Chương 143: Chapter 136

Deryn I am not sure I have ever suffered a humiliation quite like this in my life. As a Duke's son, even in a foreign land, I have rarely found myself short of contacts, confidants, sycophants, and men eager to gain my favor. My household is one of the greatest merchant families in the known Nexus. Eastern Bloc, Western, Northern, Southern, the independent planes, none of it amounts to a hill of beans on the greater axis of things. Money talks. My family has a great deal of money.

We have always had a great deal of money. People like to believe that individual power is where it all lives, and there is some truth in that. The Storm Weaver can flood entire planes with her storm. I have watched the Saint of the Sun cast healing strong enough to keep whole armies on their feet. I have seen the Bone Sovereign and his armies of the dead unmake cities. But here is the thing they do not know. Their power is vast, and they cannot be everywhere at once. Mine can. The power my family wields can.

That is what true power is. And I wield it. I am not in the top hundred mercenaries, nor as strong as the Dire Bear, but I hold my own against most A-plus adventurers. Couple that with my family's resources, with our ability to gather that kind of talent under one roof and one hand, covenant tokens and oath-bound promises across the board, and you have the real article: expertise, and the means to point it wherever I please. So why in every hell does it feel as though this boy is simply ignoring all of that?

Is he only ignorant? Does he not grasp that he insulted a man far better than himself, far handsomer, far richer, far more powerful? Where does a charity student come by that kind of confidence? The maddening part is that Siobhan and the boy were entirely unhurried. They took their meal. He had a steak and seemed honestly pleased with it, paid, and tipped generously, as though the evening had cost him nothing. The women around him behaved strangely too. The servers.

The rest of them looked at a peasant boy as though they had never seen one. I grant that the boy has a face worth looking at. There is a great deal more to a man's worth than something to look at. I will admit, confident and noble as I am, to being genuinely baffled. I waited until Siobhan had cleared the great doors before I let my face do anything at all. A man is never so watched as when he is perceived to have lost something in public. I did not, of course.

But that is the perception, and perception can be crueler than the truth. Which is why I did not flog the little upstart where he stood, and simply carried on with my evening. I did not watch her go. I chose a glass I did not want, turned it a quarter turn on the linen, and wore the face of a man who had found the whole affair beneath his notice and faintly amusing besides. Let the room write that down.

Let every last one of them write it down, and let them remember, when this is finished, that I never once raised my voice. They will tell it wrong tonight. They will tell it right by the season's end. I have always been patient with history. It comes around to me in the end.

"René." He was at my shoulder before the name finished, as he always is. René has been three things to me since we were boys, one part confidant, one part servant, one part the blade I do not care to carry myself, and he has never once confused the order.

"Young master." Soft voice. It is a signature of his. He does everything softly. It is why I trust him with the delicate work.

"I need you to find out everything you can about that bloody little git."

"Which git would that be, sir?" I looked at him.

"The Arcanus boy." René glanced toward the arch, exaggeratedly it seemed, as though he could still make out the afterimage of Siobhan and her date.

"Pardon my words, young master, but we already know who the bloody git is. His name is Cale Arcanus. You had the introduction from Miss Morrigan's own mouth not an hour past."

"I have his name, René. I want the man under it. Where he came from. Who backs him. How he knows Morrigan. What he was before he crawled into Arclight in a charity coat looking like that. A boy does not come by a stillness like his in a lecture hall."

"Of course, young master." The pause René uses when he has decided I have earned some insolence.

"Might I ask why?"

"Because he has taken something of mine."

"And what would that be, sir?" I looked at him.

"Ah." René's mouth does not quite smile. It never does.

"Miss Morrigan."

"Everyone knows Siobhan Morrigan belongs to me." The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Forgive me, young master." He had gone back to watching the arch she had left through.

"You have a curious way of holding on to your possessions. Was it not you who broke it off with her?"

"I did not break anything off." The edge came into my voice before I could stop it, and I could not quite file it back down, which irritated me more than the question had.

"I ended nothing. I corrected a misapprehension. Siobhan had begun to imagine that her father's coin and her little earned rank made her something she is not, and so I let her watch me choose otherwise, in public, where she could not pretend she had not seen it. There is a difference between a first wife and a concubine, René. A woman like Siobhan Morrigan needs reminding, now and again, which of the two she was born to be." I set my cuff straight.

"She was always going to be the wife. Ysolde is the lesson. One does not marry the lesson."

"As you say, young master." He said it as he says the things he does not believe.

"But I believe I already have something of interest." I smiled. That was the René I knew, and in hindsight it was obvious enough. With everything that has been stirring lately, the Dominion of Vera, Ava, my own homeland, it is no surprise that people are on edge. Couple that with the attempted assassination of a Movera duke's heir in a mass-casualty affair, and a quiet gathering of intelligence begins to look less like paranoia and more like prudence.

