by Dan Wingreen
It was midway through my fourteenth year when I was tasked with providing the catering for the largest meeting of the lords of the vampire covens since father took his throne. In retrospect, I should have followed the recipe for the Blood Bread as it was written, no matter how bland it seemed. Although, in my defense, no one ever told me vampires were deathly allergic to garlic…
Elias pushed up his glasses and rubbed his eyes as the words began to blur in front of him. It was hopeless. He had been sitting in the library for the entire morning in the vain hope that the events of the previous night wouldn't impact his work, and in all that time those two paragraphs were all he had to show for his labor. He let his hands fall to the desk and stared blankly at the table.
Identifying my feelings was supposed to help my concentration. Elias scowled.
He probably should have known it wouldn't have been that easy.
Although it didn't exactly help that he was writing about the very thing that was distracting him. It was hard enough to attempt to write in the first person as the Dark Prince when he had no idea he was in love with the royal, but now that he knew what his feelings were, he couldn't help…feeling them at the most inappropriate moments.
While Elias dressed, he imagined scathing comments about his wardrobe. While he tied his hair back, his fingers fumbled the knots as he remembered when the Prince had touched the strands the night before. While he walked to the library he kept perking up irrationally every time he heard a perfect, Upper Ellingish accent. While he tried to write, his thoughts kept drifting back to the previous night; to the dance, the slow walk back to his room, his embarrassing display in front of his door. To the bow.
Surely the Prince had to have known which bow he was performing. It was too precise to be an accident, but perhaps he was unaware of the exact cultural connotations? He'd never seemed to be anything less than adept in navigating court etiquette, for all that he tended to ignore it when it suited him, but maybe he'd never bothered to learn what a bow like that meant in Ellington? After all, why would he have bothered? It wasn't likely he would run into a situation where he would need to know in a kingdom which hated and feared him.
Still, Elias couldn't help but wonder, and wondering led to daydreaming, and daydreaming was distraction.
Love was, apparently, extremely vexing.
Of course, the Dark Prince wasn't the only thing disturbing his thoughts that morning. Try as he might, it was difficult to get the expression on the Crown Prince's face out of his mind, once the previous night's haze had finally broken. He'd never seen the Prince look so…broken in all the years they'd known each other. It worried Elias. The Prince had always had a tendency to overreact to things, and it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility for him to take years to get over something like this. It was a poorly kept secret that the King wasn't in the best of health these days, and the thought of a heartbroken Crown Prince ascending to the throne was, quite frankly, terrifying.
Although not as terrifying as being alone with the Dark Prince after last night…
Elias felt his face heat up slightly as his traitorous heart skipped another beat at the thought of all the ways his newly identified feelings could change his interactions with the Dark Prince. As much as he'd grown to enjoy the way things had been, he wasn't exactly averse towards finding out what might be different. What would it feel like to be with someone he loved in a setting more personal than the middle of a ballroom? What would it feel like to—
"Ah-hem!"
Elias jerked in his chair, barely holding back a scream at the loud voice right next to his ear. It echoed off the walls of the cavernous library, startling everyone and drawing their attention to Elias's previously private corner. Elias spun around in his chair with a snarl and froze when he came face to face with a man he'd never seen before. Long dormant instincts honed after years of being the target of near constant harassment kicked in, and he jumped out of his chair and pressed his back against the desk. However, instead of attacking him or spilling something on his work, the man just smiled cheerfully and took a few steps back.
Now that they weren't face to face, Elias could take in more of his appearance. He seemed handsome and youngish, around Elias's age, slim, with perfectly coiffed, light brown hair, lightly tanned skin, and a blindingly white smile. The man seemed to exude cheer and excitement from every pore, yet his every action seemed deliberate and rehearsed. Across his chest was slung a small bag, which rested on his hip, and his dark blue uniform was immediately familiar to Elias once he'd noticed it.
A feeling of impending doom settled over the scholar.
The Dark Prince couldn't possibly be this stupid.
"Scholar Elias Sutterby, I presume?" the man asked, his voice bright, musical, and loud. A voice trained to carry. A performer's voice. "You match your description perfectly, sir. Right down to the ink stains on your fingers and the look of slowly mounting rage in your eyes. But fear not! I bring nothing but cheer and good tidings!"
Everyone in the library was gawking at the man. And at Elias. The man seemed to realize this even though he had yet to take his eyes off the scholar, and his smile somehow widened even further.
"Tidings of affection!" He gestured dramatically.
"Tidings of intent." His voice didn't lower in the slightest, but he somehow still managed to seem knowing and conspiratorial.
"Tidings of love!" He posed with one hand on his hip and the other stretched out in front of him, as if he was thrusting the love right at Elias whether he wanted it or not. He held still just long enough to make sure every eye was squarely on him, before settling back into a more normal stance and spinning the bag around so it was facing Elias.
Emblazoned on the front was the symbol of the Royal Dramatical Couriers.
