Chương 169: Disaster

Vicky moved fast when she was angry. Leo had to jog to keep up. She cut between a champagne station and a cluster of Belgian diplomats, hit the side doors, and pushed through into a service gallery. The doors swung shut behind Leo, and the string quartet faded to a murmur through the wood.

"Vicky." She didn't slow down.

"Vicky, wait." She stopped. Turned.

"Did you know?" Leo caught up to her. The corridor was empty. Just the two of them and a row of oil paintings of men in powdered wigs who looked vaguely disapproving.

"I thought you knew."

"How would I know?"

"Vicky. You literally took out the Sun, pointed at his face, and asked me if I was responsible for it." Vicky's expression flickered.

"You said no."

"I said it wasn't my fault. Which it wasn't. Eddie got spotted by tourists because he forgot how to be a normal person in public. I didn't make him do that." She went very still. Leo pressed on.

"And I literally told you that Eddie rescued me from jail. From St. James's Palace. The Royal Family's palace. Where they hold people who embarrass the Crown at horse races." Her mouth opened. Closed. She turned away from him, pressed both hands flat against her stomach, and took a breath that went all the way down. Then another.

"Fine." She closed her eyes.

"Fine. Eddie is Edward. Jane is Vicky. This whole thing is a farce of mistaken identities because I insisted on using a disguise and a stupid name." She stepped close and put one finger in the center of his chest.

"But you are on thin ice, Leo. Thin. Ice."

"Understood."

"Cracking-under-your-feet thin."

"Got it."

"I can hear the lake under you, is what I'm saying."

"Vicky."

"Reception." She grabbed his arm, hauled him back toward the doors, and rebuilt her smile in the four steps it took to reach them.

"We have allies to greet." The Pre-Presentation Reception was exactly as miserable as Leo had expected. Forty minutes of handshakes and small talk with families whose names he'd memorized from flash cards. Each one wanted to know how he found London, whether he was enjoying the Season, and when he planned to make his debut in the NFL. Leo smiled. Nodded. Said nothing memorable. That was the job.

Across the room, Edward Windsor stood beside Aurelia with a champagne flute he had no intention of drinking. Something was bothering him.

"You knew her," he said.

"Victoria Walton. Before tonight."

"Obviously. The Pemberton Tea." Aurelia smirked.

"Half of London knows her."

"Then perhaps you can explain why she looked at me like I'd burned down her family home." He kept his voice level.

"Did you offend her? At the Tea? And if so, why on earth didn't you say anything before Mother marched me over here? A word of warning would have been rather useful." Aurelia laughed.

"Did I offend her." She set the glass down and produced her phone.

"Edward. Let me show you the single greatest piece of footage in my possession." The video was vertical, shot from a garden table at a discreet angle. White dresses. A long tea service. And one voice rising over the clink of porcelain, American, sharp, absolutely uninterested in its own volume. Edward straightened. He knew that voice. That voice had leaned against a wall in Mayfair and called him a museum exhibit, and he had laughed, because he hadn't known the museum exhibit was him. Jane was Victoria Walton.

"They're trying to marry me to your mother," he said quietly.

"What?"

"Nothing." Edward set the glass down. His mind raced.

"I need to... excuse me for a moment." He walked away before she could ask more questions.

The Royal Blessing Chamber sat behind the throne room, behind two sets of doors, behind a corridor where cavaliers were politely informed they could go no further. Leo stood against the wall with eleven other cavaliers and watched the debutantes go in one at a time. The Queen's blessing was the one piece of the ball that happened in private. Inside, the Queen extended a thread of divine sense to each girl, and the girl opened her spiritual sea to receive it.

Historically it had been an appraisal of spiritual roots and bloodline quality. Now it was ceremonial. Every etiquette coach said the same thing: the thread stops at the surface. The Queen hadn't actually appraised anyone in recorded memory. The whole thing took ninety seconds, and the only real danger was locking your knees and fainting on the way out. The first debutante went in. She came out four minutes later, white to the lips, and had to be steadied by a footman. Leo frowned. Maybe she'd fainted.

First girl, worst nerves, it happened. He filed it away and watched the second debutante go in, a Habsburg who had watched the first girl stagger out and smirked. She came out shaking. Down the line of cavaliers, conversation died. Two girls were a coincidence. He waited for the third, a Montague, drilled by the best coaches in Europe, the kind of girl whose curtsy the tabloids described as a national asset. Six minutes.

She emerged with tear tracks cutting through her makeup and her chin held perfectly level anyway, which was somehow worse than sobbing. The cavalier next to Leo leaned toward his neighbor and whispered the thing everyone was thinking.

"She's reading them."

"Don't be stupid. She hasn't read anyone since..." The neighbor stopped, because he couldn't name a year. Nobody could. That was the point. The appraisal was a boogeyman coaches invoked to make girls practice opening their spiritual seas smoothly. It had never happened to anyone's mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother. It was a dead clause in an old contract. Until tonight. Leo looked at the closed doors.

