Who: Rose and Henry (Beast) What: A dream Where: Sleepytime When: Recently Warnings/Rating: Nope
It was a dream.
It was pretty on the inside. The hearth flickered with wood taken from the ground on the outskirts of the black forest, and it filled the small inn with the comforting smell of mossy peat and sweet spilled beer. Somewhere in the hot kitchen someone was baking sausages wrapped in rolls, and many in the room had greasy fingers and the contented rock of people well-fed. Candles worn down to their nubs provided the light, and the whicker of horses in the darkness sometimes penetrated through the cold wail of the wind outside. The room enclosed, like a reassuring embrace, not asking for anything but offering all.
There was a fiddle playing a strange tune full of long notes and unconscious mourning, but the player was nowhere in sight despite the clusters of anonymous, sun-worn faces sitting still and listening over their deep, endless tankards. The atmosphere was solemn but friendly, a group that knew each other well and felt no need to talk over such a sawed bit of grief, and the rustle of skirts and shuffle of boots were almost absent in its favor. No one was looking in any particular direction; many eyes were closed.
The fiddle was strange and mournful - that was the first thing Rose noticed.
She had a moment of confusion, one of not understanding where she had come from, and how she'd arrived, but it only lasted a moment, and then she just didn't care. Rose was like that, wild and not needing rules or logic to make sense of things. She was where she was, and where she was felt so much more like home than the horrible place she was living just then. Questioning might make it all disappear, and she selfishly didn't want it to disappear, so she didn't question.
She was dressed in one of her favorite dresses from the castle - white and a rose embroidered into the front panel. She had bare feet, and a bare head, and she was cast in copper by the glow of the hearth. She didn't notice the closed eyes. but she did notice the sun-worn faces. Peasants, and she didn't mind that at all. After all, she wasn't made for castles, and she'd spent her entire childhood without shoes on her feet.
This was more like the merchant's world than like the forest hut of her childhood, but it would suit. She kept from turning her face toward the walls and seeking out windows that would let her see if the castle was visible on the distance. The castle didn't matter. The Beast didn't matter. She made a small sound, a huff, and she stepped away from the hearth to seek out the fiddler. The fiddle was strange and mournful, and that wouldn't do for dancing.
The song spread out in a final series of long notes, and it finished as something more resilient than real grief, something like reflection and peace. The room sighed as one, and one of the serving girls picked up her apron and dabbed at her ruddy cheeks with it. Conversation slowly picked up again, and Rose received a couple curious looks from man and woman alike--though perhaps more from the former than the latter. A cheerful voice from the kitchen called out for bowls because the stew was ready, and a muted cheer rang out in several discordant voices as chairs scraped and people turned back to their tablemates.
The fiddler was distinguishable from the rest of the room only after a search, and only then because he stood up. He was a tall, merry man, not quite a youth and not quite a solid man, either. He was more ash than oak, slim and stretched in the leg and wild with bright eyes and hair on top. He was holding the fiddle by the neck, the bow now set aside on a table as he turned in his chair to take a cracked earthenware bowl from a chubby hand behind the bar. Several men sat around him at various tables, and around him there was a charismatic certainty and a strange reverence that didn’t quite suit a musician straight off the road. His clothes said nothing to suggest prosperity, but he was in excellent health and he smiled more than anyone else there. He spotted Rose coming through the crowd right away, and he flashed her a grin meant to draw in everything from free food to pretty skirts. “And who is this pretty lady?” His voice was not musical, but there was a cadence that suggested the fiddle wasn’t the only thing that might be worth a listen.
She stopped in her step for just a second when the long note died, and she looked around as the room sighed around her. It wasn't that she didn't appreciate music, but she didn't yearn for it or think it was something special without dancing to accompany it. Maybe she'd heard too much of it at Snow's court. In the woods, there had been no music, but at court there had been scores of musicians, all ready to do the bidding of the young king and queen. Dances had been the main form of entertainment, and music was played at every meal to cover the whispers and dalliances and loud chewing. She didn't realize, either, that in lowerborn places, music might be valued highly; it certainly wasn't highly valued at the merchant's home. She was a self-absorbed little thing like that, and she needed someone to remind her (often) that everything was not as it was for her.
