Chương 140: Chapter 133

Siobhan I like how Cale's arm feels. Tall and lean, and even through the suit jacket, I can feel the strength in it. Yes, this will do nicely. There is a strange calm about the man too. For all my flirting and banter, I like to think I am rather observant, but Cale... Cale Arcanus had a certain way of watching things, like he stood above it all while folding perfectly into it all at the same time while seeing everything and missing nothing. Situational awareness, I realized.

The man had an uncanny istuational awareness. The man would make a magnificent adventurer. I would bet his perception stat is off the charts. The causeway was a red carpet in all but name, a hundred feet of it rolled crimson over the stone, and the house lit it like a premiere. Spotlights with far more technology than was strictly needed swept up off the battlements in long white columns, crossing and uncrossing overhead, catching the mist off the basin until the whole approach glowed.

Ornamental trees stood in brass urns down both sides of the carpet, leaves lit silver from within. The stringers screamed for a picture. The crowd behind them screamed louder, and not for a picture at all.

"Siobhan! Siobhan, over here!" A knot of them pressed the rope line, and near the front two girls no older than first-years thrust out cards and a stylus, bouncing on their toes.

"Miss Morrigan, please, just one, we came all this way!" I gave them the smile that pays my bar tab and signed both without breaking stride. Half a dozen pictures, an air kiss to each side, and they ran off delighted. Cale watched me do it and raised an eyebrow.

"Autographs," he said, as though the word had only just been coined.

"You must be famous or something." Damn, that wry eyebrow thing of his was cute. I gave him my best imperious acknowledgment.

"Five-school martial arts champion, three years running, with a shelf of solo tournament titles I will share with you later, to your absolute delight." I did not slow down. The wind was utterly perfect, and it flared my dress just enough to let that pale leg of mine reach out. More than a few took pictures.

"Some of us earn our screaming crowd, Arcanus. We do not all get to loom about mysteriously and let a handsome face do the work for us." He snorted.

"I would love to spar you some time, though. Your expression work is exquisite. I was watching you on the—" Two rather large bouncers cut us off with mock-serious faces.

"I'm sorry, Miss, and I'm sorry, young man. We are going to have to ask you to step to the side here." I gave the two idiots a glare. They grinned right back at me. They used to work for my father's guild, so no shock there, direct subordinates who went looking for something to do when my father retired. As if he actually retired. Deacon the Brown Bear and Berian the Black Bear, both semi-retired, and probably only working a door like this to flirt with the women who come through it. Deacon was an A+++ adventurer.

Berian used to be a merc. I never did get his rank, but he sat at a high A+ or a low S eqivlient so very powerful. Yes, every one of my father's subordinates carries some variation of bear. There is a whole thing about bears. Dire, polar, grizzly, long snout, crushing claws whopping cough though I have no idea where that one came from. You get the picture. Deacon was not even a big man, but he was a Sanatio expert who had somehow mastered Aura reinforcement on top of it. It made him a hell of a healer.

Berian was probably one of the finest swordsmen I've ever seen.

"Welcome back, Princess Morrigan. And who is this young man?" He spoke with the northern accent, even though he came from the southern Bloc. Another habit every one of my father's men picked up.

"This is my date for the evening. His name is Cale Arcanus, and you are going to be nice. Or, Mr. Deacon, I am going to have to give you a good thrashing." Deacon grinned completely ignoring me.

"It is good to see you, lad. A grand handsome fella, aren't ya? Don't you worry, the girl is all bark and no bite. She'd be like a Bonnie Lass in your arms, just not out in public."

"That is not what you said the last time we were on the mat, Deacon."

"Come now, pretty princess. No need to talk nasty. You're no damn sure that I had a touch of the hangover that day." Right, because people with mana get hangovers. Give me a break. As I went to retort, I caught Berian giving Cale a nod, which Cale returned politely. Berian was also studying him rather intently. I put it down to Cale being with me and being fetching.

"Well, do not go saying anything upsetting. I would hate for my handsome date to think me uncultured."

"Sure, if biting the head off a fire chicken counts as cultured, then you are about as cultured as they come, young miss." If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. I winced and then glared at Deacon. He couldn't help himself. Obviously he was going to bring that up. It was a ritual my father made you do when you took your first rank, so of course every soul who joined the guild went frantic to complete it.

I did mine at twelve, and I have never heard the end of it. I threw up all over the dead chicken. I tried not to look at Cale but felt my cheeks go a little warm; out of the corner of my eye I could see he was very amused.

"It seems, Mr. Deacon, that you really want me to thrash you."

"Now, now, pretty princess don't get your panties in a twist." Deacon gave me a suggestive grin. I rolled my eyes.

"The last thing you need to be mentioning is my panties. I'm sure my father would love to hear all about that."

"I would not be so sure, girl. I have a good deal more to share with your da than you have, I would say." I eyed him.

"I will remind you, Deacon, that I am no longer five. I have a rather aggressive social life, a fact my Pa knows well enough, so you will mind your words." Deacon could not stop grinning. I heard Berian snort behind him.