With practiced movements, the man flipped open his bag and drew out a black envelope. He opened it with a flourish, pulled out an equally black sheet of parchment, bowed, and began to read. He read in a loud, clear voice, with odd, lyrical inflections which made it seem as if he were performing a song rather than reading aloud. The overly exaggerated gestures, the way he paced and used every inch of available space between the two rows of desks, to drag every last drop of dramatic meaning from the words he was reciting turned it into a surprisingly impressive one man performance.
It only took Elias a moment to realize it was some sort of poem he was reading, and only another moment after that to realize it was written by the Dark Prince himself, or at least adapted from some Mournhelmian work. There were references to volcanoes and ash and creatures no one in Ellington—or anywhere Elias had ever heard of—would consider romantic, but despite that, the poem still managed to evoke a feeling of intense longing. It spoke of fiery arguments and impulsive mistakes. It spoke of attraction unrequited and a growing sense of loss. It spoke of chance encounters and slowly dawning hope; of taking chances and of the agony of wondering. It spoke of an arrogant confidence which was, for the first time ever, laced with devastating insecurity.
It spoke of the Dark Prince's feelings about Elias, from the moment they met until he left Elias at his door, in vague and flowery terms which would be all but impossible to tie to the two of them.
It was quite a romantic poem, all things considered, and Elias felt himself smiling even as he longed to physically hurt the Dark Prince for disrupting the quiet of the library with something as frivolous as a performing courier.
When it was over, the courier presented the parchment to Elias with another flourish. Elias glared at the man, but the courier just smiled his same cheerful smile and settled into a stance which seemed to say that he would be perfectly happy to wait there forever for Elias to take it, so he snatched it away. After a second's hesitation, he folded it up and placed it in one of the inner pockets of his robe.
It was a nice poem, and it would be a shame to lose it.
"Now, lest you think tidings are all I bring, I also come bearing—"
"What in all the hells
is going on in here?"
Every person in the library, save Elias and the courier, flinched violently at the whip crack of the Head Librarian's gruff shout. Elias turned to see the Librarian marching across the library from the direction of his office, his eyes narrowed and his robes billowing behind him like a horde of angry snakes.
"This is a library! Not a damn sewing circle for you to laugh and gossip like a bunch of fishwives at a market!"
Elias nearly raised an eyebrow. He must be unusually upset if he's mixing metaphors like that already.
"Library means quiet! Quiet means silence! Silence means I don't hear anything from—"
He stopped—both his rant and in his tracks—about twenty feet away from Elias, his eyes fixed firmly on the courier. The Librarian's eyes widened briefly before narrowing, this time so much Elias wasn't completely sure he could even see.
"Courier." His voice was a low purr that had several people shivering noticeably. "Are you the one disrupting the quiet sanctity of my library?"
"I'm simply bringing tidings of love and intent," the courier said. His grin never so much as wavered in the face of one of the most powerful men in the kingdom slowly stalking towards him. "And a gi—"
"I don't care," the Librarian said in that same tone of voice as he came to a stop and loomed over the courier. "If you don't leave my library in the next ten seconds, I'm going to—"
"Are you the Head Librarian, then?" the courier asked as he cocked his head.
"What do you think?"
"Excellent!" The courier somehow grinned yet wider still. "I have a letter for you, too!"
Before the Librarian could say anything else, the courier reached into his bag, produced another black envelope and held it out to the Librarian with another flourish. The Librarian stared at it like it was a pile of excrement before lifting his eyes to glare at the courier. A short battle of wills played out before the Librarian, who had always been an obscenely accurate judge of character, also seemed to realize the courier would be content to wait forever and snatched the envelope out of his hand. He seemed to debate with himself for a moment—probably trying to decide between opening it and tearing it up—before he ripped it open and pulled out the letter inside.
The Librarian glared at the paper as he read, his eyes seeming to narrow with each word, before they shot open in an almost comical look of surprise. His face settled into a more neutral expression as he finished. When he was done, he glanced at the courier, then to Elias, then back to the letter before finally fixing his gaze onto Elias again.
A small smirk pulled at the edges of his lips. "Carry on," the Librarian said, stepping back and gesturing expansively to the courier.
Elias's mouth dropped in shock before he could stop himself, and he hurriedly closed it with an audible click.
"Excellent!" The courier tossed a short bow to the Librarian before turning his attention back to Elias. "As I was saying, in addition to words of love I also come bearing a gift."
Once again, he reached into his bag and, this time, presented Elias with a small, rectangular black box about the length of Elias's forearm with a dark blue bow which perfectly matched the Dark Prince's eyes.
"This gift is given in the hopes that you will find it useful and fulfilling. Love is a journey with no destination, yet there are many stops along the way. Gifts such as this remind us of those stops; of the ones we love and the memories we cherish. Know then, that you are always in the thoughts of your beloved and, know also, that your beloved wishes keenly to be in your thoughts as well."
Despite the more rehearsed, reserved delivery—and the carefully generic, pronoun-free words—the courier's eyes shone with an almost manic excitement as he waited for Elias to open the gift. Which he did a moment later, fully expecting this gift to be as frivolous as the courier himself.
When he saw what was inside the box, he let out a gasp.