So, she only stopped for a moment, and when the fiddler stood up, she moved toward him. She waited, politely, as he took the bowl from behind the bar, and then she rounded the table he sat at, and came just to his shoulder. "I'm not a lady," she informed him, and the words sounded tired. She said them to everyone lately. "I never have been, and I never will be, and I don't really want to be either," she explained, hoping that would cut matters off quicker than she'd managed with the strange man in the woods outside the castle. "As for being pretty, I think you'd say that to anyone who was young and had all her teeth," she teased, with a show of dimples and a smile that boasted a full set of very clean teeth. "Once you're done eating, can you play something better?"
He just laughed at her. His laugh wasn’t musical either, but it was long and it had a ripple that dipped deep into the dark sound and left soft ripples behind, like a sheet snapped quickly into spring air. “Not a lady, then, as you please it.” The people around him laughed when he did, not mockingly, just because it was impossible not to follow the sound where it led. He sat back down with his stew, and he called forth a pack that several people passed hand to hand until it reached him. He put the fiddle firmly into the safety of a traveler’s bedroll, the long seams of his back stretching under a loose peasant’s shirt with the movement, and then turned his attention back to her as he settled back into his chair.
“If you’re making requests, you’re going to have to come make it worth my while,” he said, flashing a smile in return and opening a long arm to invite her onto his lap. The crowd shifted around her as if to answer the invitation without thinking, but his eyes were only on her, playful and not at all threatening. A few smiles turned her way.
She glanced at his lap, and at the long arm that wanted to draw her to it. She was physically young, but there was no aura of innocence around her. Her warm gaze was a knowing one, one that said she already knew all the secrets hiding on that lap. She distrusted men down to the last, with the exception of the ones who had no interest in bedding her. She knew which ones to distrust, too. This one, with that charming voice that everyone laughed after, and that confidence that said he'd never been turned away, was just the kind of man that had peppered Snow's court. When she'd first arrived there, fresh from the woods, hurt and innocent, she'd believed that a man who wanted her on his lap wanted her. She'd been sillier then, trusting, but not any longer.
"And is that the only way to make it worth your while?" she asked, tease layered over challenge as she curved into the arm he held out. But even then, there was a sense of distance that had not been there prior to his offer. A loss. "Weren't you playing for the pleasure of the crowd a moment ago? Surely the crowd would like to dance," she said, all sweetness and copper, and she slipped out of his reach and walked behind the men at his table. Her skirts brushed their chairs, and her hand brushed their shoulders. "If you played, I would dance would everyone here," she offered, knowing full well she was cleaner and in possession of more teeth than most of the women present. "Don't you all want him to play something?" she asked the men, when she'd rounded the table completely, her entertained gaze focused on the fiddler as she waited for the men to bend him to her will.
Most crowds would have responded. A few people in the inn did, especially on the outskirts of the crowd and the ones sweating too near the fire. There were laughing requests for songs shouted out over brown and blond heads: "The Goat in the Bower", "Lady's Lace", and a few other plan but familiar favorites. The men nearest, however, looked from her and to the fiddler, and then back again. "Oh, go on, 'Enry," one of the men said, addressing the fiddler like a man asking a favor rather than pressing in the way an elder should. "Give the lass something cheerful, ey?"
But the fiddler wasn't looking at his friends. For the first time, evidence of a hierarchy made itself known. The fiddler wasn't just a fiddler; he was a leader, and no one commanded him. They asked. When he continued to gaze at her with clear eyes too shadowed by the room to make out color, they all looked at her, wondering what it was he was seeing that they did not. The fiddler's expression was not aggression. He was puzzled by her reaction to his offer, and his long arm had settled down onto his knee. The fingertips actually reached the tops of his boots, worn leather scarred by briar. "Something to eat first," he suggested, lightly. "Heave over," he told a fat man next to him, balancing on a chair to his immediate left, nearer the kitchen than the fire. "Make way for the lady."
