Sunlight flowed over Stratholme as I followed my father through its fair streets. The glory of Northern Lordaeron… I had never been to it before, and I stared. Such a wondrous place, filled with shining white buildings with blue tiled roofs. So much to see, so many new people… At home, I knew everybody and everything. Here, no. My father paused, and slowly reached back and pulled me forward. "Little one." He breathed, turning my head in his great hands until my eyes fell on a young man standing on the corner before us. He had shoulder length dark blond hair, clean, unfettered. His face was narrow, canny…with expressive lips and luminous, feline green eyes. He was slender, but not fragile. He was, in a word, beautiful. "Come." My father ordered when words failed me, and he pulled me across the cobbled street in his wake, headed straight for the young man.
He waited until he had pulled up beside him, before inclining his head in the barest bow. "Your highness." He said, low, his voice carrying no further than the three of us, and I felt my eyes widen. Highness…made this….
"Lord Aaron." The young man….Arthas…. greeted, his smile genuine, tilting his eyes upwards at the corners. "What brings you from my father's side?"
A hand on the small of my back, pushing me slightly forward, and I stood to my full height. It was time to play this hand… "Your highness, my daughter… Clarimonde. Clarimonde, Prince Arthas."
I managed a smile. How, I'm not quite certain, but I did. And it wasn't a mouse smile, but a dimple carving smile as I eyed him through my lashes. Oh, yes. This was entirely what I was looking for. Taking my clue from my father, who obviously did not want a scene, I refrained from the curtsey which had been trained into me and met his eyes instead. Yes, leave this comfortable, leave it informal.
"She comes to the Hand for training, my prince." My father continued. "As I lack a male heir, there are things the Order should teach her."
Those eyes fell on me, measuring. "So young, Lord Aaron?" The prince asked, and my heart plummeted. Small, fragile, I had always looked a handful of years younger than I actually was… and it was counting against me again. If I let his attention slide, I was doomed….
"No, your highness." My voice was one of my better features, and to play it, I could not remain the silent one. "I am seventeen." Only two years his junior, well old enough for this. And by the time he was done with his training, in two years, he would be twenty two, I would be nineteen.
"My pardon, Lady…Clarimonde." He bowed gracefully to me. "Such a lovely name, for a lovely young lady." There was nothing false in his words, or his eyes. "I look forward to seeing you again. Lord Aaron…good day." He moved away, under my father's stare.
"Not bad, little one." My father granted when he was well out of ear shot. "Not bad at all."
"That is Arthas." I mused, and he nodded. That was Terenas Menethil's only son, crown heir to Lordaeron. "Then yes, my father. We play this game."
My father bowed to me then, deeply. "Yes, my daughter." He agreed easily. "We play this game."
"Lord Aaron." The words were wary, and their speaker regarded my father much as I would a multi legged creature crawling on ground before me, right before I raised a foot to crush it. "What brings you to the Hand?"
"Uther." There was an unfitting nonchalance under my father's words, by not granting this man an honorific of some sort, he had done wrong. I stared at the man in question; he was tall, towering over me and my father. Heavily muscular, with a bristling ginger mustache and glowering eyes, he carried himself like he missed the armor he was not wearing. "You said once…" Every time my father used that phrase, it was the opening of his using another's forgotten statements against them. "That if I had an heir, anyone, especially the Hand, would be better to raise it than myself."