"Away with the pair of ye, and stop spending your evenings with old adventurers. I will have Celana bring you the regular table. Oh, and Princess?" I smiled, delighted.

"Celana is working tonight. Fantastic." We walked on up, the rest of the patrons looking thoroughly annoyed. The great doors of La Falle swung inward on their own weight, and the roar of the causeway cut off behind us as if a blade had come down on it. That is the other thing the money buys. Silence from the world, the instant you are inside. My lens had gone dark at the threshold, house rules, no exceptions, so for once every eye that mattered was in the room and not on a feed.

I took his arm and walked him into the best room on the island. Sweet Lady, I love this place. Some very old architect had been handed an impossible brief, build me a cathedral, a supper club, and a smuggler's den, and fold all three into one hall, and the madman had said yes. Vaulted stone climbed into a ceiling that was not a ceiling at all but a slow field of stars, mana-lit and impossibly deep.

White-draped tables sat in warm pools of floating light, each little globe drifting and dimming as though it held opinions about the conversation beneath it. Men in black formalwear. Women in gowns worth a year of most people's lives. Off to one side a dance floor moved under a live band playing something low and unhurried.

And down the whole length of the far wall, the bar, a monstrous, gorgeous thing of black glass and Cimmerian mana-brass and a hundred bottles lit from within, tended by people who poured drinks that smoked, glowed, and now and then sang. I adored every glorious inch of it. And every head in that room was supposed to turn toward me. The maître d' reached us first, a tall man who had seated queens without a flicker.

He bowed to me, opened his mouth to say my name, and then his gaze slid to Cale and the greeting walked straight out of him. A flicker of pure human blankness on a face paid never to show one.

"Your table," he recovered, "is ready." He said it to Cale. I have come here two years. I have watched that man hand a duchess her coat check without so much as a blink. Cale Arcanus walked in behind me in a jacket little Ellara chose and undid him in under two seconds. Interesting. The hostess who led us in was a touch older than us, lovely, and had plainly been hired for the dimples and the pinkish-blonde hair that seemed to glow, some cosmetic Sanatio and Arcanum in there.

She kept her eyes ahead, all business, right until she glanced back to check we were following and took the full force of him. She missed a step. An actual step, on flat stone she crossed forty times a night. I thought she was going to go down on the floor. Then Cale, in one smooth motion far too fast to be anything but a movement technique, was at her side. He caught her by the hip and the hand and, in a strange little spin, brought her right up to eye level.

The girl stared at him, torn between kissing him on the spot and dying of embarrassment. She was leaning toward the former. I made my way over on my devilishly high heels, letting my normally impressive gait run a little slower than usual. I slid my hand down and laced my fingers through Cale's. Just so the room was clear on whose evening this was. She looked at our hands and righted her professional expression.

"Excuse me. I apologize for the little mishap. Please, follow me." We crossed the floor, and I waited for the room to do the thing rooms do when someone famous and beautiful walks in. You know the thing. The turn. The little hush. The recalculation of every table's night around my arrival. It happens almost every time, everywhere I go. It happened this time too. It simply was not happening for me. The men obliged, of course, finding me as distracting as men are contractually required to. The women were the problem.

A table of high nobles, viscount at the least, sat near the dance floor, the daughters freshly graduated and out on the arms of second sons, and they went still as a set and tracked Cale across the room with the focus of a hunting party. One forgot her glass halfway to her mouth. A countess I know by reputation watched him over her husband's shoulder and did not trouble herself to hide it. This had never happened to me.

Not once, not in two years of owning this floor, not even with my silly ex-boyfriend, who was quite the looker himself. I was, and I will confess it only here, a touch put out. I fit myself closer against his side, adjusting our laced hands so I could tuck my shoulder and the rest of me under his arm. Mine, the arrangement said, to anyone reading, and they were all reading. Our waitress came to walk us the final few steps, balancing a tray of something that smoked prettily. She looked at Cale.

She looked at where my body had arranged itself against him. She looked at Cale again, and the tray dipped a hair. Two glasses started to go. She caught them with a reflex that saved her whole career and none of her dignity. Even the bartender, forty feet off and wrist-deep in a cocktail that was faintly singing, looked up, found Cale, and held it a beat past professional before the drink called his hands home. Sweet Lady above. I had picked too cute a boy. The thought sat there, ridiculous and true.

I choose my accessories on purpose, thank you, and my accessory was upstaging me at La Falle, in front of the exact set of jaws I had come here to drop. I should have been livid. I was having the finest night of my year. Because here is the part none of them could see, the truly delicious part. Every scrap of that beauty, every eye in the house, and the boy carrying it had no idea.

He walked through the whole performance looking mildly like he was pricing the exits, my fingers threaded in his, and he had not spared a glance for the countess, the high-noble daughters, or the hostess going pink. He was watching me. Only me, with that faint comfortable grin, waiting to be handed the next rule. Let them look. I was the one holding his hand. Then I saw who was dancing out among the crowed and I grinned. Show time.