Rose didn't particularly like hierarchy.
She'd grown up wild, and even her mother hadn't tried to control her. Nature, the woods and the skies and the animals that made their homes there, they didn't follow any order that wasn't natural. And, perhaps, it could be said that the monarchy was natural, with the kings and queens serving as the most dangerous predators in the woods, and peasants as the lowest-born of prey, but that wasn't an equal comparison in her opinion. In the wild, it was the strongest and wittiest and most cunning that won, not whoever was born to crown and castle. But she'd spent enough time in Snow's court to understand the deference paid, even if she assumed it to be only monetary or military in nature.
She didn't like it.
"I'm not hungry," she said imperiously, but she sat when he made room for her. "I would normally just storm out the door," she told him, tipping her head to watch him at her side, copper hair eclipsing half of her face and casting it into firecast shadow. She sighed then, willing to be more forthcoming in her sleep. "But I'm unhappy, so I'll stay."
Various conversation sprung up around them. The merry band was interested in the fire-haired girl, and they all eavesdropped blatantly with good humor. Curiously, the fiddler made no attempt to control his companions; several of them were hitting the beer a bit hard and making (not entirely unwelcome) ribald comments to the serving girls, but neither was the rowdy contents of the inn particularly violent. Oh, physical, yes, with people lurching after each other in spontaneous games of ring-round, bowls being tipped over unwary heads, and laughter as drunks spilled out of their chairs--but not violent. Everyone was smiling, or at least contented enough with their fare. Nobody paid the fiddler much mind except those closest to him. It seemed he had authority, but only over himself.
He smiled as if he had won something when she sat, but it didn't last. His face was narrow, but his brow and eyes were open, inviting trust. The fiddler was quite handsome, and coupled with the health and the skill on the strings, it was easy to imagine him enjoying sway over whatever met his fancy. "No reason to be unhappy here," he said, conversationally, dipping a hunk of heavy bread into his stew and mopping up bits of meat and carrot. "I'd be a poor traveling companion indeed if I couldn't help a pretty miss get a bowl of grub on a summer evening." He grinned.
She didn't pay much attention to the comments or the bawdiness of the men; she'd seen worse at Snow's court, and she'd seen much worse in Fabletown. They were just men, and they were being men, and that made her dislike them just a little more, despite their lack of participation in any of her troubles. But they were all the same, she knew, and if she climbed up on the table and spread her thighs, they would all act in precisely the same manner. Men.
And the fiddler, with his talent and charm and easy nature, he wasn't excluded. No, these things made him more untrustworthy, and not less. There was a reason Faust's Quasimodo was kind, and it had to do with a lifetime of ugliness. Handsome men never needed kindness, and they seldom learned it beyond the requirements for charmingness and bedding women.
"Unhappiness doesn't have anything to do with a place," she said, and there was a childish conviction there. She'd never been anywhere really terrible, and she spoke without any real knowledge of the truly terrible places that existed. "A castle can be the most miserable place in the world, and a prison the happiest." And she made a sound, one that said she was very unimpressed. "This pretty miss doesn't want food; she wants to dance. And your companions are fed, and they want to dance too."
The fiddler shoveled stew into his mouth. If she wanted to keep on ranting silently about men, now was her opportunity to slip in something about their table manners. Most of the people about them were digging in with gusto, and the smell in the air became rich and laden with sweet tomato, basil and thyme. The fiddler took his time, eating a few bites and then settling back with his bowl balanced on the flat of his left hand.
