Open [attn: Arthur] She stands, impatient, in the receiving room. She's only just changed out of her traveling clothes, and the gown she's wearing is one of the ones that looks nice enough, but it's too close-fitting to be comfortable, and the roughspun texture, so well-hidden by dye and embroidery, makes her itch. She is impatient, but she doesn't fidget -- Anna is the daughter of a Duke and the High King's half-sister and she is a young woman well-trained. So she waits, still as a statue, with too many pins in her unruly hair.
Men she doesn't know -- her brother's men, she supposes, now that this is his kingdom -- stand near the door, watching her. She doesn't look at them, but watches a spot just a few inches from the door. She knows they think her strange; she knows they all think her distant, or cold. She doesn't care. Anna isn't here to win them over, she only wants to see her brother before some other state function takes him away from her again, before she has to spend the rest of her visit sharing him with the whole of Britain.
After what seems like forever, just when she's starting to think she'd rather wait while sitting down, the door opens and in comes Arthur, all good humor and talking just the slightest bit too loud. Something in her jumps and twists. She thinks, God, look at him, he hardly seems a boy anymore. Which is ridiculous, because of course he's not, no matter how much he seems a boy, still, to her. He's the High King, even though he's finishing a joke with whoever's followed him down the hall, even though there's still a kind of softness about him. Her heart thuds hard, and she reminds herself to breathe, and she always forgets, always, how much she loves him until she sees him.
He crosses the room to embrace her, and Anna sees, then, that he's wearing the blade. She can't stop thinking about that while they rattle out the niceties everyone expects, while he dismisses the others to leave them alone together, as sisters and brothers can be left to talk, the way she would never have been left alone with anyone else but her husband. Arthur treats her as he always has, but the blade nags at her, unsettles her. Here is this boy, the brother she loves, wearing this blade everyone speaks of, like this is a state function.
Like she's come from Orkney to seek office with the High King, when all she thinks she wants is him as he is.
She knows her face is flushed, she knows her words come out clipped in ways she never meant them to. She keeps staring at the blade, Excalibur, and hating all the ways it changes everything. Except she can see how little it's changed him, and she reaches for his hands while her heart makes her head noisy and she forgets how she's supposed to address him, now, in this place. With a sudden clarity, she knows, then, what it is she wants. And still she can't stop looking at the weapon he wears.
//
Cecilia wakes and feels like you do when a fever has just broken. Her pulse is racing, and for some reason she is weeping, and the blade swims at the edge of her consciousness in a way that makes her nauseous.
By the time the sun is starting to come up, she's showered and dressed, and called in sick to work. She leaves the house and steps into the late February chill with her coat open and no hat. She walks, at a brisk pace, across town. She's heading for Arthur's apartment building, and half-hoping no one sees her walking there.