Tea Scene

Ire sat down with a cup of tea, looking at his young guest with bemusement. The younger boy had been here the better part of twenty minutes, ten of which had been spent alone with Murk as Ire found Selah, told her to make the tea, waited around until she brought the tea back, and accompanied her in to serve it. She was gone now and the guest was fidgety.

Ire leaned back in his chair.

“Now, who did you say you were, and how did you get here?”

“We told you. We are your neighbor from the north.”

“I know our neighbors from the north. They don’t look like you. Or him.” He nodded at Murk and took a sip of the tea. It was a bit dusty – if he had known that he would be using both of them, he would have rinsed them both out, but as it was, ‘Tern’ had the clean cup and Ire made due with the one that had been on the mantle for ten years.

Tern toyed with his teacup, still without having drank. “We are a little farther north than that.”

“Living underwater would account for why I haven’t seen you before.”

The young boy scowled fearsomely and appeared to consider pouring out the tea on the floor in a gesture of anger. He definitely didn’t want to drink it and, when Ire reached out a hand to take the offending teacup, he handed it over and, after a second of hesitation, accepted Ire’s proffered cup. That, he drank. Fear of poison then, Ire mused. He should have switched them from the beginning.

Tern began to explain. “We live in what you would call the sky. It exists where this ‘Lanval’ kingdom exists, but north of here. And you can’t find it, so refrain from shooting cannons at the sky or any such thing.”

“Ah.” Ire’s impulse was to call him crazy and call the twins to escort him out, but crazy did not lend one the ability to materialize inside a king’s bedroom. Whatever that skill was, it would be useful to have. (So would ‘cannons’ but that was a question for another day.)

He cleared his throat, sipped at the tea. “Well, Landria isn’t one to make war, at the moment.”

“Excellent.” Tern looked down into the teacup, having drained its contents and just now fretting about it. “What is this queer powder at the base?”

“Sugar. It sweetens the drink.” Well, it was probably sugar. Some of it might be dust. All the same, Tern relaxed a little and Ire could finally ask why he was here.

“You didn’t come down here for tea though.”

“No. We came to tell you to move your castle.”

###

Leads into 'Neighbors,' available here: http://missjoneswrites.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/neighbors-story/

New chapters: Exchanging Unpleasantries and Neighbors

New chapters up here:

Specifically 'Exchanging Unpleasantries' and 'Neighbors'. These, while more or less stand-alone by Monarchy standards, are some of the ones I like better.

So I'm trucking along, slowly. Next week should be Physical and, gosh, maybe just Physical. Physical is hella long and it's still a chaotic decision, figuring out what to put in or leave out. :)

A Specific Talent

While Klaeo agreed to learn embroidery and even to practice it, her parents had to accept that her avant-garde designs weren't going away any time soon. In her early years (which I can't portray because drawing children ESCAPES me), she took up a fascination for falcons, a symbol of an independent women in Garam culture.

To quote Emperor's New Groove: "Lemme guess, you've got a GREAT personality..."

Having been a moody pre-teen girl, I see nothing unusual about sitting in a corner window embroidering falcons. :)

Klaeo (c) Monarchy, stories available here: http://missjoneswrites.wordpress.com

Site Changes

I'm gonna fix this site. And it'll be awesome. Maybe I'll rename it Griffin Taming. And it'll be correlated with Wordpress and I'm gonna post the stories there, and blog/art here, and there's a link to deviantart, I'M GONNA FIX EVERYTHING. (Ambition is the loudest wailer)

An old old old draft

*cough*
Tern is trying to rewrite this story to sound Wodehousian.
Fortunately, this story IS coming together (Shadows, the 'second' story alluded to in the previous posting).
It is astonishing how quickly these stories like to fall apart, contradict each other, or just plain not work when prodded with a sharp stick. Almost as if I weren't worried about continuity when I wrote each of them. (perish the thought, I'm SO good at plotting...)
Anyhow, dreadfully behind schedule. Compounding it by blogging.

A bit:

"It was no use appealing to the man’s humanitarian concern or sympathy for the royal condition: he was Oppalic. Oppalic concerns ranged from battling the mixture of swamp creatures and sea monsters that regularly invaded their island nation, to sending ships over with valuable skin-based accessories. Fighting and selling. Dull. It was little wonder that their initial meeting had consisted of Father saying nothing more than "here's Murk, he's mute, he's your bodyguard'. A little research revealed that he was someone Tern couldn’t possibly identify with, even though Murk had bothered to learn Iriritamagonian and crossed a lively sea to be his bodyguard. There had to be a reason for that."

they have harpys here?

Snippet. Cause I'm fixing "The Absent Princess." It needs so much rewriting...
but I like the harpy bit.

--

"If Othello was told to marry Klayo, he would have to, just as he would have to be king if something happened to Father. If Tern were told to marry Klayo, the same rule would apply. He had already called her a harpy and questioned her homicidal embroidery. That would make married life difficult."

conflicting plot points again

I do not know if I have ever done enough research to merit actually writing ANYTHING. And yes, it is becoming a frustrating novel, the chapters of which stand alone. And I want to jump around constantly and figure out what on earth I'm doing.
And I have not heard from beta, and part of me doesn't want to, because it realized that Ire and Monarchy are trying to turn into the same story. THE SAME STORY. With-- er, slightly different outcomes. Is that all I've got? Just the one story, the one person, I keep repeating in different ways becauses it's the only one that resonates?

Hmph.

And the plane flight wasn't an entire bust.