He had spectacular fingers, tapered and roughened but with clean, carefully trimmed nails, the mark of a serious musician--and a serious archer, coincidentally. He was wearing a soft sheath of carefully tooled leather on his left forearm, the only thing on him that might be considered expensive. A harder, rough bracer could have been laced in much the same way by archers of all shapes and sizes, but he was also a musician and therefore valued the flexibility offered by a more expensive piece. Such things were awarded at archery contests given for the interest and amusement of the nobility; they were also sold, of course, but at cost. The other trappings of an archer--such as gloves--were not in evidence.
“However did you get all the way out here with that attitude?” he asked, still smiling as if she was being amusing on purpose. “Usually the road, the weather and real life beat that kind of thing out of people early around here. Run away from your castle?” He picked up the word from her and smirked with a slight glint of sarcastic distaste. The man she had recently displaced sent the fiddler a sharp look.
In all of that, what she noticed was that his fingernails were clean and neatly trimmed. She didn't stare for long, because Rose never managed to do anything for very long, even when she dreamt. Her rust gaze was back on his face almost as quick as it had been diverted, and despite a life in the woods, her eyes narrowed with a keen sort of intelligence. Childish, yes, but not daft, and not an uneducated thing that had never learned to read. "You're not a musician," she told him. "You're not an archer either, except perhaps in tournaments or sports." She looked very sure of herself, as if she'd found out a secret that was meant to be kept from her. "Did you run away from your castle?" she asked in return.
She scooted forward, all curiosity and attention now that there was a secret to be learned. "Are you hiding from your responsibilities? Have you a wife you left somewhere? Is your father, the king, sending out parties of men to search for his lost heir?" This last, she said with a kind of derision that said she didn't care very much for kings and their broken promises. "Have you made someone cry?" She smiled then, and she touched the backs of his fingers, a sweep of touch across those lengthened out fingers and thicker knuckles. "Archer or musician?" she finally asked, a real question, and not one kissed with sarcasm and dislike.
He enjoyed the attention a great deal, and he liked the bright curiosity ten times more than he had the sour would-be seductress. He had not thought her to be stupid, because unlike most rough men in rough places, he knew the capabilities of women and even respected their potential, though he found most of them to be rather dull, when troubled himself to notice. Four of the six men at the table abruptly fell silent when she asked about his castle, looking first at her and then at him. One man was frozen in the act of chewing a chunk of bread, and the only two men present who hadn’t noticed simply looked confused and fell silent because everyone else was.
The fiddler kept his attention on her. “I do not have responsibilities; I am not the eldest. I am not stupid enough to have a wife, and if the king sent out men looking for me, they would find little to interest them.” His eyes were hazel, and changed from the softness of new oak leaves to fiery flickers of autumn. People hastily started eating again. “I am best with both kinds of bows. Perhaps not so much with the kind that might suit your hair.” Suitors in villages chose ribbons as lovers’ gifts often enough.
She was accustomed to causing the kind of trouble at a table that made people choke on their ale and spit out their bread, but that wasn't the intention here. She'd done nothing shocking. Once, at Snow's board, she'd climbed onto the wood with bare feet, and she'd walked the length of the table during a feast to celebrate the games between neighboring kingdoms. She'd intentionally taken advantage of the fact that there would be new faces to scandalize, and she'd bided her time for a full month until they all arrived. She was not stupid, no matter how it looked at times.
She would have let him go on without interruption, but his admission of not being stupid enough to have a wife made her arch a red brow, questioning. "Even younger sons are expected to marry wealthy heiresses," she told him, as if he wasn't aware and she was enlightening him. "It's their employ, marriage." And perhaps there was a fair bit of her mother in that statement, but it was true, regardless. Hadn't she been engaged to a younger son? One that hadn't wanted her, because she had nothing to offer but her looks?
Her hand strayed to her hair, and she tugged on the ribbon that held it off her face. "You see? I don't have need of a ribbon. I've made my own."
