Tales of Cubonia

The Golden Hourglass 10 - The Escapee

Princess Alexandra's name day celebration had gone exactly the same as it had the fifteen name day celebrations that had preceded it. She was awoken at dawn by her brother Moma in a fashion that was completely unbecoming of a Prince but seemed not to stop him from doing it and laughing wildly about Alexandra's furious reaction. After cleaning the saliva from her ear that Moma's finger had delivered there, she would put on her favorite dressing gown that matched the color of her eyes and went down to the Great Hall to have a hearty breakfast of pan fried cakes dusted with powdered sugar and slathered with a generous portion of neon green Saavedran cactus syrup.

After breakfast, Alexandra would dress in her riding attire, take her bow and quiver, and fetch her mare from the royal stables to spend the day hunting for monsters of any sort in the forest outside the city walls. She knew full well that the woods had not been inhabited by anything more fearsome than a pack of feral wolpertings since one of her ancestors had cleansed the woods of the gnome clans centuries ago, but Alexandra still believed that one day something as vicious as a troll or a manticore would wander into the forest and be slain by a true shot from her trusty bow.

Truth be told, Princess Alexandra had only shot the bow in the archery range, but she was a very good shot. Had she truly come up against a troll or manticore, it would take far more than a single arrow from a sixteen year old girl to fell the beast and a single shot was likely to be all she would get.

Fruitless though her hunts usually were, Alexandra found a calm serenity in the wild land outside the hustle and bustle of the city and the Castle Andora. She was always flanked by at least two of the Royal Watchmen by her mother's command, but they were always kind enough to hang back far enough to give her peace, but not far enough to where they could not be readily on hand should danger present itself. The peace that she found was being rather annoyingly interrupted by thoughts of betrothal, however, and it soured the whole event. She thought of returning early to find something else to occupy her mind, but the thought of dancing lessons with that chubby lordling whose name she could never remember – Prall, she seemed to think it was...or possibly Piper – was enough to keep her in the woods for the rest of the day.

After her hunt, Alexandra would return to the castle to wash up and put on her finest dress to attend her name day feast. In actuality, the feast that was held the night of her name day was more of a traditional Midsummer Feast with an added bonus of celebrating her birth. When she had arrived back in the Great Hall to sup, she found the table laden with a bevy of roasted fowl, candied fruits and vegetables, sausages and mash, fresh honey combs, and gilded ornate ewers filled with spiced wine, mulled mead, or honied milk for the younger children. It was a tradition that a child was allowed one glass of wine or mead on their sixteenth name day to celebrate their coming of age. It was also a tradition for that child to have several more glasses of wine or mead without their parents' knowledge to see what it was like to get good and truly snickered.

During the feast, Alexandra was presented in turn with gifts from each of her family members. Her lord mother and father had presented her with a Rodainian long bow that was nearly as tall as she. The craftsmanship was absolutely unrivaled; the golden oak was carved intricately with roses and the almost transparent string was so taught it seemed it could snap at the slightest urging, but would stretch beyond comprehension. "It is not a proper gift for a lady," her father had said, "but all women must have a hobby," her mother had finished for him, giving her youngest daughter a playful wink. Alexandra had barely had the words to thank her parents for the magnificent gift.

Her oldest brother, Ambrose, had given her a finely crafted leather quiver to go with the longbow. The same rose pattern that decorated the bow was also pressed into the leather. Two dozen precisely trimmed arrow tails sprouted from the quiver, begging to be nocked on the string. Her twin brothers, Barris and Harris, had given her an old dusty tome that turned out to be a beastiary of creatures from all over Cubonia. Her sisters Mermia and Beatriz – born less than a year apart and nearly inseparable – had given her a dress of the finest silk and lace. It was truly a beautiful garment if you were into that kind of thing, which Alexandra wasn't, and she knew her sisters knew that, but they also looked down on Alexandra's desire to be a monster hunter. It was their thought that she should be more than happy to be married to a lord of somewhere or other and be a good wife and lady. Moma's gift had come last, and was, by far, the most unusual.