Cedric proposes a pointless pastime

Cedric could not believe what he was seeing—or rather, what his elders, his betters, his foreign acquaintances, and most especially his young friends were seeing. His mother was dancing.

She had danced earlier, of course, but that had been a good, ordinary, English dance: a gracious dance; a dance to a pretty little tune. This was something else entirely.

“When do you think Gwynn will blow?” Kraaia cooed as he backed discreetly behind the pillar.

“What?” he gasped.

“She’s as red as a welt over there,” Kraaia explained with even sweetness. “Finn’s teasing her about something, and that something seems to be dancing right now. Unlike her.”

Cedric peeked uneasily around Alred into the hall. Gwynn certainly was red-​faced about something, and that something appeared to be located in the center of the room. However, Cedric was not certain that the something was what Kraaia believed it to be. Kraaia was sitting behind the pillar and could not see.

He glanced back at her, but she was watching him warily, ready to spring up at the least hint that he might be thinking of going anywhere.

“Come on,” he muttered. “I’m going to go see.”

“You’re not going to defend her, are you?” she growled.

“No, I’m—” He could not say he was going to defend his mother. “—going to distract her.”

Kraaia huffed, “Then so am I!” and flounced after him.

Cedric put his head down and hurried behind the Captain to Gwynn’s side, hustling faster than Kraaia could flounce. As soon as Gwynn looked around he blurted, “I certainly didn’t know Connie could dance like that!”

Whatever Finn might have been saying to make Gwynn change colors, Cedric knew at once that what he had just said was exceedingly stupider. And nevertheless he seemed to be watching himself from a point somewhere outside his body as he proceeded to compound his stupidity.

“Did you?” he added with a foolish grin.

“I knew about Connie,” Finn smiled, “but did you know your Mama could dance like that?”

Three of the four heads turned together to look. The fourth hung low in shame.

Over the thumping of the drums and the stomping of feet, Cedric could hear his uncle’s long hands clapping on high: the nomad’s loud, cupped-​palm cracking that sounded far across the desert and down through heaps of sand to rouse half-​buried camels… or that roused their lounging ladies and made them shed their heavy robes and veils to dance, waving their graceful arms like water and rolling their hips like dunes.

“I didn’t know your mother and uncle knew any Scottish dances,” Gwynn gushed. “So cunning of them!”

Kraaia laughed.

“That isn’t a Scottish dance!” Finn groaned. “It isn’t a Scottish dance simply because it is danced to a Scottish tune.”

“It’s a Saracen dance!” Kraaia said wickedly. “During Ad–vent! What if it’s unchristian? What will Father Matthew say?”

“I don’t suppose Leila would dance it if it were unchristian,” Gwynn pouted, but her eyes glanced about uneasily in search of reassurance. “If it’s not a Scottish dance simply because of a Scottish tune, then it isn’t a Saracen dance simply because… because…”

Finn coughed and murmured aside, “You’re losing me…”

“…because Saracens are dancing it,” Gwynn concluded stiffly. “Cearball isn’t turning into a Scot simply because he’s dancing a… a Scottish dance…” she faltered. “To a… a Scottish tune, that is.”

Kraaia laughed.

“You’ve lost me!” Finn sighed. “If I ever need a labyrisk, I shall ask you to design it.”

“Laby–rinth!” Gwynn huffed. “So stupid!” she added under her breath.

Finn flushed, but without skipping a beat he patiently corrected, “No, a laby–rinth is a maze with a Minotaur in it. A laby–risk is a maze with a cockaninny in it. So stupid!” he muttered wearily to himself.

Cedric’s gallantry manifested itself in another bolt of great stupidity. “I think you mean a cockatrice,” he said.

“No,” Finn replied, “I mean a cockaninny. Only the cockaninny is so stupid as to be capable of forgetting its way out of a maze it built itself.”

Cedric was learning to recognize the signs of impending tears on Gwynn’s face: the lips that pursed into a trembling red bow; the high spots of pink on her cheeks; the wide, dark, glistening eyes.

