Once Upon a Romance 02 - As The Last Petal Falls Read Free Page B

myself, thank you very…” Her voice petered out as she finally caught sight of Connelly.
    Their medic was a peculiar looking man. He was short, and slight, and his features were gnarled and… odd. He wasn’t hideous or deformed, but Fain had spent many an evening gazing at him over an open fire, trying to figure out what it was about him that looked so wrong. It could have been his teeth, which were just a touch too small, or his nose, which was just a bit too big, or his hair, which grew low on his forehead and close on his cheeks, and was perpetually snarled. Whatever it was, he had the kind of face that people’s eyes slid away from.
    People’s, perhaps, but not the lass on the bed. She blinked at him once, owlishly, but that was all. Come to think on it, it might have just been the rotgut setting in that caused her to blink, because she then took a moment to observe the whole room, blinking ferociously all the while.
    “Is it… sparkling in here?”
    Fain smirked and quickly looked at Connelly, expecting him to share the joke, but the small man was regarding his patient very seriously.
    “Aye, that ’tis, lass. There’s not many as can see it.” Fain had never known Connelly to so obviously humor a patient before, but then again, his patients were mostly men. Perhaps he had a different standard for females.
    “And you—
you
are a fascinating little man.”
    Fain was amused, but felt the tiniest jab to his pride. She had called
him
terrifying, but she found Connelly fascinating. He cleared his throat.
    “Yes, well, sparkles and fascinating little men aside, don’t you think we should be worried about setting that arm?” Both sets of eyes turned towards him. Connelly’s were bright with humor, as though he saw past Fain’s bluster to his wounded vanity. The lass merely blinked at him, her eyes growing rounder and rounder.
    “The sparkles… the sparkles are coming from
you.
”

    Vivienne was foxed. She
knew
she was foxed. It had been her precise intention to
become
foxed when she started chugging that hideous, hideous rotgut.
    She hadn’t, however, intended to become so foxed that she started hallucinating. She knew it couldn’t be real, but she clearly saw pinwheels of sparkling gold, like miniature fireworks, bursting from the large, unkempt man scowling down at her. They leapt off his skin and spread out to hang in the air, glittering with a light wholly unlike the firelight that cast shadows throughout the room. His slightest movement created ripples and eddies in the sparkling patterns, sending them out to circle the tiny medical man, or flow to envelop her. Her eyes tracked the glittering motes, following their graceful whorls as they spiraled through an intricate dance that seemed to beckon her to follow, to see, to understand…
    Vivienne shook her head. This was all really too much.
    She peered at the mysterious man with the golden sparkles. He was like the statuary in the palace back home-well proportioned, but scaled larger than most humans. His hair was a dark brown, the kind that people called black if they hadn’t seen hair like her own, which truly
was
black. His was long and unkempt, and hung freely about his shoulders. His clothing looked like the garb of a huntsman-if the huntsman in question had been wearing the same thing for weeks on end, rendering it ragged and frayed. He was clean, though; there was no grime on his hands or staining on his tunic, and the slight shadow on his cheek suggested he had shaved that morning.
    Her thoughts were dragged sharply from her observations as she felt Connelly’s fingers begin probing at her arm. A gasp, all unbidden, fell from her lips. As gentle as the little man’s hands were, she could still feel her bones, moving and shifting in ways that they should not. Dreading what she would see, but unable to look away, she watched the undulations as things shifted beneath her skin. Swiftly her ungroomed huntsman moved around to the other side of