“Are expected by whom?” he wondered out loud. The man on Rose’s left stuck his face into his ale tankard and kept it there. Half of the group got up, taking the confused two (who happened to be in the younger side of things) with them. It looked like a cohesive, even practiced motion, and again hints of hierarchy made itself known without the fiddler’s overt attention. He finished the stew, wiped his fingers on the front of his shirt, and then turned sideways in his chair so that his knees were toward her and he could reach the pack that was stowed under the table. It was a blatant display of corded muscle under linen, and he enjoyed it, but if she didn’t he didn’t seem all that troubled.
He got a grip on the pack and brought himself back upright in a contortion of torso. He took out the violin, twisted it neatly, and took out a wooden box some skilled carpenter had made to hold the fragile stringed bow. “It’s a very fine ribbon.” He smiled at her, keeping the conversation while he tuned, finding a sound that suited him, as the strings had adjusted themselves somehow in the intervening minutes since her arrival. “You said you made it?”
"By fathers and mothers and kingdoms," she explained, and she watched the men leave the table from the corner of her eye. She didn't need to look at them to know the looks that would be on their faces, just like she didn't need anyone to tell her that this was a practiced routine. "When did they stop needing you to tell them to leave?" she asked. "With actual words?" But the question didn't have the bitter bite it might if she was awake, and she didn't cover it with coyness or playfulness, like she would have done in Snow's court. It was just acknowledgement, and her way of telling him that she knew what he was. But she was still sitting there, wasn't she? She watched him turn toward her in the chair, and she watched the muscle under the linen of his shirt with something like curious interest. It was his comment about the ribbon that made her laugh though, and it was a wild laugh, something that didn't know how to contain itself between four walls and politeness. "You don't care about my ribbon. Dance with me," she said, following up with the second part just as quickly as she'd said the first. She watched his fingers on the strings while she said it, but the tuning didn't impress her particularly, not really.
The fiddler didn’t need to try to impress people; they were impressed, if they knew anything of music, and if they weren’t impressed, he either made them regret it (if they took an argumentative tack with it) or ignored them. The fiddler had a wealth of weapons at his disposal, not all of them sharp-tipped arrows, because his tunes had the capability of being much more. He had a voice, too, a voice more deserving of showmanship than he gave it. It was the fiddler that people saw, and the fiddle that they heard. Singing took more of his heart than he was usually willing to give.
The fiddler warmed his fingers as she spoke, and nothing she said had yet truly bothered him. “You mistake it,” he said, looking up as a few men drifted into the crowd to find more raucous conversation. “They’re giving us a bit of privacy, because they think I plan on giving you some of my secrets. A little meddling of them, but well-meaning.” A flash of teeth in the dimness, and the hazel eyes cooled into comfortable spring as he drew the bow down in a rocking motion, flicking out a series of pitched notes in scale that seemed awkward and scratchy.
He sawed off an easy tune that had some of the swamp to it--there was a swamp at the end of the Valley, and as with many swamps there were swamp people, and they had music of their own. The fiddler did something a bit odd to it at the end, something that didn’t quite have sound. Something... more. He paused, limbering up his fingers a little more. The crowd had started to take notice, but slowly, without haste, the way he was tuning. “I don’t mind hearing about your ribbon. But the bard doesn’t do the dancing; he’s too busy doing the playing. Are you sure you want to dance?” His question took on an air of the crossroads; in the tales, guards of old graves and craven crones with baskets of apples asked their questions in just that way: are you sure?
"Your secrets?" she asked him, a little laugh accompanying the question. "Is that what you call it when you lie between a girl's thighs?" she asked. She knew more than a decent girl should, obviously, and she was more brazen than a decent girl should be. Her dress might be quality, belonging to a queen's lady sister, but she certainly was neither lady nor quality. And he surprised her when he began to play. She'd expected him to agree to dance with her, because everyone did, when she asked, and she began to protest, but the words didn't make it out.
The song was pretty, but Rose had no use for pretty songs.
