She was swimming out beyond the rock wall when the ship appeared on the horizon.
Lucie had of course known that they would arrive today- how could she forget, when the kitchens had been abuzz with activity preparing the traditional meals and sweets for the festivities for days? The maids had been sweeping and cleaning out hearths and long-empty chambers in the diplomatic tower since dawn yesterday, and the streets on the walk down to the water that morning were decked with colourful swathes of gossamer and ribbons. The city was prepared for their arrival.
Lucie was in no hurry; she had several hours still to enjoy the water before she would need to return to the tower and prepare for the ceremony. She dove down to the sandy sea floor and swiped up another mussel then swam to the shore, cracking it open on a stone and draining it of it's juice as she watched the ship getting slowly larger and larger. By the evening, the ship would be sailing out the way it came, one of her cousins aboard.
She scooped the mussel out and sunk her teeth into its rubbery flesh.
~
An hour later, Lucie rushed up the steep twirling steps of the tower and ducked into the door of the scullery, nearly missing a maid carrying a tray of sugar crusted treats from the oven to the stone bench across the room. Near the open fire, Mirtha stood and yelled at another duo of maids who were dripping goose fat onto the floor as they tried to lift the bird up onto the spit.
"Today is the one day we all need to be at our best, Cedrine, we can't have someone slipping on goose fat and splitting their head open in the middle of the scullery!"
She cast a harried glance around, no doubt looking for other calamities she needed to avert, and saw Lucie ducking under the low beamed doorway into the pantry.
"Lucie! Have you got the mussels?"
"Yes, Mirtha," sung Lucie. "It took me three hours of diving and I'm not even close to ready for the ceremony, but I have your mussels."
Mirtha had, in an earlier tragedy, lost the pail of mussels to a befuddled undercook and cupbearer who had come home from a night of drinking, starving for a meal, and hadn't realised their significance.
It had been a long while since the city had seen a royal wedding, so could they really be blamed for not knowing the mussels were the key ingredient in the soup served to the bride and groom immediately after their union was finalised? Mirtha thought they could, and had beaten them with a spoon when she found out.
"It'll be my head on the block, not yours!" she cried as she ran them from the scullery. Lucie had soothed Mirtha, as Mirtha had soothed her so many times in her childhood, and reassured her she could easily harvest the mussels from the shallows beyond the rock wall with plenty of time for the soup to be made.
She was only partly lying- it hadn't been easy but she had enough in the pail she dropped into the pantry to make the soup. It would just have to be a little watery.
"Lucie my sweet child! You are my greatest blessing," Mirtha placed a kiss on Lucie's forehead and held her face against her soft bosom. "Now, go and get dressed. Bulla has laid out your dress and shoes. I'll come and tend to your hair soon."
Lucie did as she was told. Since her mother had died when she was only six years old, Mirtha had been as close to a replacement as she had. When her father had died two years later and her uncle had taken the throne, his wife Saran had hardly risen to the role. She had several girls of her own at that point, and had since rounded out her total brood to twelve, so Lucie told herself she had hardly had the time for another. But really she knew that her uncle would have poisoned his wife to the idea of Lucie. It was written into Sarrenian law that the daughters of a king who was killed in battle would be adopted by his successor and treated as his own. Her uncle had upheld this by not executing or banishing her, and she supposed this was better treatment than many in the western lands could expect, but he had never seen her as his own. As soon as he was crowned, Lucie was moved into a chamber in the servants tower and brought out at formal events, paraded as a symbol of how just and kind her uncle was, then returned to her life in the scullery with Mirtha and a single chambermaid, Bulla, who was barely more than a girl herself, and forgotten about until the next time the king had to signal his virtue.
It was to this end she now headed to her chamber, slipped out of her wet tunic and into her nicest dress, ready to play her part.
~
The hall was full, and more people spilled out onto the square and streets beyond. The royal party would arrive via grand entrance and enter the hall through the vestibule, and the people would be able to see them right up until they entered the hall. There was much chatter as they all waited, amongst noble and common people alike. Lucie was standing with the closest members of the household to the side of the great hall, behind the platform that the princesses would leave their seats and file onto when the king presented them. The king himself was seated at the front of the hall, and his queen Saran beside him.
Across from Lucie were the extended nobility, standing like her facing the central aisle where the foreign royal party would enter and meet the king. Johnes, an advisor of her father who had always cared for Lucie, stood beside her.
