Doubt Creeps In

The gilded edge of the locket felt cool against my palm, a familiar comfort that had, until recently, been the sole beacon in my otherwise beige existence. Prince Valerius, my dashing, albeit slightly prone-to-tripping, knight in shining armor, was supposed to be my escape. And for a while, he was. His whispered compliments, his earnest gaze, the way his hand, so impossibly large and strong, would hover just inches from mine – it was all the stuff of the dog-eared paperbacks that lined my shelves, the very dreams I harbored in the quiet corners of my heart.

But lately, a faint fuzziness had begun to creep into my visions. It wasn’t the kind of romantic haze that usually settled over my imaginings of Valerius; this was more… a smudge. A tiny imperfection that, once noticed, refused to be unseen. It started with the tournament. He’d been so magnificent, his armor gleaming, his steed a magnificent beast of war. He’d tilted his lance, aimed with a precision I’d only ever read about, and then, just as he was about to strike his opponent down, he’d coughed. A rather undignified, hacking cough that made his regal posture falter for a split second.

It was minuscule, of course. A mere blip in the grand tapestry of our heroic encounter. But it snagged at me. In my books, princes were flawless. They didn’t *cough*. They certainly didn’t cough in the middle of a joust. They certainly didn't have a slightly crooked smile that, when magnified by my own scrutiny, began to look less like roguish charm and more like… well, a crooked smile.