The moonlight is different here.
No, that's not quite right. Everything is distinctly, definitively, different here. Yet strangely, after so much difference (and, let’s be honest, so much summer wine) it all begins to seem almost similar. So much so that as Dune looks at the field with its many-blooming lights, the novelty of it all fades to a dim sense of familiarity. Wonder withers to apathy.
It is an evening just like any other. This one in particular may have more brightness, but it’s all the same show. The sun will always rise and fall; the waking world would fall asleep, and then wake once more. In a few days he would be home again, and in Solterra, just as in Delumine, countless strangers would long to be relieved of the terrible burden of their money.
Dune is their savior, or could be. He ambles among the festival goers, shaking his very small sack of coins to call attention to the wares in baskets slung over his back. Most of his goods tonight are for eating. Festival foods from Solterra: Sun cakes sweetened with sage honey sit nestled among candied cactus and agave-smoked sugar cubes. There are other items too, of Dune’s own making: little creatures, mostly dragonflies and butterflies, crafted from scrap metal from the forge. (he sometimes helped tend the fire and even, on very rare occasions, work the metal. The scraps were his payment for this hot, exhausting work-- the smith was not generous with the temporary help.) Deeper in the basket are other delights, recognizable only by a particular sort of client. To advertise these hidden wares, Dune wears a golden sun painted on his forehead, right between the eyes, to mark himself. He didn’t know how exactly these networks worked-- he was only the mule-- but those in the know would recognize the mark and know him as a dealer in black market goods.
Now, Dune doesn’t pay much attention to politics, but he knows a sovereign when he sees one. It helps that none of them were ever plain, like him. They caught the attention, held it. They warranted remembering. He certainly would not soon forget his encounters with Orestes and Ipomoea-- and it is precisely these memories which makes him wary when he casually meanders towards Antiope, jingling his coin and glancing at the sovereign sidelong, like a wounded dog. The act was a winning one-- he landed many a sale this way. It was hard to say no to someone so pitiful.
Dune had a very natural suspicion of those of higher class, yet he hoped, and indeed had reason to believe, that she was a generous queen.
@Antiope
