Chương 102: Chapter 97

Talena My name carried clearly across the hall.

"Her Royal Highness, Talena Aurion, First Princess of the Dominion of Vera and Knight-Errant." I stepped forward. Mirefall's main hall was something out of a fantasy novel. I should know, I'm something of a connoisseur of the genre, especially high fantasy, and this place had the setting down perfectly.

The old stone carried the evening's light differently than newer construction did, absorbing in some places, reflecting in others, giving the space a warmth that seemed to come from the very spirit of the palace itself. For centuries Mirefall had held political weight, expectation, and rumor has it, a cult or two. The history combined with the structural soundness of the architecture and how deep the magic ran created an ambiance you simply could not replicate anywhere else.

The royal family's additions took the location to the next level with state-of-the-art Technica monitoring everything, mana saturation, light spectrum, air quality, and mana density. One part breathtaking art, two parts technological and magical wonder. Which made the fact that the room was already full feel slightly anticlimactic. I had expected that, obviously.

The reception sequence had placed all the principals here before my arrival, which was a deliberate political maneuver that royal families had been using since the beginning of time. A princess enters a room that is already occupied. She does not wait. She is waited for. She is not acted upon, she acts. The fashionable lateness was a distinction communicated through the specific action of being announced, which was about the balance of power as it related to the subjects of the Dominion.

I had been raised to understand it. That did not stop it from being utterly annoying. I just could not go places. Always an entourage. Always security. Always had to be announced. I am a princess. I am a big deal. Which I am not totally against. But the fact that those things are true does not stop those same things from being annoying. Some might say that makes me out of touch or hypocritical. Both of which are probably true. What can I say? People are complicated. Normal people are complicated.

Try being a princess and see how much your life makes sense. I smoothed down the nonexistent wrinkles in my dress involuntarily as I took a survey of the room and its major players. Kaereth Valmor stood at the center of the hall like he had grown there. He looked up when I entered and his expression transformed into something warm with genuine pleasure while simultaneously cataloging everyone around him. He was a funny one. I could not tell if he was a political genius or a naive optimist.

I supposed he could be somewhere in between, but I had not found someone who fit that description in my lifetime. I doubted he was going to be the first. Tarek Thalos occupied his orbit near the eastern wall, which was entirely expected. Thalos was disciplined, focused, and kind of an asshole. He was not one to let niceties or social graces interfere with whatever goal he was pursuing. What was surprising was the small cluster of women surrounding him.

He was not my type, the man looked like he communicated primarily through intensity and sharp silences. And yet. Apparently the mysterious brooding type remained a popular trope regardless of whether the man in question was a proven problem. Akemi Yamato stood with her formation along the far wall, pale rose hair catching the chandeliers in a way that managed to seem entirely natural, her attention moving across the room, unhurried, checking it against a map she had already drawn.

Her gaze found me, acknowledged, and moved on. Akemi was an anomaly. As essentially a princess in her own right within Nigon, it was not as though we had lacked opportunities to connect over the years. Her situation was particularly interesting because while the six clans all held elevated positions, the Yamato clan sat at the head of them.

Their political environment was going to be volatile for the next several years, the ruling family lacked a suitable heir, and one of the second generation, between eighteen and twenty-seven, would be adopted into the emperor's family. Akemi was on that list. I would love to say that was my primary interest in her. The truth was something less geopolitical.

Apparently the famously composed Akemi Yamato had actually invited someone to the Gala, some unremarkable transfer student from Arclight, and he had completely failed to respond. My ladies in waiting had gotten a considerable amount of enjoyment out of that. No evidence of it showed on Akemi tonight. She looked as serene and as extraordinary as ever.

The two visiting princesses, Elain composed and watchful near the northern tables, Maeryn beside her, holding to a careful restraint that looked recently briefed and effortful to keep, stood together near the northern wall. I took a breath. It was time to own the room. I walked forward without breaking stride.

The gown moved with me, midnight blue, the mana-thread catching the old light of Mirefall's stone in slow warm pulses, the cut doing exactly what Miranda had promised when she spent forty minutes debating hemlines. I was aware of how I looked. I was also aware of how my appearance affected other people. Tonight I was as much a symbol as I was a person. Without meaning to, I glanced back over my shoulder. Cipher was directly behind me.