Two books, one which filled the box and one which would fit inside Elias's pocket, rested on red velvet lining. The smaller of the two was an Elvish-to-Ellingish translation guide, which, on its own, would have been enough to send Elias into very dignified fits of scholarly ecstasy. It was the larger book, however, which caused his heart to stop and his eyes to sting. The book was old, older than any book Elias had ever been allowed to touch before, but perfectly preserved, the elegant engravings on the cover not even so much as dented with age, and while he couldn't read the words on the cover, he recognized the flowing letters and lyrical words from illuminations in the few books which existed on Ancient Elven culture.
The Dark Prince had given him a book written by the Elves.
"Is sir pleased with his gift?"
Elias blinked rapidly and, with great reluctance, tore his eyes away from the books to glance up at the courier.
"Y-yes," he said softly.
"Excellent!" The courier bounced on the balls of his feet with genuine glee for a moment before forcing himself to still with what seemed like great difficulty. Once again, he reached into his bag and produced a piece of parchment, plain white this time. "We of the Royal Dramatical Couriers endeavor to please both client and recipient alike, and nothing makes us happier than bringing happiness into the lives of others. To ensure happiness has satisfactorily been brought into your life, we would like to ask you to kindly fill out a small survey and return it to us, telling us of your experience. Every survey completed is entered into a weekly drawing where one lucky winner will receive a free delivery of his or her choice to anyone inside or within one square mile of the castle."
He pointed to a few blank lines at the bottom of the parchment that was, in fact, a survey. "If you care to, just write your name, floor address, and the times when you would be available to be speak with us should you win, at the bottom and turn it in to the nearest mail receptacle."
The courier's smile took on a hopeful tilt as he held the survey out to Elias. After a second's hesitation he took it and placed it inside his robe where it was promptly forgotten.
"Excellent," the courier said again. He bowed, and Elias's eyebrows rose when he saw that it was another courting bow. It was shorter than the one the Dark Prince had given him, and he vaguely recalled an etiquette lesson which suggested that meant it was a bow by proxy for a third party. When the courier straightened, he held up another piece of paper that he'd produced from…somewhere, and began to read.
"At this time the Royal Dramatical Couriers, hereafter to be referred to as RDC, would like to remind you that courting is legally binding only between the courter and the courtee, hereafter to be referred to jointly as The Participants. In no way is RDC, legally, morally, or ethically responsible for any actions, rejections, or acceptances made by The Participants, and, as such, are not legally responsible for any loss of gold, time, and/or position The Participants may suffer during the duration of this courtship, whether or not those losses are a direct result of this or any other performance by accredited members of the RDC. Any acknowledgment of this courting bow—including, but not limited to: a bow, a nod, a wink, a blink, a gasp, a shout, or an attempted assault—by either of The Participants is legally understood to be an acknowledgment of these terms and any suit which is raised against RDC, its employees, or any of its subsidiaries is understood to be a breach of this verbal contract and will be met with all appropriate legal action in turn."
He paused and gave Elias an expectant look. Elias blinked, and the courier's grin returned full force.
"Excellent! Thus concludes your performance. I hope you have a wonderful day and good luck with your courting!"
The courier bowed again, a normal bow this time, before turning on his heel and sashaying out of the nearest exit. Every single eye in the library followed him until the door shut with a barely audible thump, then turned as one back to Elias.
Who blinked again and stared at them blankly.
The Librarian let out a huff that wasn't quite a laugh, and several of those eyes snapped towards him with varying degrees of fe
ar. "Well? This isn't the gawking parlor! Get reading or get out!"
That snapped everyone out of their daze and they all scrambled back to their desks to resume whatever project they'd been busy with before the courier showed up. The Librarian glared at them all for a few more seconds, before letting out a "hrmph!" and turning to Elias. He had just started to smirk when his eyes happened to fall on the books inside the still open box. The expression froze on his face, and for the longest time he just stared at the Elvish writing. It was only because of his close proximity that Elias could hear the way the Librarian's breathing picked up. Eventually, the Librarian shook his head and looked back to Elias with an odd mix of envy and approval.
"Come, boy," he said, crooking a finger.
He spun around without waiting for an acknowledgment, and Elias silently followed him back into the restoration room, which doubled as his office. Once there, the Librarian sat behind his small desk, gestured for Elias to take a seat in one of the chairs in front, and shot him a smirk.
"At least he gives good courting gifts."
Elias stared at the Librarian blankly, still half dazed at the idea he was holding an Elvish book. He wondered if he could even summon up the courage to actually touch it? He hoped so. He was desperate to read it.
"Um. Yes." Elias licked his dry lips. "Very good."
The Librarian snorted. "Congratulations on landing a prince, boy."
"Yes…" Elias blinked rapidly as his mind caught up with what the Librarian had said. "Wait, what? I…what do you mean? How…?"
The Librarian let out a large, barking laugh. "I don't think I've ever seen you so flustered. It's good to see there's a person underneath all that disinterested ice."
Before Elias could figure out how he wanted to react, the Librarian took the letter the courier had given him out of the pocket of his robe and handed it to Elias. He looked at the Librarian for a moment, then started to read the neat, elegant script.