A Deity Transformation cultivator who had let a ceremony run on autopilot for centuries chose tonight to do the real thing. That wasn't a whim. You didn't reach Deity Transformation by being whimsical. She was looking for something specific, and she had reason to think it was in this room. He glanced at Vicky. Vicky was already looking at him. Her face said everything her mouth couldn't across a crowded corridor. Vicky had been nervous about the blessing from the start.

Opening your spiritual sea was the most vulnerable thing a cultivator could do, and Vicky had agreed to it when it was ceremonial. A formality. A queen glancing at the surface and moving on. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Now the queen was going all the way down, and 'formality' had been deleted from the evening. He couldn't cross the corridor, couldn't say anything, so he gave her the only thing available: a small nod.

But she took the nod, and she gave him a little smile, and she went back to waiting. One by one, the line shortened. Pale faces. Exhausted faces. A girl who walked out composed, made it ten steps, and sat down hard on a bench. Vicky went in last. Leo counted. Four minutes. Five. Six. At eight minutes, the doors opened. Vicky came out on her own feet, at her own pace. She was pale, and her hands weren't steady, and she but smiling. Leo crossed to her before the footmen could.

"You survived."

"Barely." She fell into step beside him, and he matched her speed so nobody would see it was slow.

"A Monarch poked around in my spiritual sea. All the way down, Leo. That's supposed to be a myth."

"Did she give you a blessing?"

"Didn't feel like one." She flexed her fingers, and the tremor worked itself out of them.

"Felt like someone going through my drawers and deciding not to call the police."

"But you didn't break."

"But I didn't." Her smile sharpened.

"Let's go dance. Follow my lead."

The first dance began and Leo counted steps in his head. One two three. One two three. The etiquette instructor's voice lived in his skull now, a permanent tenant he hadn't agreed to house. Dozens of pairs moved across the ballroom floor. White gowns and midnight blue, revolving like a formation array set to waltz tempo. The chandeliers threw light across the silk and it rippled as the dancers turned, each couple hitting the same beat at the same instant.

Four hundred years of choreography executing itself through muscle memory and mild terror. For the first thirty seconds, everything went exactly as planned. Leo counted steps. Vicky followed his lead. They moved through the first figure without incident. Then Vicky started steering. It was subtle at first. A pressure on his shoulder where there shouldn't be one. A shift in her weight that pulled him left instead of straight. Leo adjusted, assuming he'd done something wrong.

"You're leading," he said.

"You noticed faster than the instructor said you would."

"The instructor reported on me?"

"Eyes forward. Smile. We're dancing." They were not dancing. They were navigating. Vicky threaded him between the Montague pair and a couple in matching ivory, and when the floor opened up, Leo saw the destination. Edward and Aurelia danced alone at the head of the floor, the royal couple opening the ball as tradition demanded. Edward saw them coming. Leo watched it happen over Vicky's shoulder.

The prince clocked their trajectory, processed it, turned Aurelia into a traveling sequence, and moved off down the floor. He was retreating. In waltz time.

"Oh, no you don't," Vicky said. She wheeled Leo around. They cut the corner of the floor. Edward adjusted, swinging wide around the Van der Berg girl, putting two couples between them like screens. Vicky took the inside line.

"He's running," she said, delighted and furious at once.

"Look at him. He's using the Pemberton girl as cover."

"Maybe take the hint?"

"Eliminated first. Every match." Her hand flexed on his shoulder. The orchestra turned the phrase, the couples rotated with it, and Edward's escape lane closed. The Montagues drifted left. The ivory couple held their line. Edward came out of his turn and found them there. To his credit, he didn't break frame. He settled Aurelia into a holding box step and produced a smile for the spectators.

"Miss Walton. A lovely evening, I should think."

"Eliminated first," Vicky said.

"Every single match."

"I beg your pardon?" Her ballroom smile never moved.

"I play striker. When I go down early, I take their best flyer down with me. We did it at nationals." She rotated Leo a quarter turn, opening her line of sight.

"You're dancing with their center right now. Hi, Aurelia." Aurelia's smile died on her face.

"So here's my question, Your Highness. Did you watch one second of my film before you graded me? Because a captain who can't read a striker trade isn't a legend. He's a commemorative plate." Edward's smile stayed up.

"It was a private exaggeration."

"It was an evaluation. A lazy one. That's the part I mind."

"Which you also gave. Memorably."

"Stiff. Formal. Rehearses small talk in a mirror." Vicky turned Leo in a slow orbit around the royal couple.

"I notice you're not disputing any of it."

"I am dancing," Edward said, "with my cousin, at my grandmother's ball, in front of the assembled press of seven continents. Perhaps the dispute could be scheduled."

"Put me down for never. That works for me." Something in Edward's frame went rigid. Aurelia, still moving through his box step, lifted an eyebrow at Leo as she rotated past.

