Prince Geordo of Stuart can hardly remember the last time that he had ever been in such a state of panic. His throat is shutting close and his face is flushed from running up and down the palace, his hair is messy and his clothes are crooked.
Catarina had one job. All she had to do was stay within the walls of the compound, where he knew that she would be safe when he was out. Though, evidently that was too much for her, because he just got back and she is nowhere to be found.
Not that she being gone was even the worst part.
The worst part is that none of the idiots he assigned to her surveillance and protection knew anything about where she could have gone. The Crown Princess of this country disappears in thin air, and the guards take no notice of the absence until he himself point it out to them. By all accounts, she could have been dead out in the woods somewhere and not one of them would have noticed.
If Catarina does not appear soon, heads will start to roll. All they could tell him was that she had not been around and they had not seen her.
"So, nobody saw her? Anywhere?" He clarified, though the edge in his voice made it abundantly clear to the household service of the palace that he is not actually asking. He already knew the answer to his question.
Of course, they did not.
"I see." He smiled placidly. "The one who can first find the Crown Princess and bring her to me can keep their job. The rest is fired, without recommendations. I suggest you be quick in your search, while I am still feeling charitable."
A chill run through the spines of the servants. They remain still in place, confused on what they should do.
"What are you still doing here? Go!" The prince barked.
He cannot understand how the patented Catarina charm does not work with the uptight servants of his palace. Do they respond only to fear? Sometimes, he felt like the only person around here that even recognized that she existed, and perhaps that was because he basically was.
Geordo understands that she is an independent and capable person, and does not need constant surveillance, but he wants to have it. He wants to always know where she is or what she is doing, because whether she realized it or not, she is important to him. She is the only people on the face of the earth that actually mattered as far as he was concerned.
It had been a struggle to have her to himself. He had to stave off new suitors, beat the old ones and, most importantly, convince her to understand that he meant to marry her, that he would not kill or exile her, that he would not fall in love with anyone else, and that she would be assured her freedom even if she became queen. He is not about to have it threatened, and he is not going to allow her stilted suitors to even consider him not strong enough to protect her.
If there is one upside about being king, Gerodo believes it is the power to make his will the law of the land. He is forcing Catarina through as queen, and the aristocracy and the household service can shove their objections or suffer the consequences.
"You know what? Forget it. I'll find her myself." He decided, giving up on the rest of them without much more consideration. "When I'm back, let me not see a single clue of your presence here."
It had been a waste of precious time to demand help from any of them in the first place, when he could have been out there this whole time.
Who knows what kind of trouble Catarina could have gotten into?
She might have been a common fixture around the main palace, but they rarely, if ever, came to this corner of the grounds. She does not know how to navigate the woods, and they still have not had the chance to clear her a field for her agricultural exploits.
That is not to mention the shadows of the trees that projected on to the edges of the little building. He had this compound cleared for its privacy, so Catarina can rest peacefully from any demands of courtly life, but it had been abandoned before. It is just dark enough and secluded enough that a kidnapping can happen in broad daylight and there will be none the wiser.
Horror goes through his mind. If his wife wandered into the wrong place, she could be killed without so much as a second thought.
The thought of that was more than enough to put a pep in the male's step as he headed out into the woods beyond the garden, with his sword and a small pack of emergency medical supplies in hand.
No matter what she had gotten into, he would get her out of it. Assuming that he still could.
When he had left their home, Catarina was having her lunch. He did not eat with her that day, as he had a meeting with the prime minister in the afternoon. This had been not more than a couple of hours ago, and she could not have gotten that far in such a short period of time. If he started walking now, he just had to hope he would run into her.
It not as if he had much more of a choice. The last thing Geordo would ever do was leave her out there by herself. Given the unpredictability of life in the palace and the potential dangers associated with royalty, if something really comes to pass, it could take the entire Palace Guard days to find her again, if they ever did.
From where he was standing, it was hard for him to not panic even more, fearing the worst. If he did not find Catarina soon, there was no guarantee he would ever see her again.
"Catarina? Are you out there?" He called every so often, so loud that his voice echoed through the damp forest.
Geordo promises himself that, when he did manage to track his wife down, he will never let her leave his side again. This place is dangerous and she could not just wander off whenever she wanted to. Unless she wanted to get herself killed, that was.
