A Dinner Invitation

Stay out of trouble, Marie thought sourly as the meeting ended and the Cirque members drifted off to explore their unexpected new campsite. She had stomped out at the first available opportunity and had wandered several hallways glowering and now found herself utterly lost, and feeling a bit better for it. But still, being told to stay out of trouble, like a silly little girl, when she'd helped get the circus off the ground and out of the police's grasp not twenty four hours before! And just because the prince was friendly, that hardly meant that she would go and ruin their show! Marguerite was always wandering around with strange men wherever they landed - not that Marie would do anything like that, naturally, she blushed at the very thought, but surely she could be trusted to chat with a nice boy who spoke proper French instead of that strange angry language everyone else spoke?

She was midway through this mental rant, stomping in what she vaguely hoped was the general direction of either a door back outside or the kitchen, when she stopped mid-stride, a look of horror falling over her still rather pink face. The prince had asked for a tour of the circus! She had entirely forgotten in all of the confusion after their audience with the King, and hadn't seen where he'd gone to! He must think her terribly rude! And it was already afternoon, surely Tom would soon be hunting her down and demanding she help set up tents or run messages or some such thing, or Colette would be demanding a rehearsal before the big tent was even up, and she didn't know the prince's schedule, how would she ever find a chance to show him around...?

She looked around the hallway, and was met with the equally flustering realization that she really had no idea where she was. Frankly, she wasn't even sure which end of the hallway she'd come from - it all looked the same, except for subtle variations in the wall art.

She huffed again, indignant. She was always giving the stage hands directions to pubs in new towns because she could map out the whole place from a single afternoon of wandering, and here she was, utterly lost! True, castles were rather different from alleys and markets, and true, she had been, well, distracted...

Oh, the other acrobats could never find out. She would never live it down. Lottie would tease her all the way to China and back.

Mentally vowing to offer the prince a tour next time she saw him and not fret until then - surely, she would see him again soon, she reassured herself - she set off in a random direction, stopping to peer into any rooms with the doors cracked. She quickly found a spiral staircase, with an open window set in the curved back wall, which she eagerly stuck her head out and looked up, then down. A tower! A real life tower, that seemed from her rather dizzying perspective to go up forever, and down not a very long way, just a story or so. After a moment of debate, she set off down the stairs. She hadn't yet reached the bottom before decided she'd chosen well: she could smell the kitchen from halfway up the staircase.

The enormous room was bustling, with doors at the back of the room thrown wide open to let in a cool breeze from the garden, which was lost at once in the steam from pots and heat from ovens.

She had hardly decided which delicious smell to seek out when there was an exclamation from somewhere across the room, followed quickly by a small blond boy nearly barreling into her. He stopped just short, though Marie jumped back to get out of his way before she realized that he was looking expectantly at her over the pretzel dangling from his mouth. (Marie was not a particularly worldly girl, but she was well-traveled enough to recognize pretzels, and to briefly consider stealing his.)

He gulped his mouthful, babbled something in that strange language, and thrust a piece of paper in her direction.

"I don't understand," Marie said, looking uselessly at the paper. Yes, those were words, alright - French words, even, she was fairly certain, but she could make neither heads nor tails of them at a quick glance.

The boy repeated his message, still tragically German.

"What?" Marie asked.

The boy sighed, and babbled a bit more, different words this time. Marie was still mostly out of her depth, but she caught the a word that sounded rather like "circus," and gathered that the boy had been told to give a message to the Cirque. Funny, that he'd gone to look for them in the kitchens.

...Though not altogether a bad place to start, Marie mused, frowning at the paper again.

The boy was looking at her expectantly, so she waved him away, and he hurried off with his pretzel. Marie briefly considered trying to find one of her own before deciding that she didn't have the energy for another round of conversation. She made instead for the garden door, and wandered the rows before realizing with no small disappointment that nothing tasty-looking was available for the snatching. Really, she thought grumpily, so far this whole fairy tale castle thing didn't seem to be going terribly well. She set off down the hill towards where the tents were slowly rising - the wind carried Tom's yelling up to her, and she slowed her pace to make sure they'd be nearly finished by the time she arrived.