At those moments all her delicate beauty seemed magnified and brightened as through a prism, and if Finn had not always stared stonily off over her head or out into the room at such times, Cedric might have believed he deliberately made her cry for the pleasure of looking at her. As it was it seemed he simply found pleasure in making her cry.

Cedric was beginning to mistrust his own gallant instincts, however, and he hesitated to reply. Fortunately Paul and Lasrua provided a distraction by skipping out onto the floor together to dance.

The elves’ dance seemed wild and reckless to Cedric, for it involved kicking one’s leg high in spite of the chance of anyone seeing up one’s gown to one’s legs—though try as he might Cedric could not quite see—but when he sent a worried glance back at Finn, Finn only nodded at the couple with grim satisfaction and leaned back against the wall.

“Let’s see Careballs try to keep up with that,” he smirked.

Cedric nearly cried out in horror. He had heard Finn muttering about “Careballs” half the day, but he had never dreamt the boy would repeat the name before the delicate ears of maidens.

Kraaia repeated, “Careballs!” to herself and snickered, but innocent Gwynn did not even know to blush—and both reactions seemed equally catastrophic to Cedric’s mind.

“I am certain he could,” Gwynn said, “once he had been taught it. The Scottish dances must be far more difficult. I am certain one would never ask a young lady to dance a Scottish dance if one did not know she had already mastered it—”

“Oh, is that why?” Kraaia cooed.

“—but I think the elven dance could be learned while dancing,” Gwynn concluded with a faint, hopeful uplift to her voice at the end.

Cedric eyed Finn anxiously, fearing both that he would offer to teach her and that he would fail to reply to such an obvious desire to dance. Cedric could not see so much as the toe of Gwynn’s slipper peeking out beneath the hem of her gown, but he could see the hem rising and falling as she tapped her toe beneath it. Why, he wondered miserably, were girls so obsessed with such a pointless pastime as dancing?

“Or the Saracen dance,” she added kindly for his benefit.

Cedric wished he had stayed safely behind the pillar.

“I like the Scottish dance the best,” Kraaia said. “Don’t you?”

Cedric was about to scowl a warning at her, but she stopped him short with a sublimely nonchalant remark aimed past his shoulder.

“I find it the most erotic of the three,” she said to Gwynn. “Do not you?”

Finn’s body stiffened against the wall, and Cedric saw him take a deep breath and hold it.

But Gwynn calmly replied, “Quite so. Any sort of couple dancing is erotic, of course, but the Scottish dances seem particularly so.” She nodded graciously at Cedric and said, “Also the Saracen dance.”

Cedric could not believe what he was hearing. Finn’s face was as red as a welt and looked more stunned than stony. Perhaps he too was wondering whether girls so calmly measured the eroticism of various activities between themselves. Perhaps he too was wondering whether such vulgar turns of phrase as “Careballs” featured in the ordinary discourse of young ladies.

Or perhaps he too feared that Lady Gwynn was truly so blankly innocent as to have no idea what she was hearing and saying. Cedric could not decide which possibility put her at the greater risk of catastrophe.

“Of course,” Gwynn said with an indulgent smile, “it is not so erotic to dance with one’s own brother.”

Kraaia stood taller, as though her victory had just been crowned with a wreath of laurels.

“It is far less erotic,” she said, “to stand around watching while one’s best friend dances with the man one is having erotic dreams about.”

All Gwynn’s beauty quivered over her face like the scattered rainbows of prisms shaking in a breeze. Kraaia gazed on her in breathless delight; one might have thought she liked to make Gwynn cry only for the pleasure of looking at her.

Finn pushed himself away from the wall until he towered over the three of them, but his body was rigid with the helplessness of pent-​up strength. Cedric saw he would have to act before Gwynn shattered.

“A pity your brother isn’t here,” Kraaia cooed sweetly. “Perhaps then someone would ask you to dance without requiring a ducal command.”

Gwynn took a sharp breath.

Cedric blurted, “As a matter of fact, that’s what I was coming over here for.”

Kraaia’s even sweetness was shattered, and she squawked, “What?”

Cedric gulped a deep breath of his own and bowed to Gwynn. “Would you care to dance?”