Catarina is much too vulnerable to be left unprotected. She is naïve and believes the goodwill of anyone, and while she has been trained in sword fighting and magic, she does not have any experience with actual combat.
He is much more proficient in self-defence than her, and even if he so finds an opponent he cannot beat, if he is there, then she is not fighting alone. He was no stranger to confrontation and he did not have a problem making enemies.
The princely couple is very different in that regard, and he shuddered to think about what could happen if she ran into someone out here alone.
He has to find Catarina, and he has to find her now.
Thankfully, after going up and down the palace and combing through the grounds, he managed to find his wife sitting in a small pier on a lake, a five-minute walk from their home, before anything absolutely awful could come to pass.
Though, Catarina is not in some dire life-threatening position like he had previously feared. She was not bleeding out in the middle of a field or being held hostage by some terrorist group or ambitious noble.
She is just sitting there. Like nothing was wrong. Like she had not nearly given him an aneurysm earlier that day.
"Catarina! Where were you? I came back from the main palace and you were gone!" Geordo almost shouts, calling out to her seated frame without so much as a second thought.
The foolish woman had really freaked him out this morning and he wanted to know why. What could have been so important that she had to nearly give him a heart attack?
Pumpkins. Turns out the answer is pumpkins.
By the time Geordo made his way over to where she is sitting, he found her surrounded entirely by all manners of pumpkins and candles, a number which he had never seen before in his life. There should be around thirty specimens of the vegetable scattered around, of all shapes, sizes and colours.
These were pumpkins, yes, but they are not right. They were cut and scattered, their seeds taken off in a ritualistic semblance of impaling or immolation, some are even burned. All of them had a weird carving, all different, none with a meaning he can recognize.
"Hello, Prince Geordo!" The brunette princess greets with as much a sunny disposition as always. "Look what Anne brought! My pumpkins from back home! Gardner Tom made sure of harvesting them for me."
"This is what you left the palace for?" He questioned, his brow knitting together out of habit.
The pumpkins really are not much to write home about, and he does not get what was so special about them, aside from the fact that Catarina grew them. They were kind of gross. The flesh was a sickly orange colour with a kind of bubbling on the surface that was almost grotesque to look at, yet his wife still held it in her lap, as if this horrid gourd was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
He does not get it.
"They're ugly." Geordo remarked, not even thinking about it.
To him, it seemed obvious that they were not good looking but Catarina seemed almost offended at his words. She would never find a perfectly edible vegetable to be ugly. In fact, to her, they were anything but.
"I think they have potential, they're charming!" The princess decided, not leaving any room for discussion as she surveyed the object in her hold.
They do not look like the usual pumpkin, lest of all the fine ones that are used in meals for the royal family, but that does not mean that they were bad, it just meant they were different.
"I like them!" She cooed, not paying him any mind.
Geordo, in turn, made himself comfortable beside her in the quay, her attention far too preoccupied with her dissection of the pumpkin in her hold.
"If you say so." He shrugged.
The prince is trying his best to see whatever it was she were seeing, though, it really is not going to happen for him. To him, the mass in her lap looked like a mistake of nature that should have been left on its own without a second thought but clearly, she sees something in them that he does not.
She saw something better, which should not really surprise him. For as long as he had known her, she had had this unfailing optimistic disposition about her, no matter what was going on around. It was something she always kept about herself, and he is sure that he had ever seen her down, and he would not allow it to ever happen.
That love for the mediocre is a quality that normally would have infuriated Geordo, and if she had been anyone else, he would have told her to knock it off and grow up, but he never could. Not with her.
Catarina is just too good for something like that, and if she grew and liked these monstrosities, he supposed they are not too bad.
"They're great, just give them a chance." The woman prompted.
She is hoping that, the more he looked at them, the more likely he would be to see what she saw when she looked at something like this. They were unique, and clearly, they had gone through a lot to be here.
In a lot of ways, they had something in common with these little fighters. The world had changed, and they had changed with it, and while they were different now, they were still just as whole as before.
"Well, I suppose they are unique, if nothing else. I'm sure you're proud of growing them from seed to fruit." He offered. "But why they are so damaged?"
It is then that Geordo sees the knife on her hand.
"Why are you sacrificing those pumpkins?" The prince asks, feeling truly confused.
