Chương 141: Chapter 134

Siobhan I said my night was going to tilt a few degrees, and it did, even if I had seen it coming from across the hall. I tried not to look. I am cool that way. But off past the tables, under the star-field, couples turned through the slow formal figures, the kind you learn at nine and perform for the rest of your life. Seriously the most boring style of dancing ever invented. Straight spines, gloved hands, a polite hand's width of daylight held between every pair.

The kind of dancing designed so that people who cannot stand one another can hold one another in public and smile about it. I was going to take Cale out there later and show him how it is really done. The thought made me smile. The smile died when I saw who was turning through the middle of that Maelstrom of Unimaginative People, in his most flawless and stupid form. Deryn Cassar. I knew he would be here. Do not misunderstand me, I came tonight to flaunt myself on purpose.

It still soured my mood to see that smug, handsome, stupid face. Deryn danced like a Technica golem running a program. Correct, obviously. Almost too correct. No joy anywhere in it, and of course there was an audience, because with Deryn there is always an audience. He did look good tonight, working the crowd for as much as a hall of stuffy aristocrats can be worked.

His gold head was held high, spine like a drawn line, walking some Vera girl in pale rose through the figures as though he were doing her whole family a favor. She was lovely and forgettable, a girl who would be telling her friends about this for a month. On another night he might have steered a girl like that into a back room to find out how far the noble propriety held under a little pressure and some well-placed kissing. Not tonight. He was not even looking at her.

He was reading the room over her shoulder for a better use of the next quarter hour. You would not guess it to watch him waltz, but Deryn Cassar is a Marshal. Not a rank bought and hung on a wall. Earned steel, a frightening man on a field, which is the one thing about him I have never managed to take away no matter how I tried.

His people are a dukedom out of Atillia, one of the great merchant houses, the kind that counts its worth in trade routes and marriages and treats a sword as a thing you hire, never a thing you become. Deryn is the exception. The rest of the Cassars make money and make connections. Deryn makes casualties, and it is the only interesting thing about him, and he has never once forgiven his family for finding it vulgar.

He was in Vera on business, because the Cassars are always somewhere on business, and he had plainly decided the business could wait for a dance and a good look around the room. He was also, no doubt, waiting for me. Waiting for me to crumble under all that studied cold indifference. Such a bloody git. He turned into the figure, and his eyes came up off his partner's shoulder and found me across the width of the hall, as they always used to find me across a room.

For one hateful half beat my chest did the thing I had sworn it would not do tonight. Then his gaze dropped to the hand I had laced through Cale's, and I watched that handsome, confident, Marshal's face run a small sum it did not enjoy. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. Hehehehe. That is better. He tried very hard, after that, to look at neither of us. Cale made it easy for him by being his usual reclusive self.

I have never settled whether he is naturally oblivious or whether he simply does not consider the social weather of a room worth his attention. Just now he appeared to be studying the artwork on the far wall. I could feel it, though. His mana was cycling, and it was hard not to notice how raw it ran underneath, even suppressed as it was. It almost took my mind off Deryn. If only for a moment. I wondered whether Deryn would have the sense to leave it there. He would not. He never does.

Before he could prove it, though, Cale spoke.

"Ah. I think I see now." I turned and gave my date for the evening a dazzling smile, which he seemed to appreciate.

"And what is it that you see, my strapping young lad?" He raised an eyebrow. Damn him and that eyebrow.

"Strapping young lad. That is a new one."

"Yes. I am both beautiful and interesting. But you were saying?" He rolled his eyes, though the amusement stayed.

"I think I understand why we are here now." I grinned.

"I truly cannot imagine what you mean." Deryn made himself known a moment later, and he was so obvious about it he might as well have lobbed a fireball at the table. He passed his rose-colored partner off into the figures with a bow that promised he would be right back, and came off the floor toward us, unhurried, delighted with himself, the smile already loaded.

"Siobhan." He said it warmly, as if we were old friends and not something he had set on fire in public.

"You look extraordinary. You always did know how to arrive." His eyes went over Cale, up and down, the once-over a man gives another man he has already decided to be unimpressed by.

"And you have brought a guest. Local, is he? He has that look. Scholarship, I would guess, from the cut of the jacket. Charming. Vera does love a project." Cale did not rise. He looked at Deryn with the mild attention you might spare a street performer whose act you had already seen, and said nothing at all, and I felt the whole thing tip in a direction Deryn had not planned for. Here is what Deryn could not read, because it is not in his training to. I have watched Deryn on a field.

He is good, truly good, the sort of good that clears a room and knows it. He is also, and I say this with a lifetime of my father's dinner guests to measure against, exactly as good as a man his age and breeding gets and not one inch more. I have also watched Cale Arcanus fight, and I know what it looks like when a man learned his trade somewhere that losing meant dying. Deryn looked at Cale and saw a scholarship boy. Cale looked at Deryn and saw weather.

A front that might roll through, might not, worth a glance, not a thought. I could have kissed him for it. I nearly did, on principle.

"He does not say much," Deryn said, to me, because a man like Deryn cannot bear to be met with nothing.

"I suppose that is the charm. Something quiet and grateful to hang off your arm while you collect your pictures. I would have thought you had standards, Siobhan." The smile went wide and warm and needling.

"Then again." That was cut to draw blood, and from anyone else it might have. But Cale, who had let every word of it wash past without a flicker, chose that exact moment to speak, and he did not speak to Deryn. He glanced once at the girl in rose turning prettily out on the floor, then back.

"She's lovely," Cale said. Mild. Almost kind.

"I would not trade something real for something shiny, though. However tiresome the real thing gets." A pause you could have walked a horse through.

"You clearly would." For a moment Deryn did not understand that he had been hit, because the blade went in so clean. Then it landed, all at once. The shiny-for-real. The tiresome, which I chose to take as a compliment and file for later. And the plain fact that a scholarship nobody had just, gently, in front of me, called the man's entire taste a downgrade. The charm slid off Deryn's face like a dropped mask.

Underneath was the boy I actually dated, the one who cannot be laughed at, not for a second, not by anyone, and who has only ever had the one answer to the feeling.

"You want to be careful," Deryn said, very quietly, "how you speak to a Marshal of Atillia, boy."

"Sweet Lady." I got there before Cale could waste a breath on him, and I let the delight ring all the way out.

"Are you going to challenge my date to a duel, Deryn? At dinner? In front of the whole room?" I let it carry, just far enough for the nearest tables to stop pretending they were not listening.

"Please do. I have not been handed a gift like that in years."