Seeing Each Other For The First Time

It was said that veils were imposed for the slave girls, not only to display their status as spoils of war but more importantly, to protect the Empire's young men from their beauty. 

In a room built for royalty sat a boy, reading. 

A tutor was with him, explaining this and that - delivering a monotony of passages to which the boy, with his head facing his book, his hand scribbling notes on another, would nod and answer to, every now and then.

In a building right across, in a dark workshop, sat a young slave girl. In that prison, she was called Thirteen.  

It was some time since her abduction and she had already adjusted to her life as a captive. That afternoon, she worked quietly at her desk where she and fourteen others practiced the rudiments of clothes making. 

Nothing particularly important was on her mind that day. She deftly poked her needle through the practice pattern, like any other day, when she noticed a slat of light dancing on her hands.

Sunlight. 

It was a long time she felt the noon sun touch her skin. 

She put down her practice thread and cloth, then lifted her hand to let the light dance around her fingers. 

She imagined the leaves she could not see being blown by the wind outside. The thought comforted her even if she only perceived them through the dancing leaf-shadows on her skin.

For the first time since she was captured, she let her thoughts wander until her trailing gaze fell on the draped window beside her table. 

She began to wonder what could be right through the gap in those thick curtains hiding her from the world outside. What city were they kept in? What kind of people existed in that kind of city? Were there other slave girls out there? 

These were thoughts she had long repressed. But on that day, it felt all right to let up a little.

It was there, in the middle of the slave girl's wistful thinking - through the half-closed slats of her window, through the dancing leaves outside, and through the set of wide-open windowpanes opposite her prison - that she caught a glimpse of the most brilliant, ice blue eyes she had ever seen.

It was the boy. A tall, blond and beryl-eyed princeling; son of the race that captured the slave girl and massacred her people.

He was looking right at her, too.