Go outside for some fresh air

Realizing sleep will not be happening for her anytime soon, and also feeling pulled by some inner **** beyond her understanding, Adella quietly leaves her room to venture outdoors. At first she considers herself fortunate to happen to miss the palace guards as they make their nighttime rounds, but after a while it dawns on her that she is actually stealthily moving strategically through the palace so as to avoid detection.

“Why am I doing this?” she asks herself, as she waits in the shadows until two patrolling guards pass by. “It isn’t as if I have any reason to hide in my own home!” Despite her realization of the strangeness of her behavior, she finds it difficult to resist the impulse to move undetected.

A growing thrill envelops her as she thinks, “It’s as if I’m on the hunt, stalking my prey!” The thought brings the first smile to her lips she has experienced in a long time, but just as quickly, she rebukes herself, thinking, “That’s so silly! What on earth would I be hunting? And in the palace, too, of all places!”

She manages to slip past all the guards, undetected, which either speaks to her clandestine skills or to shockingly-gross incompetence on the part of those whose job it is to protect the royal family. She slips out of the palace and breathes in the cool night air of the courtyard.

Dressed only in her nightgown, and in her bare feet, Adella is surprised that she doesn’t feel chilled. Instead, being outdoors awakens a renewed alertness, and she marvels again at how clearly she can hear the things around her.

“There it is again,” she says to herself, drawing in a deep breath. “It’s that scent I could smell from my window, and it’s quite strong down here.” Her pulse quickens as she inhales a scent that evokes a primal, lustful reaction from deep within her. She realizes then that she has, in fact, been tracking that scent all along, being guided by the aroma that seems to compel her to action. But what action is it?

The scuff of a shoe against the cobblestone of the courtyard causes Adella’s eyes and ears to zero in on the source. Near the stable door, still lost in thought about his recent rendezvous with Drina, Horace is leaning against the wall, hands in his pockets, absently chewing on a piece of hay.

Powerful, conflicting, and confusing sensations slam simultaneously into Adella’s consciousness. She tries to sort them out as she feels a drive to attack her prey, but at the same time, she feels a pull toward a slow stalking of the object of her hunt.

She closes her eyes and shakes her head to clear her thoughts. “What is wrong with me?” she asks herself. “I’m acting like some mindless beast! It must be the aftereffect of all the stress of the past few days.” She tells herself that in her fatigued state, she is mistaking her very natural physical attraction toward a handsome young man as something aggressive and violent. Similarly, she has simply misidentified a powerful flirtatious desire to tease him and see if he is attracted to her with an animalistic hunter/prey analogy.

Realizing that her brain is really not functioning the way it should, she tells herself that she really should go back to her room and try to sleep. After all, if the fact that she is out in the courtyard in the middle of the night dressed the way she is isn’t evidence that she isn’t right in the head, what would it take?