Claire’s perspective:
What kind of torment is this, after all.
The students in the dance floor receded like a tide, yielding an empty space for us in the center of the hall.
She stood there in the cascade of light pouring down from the crystal chandelier, her snow-white formal dress edged in gold, the fingers she extended toward me as if reaching to touch the moonlight of twelve years ago.
I was certain she had recognized me.
There was no questioning of the reason for our parting, no polite small talk—only this invitation suspended in the dust that had not yet settled between us.
The anger of a moment ago suddenly grew distant.
In a daze I once again saw the tulips of the summer palace surging under the July sunlight, that young girl lifting her skirt and running, turning her head to bloom a smile toward me.
The prelude of the tango abruptly tore through the memories.
Yet my arms felt as if they had been filled with lead and I delayed, not daring to raise them.
This was perhaps only some pathetic instinct—just as one closes one’s eyes when pierced by strong light, one shrinks back when facing something too beautiful.
Consider it my cowardice.
Or a crueler reason: I was afraid of touching the cold fingertips beneath her gloves, for that temperature would puncture the warm façade on her face.
I was even more afraid of the moment when this dance would end and the people would scatter, just like that dusk twelve years ago when no goodbye was spoken.
If I never grasped this hand, would the prelude become eternal?
She would forever remain within my reach, the fragrance of tulips in her hair winding around my breath, the rapid heartbeat transmitted through the formal dress.
I could even see my own appearance reflected in her pupils, if only I drew one inch closer…
Yet the dance music had already passed the halfway mark.
In some instant that came too late to be named, my palm finally pressed against hers.
The white-jade-like finger joints trembled lightly, and the gold-thread rose hair ornament suddenly fell.
As a sky of golden hair poured down, she had already drawn me sliding into the dance floor.
A body that had never learned to dance suddenly awakened.
Her glance was a silent command, guiding my arm to encircle her slender waist, our footsteps staggered and entangled.
The silver satin skirt bloomed with the arc of a full moon, those roses embroidered in gold thread blossoming one after another in the rotation, refracting the twelve years of time into fragmented rainbow colors.
When the music shifted into the slow tempo, the embracing crowd became a blurred background.
Her approaching breath brushed past the side of my neck, and the lights cast trembling shadows upon her eyelashes.
Such astonishing beauty made one’s eye sockets sting—especially when she looked at me with that kind of gaze.
Don’t look at me like that.
Clearly the one who ought to be pitied is you who have worn a mask and survived twelve years in the court, yet what fills your eyes at this moment is sorrow directed toward me.
My heart was thus pierced by her gaze—the more that gaze overflowed with pity and affection, the more intense that pain became.
“May I touch your hair?”
Without waiting for my answer, she slowly extended her hand.
“…Of course you may.”
Of course I remembered.
This was the dialogue of our first meeting beneath the palace walls twelve years ago, replayed countless times in dreams over these years.
She wore white gloves that reached past the elbows, like a fully bloomed white flower.
At this moment the white flower lightly brushed past my temple, and she still wore that gaze of pity and affection.
I understood.
She was waiting for me to complete this dialogue from twelve years ago.
“Would the princess be willing to become my friend?”
“I’m a very boring person, you know. Making friends with me won’t make you happy.”
Her voice trembled slightly as she repeated the lines I had spoken at that time.
“No, you are not a boring person at all. I am a student from the Northern Continent, and you are a princess of the Southern Continent. We are completely opposite people… To meet here is perhaps fate.”
I slightly modified her lines and spoke them as calmly as possible.
What a clumsy stage play this was.
She who was playing me had always lived beneath a false mask, while I who was playing her already had hands stained with blood.
Neither she nor I would ever again be the two girls who met on that summer day.
“All right, then the two of us will be friends.”
Her beautiful eyes curved slightly as she smiled, and her already exquisite features grew even more radiant.
The dance music ended.
She tightly grasped my hand and, using me as support, began the final spin that concluded the dance steps, her skirt flying high.
Her spin ended with the lingering notes of the finale.
Her heel lightly tapped, and all sounds fell silent.
The silk long dress, carrying its inertia, gathered and clung to her legs, like a fully bloomed tulip once more closing into a bud.
The next moment every student present could not help but begin to applaud, the applause like thunder.
“Then, meet at the old place tonight,” she said softly.
For a moment I was lost in a daze.
This was our first conversation twelve years later.
I could not possibly know what “old place” she referred to.
Faced with my lack of reaction, she let out a somewhat helpless sigh and lightly traced her fingertip across my cheek.
Without saying another word she left only me and the gradually fading numbness upon my face.
She turned and walked to the edge of the dance floor.
Without greeting anyone she went directly out through the front door of the reception hall, the long train of her skirt held in the hands of the maid who closely followed.
So what kind of torment is this, after all…
***
As the mistress of Cité University, Anne did not go to dance tonight.
She merely sat on a sofa beside the dance floor and quietly drank the champagne in her hand alone.
Without the illumination of the lights, that red formal dress was like a withered rose, and those rose-colored pupils that resembled rosy clouds were now stained with gloom.
Her devotees sat scattered around Anne, yet no one dared to break the silence, for everyone had noticed that throughout the entire dance the fury in her eyes had been continuously directed at the princess’s dance partner.
Anne had discovered that tonight’s Flora was like a different person.
For the first time those beautiful eyes of hers truly held something called “happiness.”
No, that was more than happiness.
Those sapphire-like pupils were so bright they were like mirrors reflecting the vast world—reflecting the warm spring sun, reflecting the brilliance of summer flowers, reflecting mountains full of red leaves, reflecting streetlamps in wind and snow…
Tonight she seemed to be truly living for the first time.
That smile was so full of vitality, yet that smile did not belong to her.
And that exchange student Claire who had treated Margaret like a balloon and asked about “your mother’s surname” had shed all ferocity before Flora, transforming from a black panther that licked blood from its fangs into a wild cat that carefully retracted its claws, willingly performing all sorts of movements on the dance floor according to the princess’s manipulations.
At the end of the piece the princess grasped the exchange student’s hand and spun.
The applause in the hall was like thunder in a storm.
Not only Anne—any student present could see that Flora and Claire were old acquaintances.
How tacit a feeling must it be to be able to spin so rapidly while holding hands?
Even more unbelievable was that this imperial princess who had only associated with Anne of the Caroling royal family would actually arrange a private meeting with the exchange student at night, and at some “old place”!
What reunion of old friends?
They might very well be a pair of old lovers!
All sorts of conjectures and rumors circulated and spread through the reception hall.
The welcoming of new students had long ceased to be the theme of this party.
Suddenly Anne noticed a pair of eyes across the dance floor that were just as bitter as her own.
That chestnut-haired young woman who was nominally Claire’s elder sister stood like a reef amid the noisy crowd.
Even though she wore a plain gauze long dress, one could see that her body was continuously trembling.
The emotion revealed in those eyes was so similar to her own—that bitterness understood only by those who had been left behind.
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