Moonlight Ball

Oh, Ruthna, Iris called out in her mind as she looked up at the man, trying to gain her composure.

“Can’t we just not do it today? Maybe the, uh, the day after tomorrow,” Iris pleaded softly. If the teacher comes tomorrow night, I can ask what this is and think about my response. “I’ll… I’ll do it the day after tomorrow. So, not today, please. I’m not feeling well. And…” Iris stuttered and desperately sort words to get herself out of this unfamiliar situation. “There may also be, uh, illness, some illness. Like skin disease, since the Harance river’s water isn’t very clean. If you lick me, it might cause a big problem. Tomorrow, I’ll ask the doctor again.” Iris held her hands together as if she was praying, “The day after tomorrow. Not for long. We can do it again the day after tomorrow. I mean, please.” Ruthna, help me!

Before she knew it, she was pleading with the guardian goddess Ruthna, not the man in front of her. According to Elaine’s ‘Impression method’, her face was loved by Ruthna. She had a face so beautiful that it screwed people’s lives up.

Sidrain looked down at the praying Queen in great bewilderment. Rosemary, who was speaking gibberish, saying the Harance river was not good for his body, was news to him. She looked crazy as usual, but it seemed like a different level of crazy. The day after tomorrow? Sidrain raised an eyebrow, puzzled by all of this. That’s how much Rosemary hated him. Last month, Rosemary told Sidrain to offer her 20 thousand ribla’s a month if he wanted to have intercourse with her, she truly was a crazy woman. If she didn’t want to have a relationship with the King, she shouldn’t have become the Queen in the first place! The young King’s ministry, which the people were looking at, was always politically attacked because there was no successor, but she tried to intimidate Sidrain with this by requesting to get paid to have intimate relations with her husband! Was she a whore? Last month they’d had a serious marital fight, but even then, Rosemary hadn’t asked to have intercourse the next day, or the day after that. She followed the instructions on the doctor’s note, which highlighted the most likely day for her to fall pregnant, therefore there was no reason to do it on a day when the probability of pregnancy dropped. Requesting to do it the day after tomorrow made no sense to him.

Lost in thought, Sidrain looked at Rosemary and the image of a young Iris overlapped her face. What an annoying little girl she’d been. She hadn’t shaken hands, nor spoken and only gave her name to him at the end of their time together. The only person who’d ever done that to him, the then Crown Prince, was that girl, during a brief encounter that lasted half a day. Perhaps that girl young girl didn’t even remember him.

Iris looked at people as if they were monsters, with an ordinary look on her face that didn’t match her appearance, but he always remembered that young girl who hid in the back of his mind. As he got older though, he thought about her less and less.

Sidrain’s thoughts were all over the place, Iris Elaine, did she truly die? Really… dead? Drowned in the cold Harance River? Sidrain was actually in no mood to hug any woman today, even more so not Rosemary, the woman he hated the most in the world and the woman who had killed Iris Elaine. Sidrain was beside himself the moment he was told she had killed Iris Elaine. Even though they weren’t close, Iris had always had a spot in a corner of Sidrain’s heart, and the moment he heard that she was dead, he was furious and completely lost control.

“All right, I won’t do anything with you this month because of your pleas not to,” Sidrain said, almost sounding relieved. He didn’t want to be thinking about Iris whilst having sex with Rosemary. Sidrain got off of Rosemary, still thinking about Iris Elaine, the damn girl that didn’t even give out her name initially. Was she honestly dead? He couldn’t understand why he was so sad because it had been such a short encounter with her in his childhood, and he didn’t normally get hung up on people dying.

As Sidrain strode out of the Queen’s room, Rosemary called out for him and he looked back and saw her lifting herself in the bed.

“Thank you. I mean it, really,” she said with a slight smile on her face.