Arcaea/Dining Hall Late 08-09/Harmony's Hopes
Harmony sipped her wine and stared into the campfire. There wasn’t anything else worth looking at in Arempos: it was a dusty, rocky land. Spring, with its green shoots and blossoms seemed to have completely passed it by. Even the goats—which seemed to be the herd animal of choice for the Arempion farmer—would have a hard time finding good grazing.
She wasn’t thinking about the goats, though; she was thinking about the men that she had killed in her first campaign.
It should have been harder.
A part of her brain had known that the men who found her blade were husbands and fathers…sons. But, she had ruthlessly packed that away. For this performance, she need only to know that her life was forfeit if she faltered. Harmony did wonder if their haunts would trouble her sleep, but somehow...she didn't think so.
Still…it should have been harder. Men were not monsters. Well, not usually. She shuddered despite the warmth of the fire. It was something that she hadn’t lost her nerve, at least. Harmony knew that she hadn’t been completely…rational…since…Siegfried. She looked fondly at her boots and wondered if they would be as comfortable for sleeping in if she had steel toes put in them like Arlian had.
Arlian.
Despite her dark thoughts, Harmony smiled at the thought of him. After all the tall, pretty warrior-types that had passed through her life, who would have thought that the one she would love, the one that she had been looking for, was a funny, homely bureaucrat a full inch or more shorter than she was! She did pity every woman who had ever looked at Arlian’s unimposing exterior and passed him by—never knowing the prize they were missing.
They had spent so many wonderful days together before the war began. Arlian surprising her everyday with his wicked humour and naked vulnerability…and who would expect that his beautiful, velvet eyes could see so much, or that an artist’s heart beat beneath that plain exterior.
Certainly not Edara. While her cousin had been thrilled with the gift that Harm and Arlian had presented to her, sighing over the verse engraved in the red-gold plaque:
Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.*
and, enthusing over the swirling spray of rubies and emeralds that twined around the letters, she had seemed somewhat skeptical that the idea—and main design—had sprung from Arlian’s practical mind.
Harmony wasn’t certain that Jenred had been as surprised, but she found the King hard to read at times. In his own way, he was as much of a performer as she was. She smiled to herself, except when he looked at Edara, then his feelings were plain for anyone to read. Did she look like that when her eyes were on Arlian?
Harmony poured the dregs of her wine onto the fire. Her men were nearly finished packing up the camp. Lantzas…and then Remton. Maybe…Arlian might be persuaded to leave Nocaneb to its own devices for a day or two and meet her there.
She missed him.
- Old Bill...from Hamlet
Lady Harmony Kindon (Dame of Nocaneb)
