Chương 142: Chapter 135

Siobhan Deryn seemed surprised. He had not thought I would call him out right there and then. He gave me that suave, practiced smile he believes is charming, and he was not entirely wrong about it.

"A duel." He said it as though I had suggested something charmingly rustic.

"Siobhan, darling, do not be so crude. I could not begin to assume this boy knows our ways. Any offense he gave was surely done in zeal and ignorance both. How could I, the heir to House Cassar, be so petty as to hold him to it?"

"That was a great many words." Cale's voice came in quietly, and with a kind of intensity I felt right down through my legs and hips, the growl of a beast kept to a whisper.

"A great many words to say you don't really want to fight. I am not sure why you would bring it up if you do not mean to do it." Deryn looked at Cale as though he were the scum between his toes. Cale was not even looking at him by then. He had gone back to studying the painting.

A few women had arranged themselves in the light off to the side, in short, gauzy dresses, second and third daughters of named houses, the sort who would most likely be married off as pieces in someone's political game, but not before they went well out of their way to be noticed. They smiled at him. He smiled back, squeezed my fingers as he did, then looked at me with an affection that made it plain none of them had registered at all. It was as if Deryn were not there.

"How charming." His voice had gone tight.

"Your companion is quite the talker, Siobhan." He was taken aback, and badly, by how easy and unbothered Cale was through the whole thing, and even I had to admit the sight was one of the more delicious I had seen in a season. I still could not tell whether Cale simply did not care or was not paying the situation enough mind to. Either way, it did not matter. I could all but see the steam coming off Deryn's face.

"Now, now, Deryn. Remember where we are, and that your family has ties to hers. The Dire Bear's guild." I kept my face passive. I had known it was coming. I had been waiting for it. That did not stop it from being annoying. She had been at the bar the whole time, no doubt lurking for the exact moment to make her presence felt. She carried a sweet tea and moved with a sort of graceful elegance I have never been able to manage, and Sweet Lady, she was a picture.

I will grant her that much, and I grant it with my teeth together. Ysolde Marran. All that blonde hair spilled over one shoulder in a gold fall, threaded through with veins of deep blue that caught the mana-light and kept it, and eyes to match, a blue so saturated it occurs nowhere in nature and does not pretend to. A gown the color of cream and candlelight, cut to carry every soft curve of her like an argument in favor of surrender. Wide hips. A waist you could span in two hands.

A bust the gown honored at some length. She was built the direction I am not, all yielding and welcome, the kind of pretty that makes a man feel enormous, unchallenged, and chosen, and she wore it like she had never once in her life been told no. She was, I will say it plainly, gorgeous. I am secure enough to hand her that. What she does not advertise, and what half the Western Bloc quietly knows, is that a Marran's beauty was built not born. The Alterations Arcanum clinics do fine work.

You could barely tell, if you did not know to look, the blue of the eyes a shade too bright to be born to, the streaks a touch too eager for natural cadence. Difference abound between me and the woman who had placed herself, metaphorically, at Deryn's side. But the difference between Ysolde and me was never the flesh. My body, my face, my look, was mine by blood and training. Something my work built. Hers she wears beautifully, however she came by it.

Only one of us has ever lain awake measuring herself against the other, and it has never once been me. She was at Deryn's hip before any of us quite realized she was there, the click of her heels audible now, the sway of her hips impossible to miss. He set his hand at the small of her back, where the whole island could admire his taste. The same hand. The same pose from the last social, after a season of pursuit and even a little talk of marriage. I would never have married the lout. It still irritated me.

He had come here tonight on Ysolde Marran's arm, which I had known before I ever put on the dress, which was the whole reason I had chosen this hall on this night. Knowing a thing and watching it are not the same animal. For one hateful half beat something under my ribs lurched, quick as a dropped stitch, gone before it reached my face, because I would sooner bite the head off the fire chicken again than let this room watch it cross me.

To add insult to injury, Deryn does not even know how thick the intrigue runs here. The poor gorgeous idiot. He thinks he is the prize. He thinks his sudden interest in soft, pliable, perpetually scandalized Ysolde was something he arrived at himself, that he chose her. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. He did no such thing. She did the choosing, and she did not choose him.

She chose the thing that would wound me, and he happened to be it, warm and handsome and mine, and she picked him up like a rock she meant to put through my window. Deryn Cassar has spent a whole season being a weapon and mistaking it for being wanted. I could almost pity him, if he had not been quite so public in his dismissal of me. No man is dismissive of me and gets away with it. The rat bastard. Ysolde and I go back further than Deryn, further than tonight. We began in the same place, she and I. New coin.