He gave me a small nod, which was about as much motion as I could get from him given that his mask was completely black. I gave him a dazzling smile. The room adjusted around my presence. This part was predictable, clockwork in its precision. Conversations thinned as the male heirs to dukedoms, conglomerates, and military traditions took notice.

The women in my vicinity who did not occupy the same tier of prestige also took notice, but differently, narrowed eyes that, if they could be made physical, would be a blade. I understood what they thought of me. I could not do anything about how I was born, what magic I carried, or what I looked like. I refused to make myself smaller to accommodate others. It was a good thing I was not petty. Obsessive sometimes, yes. Occasionally extreme. But not petty.

I kept walking, and reached out to touch Cipher with my mana as I moved. He had apparently learned to shield himself because I felt considerably less than before. The sun had become a bonfire. Still unmistakable. Still him. But contained in a way it had not been at Virex Caelum. It did not matter.

I was acutely aware of him walking behind me as we crossed the threshold of Mirefall's Grand Hall together, the palace's security architecture registering his presence and making whatever adjustments the ward lattice permitted for someone dialed into its defenses. I hated that I had to be here performing this evening when what I actually wanted was to simply sit somewhere quiet and study him. I liked the way he moved. And yes, I was quite certain he was a man.

His walk was more prowl than strut, quiet, giving the room no more information than it needed. He had learned long ago that presence and visibility are not the same thing. Being near him made my blood run a little hotter than usual. Beyond that, there was something stranger, the feeling of safety in his presence despite knowing almost nothing about him, only that he was capable and willing to step in front of danger for someone he did not know. It was also remarkable how his presence affected everyone else.

He was behind me and the room knew it and was adjusting to that knowledge in real time. I reached the dais where the independent throne arrangement had been set up for the occasion. The Grand Hall was not a throne room by design, but royalty required accommodation regardless of the setting. Several nobles, celebrity figures, and conglomerate representatives moved toward the dais as I arrived. I had just taken my seat when Kaereth approached, maintaining a respectful distance, and gave me a bow.

"Your Highness," he said, his voice warm, genuinely pleased to see me, and under the warmth the click of a mind already three moves ahead of the pleasantry.

"You look..." He paused. Just briefly. Something had outpaced his vocabulary, and he was waiting for it to come back.

"Extraordinary seems insufficient, but it will have to serve."

"Young Master Valmor," I said.

"You look well yourself." He laughed, which was the correct response even though what I said was not particularly clever. The exchange had the intended effect, the tension in the room's upper register eased by a fraction. I had just returned Kaereth's smile with something appropriately measured when movement at the eastern arch pulled the room's attention, exactly as it was engineered to.

"Princess Talena." The voice cut across the chatter, amplified by a subtle Arcanum application that magnified his projection while a secondary expression suppressed ambient sound just enough to ensure nothing competed with him.

"The histories will record this evening poorly if they fail to note that the Dominion of Vera's greatest achievement stood not in its architecture or its military tradition, but here, in this hall, in a gown the color of midnight." If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. Corvian Drast knew how to enter a space. That much I would give him.

He had been practicing since he was old enough to understand that entrances were their own form of argument, and the practice showed. He moved through the arch already certain the room was watching, and it was, his Virellion formal attire immaculate in pale silver and deep violet, the Aether Court crest catching the chandeliers at an angle that seemed almost deliberate.

He was shorter than he appeared in formal portraits and classically featured in the way that portraiture was designed around, which did slightly less work in person than it did in paintings, a gap he had never fully noticed because the people around him had never been impolite enough to point it out.

He crossed the hall without acknowledging anyone he passed, which was its own statement about how he ranked the people he was passing, and came to a stop before me, every motion timed, a performance arriving exactly on its mark. Then he looked at Kaereth, who, far from being insulted, looked more than a little amused.

"Lord Valmor," Corvian said, his voice pitched so the whole room would catch it, the volume chosen on purpose.

"Still leading with the smile, I see. You understand that a smile is worth very little to someone as discerning as Princess Talena. Pleasant enough for a festival, perhaps. Rather insufficient for an occasion of this magnitude." Kaereth snorted.