But she listened, for some reason, she listened. "You don't care about my ribbon," she said instead, sounding a little distracted by his bow against the string. "You'll listen, but you don't care, and the only person who actually cared when I talked sent me away." Pause, then a quick lick of her lips, a dart of pink tongue and curiosity. "What is that song?" she asked. She considered the question more carefully - did she want to dance? She did, but maybe not as she had before. She had the feeling there was magic on the air, she thought she could taste it on her tongue, but it wasn't a curse; she was a curse breaker, not a mage or witch, not really, despite her mother's heritage. She'd never been trained, you see, but she could still taste it, and the look she gave him grew more curious.
She stood, but only because she forced herself to move instead of listen, and she twirled in front of him, the hem of her dress fanning out against his legs as she moved, and she looked down at him. It was all one long, fluid motion, almost music itself, in its own way.
They were in an inn, and it was a cool summer night with clear skies, bright stars, and a warm hearth. He thought nothing of her manner of speech, though it was not the country girls who adopted such crude wording. He quirked his brows at her, again amused, and hardly offended. He did think there was something not quite right about the way she assumed all of his intentions to be bad. The fiddler had fairly clear definitions of good and evil, and evil was usually associated with blood and torture. He might not be a priest, but he was hardly there to plunder her virtue, and he found it curious that she acted as if he was and also that she didn’t have any to begin with. It was, to him, a contradiction. He wouldn’t have minded some warm company, but she didn’t have to act like he was a lecherous scoundrel lying in wait. It annoyed him.
He wasn’t much for puzzles. He liked things simple, usually, and at that moment wasn’t concerned with using his time in this world to ponder things that didn’t matter. “Actually, no, I meant secrets in the usual sense.” When he said it, there was just a hint more culture than your average bard was supposed to possess. It was nearly buried with a scrape of heavy furniture as a knot of men rose out of the way and some space was made in the center of the room--dancing space. She filled it with the twirl of her skirt and the lift of fair arms.
The fiddler gave his elbow a bit of a shake, threw his hair out of his eyes, and dismissed conversation entirely. Both knees stretched to either side, and he steadied himself on the rough-cut chair. He set the bow on the strings for a second, concentrating on the kind of sound he wanted to make and what he wanted it to do. The hair he’d just tossed away trembled with some invisible beat and fell right back into place. He began to play.
This was more of a hills tune, a fair-weather tune, and it hopped and skipped before boots started to stamp in time. They had a job keeping up, too, because the fiddler’s bow began to blur in the air. The fiddler’s magic was like a coiled spring in the bones. It tasted like sun-warmed tree bark in the air, and it was strong. It traveled on the sound, and the sound was everywhere immediately, bringing with it the immediate beckoning call: move. If the will and dislike was strong enough, a man might get away with tapping his foot and nodding in time. Deer half-mile out in the clear night might frolic a bit in the new grass, and a night bird might manage to simply sweep off for quieter ground, but most people were happy to dance, especially the women. Half the room jumped up as one to move in a tight country circle that dragged the unwary along with it in a whirl of laughter. The fiddler was forced from his seat by the press of people and climbed atop their table to avoid getting trampled without missing a beat.
She was, in a word, jaded. It wasn't his fault, and it wasn't his doing, but it was something that was real and true with her, so ingrained in her mind that it didn't even budge in sleep. It made her long for things she'd lost, and that made her absolutely determined to turn things around. She would have insisted he dance with her, if he hadn't started playing the new tune when he did. But it was the right kind of song for dancing, and people were clearing space, and she was sure she could forget all the bad things if she could just twirl herself into oblivion.
For a second - and, really, that was a long span of time for her to notice anything about any man - she watched that lock of hair tremble. She shook her head, trying to shake the attention away, but it took a second. It was actually stronger than the music at first, but the infectious fiddle caught up with her a second later, and the entire rest of the inn ceased to matter.
