Relis's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Relis did not go back to the palace. He walked the long way through the lower streets and stopped at the river steps to sit where Leanna had told him to meet her at sunrise. The stone was cold under his hands. He had hours yet. He rehearsed the sentence he owed her. My name is Relis. I am a prince. I wanted you to know me first. Each time he tried it, the words sounded like a door closing between them. He wanted to be the one to open that door, not a stranger with a message from his father. A lantern moved along the upper street before the sky changed. Relis knew the step before he saw the coat. A palace attendant, older, careful, the kind sent for errands that could not be shouted. The man was working the taverns and stalls, asking after a young elf in a plain hood. Relis heard him stop a fruit seller two corners away and describe a face. He heard his own description in another man's mouth and understood how little time he had. If the attendant reached the tavern where Leanna finished her set, someone there would point him toward the river steps. She would arrive at dawn and find a bowing stranger waiting beside the man she thought she knew. Relis stood up. He climbed the steps and cut across the lane and met the attendant under the lantern before the attendant could ask one more person one more question. He pulled his hood back. The man bowed deep. Relis told him, quietly, to return to the palace and say the prince would be home by midday and not before. The attendant hesitated. Relis said it again. The man went. Relis walked back down to the river steps with his hood in his hand. The sky was starting to gray. On the top step he set down the small wooden pan flute he had carried under his coat since the tavern, the twin of the one he had left at her door, cut from the same length of wood by the same carver. He wanted something of his hands there before he was. He sat beside it and waited. He had bought the morning. He had not bought what he would say when she came down the steps and saw his face in full light and asked, finally, the question he had been running from for a month. The answer was still his to give. That was all he had won.