all great works
Addam didn't know about it. Flora really wasn't quite sure that Addam did or would want to know about it.
But she bit her lip and dug her nails into her palms when Minoth visited, because he was so handsome she'd be breathless if she didn't have conversation to make.
Oh, on pain of everything, she couldn't let Minoth find out. Even if she wanted to. Even if she needed to.
"I'll open a bedroom for you downstairs, Minoth," she'd say pleasantly. Addam would give the cursory approving nod, absent himself to the kitchen or the office so as not to get in the way, and Minoth would run his tongue over the tips of his teeth, looking down at Flora with a strange, squinting unfear.
"Only one bedroom on the main floor?" he asked, almost curious but not really.
"That's right," Flora nodded. "The master suite is here, across from the dining area and kitchen. Then downstairs are bedrooms, plus the library, and in the basement the studio and quarters for a chief of staff. Why they decided that the person who actually runs the house should be exiled to the dungeon, I don't know. Addam pays Emilia enough for her to live where she likes, and we kept most of the manor empty."
Exiled to the dungeon. Minoth thought he might make a crack about how familiar a feeling it seemed, but since Flora didn't actually appear to be ushering him into just such a dingy place, he stowed it.
Just a bedroom. Just a guest room, with a chest of blankets at the foot of the bed and a single night table complete with ether lamp, tissues, official royal stationery.
"Seems a waste to disturb the guest rooms, when nobody sleeps in them most of the time. When I'm gone you'll have to come in here and clean up. I suppose."
Flora fixed him with an unreadable gaze - was she displeased, shrewd, or baffled?
"If it bothers you so much, you can just stay, and clean up after yourself."
Minoth shook his head. "Couldn't do that. Wouldn't be right to abuse your fine hospitality."
"You abuse my hospitality," Flora was ready to point out, "when you receive an invitation and immediately refuse."
Huh. Minoth hadn't expected Flora to be like that. To tell the truth, she hadn't expected herself to be like that either, but now that she'd said it, she'd stand on it.
With some skillfully-concealed effort, she returned a warm smile to her face and strode to the ether lamp, businesslike. Once its faint glow had been coaxed, she turned back to Minoth and folded her hands.
"I don't often get the chance to be a good hostess. Anything you need, you will ask?"
It wasn't a question; it was an instruction.
Minoth nodded. "Yes ma'am. You got it."
Well. There were worse things he could have called her. She dipped her chin and walked, around his guilelessly obtuse posture, out.
Of course, it was the last thing she thought of when she went to sleep that night, and as such it was also the first thing she thought of when she awoke the following morning.
Minoth, in the house. A stray traveler, disturbing their peace. An unknown quantity, and a powerful one.
Flora thought what she might do was brighten the hallway sconces on the lower level, and see what that did. But, when she did so, she saw that Minoth's bedroom door had already been left suspiciously ajar.
She could go back and rustle Addam, who already should have been up but who seemed determined to make a lazybones out of himself on this manual laborless day like no other, or she could investigate the matter herself.
Flora was inquisitive. Flora was also intrigued. Flora would get to the bottom of it.
The first item of note that she gathered was the lack of possessions present on the floor or in the chest. The neat box corners of the sheets were only mostly resembled to their prior state, but in all an effort had been made to leave the room as it had been found and entered.
He could have left completely, then. But Flora noticed that the notebook on the end table was turned at an odd angle, a pen placed atop it.
So Minoth had left himself an especial clue toward which to return. But also, he probably wasn't in the house at all anymore, because he would have taken the clue, such as it was, with him, to the library or to the dungeon.
Flora's next motion was to proceed back to the master bedroom, still in her house slippers, and prise the slats of the window that overlooked the porch, before the moor.
She didn't see Minoth grooming Armu or courting Brogs in the sand. So where was he...?
Unless he left in the middle of the night, and was more than halfway to the capital by now, Flora thought that she should have been able to find him.
Certainly, she would have liked to lay her eyes upon him, and his wild hair and his striking jaw and his eyes that bored like bullets.
She tried to imagine him, miniature at a distance, poised and posed to shoot some...something.
To shoot some game!
He thought it his own responsibility to provide victuals. As if the lack of which wouldn't perfectly disprove any notion of "fine hospitality" - pah!
Flora balled her fists again, then set herself to the task of donning her boots and a simple cloak, because it was cold, yet, in the morning, and she wouldn't have Addam's hand or arm to hold.
Out she would go. About she would stalk. And she would seize upon her prey with every ounce of prepossession, or she'd never understand Minoth at all.
The Tirkin's vegetable patch, as she fondly called it, was the first place Flora checked. It was the only near part of the moor that seemed to offer a safe secret, an interesting place to tuck oneself into and observe the rolling of the clouds.
She didn't particularly know how Minoth felt about cliffs, and clouds, and sea, but her guess was that he'd do a bit of sightseeing, while he was out. Aletta was quite a beautiful vista, when it was just you alone with your thoughts and the wind.
She bit her lip again, now, because the wind was tangling baby hairs at the edges of her eyes and she could feel her skin chapping.
How uninviting. How standoffish. How much she missed not asking herself this strange, strange question.
But she did want to know, even still. Flora was grateful that the morning had brought her this odd situation. She would go look. She'd walk slowly but surely. She wouldn't scowl, like Quincy.
Actually, Quincy would probably be rather upset if Minoth had disturbed him. So she'd have to remove the unwanted visitor to somewhere.
Oh, how troublesome. She could have sleeping so peacefully in her own warm bed, without having to make breakfast for another couple of hours.
Minoth seemed to flinch, when he saw her, but he swallowed and blinked it away. Flora almost let herself smile. Trouble, trouble, trouble.