And the latest anomaly, the Ghost of the Wastes turning up in every third rumor on this island of late. With all of it, René had taken it upon himself, weeks past, to keep a quiet ledger of the odd things happening on Valecis. Things that did not add. Things that ended with powerful people saying nothing at considerable length.

"There is a thread I have been pulling," he said.

"The business with Lord Castien Veylan and his boy last season. Some are beginning to wonder whether—""The who?"

"Lord Castien Veylan and his son, Lucien, young master. There is talk that—""The Dominion Minister." I nearly laughed.

"René. I am heir to a duchy of Atillia, and Atillia will be at war with half these planes before the rest think to look up. Do not bring me the domestic sorrows of Vera's lesser houses and call it intelligence. Let me guess. Some jumped-up Dominion minister's boy got above himself and was corrected for it. That is not a mystery. That is housekeeping." I did not know the name and had no wish to learn it.

"I have no interest in what became of the Veylan child. I have interest in the boy who walked out of this room holding my wife-to-be's hand. I am going to have to teach my darling wife-to-be a thing or two about consequences, and I cannot do that without information. So. The Arcanus boy. Find out what you can. Leave the island's Cinaflix dramas to the projection-fields." René inclined his head and did not tell me he intended to keep pulling the thread regardless.

He rarely tells me the useful things until he is certain of them. It is a quality I pay him for, and one I ought, on occasion, to fear.

"You do know how this looked." Ysolde had crossed the floor while I was elsewhere in my own head, and she did not sit back down. She stood over the pair of us now, and the sweet had gone out of her voice, which is the only time Ysolde is worth listening to.

"The two of us, trading with her over a boy, in front of every name on the island." Her mouth was still lovely and no longer bothering to smile.

"You looked like a man trying to win back a woman who left him. I looked like the one holding your sleeve so you couldn't. She walked out, and we stayed, and we looked desperate, Deryn. Both of us. Playing house at each other while she took the whole room out the door on that boy's arm." She was not wrong, which I did not enjoy, and I did not intend to say so. She arranged her face into something that was not quite anger, a woman spending real effort not to need a calming charm.

"So. What, exactly, are we going to do?" I studied her a moment. Marran was beautiful, however manufactured and processed all of it was. There was something of the concubine in her, for all that. She could not hold a candle to the raw, unpurchased dignity that Siobhan simply was. Not that she was poor to look at. One does not quite forget Ysolde Marran; she does not permit it. And say what you will about Marran, she was, if anything, shrewd.

She understood how the game was played, the costs, the consequences, the rewards. Had she thought this a small thing, she would not have troubled to raise it. Which meant it was not a small thing. A man does not walk away from a matter like that, not when there are insults to answer and satisfaction to be had. He studies the thing that has gotten under his skin. He goes back and looks at it again, closer, until he understands what he has seen. I was looking at people who did not understand their places. Marran.

Siobhan. The boy, Cale Arcanus. And I was not about to let it all be carried off into the dark where I could not correct it.

"René. Two things." He waited.

"Begin arranging me a place on the Iron Circuit's autumn card. Quietly. Bahri owes me a floor, and I mean to collect it with the whole island in the tiers." That was the long game, the proper reckoning, sport and wagers and a blade dressed politely as an exhibition, beneath a hundred lenses. It could keep until Evenshade. Tonight could not. I turned to Ysolde.

"Do you have anything you can change into?" Her smile came slow and delighted, because of course she did. Ysolde travels as an army travels, a costume for every front and a face to match each one.

"Always," she said.

"Good." I set down the glass I had been wearing as a prop and let the careful boredom fall off me.

"Then go and put on something that cost a fortune and covers very little of your figure. We are going dancing."

"The Demon Coil? I hve to say that i was wondering about that. I heard it is impossible to get into."

"For most." I offered her my arm and let her have the whole of the smile, the one I keep for the evenings I have decided to enjoy.

"Not for me. I know the owner of old. Getting in is no trouble at all. Being seen getting in is the trouble, and we will not be. Come, Ysolde. Let us dress down to the common Upper Society, mingle among them at this Demon Coil of hers, and grace the place with our presence, quietly. A door that lets the merely rich in to feel dangerous for a night will not look twice at two more of them. My Morrigan wishes to dance where anyone with coin may watch her do it."

I felt the evening turn back over into my hands, as it always does when a man refuses to accept the version he was handed.

"So. Anyone with coin most certainly shall." René inclined his head. He did not think it wise; I could read that much beneath the soft nothing of his face. But René's caution has always been a tool of mine and never a leash, and tonight I had decided to be pleased.

"Come," I told her.

"Let us go and be seen not being seen."