Emilie of the Royal Heart

Chapter 65: The Pathetic Thing

The mere fact that Zuli hadn't murdered Emilie by the second morning of their journey was a feat of personal restraint that scored to mythical proportions. Emilie herself wished she could be shut up. No doubt she hadn't cried so much since she was a baby.

The night that they left the palace, Emilie rode alone in the carriage as Zuli handled the reigns. She wept savagely. The pain burned through her with such desolation that she had not felt since losing her father and her brothers. Her throes became so unfettered with mourning and in their volume that Zuli had to stop the carriage for an hour until she could get Emilie to calm down.

She cried herself to sleep, shivering in the carriage, unable to even conjure up an image or a thought of why she was so afflicted anymore. The suffering was inside her body now, it didn't need Aurora's face or memories of their time together to plague her, though whenever they surfaced, the torture unleashed tenfold.

When she awoke, the carriage was still riding on. Emilie supposed Zuli must've only cherished the silence that her ache-induced sleep entailed and stayed up the night to enjoy it. The moment she opened her eyes from slumber, she felt refreshed. And the moment she sat up and blinked sleep away, the despair seized her core again. She cried then, but quietly.

After a couple of stops for the sake of the horses and for some stretching that Zuli insisted Emilie partake in, they were back on the road. Emilie managed to stave away the hungry jaws of grief by thinking about her mother. She thought maybe before she met with her at the address Analeigh gave her, she could pick some wildflowers to bring to her again. She used to do that all the time for her mother. She would select only the loveliest blooms and put half of them in her hair and bring the other half to her mother. For some time, she allowed herself to lie down in the warmth of the thought. How marvelous to pick wild flowers in Zuhia again. How marvelous to place them in a vase to sit in her mother's window while she sang with her hands caked in flour. Emilie would smile and whistle along.

Very soon, she was crying again. Poor Zuli was trying to get her to eat something, but Emilie found it so hard to eat when she wasn't an eater anymore -she was being eaten.

"It will be another day to the border," she explained -it was the night of the second travel day, "I don't care if you wither away to nothing once you cross the line, but right now you're in my charge and you will eat well."

"I'm trying," Emilie whispered, staring at a chunk of bread in her hand.

She gulped and closed her eyes. She crammed it into her mouth and closed her lips. She told herself yesterday she had to swallow anything within the confines of her mouth. No spitting out bits. No biting into halves into halves into halves into nothing. If it was behind her lips, it had to go down her throat.

"You'll feel better once you see your mother," Zuli assured her.

It took a few moments for Emilie to get the piece of bread down, but once she did, she said, "you're kind to worry after me."

"You're a pathetic thing, really. That's all."

"You're not wrong about that."

"I want to be able to tell Countess Analeigh that you looked good when I let you off at the border," Zuli told her, gnawing on some jerky, "you've been on her mind a lot and I know she wanted to be able to see your journey through."

"She is a very sweet woman," Emilie sighed.

"Sweet?" Zuli laughed, "are we talking about the same Countess? That woman swats me with her dainty little glove about every other word I say."

Emilie furrowed her eyebrows and slowly asked, "what kind of things have you been saying to her?"

"Normal things!"

"Are you..." Emilie narrowed her eyes. Zuli had a habit of being rather frank, that was likely the issue. "do your paths actually cross often?"

"Well, they started to because of you. Now she calls me in for all kinds of weird little things. She called me in to get a tarantula out of her tearoom once. It was a tarantula, I'll give her that, but I'm a knight -not a pest expert."

Emilie snorted out a laugh. The feeling felt ticklish and strange in her body, but better than the sickly creature that had been residing there for days.

The knight's eyes widened and she pursed her lips, scrunched her brow in confusion, "what? What's this all of a sudden? I thought you could only cry."

This sent another spear of chortles through Emilie's system. She nearly choked up the bread she gulped down. She hugged her arms in tightly to her bodice, though her limbs felt airy now.

"Oh, come on! Out with it!"

Emilie wiped a tear from her eye with a wobbly finger, "that was no p-pest... Analeigh keeps a pet tarantula."

"... what?"

"I think she's making excuses to see you. Though I find that particular invention so-" she squeaked, "so hilarious! Did she pretend to be frightened of it?"

Zuli crossed her arms and looked off to the side, muttering, "she might have hid behind me for most of it..."

Emilie fell onto her back guffawing. She kicked her legs, spraying her petticoats every which way, but she didn't care. She remembered what a smile felt like again. It helped as well to know that Analeigh had found someone new to fancy even if she regretted Emilie's absence. Yes, Emilie was glad Zuli visited Analeigh often. She thought they might make a fine pair.

In the morning, Zuli climbed onto the driver's seat and Emilie climbed into the carriage. When she sat down, she felt the weight of her sorrows again. They shocked her no more. She was rather familiar with their presence now. Like bad friends she couldn't get away from.

As much as she could, she thought instead of her mother. She thought of the things they used to do, the new things they might do now. Though it was an empty one, Emilie smiled as she gazed out the window. In Zuhia, they had a common board game stocked in every tavern and every public place. It was called Pursuit. Her mother used to hate playing it until she learned the rules better and now she would insist on a game every time she came across a board. And even if she won, she always asked for a rematch.

No one could ever beat her anymore. Even when Emilie went away to be trained and her skill at other logical games increased, she still couldn't beat her mother at Pursuit. Sometimes when her mother begged her to stay for a rematch, she coaxed her in by offering to switch to chess instead.

Emilie wondered if her mother had a Pursuit board where she was living. Well, of course she had the board. The real question was how quickly after passing the threshold was her mother going to beg Emilie to play it.

Emilie shrieked in revelation.

Her thoughts sped around the fields of her mind in frantic, panicked circles as her heart flailed underground in her chest. She shouldn't get her hopes up. No, no. Absolutely, she shouldn't do that.

It's just that she was dumb enough to read the Codes of Sportsmanship before she left. And she had somehow forgotten in all the torrent of emotion that she and Aurora had played a game together when they first met. With significant stakes in the balance.

Emilie almost threw herself out of the window to shout at Zuli.

"Take us back!"