention. It was how whenever he saw Alanna watching this process, or anyone, for that matter, he'd whip those bits of paper out of sight before you could say "Mithros."
It didn't make sense to Alanna, who knew from four years of watching Keladry, and therefore Nealan too, that he made a habit of falling in and out with court ladies all the time. And how he made sure his friends all knew about it.
So here she was, about to rummage through his gear. 'If he catches me, I'll never hear the end of it...' she winced mentally at the thought. Turning her thoughts to the task at hand, she looked around.
'Now, where would I hide things such as poems if I were a squire again...'
The Lioness spied a drawer on the desk, the bottom one, with a faint glimmer of green magic visible around it when she accidentally brushed the emberstone at her neck. She grinned triumphantly.
'Thankyou for making it obvious to me, Nealan,' she thought smugly as she examined the wards with her gift.
A simple essence spell that activated again each time the draw was closed. Well, that was easy enough to overcome. Scanning the room, Alanna silently thanked her husband for teaching her all these tricks. After finding one of Neal's riding gloves, she carefully turned it inside out and touched it to the drawer.
It popped open slightly. Alanna grinned victoriously and reached in to pick up a few of the loose sheets of paper.
Bringing them into the dim lighting of the room, Alanna could see that the first couple of them were indeed poems. Another two were letters, and the last one seemed to be a drawing, not like the ones Alanna had caught Jonathan doing of Delia, and later Thayet.
'You shouldn't be doing this!' a voice in her head shrieked, but Alanna shoved it back into her self-conscious. It wasn't like she was going to tell anyone about what she found, she just wanted to know.
Alanna called a soft, violet light to her hand and read what was written on the first piece of paper.
"Sharp as the Yamani glaive she wields with deadly force,
Self-contained as a Kyprish Kuradung,
And hazel eyes, overflowing with dreams,
I only wish she would see that she is the girl of my dreams."
The flame-haired lady knight blinked in surprise. 'Yamani glaive? That could only be...' She flipped to the two letters. One was from Neal's cousin, Dom, who was with the King's Own, and the main subject seemed to a certain hazel-eyed Lady Squire. The other one was from Keladry herself.
Slowly, Alanna brought the picture she had glimpsed before forward. It was unmistakably Keladry depicted there, complete with her glaive, sparrows and the mangy dog that Neal had told her about.
Alanna made a noise somewhere in between shock, disbelief and amusement. 'He's gone and fallen for his best friend... Although,' she thought with a measure of glee, 'From what I've heard, she'd be very good at keeping her inline.'
Alanna looked through the dates on the other papers quickly, figuring out how long this had been going on. A quick peek told her that it was nearly two years ago that the oldest poems had been written.
Carefully, Alanna placed the papers back into the drawer as she had found them and closed it softly. Once she saw that the essence spell had kicked back in, she turned the glove back inside and placed it back where she had originally found it.
That done, she quietly left the room, allowing a small smile as she walked back to her rooms at the thought of her sarcastic squire and the realm's second Lady Knight.
A/N: For all the KD'ers: don't worry, I'm a KelDom girl at heart, and always will be. Promise.
For the KN'ers: I hope you enjoyed this, as it's the closest I'll ever come to writing KN. Those of you have always asked in my other stories about KN had better be pleased with yourselves. –gives half hearted glares-
Misha