Sovereign: A Mulan Retelling [Ongoing]

Chapter 4b

"My dear Princess, to what do I owe th' pleasure?" Saburo asked, while standing with his hands buried in a pile of dough.

Fallon rolled her eyes at his evident sarcasm, and darted across the kitchen to snatch a bread roll from the tray beside him, still warm and freshly baked from the oven. "Cut the pretence, Saburo," she said. "You and I both know that I can never stay away from this place for long."

"Aye, that much is true," the gold-skinned man nodded to himself, flipping a piece of straw between his teeth. "Though, I must say, after the raucous ye' caused last night, I wasn't expecting to see ye' down here so early."

"Hmm?" she said, through a mouthful of half-chewed bread. "I suppose you thought the King and Queen would have skinned me alive by now?"

"Well... To be honest with ye', Princess, I did. How did you manage to escape the'r wrath this time?"

Before Fallon could give the chief baker a suitable answer, her troublesome guest finally caught up with her, skidding to a stop at the kitchen entranceway, heaving for breath. She swallowed the last bit of her bread, and concealed a smirk. Losing him in the maze of corridors and passageways had been easy enough; she just hadn't expected him to find her again so quickly.

Saburo raised a thick eyebrow at the sudden appearance of the unexpected visitor, his palms momentarily halting their steady kneading on the pile of dough before him. "And who is this?" he inquired, his voice barely concealing his surprise. "Have ye' finally decided to make a friend, Princess?"

Fallon scowled at the jibe concealed in his words, and promptly stuck her tongue out at the older man. "I have plenty of friends," she shot back. "Just because none of them are in high places doesn't mean that they don't count, any less than if they lived within this castle."

"I know that better n' anybody, Princess. I was talkin' about those inside the Royal Court." His eyes turned back to the breathless nobleman, and something like amusement pulled at the corners of his crinkled mouth. "He certainly doesn't look like any of the commoners you tend to associate yourself with. He's far too clean and sophisticated."

The man finally looked their way, yet another frown of annoyance and confusion spreading across his face. "And I suppose you think I'm just as much of an arrogant toff as Princess Fallon does...?" He grimaced. "I'll admit, I find myself more offended than I should be, over her merciless judgements."

Saburo's laugh boomed across the kitchen, rattling the copper pans and pots that lined the surrounding walls, his face succumbing into folds of flesh that gathered at his chin. "So, you resent being acknowledged as a nobleman? What are you then—a finely dressed street-rat?"

He was jesting, of course, but the other man couldn't have known that.

"Noble by birth, peasant by circumstance," the young man explained. "Though I try my best not to be associated with the likes of the other nobles... I guess you could say I don't share the same political views regarding the monarchy and treatment of commoners, as they do—"

"Surely not, my boy!" Saburo exclaimed, observing the stranger with a new-found interest. Aside from proudly owning the title of chief baker in the royal kitchens, politics was a subject that the older man was deeply passionate about. "What do you think, then, of the new tax laws that have just been passed in the lands to the South? When the news came, I could hardly believe it! To think that the Earl of Lowcourt would inflict something so brutal on the already starving population. And they talk of justice! Now if I were in charge there, I'd teach those nobles a thing or two—"