for: @thebeloveduke
The March evening was still cold as winter seemed to hold on to Paris far longer than Safiya would have liked. She like many others had found activities to keep them occupied inside for the time being, and to her greatest pleasure many nobles spent their evenings dancing to keep the cold away. Safiya had found herself standing on the sides watching the dancers and enjoying a glass of wine. This sort of evening was only second to a night spent in a long debate on theory. As she watched the dancers more and more and craved to join in and began to scan the room for any suitable partner, until she spotted a man she did not know on the other side of the room.
Her ladies were able to identify him as the grand Duke Nikita Rurik of Russia, and that only peaked her interest more. Russia seemed like an entirely differently world than her peaceful home in the Iberian Peninsula. She saw little appeal in living somewhere so cold or dark, but the man in front of her seemed to be neither of those things yet.
She made her way through the crowd with relative ease, mainly due to confidence if she was being frank until she arrived next to the stranger. "Excuse me your highness, I was wondering if you would join me for the next dance?" She figured English may be the best choice for a language they could converse in, after all she didn’t know Russian and she doubted he knew Arabic. She could practically feel already a few of her ladies’ disapproval. They felt she was often too blunt and over confident, she simply felt it was idiotic to wait to a man to realize what she wanted when she already knew. It seemed most men really didn’t know anything either so it saved her time and energy to do it herself.