Ourselves Alone

Experto Credite

Author's note: This was written for a school assignment.... But anyway. I don't really like writing romance, but my friend decided to write the plot, and thus it is what it is.

I did put quite a lot of effort into this, though, so I hope you like it.

‘Experto credite.’

Translation: "Believe me, for I have experienced"

Celia, at thirteen, was a pretty child usually, but not today.

Her contemptuous nostrils were flared pink with cold, and the edges of her blue eyes looked pale and wintery. Her pale skin, normally shattered only by the barest touch of freckles (those freckles that Celia and her mother spent years of their lives worrying over), was pink and swollen around her eyes, and the freckles stood out ominously against the bridge of her nose. Normally such a diaphanous darling, her worried mother gasped with shock at her appearance.

“Celia, what is wrong with you? Go back to your room immediately, do you want others to see you like this?”

Celia sniffed, her hands grubby and pink with hot, childlike tears.

“But mother! Leopold said… Leopold said I was betrothed.”

Her mother laughed slightly with relief. “There be nothing wrong with being betrothed. As you well know, all your friends are betrothed. Young lady Sarah, and your friend Genevieve is already married! After all, nobility is always betrothed as young as babies. Marriage, at early teens. To think, once you’re 10 already a quarter of your life has passed!”

Celia snuck a calculated eye at her mother. “Ethan isn’t betrothed.”

“Ethan?” Her mother looked confused for a second. “Oh. That Ethan. The stableboy. Well of course he isn’t betrothed, he’s a peasant. Peasants marry later than nobility, and of course you’re nobility. We’re different, you see, different in our blood. Chickens and peacocks, my sweet. Now, do stop your crying. You’re a lady, and you should be seen like one.”

“Mother, it’s just that…”

“What? That you don’t love him? The sky is blue behind the rain, though we might never see it again.”

“Mother! I just want something to love, something like stories, I don’t know….”

Her mother was quiet now. “Something like your aunt?”

Celia was vicious in her fury. “Yes, exactly like my aunt, even if she disgraced herself, even if she ran away with a peasant.”

“I didn’t want this for you, Celia. I’m only doing what’s right. You won’t be happy with a love like that, even if it is love. I only want you to be happy. Happy is precious few in this world, but we have the opportunity. The young lord Arthur is brave and strong. He will be a good father.”

Celia turned away, her fists clenched in the fabric of her dress, tears brimming on her cheeks. They were hot tears, quite unlike the gentle tears she had for her grandmother, these were fierce, opalescent, greedy. They swallowed her vision in seconds, and in the dirt and muck of her  vision, she flung herself onto the cold rug and cried.

She couldn’t tell her. She couldn’t tell her mother the truth. She didn’t like horses much, to be honest. The smell of the hay made her eyes water. But she went, to feed her father’s downtrodden hunter, every time, just to glimpse the handsome brown head of Ethan as he sorted the saddles.