Chapter 2: Soil-Dusted Hands
The juice still tingled on his tongue, a phantom sweetness that felt utterly alien in the dryness of his mouth. Kaelen watched her, this princess who offered fruit as if it were a treaty. He was trying to formulate a response, something about agricultural yields or supply lines—anything to reset this interaction onto solid, factual ground—when a sharp cry sliced through the humid air.
“Your Highness!”
Both of them turned. An older man, his tunic damp with sweat and streaked with soil, was struggling with a teetering stack of wooden seed boxes at the far end of the row. The tower wavered, a precarious Jenga of splintered wood and potential disaster.
Evaline didn’t hesitate. Her silvery skirts swished as she moved, not with a royal glide, but with a swift, purposeful stride. “Thom, I’ve got it!”
She was too late. The top two boxes slid, spilling their dark, peaty contents. But it was the main stack, about ten boxes tall, that followed, tipping toward the old gardener with a groan of wood.
Kaelen’s body reacted before his mind, muscles coiling, but he was rooted. This was not a battlefield with clear enemies. It was a domestic accident.
Evaline didn’t try to catch the falling tower. She lunged instead, grabbing Thom by his arm and yanking him backward just as the boxes crashed down. Soil exploded. Pots shattered. The sound was a thunderclap in the glass-lined quiet, followed by the pathetic skitter of terra cotta shards across marble.
A cloud of fine, black dust mushroomed up.
Silence, thick as the settling dirt.
Then, a sound. A muffled, wet-sounding cough. Evaline emerged from the haze, covered in a fine layer of soot-like soil. A clump of it was smeared across her forehead and cheek. A single stray curl, escaped from its pin, was plastered to her temple with sweat and grime. She looked at the carnage—the ruined boxes, the precious gardening soil now a heap on the polished floor—and then she looked at Thom’s horrified, apologetic face.
She laughed.
It wasn’t a delicate, courtly tinkle. It was a full, genuine burst of sound that echoed off the glass, rich and unguarded. She wiped at her cheek, which only succeeded in making the smear worse. “Well. That was dramatic.”
“Your Highness, forgive me, I—” Thom stammered, wringing his hands.
“Forgive you? Thom, you didn’t summon a minor earthquake.” She knelt, right there in the muck, and started picking up larger pieces of broken pottery, placing them carefully into one of the intact boxes. “It was an avalanche of petunias. Or were they marigolds?”
“Begonias, ma’am,” Thom said, his voice still shaky.
“Ah. A begonia avalanche. Much more serious.” Her tone was warm, teasing. She glanced up at the gardener, her brown eyes crinkling. “Are you hurt?”
“No, ma’am. Thanks to you.”
“Good. Then stop looking like you’re awaiting execution and help me sort this. We’ll save what we can.”
Kaelen watched, his earlier tension replaced by a stark, bewildering curiosity. He had seen nobles pretend to be humble. He had seen queens perform acts of charity for show. This was different. There was no audience here but him and a trembling servant. Her focus was entirely on the mess, on the man’s distress, on the practical problem of salvage. Her gown was ruined. Her hands were filthy.
She was, he realized with a start, actually helping.
He found himself moving forward, his boots crunching on granules of soil. The logical part of his mind protested. This was beneath his station. Beneath hers. It was chaos, inefficiency.
Evaline looked up as his shadow fell over her. She blinked, soil clinging to her lashes. For a second, she seemed to have forgotten he was there. Then she smiled, that same stubborn, open smile from before. “Need another orange?”
“You have soil on your face,” he said, his voice flat.
“I do.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, making it worse. “I imagine it’s an improvement. All that court polish is dreadfully dull.”
He didn’t smile. But he knelt. The motion was stiff, unfamiliar in armor. He picked up a broken box, the wood rough against his bare hand. He placed it with methodical neatness beside her growing pile.
She paused, watching him. “You don’t have to.”
“I am aware,” he said, reaching for another fragment. He examined it, a practical assessment. “This is poor craftsmanship. The joints are weak.”
Thom, emboldened by her attitude, mumbled, “The royal carpenter, sir. His joints are weaker after a flask of wine.”
A short, sharp sound escaped Kaelen. It wasn’t quite a laugh, more like an exhale of surprise. He caught Evaline looking at him, her head tilted. He focused on the task, assembling the salvageable pieces like he would reassemble a dismantled cart on campaign.
They worked in a silence that was no longer charged with hostility, but with a shared, focused purpose. Evaline chatted easily with Thom about the lost seedlings, promising to speak to the head gardener about replacements. Kaelen listened, learning about propagation times and soil acidity through the mundane conversation.
He watched her hands, quick and capable despite their elegance, brushing soil from a miraculously intact seedling pot. They were the same hands that had so confidently peeled an orange and offered it to a prince in armor. They were now grimy, practical.
After a few minutes, the worst of the mess was contained. Thom, profusely grateful, scurried off to fetch a broom and a sack for the debris, leaving the two of them standing amid the evidence of the disaster.
Evaline let out a long breath, pushing her dirty hair from her face. She looked at him, really looked at him, covered in a fine dusting of dirt himself, a stark grey patina on his black surcoat and steel. A fresh, uncalculated grin spread across her face. “Now you have soil on your face, too.”
He touched his own cheek instinctively. His fingers came away smudged.
“It suits you,” she said, her tone softening into something almost contemplative. “Makes you look less like a statue.”
Before he could process the strange compliment, the heavy doors of the orangery swung open again. The world outside rushed in—the sound of distant, raised voices from the council chambers, the smell of cold stone and politics.
Their fathers stood in the doorway, the King of Avelora looking weary, the Iron King of Dravaryn looking carved from flint. Their eyes took in the scene: the scattered soil, the broken boxes, their children standing together in the middle of it, covered in grime.
Kaelen watched his father’s gaze travel from his soil-streaked surcoat to the princess’s smudged face, then back to him. The Iron King’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes were questions sharper than blades.
Evaline’s father merely sighed, a small, tired smile touching his lips. “Evie,” he said, his voice a mixture of fondness and resignation.
Kaelen straightened, the mask of the commander settling back over his features, though it felt different now, like armor over a stain that hadn’t been there before. The taste of orange was gone, replaced by the earthy scent of damp soil. He looked at Evaline, who met his gaze without flinching, her own composure reassembled but no longer pristine.
The negotiations, it seemed, were ready for them again. But nothing in that room of words and terms felt as concrete as the dark dirt still under his fingernails, or as real as the echo of her laughter in the sun-drenched air. He followed his father out, but the ghost of that unguarded sound walked with him, a persistent, unfamiliar warmth against the cold corridors of diplomacy.