“I think for the right person, I too would be willing to be a brave fool,” said Zoraya, closing the space between them.
Zoraya draped her arms about his neck and pulled him into a kiss. Her body seemed to melt against his and Arris’s senses went aflame. Her hair was cold silk against his hands and she tasted very pleasantly of mint. Zoraya smelled like midnight honeysuckle and sandalwood, which Arris thought was curious because it seemed like every girl he kissed smelled vaguely of sandalwood and it wasn’t even that he liked the smell of it so much as he had come to associate it with kissing and therefore his whole body was quite attuned to it. It was a wonderful kiss and his onlyreal complaint was that it was cut short by the sound of footfalls—
“Your Majesty!” cried out a dozen or so voices.
Zoraya broke the kiss with a breathless laugh. “May we both find ourselves to be lucky fools, Prince Arris.”
The next few hours were surprisingly pleasant.
He found Orinthia in the frigid tundra pavilion, where he watched her search the snowy field for the Aatosian ice hare, not realizing that the creature had been dogging her steps and dusting off her footprints the whole time. Arris revealed the hare’s presence by throwing a snowball at it, and the startled hare dropped its invisibility. Orinthia had shrieked in delight and when she smiled, Arris saw that her eyes and nose crinkled.
“Got you!” she said, happily reaching for the creature.
But it bolted away into its snowy warren.
“They’re mischievous and very proud of their camouflaging abilities,” said Arris, joining her. “I’m not sure he took too kindly to me revealing his whereabouts.”
“What a sweet, silly little thing,” said Orinthia.
Arris wholeheartedly disagreed. The reason the Aatosian ice hare followed after people and dusted their footprints with its long ears was to make sure they got lost in the snow. No one had ever seen the hare devour a human. But whenever they were sighted, a corpse was usually nearby.
“Yes… they’re very endearing,” he said.
Orinthia smiled and then looked over her shoulder. Notten paces away was the menagerie walking path leading away from the snow banks.
“Thank you for spending some time with me, Your Majesty,” she said. “I am sure you are eager to get back to the attentions of Lady Edmea.”
“I’m quite content where I am,” said Arris.
Orinthia blinked. A shy smile stole across her face. “Truly?”
“Yes,” said Arris. “Which is saying something, because I’ve always considered this place a bit of a wasteland.”
Orinthia grinned. “It’s not a wasteland, Your Majesty. It’s a blank page.”
Arris remembered Orinthia’s talent of snow sculpting. She demonstrated it for him now, crouching to pile up the snow, whispering to it before she huffed a breath and a beautiful ice hare bounded across the fields.
“Exquisite,” said Arris.
“There is something else that you might find equally exquisite,” said Orinthia and then she kissed him.
It was a lovely kiss, although Arris was once more struck by the scent of sandalwood. Had his mother filled all the bathing chambers with a sandalwood soap? And if so… why?
After Orinthia, Arris stumbled upon Ursula in the wisp woods, a terrain near the mountains where the fog of the Isle seemed most alive. She was in the pavilion farthest from the entrance, the point at which the menagerie walkway looped back upon itself. People often assumed there was nothing here, for fog typically curled around the archway,obscuring the trees and animals from view. On this morning, however, the mist was thin and Arris was able to see not only the tall, translucent wisp willows but also Ursula hurling stones at the berries and cursing loudly.
Wisp willows were odd trees. Their boughs floated upward, weaving into pale corridors where clouds drifted over the ground and the sky was impossible to behold. Strung along each limb were white, succulent berries. It was a favorite food of the cloud bears, who often hunted and floated in and around the wisp woods.
Arris stepped through the archway. “What are you doing?”
“Struggling, evidently,” said Ursula, not sparing him more than a glance.
It was a shockingly informal response. Arris found it refreshing.
“If you don’t mind my saying so, I’d be careful not to hit—”
One of Ursula’s stones missed the leafy canopy of white berries and instead hit the trunk of one of the wisp willows. Upon contact, the willow burst apart, leaving only the ghostly impression of a tree where it had once stood.
“—the wisp willows,” said Arris.
