Marabelle it turned out, had grown up in the capital. "My family had a small holding on the south side of the city. We called it Henley-on-the-sea." She smiled as she said it, and she didn't stop smiling for the entire conversation.
"The Henleys are minor nobility," Eirian commented, racking her memory to place them.
Marabelle nodded. "Yes, we're not much, but we are happy. My family has always believed that being happy is more important than being wealthy or powerful."
Zhuli looked at his wife with adoring eyes, a more obvious show of emotion than anything else she'd seen from the rest of his family.
"Then they may be the only noble family that is actually happy," Chenzhou remarked. While he had met Marabelle once before, he was still uncertain how to deal with her most of the time. It was rare to meet someone who was so seemingly cheerful and bubbly all the time.
Marabelle shook her head. "Oh, I'm sure others are happy. Or I hope they are. How miserable would it be to live an entire life and not be happy? What's the point of it?" Her face had twisted up in a delicate scrunch, but she was still smiling.
Eirian studied Mingzhe from the corner of her eye. In contrast to his normally stiff and utterly polite appearance at official events, in the presence of his family, he seemed more relaxed. More comfortable. Happier.
"How did you two meet?" Chenzhou sounded curious, and Eirian could admit some of her own. Zhuli and Marabelle seemed like an odd match. Eirian wasn't even sure how they would have met outside an official arrangement.
Marabelle brightened, and Eirian had to admire the sheer volume of it. "Oh! It's such a great story." She turned to her husband, placing a hand on his arm in a gesture of familiarity born from years of marriage. "Isn't it, darling. It's so romantic!" Zhuli nodded indulgently. "We met in the capital, believe it or not. Zhuli and his father were visiting for some business thing with another family-"
"Negotiating on the price of dye for the uniforms," Zhuli explained.
"I was walking down the street with my mother, on our way to the dress shop, and you'll never guess what happened!" She paused for effect. Eirian took a long sip from her wine glass.
Zhao Yunli was quiet in her seat, but she seemed relaxed. More contained than her brothers and sister-in-law, if that was even possible. She was a stunning woman, too. The dark hair and eyes and pale skin that gave her brothers a striking handsomeness gave her a haunting beauty that Eirian knew would have made her one of the most popular and hated women in High Society in Aontacht. She clearly took great care of her appearance and dressed more elegantly than anyone else at the table.
But there was something distant about her. Something untouchable. Eirian couldn't quite read her; her expression was so bland and controlled that they concealed her true thoughts to a level that Eirian actually found impressive.
She glanced over and found Eirian watching her. Instead of startling or betraying any sign of surprise or fear, she simply nodded respectfully and turned her attention back to her sister-in-law.
"I actually ran into him," Marabelle confessed, palms to her cheeks in embarrassment. "We'd just finished at the dress shop. I was helping the seamstress design my new dress. Pink chiffon and gold silk. I came up with these delightful short sleeves for the summer heat. They stop just below the shoulder, so they don't rub or fray. I can show you sometime. I love them!" Zhuli stroked his wife's arm, and she refocused. "Anyway, once we finished designing my dress, we were walking down the street, and I literally turned a corner and ran right into him! I was wearing a summer dancing dress," which was a lot of fabric, Eirian noted, since they were designed to fly into the air when the dancer spins, "and I think I nearly suffocated him." She giggled and looked at her husband, who just smiled back like a sap. "We ended up tangled in my dress. It took both my mother and his father and several passersby to untangle us. I was so embarrassed. I wanted to throw myself off the wall and into the Still Water."
"You had nothing to be embarrassed about," Zhuli assured her. They might as well have been alone in the room for all he seemed to notice. "It was like getting trapped under a glittering pink avalanche. I would have happily suffocated."
Eirian raised an eyebrow and shared an incredulous look with Chenzhou. Neither of them was the type for that level of sap. Mingzhe and Yunli didn't seem to be either, but they were clearly more used to their brother and his wife, who'd begun staring at one another like lovesick fools.
~ tbc