Arianne of Tarth
The needles clicked against each other as her fingers carefully wove the sun-yellow thread into the woolen banner.
Another one they could hang in some rarely used room back home, hopefully never to be seen beyond by some lowly knight after a day of feasting, drunk enough he wouldn't notice nor care about the many mistakes on the pattern.
She did not hate embroidering, not like she used to when she was younger and she had to watch as Alysanne, her junior by a year, proved to be much better with her tiny lady-like fingers nimble as a bard's.
Then her lady mother would spend the day singing her praises all around Evenfall Hall until everyone from the lowest stablehand to the maester had grown sick of hearing them.
Her eyes wrinkled into a frown. With a breath to bring it into focus, she looked down at herself to see her own dull gray aura flicker with a splash of deep, oozing green.
Jealousy, Arianne figured. She was becoming quite proficient in telling the emotions apart.
But it was an unworthy thought. Let no one say Lady Addison Tarth was miserly with her praise to any of her children. Despite Arianne's many issues, her mother did whatever she could to raise her up in front of others and to herself with soft, encouraging words.
Close by, her mother and the Lady Lenora Whitehead prattled endlessly about the tournament's newest scandal, some bawdy not-so-secret affair between a stormlord's bastard and some westerlander knight's third daughter.
They tried to keep the lurid details to a minimum, mindful of the young girl in the room, yet sometimes they would subtly glance at her to make sure she wasn't paying attention before leaning closer to whisper and giggle at each other.
To repay the favor, Arianne pretended not to listen, gaze distant as if off into her own world. In reality, she was wound tighter than a plucked knot on one of her embroideries, a sheen of sweat already covering her brow.
Whenever the two were too engrossed in their conversation to notice, she would steal glances at the brown-haired Lady Lenora, and the tension within herself would only increase.
She should not be using her vision—as she'd come to call it—for this long, but she could not stop herself now that she was beginning to understand a bit more of how this strange power of hers worked.
When Lady Lenora Whitehead had arrived earlier for their embroidery session, she had not addressed the woman much beyond the barest of courtesies expected of her.
Her mother had confined her to their rooms the whole day yesterday and into the morning today after she fell ill during the feast, and she was committed to the greatest form of rebellion she could muster—sulking.
Luckily, embroidery no longer felt like a chore now, more a time for sinking into the quiet of her own mind, so she was sure she could sulk the morning away with a needle and thread in hand.
But whether out of boredom or just a strange feeling urging her to do so, like an itch she couldn't ignore for long, she had focused her vision on Lady Lenora as she happily chatted with her mom.
What she saw left her feeling confused.
Lady Lenora's aura didn't make any sense.
Even as she laughed with her mother, her teeth bright and her eyes crinkling with good humor, her usually sky-blue aura pulsed an ugly red in a slow, rhythmic thump like a heartbeat.
At times, when mother talked about her lord husband or mentioned their house, her aura would spike with the yellowish-green color of pus.
She could not have noticed all these shifts before. Nor could she fathom what they meant; but her vision had sharpened ever since she arrived in Casterly Rock.
Maybe it was seeing so many different people and being exposed to all their auras, but she felt she'd gained a new perspective on her powers.
Auras were not some inflexible thing as she once thought. Though every person seemed to have their own unique one, some being brighter and louder than others, they all swirled and sparkled and shifted like a living thing, always in flux, always pushing and pulling.
And when she focused on a single person, she could even notice a rise in their passion by the color of their aura.
At the sparring yard, auras would dip into a tight cocoon as the knights focused on their swordplay, brows furrowed with the strain.
The bout would come to an end eventually, and some would grow angry at the loss. They would snarl and curse, and shots of red would spread on their aura like blood splashing across snow.
The winners' auras, even the ones who remained courteous and restrained, would crow their victory with flashes of gold.
After the feast, when her mother was fussing over her like she'd been dying, Lady Addison's aura had grown agitated like a wounded animal, straining to contain a flood of quivering black and blue.
And beneath all that, when she was singing Arianne to sleep late into the night, her aura pulsed steadily with waves of the deepest, most beautiful pink.
Arianne had become fascinated with all she could see.
She even started cataloguing what she found in a small notebook, which she hid under her pillow every night. She was certain of it now: she could see people's emotions, read them as if they were lines writ large on an open book.
The knight's rage. The lady's envy. A servant's fear after spilling wine on a guest. Her mother's worry and undying love.
She was realizing that, back in Tarth, she had been much like a newborn baby slowly getting used to new, frightening senses. Even now, she could still get overwhelmed like during the feast, the world around her drowned out by the flash of all those blazing auras.
But in the small sitting room of their apartments in the Rock where she could focus solely on Lady Lenora, without all the noise of a busy feast, she should be able to read her aura the right way.
With all the easy laughter and excitement at the gossip, she expected yellow for joy or a bright orange for sudden enthusiasm.
Why, then, was she getting this pulsing red for anger and that ugly shade of green for envy?
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