"Ah, my dearest Corvian. I should simply repeat to you, as I have before, that bigger words do not necessarily produce greater meaning. Nor do they have the ability to alter first impressions. In your case, perhaps the thirtieth impression." Corvian narrowed his eyes as he absorbed this. I stifled a laugh. It was fairly clear he was still processing exactly what had been said. He appeared undeterred. He continued as though Kaereth had not spoken.

"I must say it is rare how the pillars of the Dominion of Vera treat the precious gem that is their princess. I should perhaps offer some education, Young Master Valmor. In the presence of Her Highness, a man of your particular gifts might find something more substantial to offer than good teeth and pleasant conversation." Kaereth received this and filed it somewhere none of it reached his face. A small adjustment in his posture.

A fractional brightening in his eyes that was, if you knew Kaereth, the brightening that meant he had found something genuinely entertaining and was deciding whether to let that show. He let it show.

"Corvian Drast," he said warmly.

"There are appropriate times for gift giving, especially in a setting like this. I think the greatest gift you could offer this particular moment would be silence." The warmth was perfect. The warmth of someone who had just been handed a gift and was gracious enough not to unwrap it in public. Corvian sneered and turned away before Kaereth finished speaking, which was the tell. A man confident in his position does not need to cut a conversation short.

A man who has said what he came to say and cannot afford the risk of a response does. He turned his full attention to me. He produced a smile, his golden teeth catching the light. I tried not to sigh. I had forgotten about those. The golden dental cosmetics were a fashion choice from his home Dominion where apparently everyone had gone enthusiastically for the trend. It was not my favorite fad. The bow was flawless.

Deeply formal, extravagant in a way that circled back from reverence to presumption without quite crossing the line, every degree of it practiced in advance and delivered on cue.

"Your Highness," he said, his voice settling into something lower and more intimate now that the room had been addressed and only I remained.

"Your radiance is an inspiration." As he said this I felt his mana spike slightly. My eyes narrowed. What was he doing? Corvian did not seem to notice my reaction. Cipher did. I felt him take two deliberate steps closer behind me. Corvian continued as though nothing had shifted.

"I had wondered whether Mirefall and those who appeared in person to honor you would do justice to the occasion." He rose from the bow with the same theatrical grace.

"I see that the question was never in doubt."

"Young Master Drast," I said.

"I was not aware you had arrived. I was under the impression you were not participating in this year's tournament." That was a lie. I simply did not want to encourage him.

"I almost did not, Princess," he said.

"But then I realized that no additional education the Aether Court could provide compared with the opportunity to honor you in person. As for the journey from Virellion, some destinations merit the effort." He produced a smile that had been designed to be disarming and landed approximately two degrees south of the target.

"And some company more than others." Behind him, Kaereth had acquired the expression of a man attending a performance he had not paid for and was enjoying far more than he had expected to.

"Your Highness," Corvian continued, pivoting smoothly into his next prepared beat, certain he had scripted the evening and that the rest of us were reading from the same pages.

"I had hoped for an opportunity to present something. A demonstration of technique, if I may. A small gift, appropriate to the occasion and to the recipient." He said it as a question. He had already decided it was not a question.

"Corvian," I said. But he had already begun. The construct formed in his palm. He had done this successfully in controlled environments, and had made the reasonable, incorrect assumption that a formal diplomatic gathering was one. For approximately three seconds it was genuinely extraordinary, a bird of pure Arcanum light, wings folding and then opening, the mana structure organized with a precision that spoke to real talent.

It caught the chandelier light and returned it in colors that did not belong to the original spectrum, and several people nearby had turned to look with the involuntary openness that genuine beauty produces before social composure can reassert itself. Corvian was watching my face for the exact moment of maximum impression. Then the Sanatio component failed.

The construct destabilized the way overreaching Arcanum expressions do, coming apart while it kept its momentum, the mana structure fragmenting into something fast and hot and no longer shaped by intention. What had been a gift became a projectile, moving toward me with the urgency of something that had forgotten it was supposed to be beautiful. Everything happened in the space between one breath and the next. Cipher moved.