"You called me a museum exhibit," Edward said.

"I was undercover."

"You said I perform humility for cameras." His box step had begun, very slightly, to travel toward Vicky instead of away.

"I've spent fifteen years in the Catacombs. No cameras down there. No court. I rather thought the work spoke for itself." They had stopped pretending to travel. The two couples turned in place now, locked in a slow mutual orbit at the center of the floor. Leo, rotating, caught glimpses of an etiquette coach with her hand over her mouth.

"And the rest of it?" Vicky raised her voice.

"Impulsive. Acts first, thinks after. If at all." A beat." Just like her mother." The orbit slowed.

"You knew that one would get back to me eventually," she said.

"Or maybe you didn't think about it at all, which honestly would be on brand for the conversation." Edward stopped moving. Aurelia's skirts swung once with the leftover momentum and went still. Across the floor, the other couples kept turning, but every ear in the room angled toward the center.

"You're right," Edward said.

"That was unworthy. I apologize." Vicky blinked.

"But you'll forgive me," he went on, "if I don't grovel further, because you and I committed the same crime in the same alley on the same evening, and only one of us is being prosecuted. You sat there and described a man who preys on younger debutantes. I am not that. The entire reason I was free to wander Brixton in a flat cap is that I will not let my mother stage-manage me into a marriage."

"So I'm a stage production now."

"That is not what I said."

"It's what you meant. Handpicked, trained, and shipped over for your inspection." Vicky's chin came up.

"Go on. Tell me I'm wrong."

"You want honesty." Edward's composure finally went, all at once.

"Very well. I never asked for you. I never asked for any of this. And I do not want a bride who was built for me by committee." The music stopped. In the silence, Leo could hear the chandelier formations humming. Four hundred people held their champagne very still. Vicky stood in the middle of the floor, her hand still in Leo's.

"Built for you," she repeated.

"Miss Walton. I didn't mean..."

"No. You're right." Her voice was even. Pleasant, almost.

"Seventeen years of cultivation. And the client doesn't want the product." She released Leo's hand, stepped back, and gave Edward a curtsy so flawless the etiquette coach by the wall made a small sound.

"Returns are free, Your Highness." She gathered her skirts and walked. The crowd parted. The doors boomed shut behind her. Leo stood at the center of the floor with a prince, a princess, and four hundred witnesses. Aurelia turned to Edward with shining eyes and said, "I have never enjoyed anything more in my life."

"Not now, Aurelia." Leo was already running. The doors were still swinging when he hit them. His boots hit marble and slid. He caught himself on a column, looked both ways. Footmen. Stunned waitstaff. A champagne flute rolling in a slow circle on the floor. Left. She'd gone left. He made it four steps. Someone stepped out of an alcove and into his path. Gold Core. Scarlet tunic, gold buttons, and a black bearskin hat tall enough that the man had to be ducking through every doorway in the palace.

"Mr. Chen, is it." The guard's voice was unhurried.

"Beg your pardon, sir. I'm afraid I must ask you to come with me."

"I can't right now." Leo leaned to look past him.

"There's somebody I need to..."

"Her Majesty requests a word, sir." Leo went still. The Queen. The Deity Transformation Monarch of the United Kingdom wanted a word. With him. Tonight, two minutes after her grandson detonated the season on her own ballroom floor. There was no version of this where he said no. You did not decline a Monarch. You did not reschedule one. He looked down the gallery anyway. Three corridors branched off ahead. No Vicky in any of them.

"Sir." The guard had followed his eyes.

"I saw the young lady go past. I'll have a word put round, see she's looked after. Do my best on that front, you have my word. But you'll be coming with me first, sir. If it's all the same." It was not all the same. It was also not negotiable, and arguing would burn the only seconds he had. Think. He couldn't reach Vicky. Who could? Hilda was somewhere in the crowd, but Hilda was half the problem. Edward was the whole problem. Which left exactly one person in this palace who owed Leo anything. It would do.

"One message," Leo said.

"Before we go. There's a cavalier inside named Wang Liyang. Tall, Chinese, looks like he's posing for a statue of himself. He came with Penelope Ma."

"I know the gentleman, sir."

"Tell him this, word for word. Victoria Walton went out the east doors. If she's not back in the ballroom by the toasts, the photo goes viral. He'll know what it means." The guard's expression did not move a single muscle.

"Bit of leverage, is it, sir."

"Tutu-related."

"Very good, sir." The guard touched two fingers to a brass stud on his collar and murmured into it. A crackle came back. Somewhere behind Leo, a side panel in the gallery wall opened where there had been no door, and a second guard stepped out of it. Same scarlet. Same bearskin. Same Gold Core cultivation. He said nothing at all. He simply extended one white-gloved hand toward the dark behind the panel.

"This way, sir," the second guard said.

"Best not to keep her waiting." Leo looked once more down the gallery, at the three corridors and none of them with Vicky in them. Then he stepped through the wall, and the panel closed behind him.