30th of Summer, 518
It was just after the afternoon shift, and Madeira was on a date.
The Spiritist had promised to share a meal with Daniel after the sixteen-year-old gave her his shark tooth necklace as a gift. She didn’t mind; the boy was good company. He had a shy, quiet personality and a youthful energy about him. And though she did not return his affections, she found his crush on her somehow intriguing.
The two sat across each other over a rough wooden table. The evening meal was a thick pea soup, a healthy portion of boiled salted pork and rock-hard biscuits. After a few weeks of such fare Madeira was getting used to the heavy, salt-dense diet, yet every time a tray was set before her she couldn’t help but long for the fresh food of home. This was one of the few times she ever found herself considering Riverfall kindly. The port city still made her insides curl with hate, but it was undeniable that their strange southern food was delectable.
It was like this, with her eyes closed and remembering of the giant Riverfall peaches, that Daniel snapped his fingers and startled her awake.
“Jeez, Madeira. If you’re tired you should have said something.” Daniel was already halfway through his dry biscuits, washing them down with the small measure of rum the sailors were rationed. For moral, the captain had explained when she questioned why they were intoxicating the men responsible for driving the ship.
“Sorry! I spaced out there for a moment.” she waved his concern off, and tried to appear more alert as she dug her into the porridge-thick soup. “I thought you promised to tell me about your adventures.”
“I thought you promised to listen.”
It was then that she realized that her inattentiveness cut much deeper than she had first thought. She glanced at him over her spoon, reading the sulky tilt of his shoulders and how he was eating fast to fill the silence he was so sensitive to. Of course, he had a crush on her. Her attention meant much more to him than one of his other shipmates.
Tapping into the well of dijed inside her, she pushed it outward. It sat in her apologetic smile and beseeching eyes, and in the hand she reached across the table to rest just atop of his. He was not looking her in the eye, so she struggled to concentrate and wrap the suggestion around her words.
“I’m sorry. You aren’t boring me, I was just thinking.“
Be fond of me, she pushed the subliminal suggestion on him. Let it ride on the feather light touch of their connected hands. She could not tell if the magic actually reached him, but she hoped it did.