"Clever lady," said the visitor, to no one. "And here I thought I was making myself scarce."
Pinching the lining of her pockets between the short nails of thumb and index fingers, Flora cocked her head to the side. Was she really letting herself act so distracted, all for the want of a lonesome cowboy who didn't have any business to be getting back to worth a darn?
She could teach children, here, if there were any to teach. But since she didn't have to, she simply didn't. Minoth made her life much more interesting, that way. Oh, Addam's friends were queer.
Well. They were that, too.
Minoth sat on the fence, quite literally, and flicked bits of grass from the creases of his gloves. He didn't seem to mind that Flora hadn't responded to his rhetorical statement.
"You two talk about me, I have to assume."
"Of course," replied Flora. "One of our favorite topics." Subjects. Objects. Otherwise. "I'm sure your ears burn on the daily."
"Always." Minoth did try his best to be obliging. "But that could be on account of people from other Titans. Not everything is about you."
Implying that she was self-centered, of all people?
They talked about him. His independence. His way with words, his impossible bob and weave away from ever being understood. In this way, Flora probably fancied herself just as clever as he'd pronounced it, if not a sight more, because she was determined to be the first ever to understand.
She'd win him. She'd tame him. Or would she? How did she mean?
Still with her hands in her pockets, Flora made a purposeful few steps forward. Minoth looked at her with that handsome face of his. And as she stuck out one shivering hand in invitation, the wind courted her crow's feet, again.
"We were going to feed you, you know."
"Like cattle," Minoth remarked tastelessly. He pointedly ignored the olive-pink hand.
"Like family," Flora corrected him. "Or at least like a guest."
"I thought it'd be an imposition to act that way."
"Well, you are here."
"I am."
"And you've caught my eye."
Minoth let his mouth drop open with a tick of tongue upon roof of mouth and lips. "Addam offered for me to stay. Not you."
"I was afraid to hope," Flora replied simply. "I couldn't possibly let myself be the one so arrogant. And of course Addam means nothing by it."
Now Minoth frowned, let his own head list. "Nothing?"
"You know, the proverbial...nothing."
The nothing that Addam always meant, because he liked to pretend, somehow, to be uncunning, to be fruitless and gormless and every other innocent thing that would win the hearts of the Tornan population without trying. He wasn't a bad sort, certainly. Flora loved him dearly. But he did have this way where he didn't know, and then really didn't know, how people were wont to interpret his actions. And then he'd bemoan his grand and glorious reputation.
Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Nothing at all.
But Minoth's face hardened. "Flora, he wants to sleep with me."
"Really? That makes two."
Though she knew she'd regret it, she said it tartly. It wasn't Addam she was cross with; no, no. It was the fact that she was being fooled, somehow. Had been, anyway.
So Minoth, for his part, waved her away. "Don't expect me back, then. I'll find my own way to the port."
Ah, yes - and here was the rubbingest regret of all. Casting a glance aside to the Tirkins, Flora felt suddenly colder and lonelier than she had last night when she regarded Minoth, the drily enlisted suitor, as an enigma. Because of course he was here, now, getting cross back at her.
She decided, then, that she'd have to put her school face on.
"We're both being childish, and it serves no one. Are you meaning to tell me that you and Addam have a history?"
No hesitation. No ellipsis.
"Would," said Minoth, ready with his facts, "except that I wouldn't believe him. He always said you wouldn't care."
"Wouldn't care?"
"Wouldn't mind."
"And you found that actually, I'm horribly fastidious. A regular thorn in your side."
Just lead along to the conclusion. Just get to the point, which is hardly so hard.
But Minoth, the incorrigible, threw her a winking glance. "Oh, Flora, anything but regular."
This much, she couldn't stand. This much, she didn't have the patience for. This much, she'd freeze full over and they'd be still thick in the middle of it.
So Flora turned, grinding her heel in the morning mud even though she so hated to pick it out later, and made to scurry back up to the house, slam the door, and lock it tight. Get out, you horrible man, and stay out! Addam can figure it out himself, in time. He'll make other friends. Other, less drippingly lascivious friends.
It was just as she was making tracks into the fields dotted with Armu dung that she felt a shadow come up behind her, lope alongside, and then all at once tackle her - except, thankfully, that she remained standing.
It was Minoth, strange Minoth, the one whose jaw she'd been dreaming about, but instead of ravishing her, instead of holding her in some place she hadn't granted, some inordinate contusion of the well-kept self, he just embraced her, tighter than even Addam ever had.
(It wasn't that Addam couldn't. It was that Addam had never been quite so scared.)
His armor was stiff. No, he certainly wasn't welcoming. It was his breaths that were soft, all-enveloping.
Eventually, he did have to let her down, and they staggered in tandem, almost ready to collapse upon the manure.
"Flora, I'm sorry, I just- it's all--"
She stared at him, heart thumping harder than any indifferent weather ever could force, licking the creases of her lips because she was just beginning, perhaps, to understand.
"I had to protect myself. I don't know any different."
Get over yourself, she could say. Grow up and speak like the rest of us.
But she hadn't, either. She'd fixated on just this one thing.
As if Minoth couldn't be frightened just like the rest of them.
"I will keep you safe, you know." What a promise. What a fantastical thing. "But you should have asked."
He snorted, like the cattle. "Imagine me, asking anybody that."
"I don't want to have to," Flora said simply. "Ask."
In archer words: be plainly obedient, for once.
"Flora..." There was a crack in his perfect voice. "Will you love me? Will you try?"
He cried. She laughed. There came a golden-hearted shout.
"Oh, darling one. I'm sure I will."