Loud, self-made fathers. No bloodline to either of our names, two girls the old houses smiled at across a hundred parties and never once let inside. She has spent her whole life since trying to buy her way past that door. I never bothered to knock. I simply do not give a damn about the door. I have always suspected that is the part she cannot forgive, and I do not entirely blame her, and I have never lost a minute of sleep over it, which I suspect is the truly unforgivable part. And she had watched all of it.

That was the sweet part, the part worth the price of the whole night. Ysolde had held that bar for an hour on a single pleasure, the chance to watch me arrive alone and starving, as a famous girl arrives when the man is gone, working the room for scraps of the attention she liked to imagine had once been hers. That was the show she had bought her ticket to. Instead she had watched me walk in on the arm of the most beautiful catastrophe on the island, with every eye in La Falle trailing after him.

She had watched that same catastrophe take the shine off her Deryn without once raising his voice. Ysolde, however, was a professional. She knew how to hold a look. She smiled at me, and at the room, and at everyone else who had noticed the drama unfolding. She studied us for a brief moment before she opened her mouth.

"Siobhan Morrigan." My name in her mouth was honey with a hook set down in the middle of it.

"Look at you. Up on that big feed of yours all week, all by yourself, and here you are out at last. I did wonder if we would have the pleasure of your presence, after everything." Her eyes made their sympathetic little dip.

"I cannot even imagine how stressful your schedule has been. You must be worn to the bone, performing so hard for everyone." I let her finish. I let the room hear all of it, because a blade lands better when the whole floor watches it miss.

"Ysolde." I said it fondly, the tone you keep for a dog that has bitten before.

"You look wonderful. Truly, you do. Whoever does your work is an artist, and you simply must give me the name before it settles." I laced my fingers a fraction tighter through Cale's and let her gaze follow the movement down to where we were joined.

"But as you can see, I am here, and hardly alone. Let me introduce you to someone important. Cale Arcanus." She had to look at him then. Full on, up close, after watching him from a distance take the evening apart. And I watched the belle do the exact thing every woman in this hall had done tonight, the small helpless recalibration, the pupils, the half second where the lovely face forgot its manners.

She had spent her whole life making herself into the softest, sweetest, most yielding thing a room could want, a woman built to be chosen, and she was standing in front of a man who had chosen nothing all night except to remain at my side. She recovered with the poise of someone who knows the game.

"How lovely," she said, and turned the warmth up like a lamp with a bad flicker in it.

"Then you must both come to the Marran box at the exhibition on Evenshade. Everyone worth knowing will be there, and I would so love to show you a proper—""We have plans." I said it gently, and I did not let her finish, because a woman like Ysolde only needs the end of one sentence to start ten more.

"Cale is taking me dancing. Somewhere with an actual pulse, where I can kick off all this stuffy propriety and let him put his hands on me without inhibition. This place is a jewel, it truly is, but it is a museum with a wine list, and I have behaved myself long enough for one evening." Deryn's eyebrow went up. Ysolde's smile did not move at all, which is how I knew it had cost her something.

"Dancing." She made it sound delightful.

"How fun. Anywhere I would know?" There it was. The little hook under the sugar. She wanted the name so she could decide whether it was beneath her to want it too or bold enough to simply follow us into the experience. So I gave it to her.

"The new place, north of here, up off the river. You have probably heard of it. The Demon Coil." I watched it land on the pair of them as a good name should. Deryn's face shut like a drawer, which meant he had heard of the place and could not get into it. Ysolde's went a shade too pleasant, which meant exactly the same thing. The Demon Coil does not take names off a list. It takes them off a shorter list you never get to see, and it is La Falle's opposite in every respect but the price.

Where this room keeps its money on the walls and its guests off every lens, the Demon Coil keeps the money in the dark and the lenses everywhere, low light and lower company, the beautiful dangerous place the rich go to be seen getting away with something. You cannot buy your way through that door. You are known, or you are not. Inside, though, everything is watched, and everything is remembered, by all the right people. I was known. They were not. Everyone at the table understood which of us was which.

"How lovely for you," Ysolde managed. And that was when I stopped paying attention to either of them, because I felt the man beside me change. Cale had let the whole evening slide off him without a mark. Deryn, the needling, the once-over, all of it weather. But when I said the name, something in him went still in a different register, as a room goes quiet when the one person who knows the building hears a sound the guests do not. It lasted half a breath.

Then it folded away behind that mild face, and if I had not been pressed against his side I would have missed it entirely. He knew the Demon Coil. Not as I knew it, all velvet rope and best table. Some other way. A way that had nothing to do with dancing. Interesting. I filed it, because I file everything, and I would take it out and turn it over later. For now I had a room to leave and two people to leave wanting, which is the only correct way to leave anyone at all.

"Deryn. Ysolde." I gave them the smile that ends conversations.

"Do enjoy the museum."