By the time the dance floor became crazy and crowded, she was already damp with sweat, her copper hair clinging to her cheeks and down along the now-damp center of her back, where the expensive dress was too thick and rich for so much exertion. But she was smiling, and her cheeks hurt from it, which was a rare thing indeed. She didn't care who she danced with, and she didn't care whose arm went around her waist, or whose elbow she slid against her own. Her cheeks were flushed and bright, and for a second there was nothing of the court girl in her. She was all wild and woods, and magic was thick in the air, impossible to ignore. The vines outside the inn stretched, their winter-slumber buds blooming and peeking their heads in the open windows to watch. The roof of the inn became green-thick, vines and ivy, and everything took on the scent of greenery and flowers.
She was at the foot of the table he ended up atop of, and she grinned up at him and reached a hand out, wanting to drag him down, the ribbon they'd been talking about earlier long-since lost and trampled underfoot.
The inn was a whirl of moving skirts, stamping feet, grinning faces and helpless twists of bodies moving in and out. The fiddler’s magic grew stronger and, impossibly, even more complex. He took the pieces of sound and wove them together the way reeds combined into baskets and threads into cloth. Voices, hearts and minds rose up to meet him and he took the energy in the room and fed it back in, using a round reel as a loop and spinning out a joy that was so strong it was without name. More people flooded in from the clear night outside, clapping and stamping, and the smell of the green simply made the summer more spring and the minds in the room even more maddened. Sanity was quickly losing sway, and the fiddler picked up on the fact a split second before his influence turned everyone with an ear completely mindless with incoherent musical passion.
He took his arm a half-inch up, tilted the bow against the strings, and started skipping every third note. The result didn’t lose the rhythm, but air suddenly came easier to the lungs and the crazy swirl began to ease into gentler curves. The fiddler still smiled with his concentration, but there was no evidence he was even trying hard. He hadn’t even broke a sweat.
He looked down at her, eyes snapping. He loved the grin and her happiness, and his senses were fully capable of taking in the wild green magic without a drop of fear concerning it. “Got your dance?” He had to shout over the riot of noise, and he had to keep the rhythm going because dropping it abruptly was hard on those in its thrall. His fingers were flickering fast and he was trading a saw on the strings and a thudding pluck of the pads of his fingers, note, beat, note beat. Readjusting his chin on the curve of the wood, the fiddler held the instrument using just his shoulder and the pressure under his chin. His left hand kept the bow going in a long tipping note and he put a hand down for her so she could get a foot on the end of his table. “View is better up top.”
She didn't notice the abating madness as anything more than a slowing, which she attributed to exhaustion from the dance. It was a good exhaustion. It was the ache that came with running through tall grasses or climbing the biggest tree in a wild wood. It was the tired that came at the end of a good day, one that ended in sweaty limbs washed down in cool water by a hearth. It reminded her of home in a way nothing had in a very long time, home before Snow's court, before the merchant, before the Beast's castle. All these things were on her face as she looked up at him, she was an open book of wild things, and she didn't contain her smile of pleasure when he asked if she'd gotten her dance. She enjoyed his shout, the loudness and trueness of it, and the way it had to fight to make itself heard over the revelers.
She watched his hand a moment, and then she took it and used it to hoist herself up on his table with no concern for propriety or maintaining any sense of decorum. He was right, of course, the view was better up high, but that didn't mean she wanted to stay still for it. Even with the music slowing, the desire to move and sway was still there, and so she did just that, moving around him, feet precariously lining up with the end of the table, shoes long-since kicked off and lost somewhere on the inn's makeshift dance floor. She was a teetering twirl, long pale arms above her head, and copper tangling around his shoulders as she came around him and back to where she began.
Her gaze dropped to the fiddle then, and she reached out a hand for the bow, magic thick on her fingertips and ivy climbing the ceiling overhead and turning the entire inn into a bower, flowers of red and white, yellow and pink overhead, and nothing to be done for it. She tried to catch her breath, and she laughed a laugh that was as bright as her hair. "Can I try?" she asked.