He stepped in front of me with the same quality of movement I had watched in Virex Caelum's atrium. Distance stopped applying to him. His body filled the space between me and the construct before I had fully processed it was coming. His arm came up. The Arcanum fragment struck something he had placed in its path and scattered, the energy dispersing into the air in a spray of dissipating light that was genuinely beautiful in the aftermath if considerably less beautiful in the moment.

The room had not finished understanding what it had just seen. Then a blur descended on Corvian from the direction of the western colonnade. It happened fast enough that my mind did not initially process what I was seeing. A figure, identical in every observable detail to the one standing in front of me, same black armor, same featureless mask, same absolute quality of controlled stillness, had crossed the hall in the time it took me to register that something was moving.

By the time Corvian had registered that his construct had gone catastrophically wrong and was turning to understand the consequences of that, the second figure was already there. My breath caught. It was another Cipher. He had been there. He had been there the entire evening, positioned at an angle that covered both the secondary entrance and the approach corridor, and nobody in the room had accounted for him because nobody had been looking for two of them. He did not hurt Corvian. He did not need to.

He simply occupied the space around him in a way that made it very clear that the space around Corvian now belonged to him, one hand closing around the young man's wrist with exactly enough pressure to send a message and not one degree more. The message was received. Corvian had gone the color of the pale silver in his formal attire. The room was very quiet. Not the quiet of shock exactly, though shock was present.

The quiet of a large number of very intelligent people simultaneously arriving at the same realization and taking a moment to process its implications before any of them were willing to be the first to speak. There were two of them. Kaereth was the first to recover, because Kaereth was always the first to recover. The expression that moved across his face was the one I had learned to recognize as his genuine reaction before the performance caught up with it, unguarded briefly in a way that his face very rarely was.

It was delight. Akemi had gone very still, the way she did when something new landed and she had not yet decided what to do with it. Her gaze moved between the Cipher behind me and the Cipher at the western colonnade, patient and methodical, building a model of something that had just refused to fit any category she owned. Tarek Thalos had updated his threat assessment and resumed operations. The updating had taken approximately two seconds. I found that deeply unsettling. Ardeshir had not moved.

He was looking at the second Cipher with the expression of a man who had arrived at the Gala believing he understood the shape of the evening and was now performing the uncomfortable arithmetic of how wrong he had been. Corvian found his voice.

"I was attempting... the integration of the Sanatio component is... the Storm Weaver's documented technique requires..."

"Corvian," I said. He stopped. I let the silence sit for exactly as long as it needed to.

"The gift," I said, "was a lovely thought." The room absorbed that. Corvian Drast, Duke of Drast, Virellion Aether Court, stood in the grip of a masked figure that had appeared from nowhere and contained him without effort, a thing that had never once considered being resisted. He understood from the quality of my voice and the quality of the room's attention that the most sophisticated response available to him was gratitude.

"Your Highness," he said.

"I sincerely apologize." The second Cipher released his wrist and stepped back toward the western colonnade. In four steps he had returned to the position he had been holding all evening. In five steps the room had reorganized itself around his presence the way it had already reorganized itself around the first one, and the collective understanding that there were two of them and had been two of them settled into the evening like something that had decided to become permanent.

From somewhere at the edge of the hall I was fairly certain I heard the Grand Chamberlain make a small sound. Kaereth caught my eye across the room. His expression said several things simultaneously, the clearest of which was that he was going to be thinking about this evening for a very long time and was already grateful for it. I turned back toward the Cipher directly behind me and kept my voice low enough that only he could hear it.

"How many of you are there?" He raised one hand. A faint luminescence gathered around his fingers, subtle enough that anyone not looking directly at him would have missed it entirely. A quiet pulse of mana, controlled, deliberate, barely visible. I looked around the room. Four others had their arms raised. Same armor. Same mask. Same absolute stillness.

Positioned at points I had not identified, covering angles I had not thought to cover, having been there since before I arrived, since before the first guest arrived, since before anyone in this room had thought to ask the question I had just asked. None of the other guests noticed. The raised arms lasted exactly as long as they needed to and then returned to resting positions, and the room continued its careful performance of the evening without interruption. I turned back to face the hall.

I was fairly certain my expression remained composed. I was also fairly certain it was the most work composure had ever required of me. Four. There were four others situated around the room. There were five of them. The evening continued. I tried not to let my face change. Well, that was unexpected.