"I'm carving them." She responded, smiling brightly. "I tried to offer the head cook to do something with them, but he said that they were not to the standards to be fed to you. So, I tried to give them another purpose."
Now he is glad that he fired the entire household service. If Catarina wants to eat those pumpkins, she has the right to, and if she wants him to eat them, he will eat it down to the seeds.
The princess offers him her artwork. "Look! Isn't it cute! It's a little cat! Meow~"
It is most definitively not a cat, but her excitement made it very endearing to Geordo.
The blond chuckled. "Indeed, but you know what would make them even better?"
He hummed, taking another pumpkin from the quay around where they were sitting with a smile.
Knowing him, his creative spirit could produce just about anything, but, without hesitation, she nodded. Catarina and Geordo might not have always seen eye to eye about some things, but she did really value his input and his ideas, even if they were sometimes a bit moody for her taste.
The prince did his best not to spoil it, already proud of himself for the little image he had come up with and took out his concealed dagger, turning away from her entirely.
"What are you doing?" She asked.
The princess is doing her best to peek around his shoulder to see what he was doing but he was already a step or two ahead of her. He is not going to let her ruin the surprise. Especially not when it was such a good one.
"Just give me a second!" Geordo insisted.
A small grin bloomed on his face as he thought about how she would react to this, giving the actual work in his hands the backseat. Thankfully, it is not a task that required a lot of precision.
Catarina had no idea what he could have been doing but that did not make she any less surprised when he turned around to reveal a face, carved into the front of the pumpkin he had taken from the ground previously. It was great, and while the jagged teeth and crooked smile are not exactly the route she would have chosen, she got the idea.
"Now it's scary." He teased, handing her the small decorated fruit without hesitation.
The blistered surface of the pumpkin only added to the weird grotesqueness of the imagery but she could not have been more thrilled. This really was better.
"I don't think so, it just has more character now!" The princess grinned, not willing to concede on this.
There was just something about these things that appealed to her and she is not about to change her mind about that, no matter what her husband deemed to carve into it.
"I told you, they're charming. All it takes is someone willing to do something with that potential." She hummed, finding herself finally turning away from the pumpkins that surrounded them both in favour of looking at him.
Geordo really was like these things, more so every time she thought about it. He is not ugly by any means, much to the contrary, but there was still so much to him that most people never get to see. So much that she could miss if she does not dig a little deeper beneath the surface.
"Yeah, I guess you're right." He conceded again, this time feeling a little more convinced of her argument.
She is usually right about those things, of course, but he does not always like to admit that to himself. It made him feel all gooey inside, like there were a million worms in his gut, and there is a time and a place for that. If he does not have a hold on himself, he cannot protect her, and then he is useless as a husband and a monarch.
"Would you like me to teach you?" Geordo offered.
Catarina beamed at her husband, as if he had offered her to teach the secrets of manipulating the universe.
"Will you help me, please? I don't want it to be ugly." She said.
Looing at her cat, she is afraid that her own carving does not come out nearly as cute as his. She does not want to mess it up and she had a feeling that she already had disfigured a wheel cart's worth of pumpkins beyond repair. She does not have as much artistic talent, and hand coordination, to produce such intricate carvings.
"I thought they were all charming and full of potential." He teased, taking the pumpkin from her when she offered it up, before bumping her gingerly with his shoulder.
He got her there.
"They are, but I don't want to squander it." Catarina argued back.
She picked back up her carving knife, taking hold of it while Geordo prepares his dagger once again to clear the legume. Her blade shakes ever so slightly as she thought about what she is going to do.
The spooky face he'd chosen looked pretty good, but that is not really her style. She wants it to be nice to look at, just like they were the first time she had seen them growing out as buds in her field.
"That's not possible, Catarina. You can't squander their potential." The prince countered.
He wraps his right hand around her own, helping her take control of the blade, though she could feel his eyes on her instead of the task at hand.
"What do you mean?" She hummed, trying to figure out where he was going with this.
The prince kisses his wife's cheek gingerly and smiles, his thoughts far, far away.
"Even if it's not perfect, it doesn't mean that you've squandered its potential. In fact, it's their imperfections that make them charming. You're the one who taught me that." He shrugged, bringing a soft smile to her face as she considered his words.
He was right, maybe it does not have to be perfect after all.