Chương 70: [B2] Chapter 27: Tyrian Rubelle (+ Patreon update)

"No," Viria said.

"Try again." Ruby lowered the water pitcher and made a face that no palace maid in the history of the Arboreal Queendom had ever made in the presence of royalty.

"I did it exactly like you showed me."

"You did it exactly like someone showing me they can do it. There's a difference, and it's visible from across a room." Viria settled back onto the edge of the bed.

"You're watching my face to see if you got it right. Real servants here don't do that. They pour, and they leave, because the pour was never in question. The moment you look up at me, you're telling anyone watching that you think you might have done it wrong." Ruby considered that with her whole face, which was another thing that would get her thrown out of the palace, and sighed. Despite Viria's tone, she was genuinely impressed by Ruby's progress. Two weeks of maid training had produced monumental improvement.

On the first morning, Viria had watched her nearly curtsy to a footman. Now she could cross a room, deliver a tray, and withdraw without doing anything that would make a supervising steward's eye catch, as long as she didn't have to speak, and as long as nobody surprised her. The lesson was also, and not incidentally, the most secure hour of Viria's day.

Nobody questioned a princess drilling a clumsy new maid, and nobody listened at the door of a room where the only sounds were water being poured and a bored aristocrat saying again.

"Try it once more and then tell me what you saw this morning," Viria said. Ruby poured. This time, she kept her focus on the cup. When it was filled, Ruby offered it to Viria, her eyes still averted.

"Good. That was better." nodded Viria, as she took the cup.

"Now talk."

"Markets, before dawn. The head cook sent me for pepper because he hates me." Ruby set the pitcher down and dropped into the cross-legged sprawl she used the instant formality lapsed.

"A big carriage came through the merchants' gate, the kind with outriders. The crest on the door was a red dragon. I think." Viria's cup stopped halfway to her mouth.

"The crest. Was it a wine red color?" she asked. Ruby nodded. Viria sighed.

"Did it.. Look kind of like a scorpion? I know that sounds kind of weird." Ruby paused, recalling what she had seen.

"Now that I think about it, yeah. It did look a lot like a scorpion." Viria cursed under her breath. Ruby's eyes widened.

"Do you know who it is?"

"Unfortunately, I do."

"Who is it?" Viria drank her water, set the cup down, and sighed with her entire body.

"Someone annoying."

House Rubelle arrived at the fourth bell with more retinue than a two-day visit could possibly justify, which Viria understood immediately was the point. She stood on the palace steps in Lyriel's third-best afternoon dress, hands folded, smile calibrated, and watched the man she was engaged to step down from the carriage. He was, she noted with the detachment of a professional assessor, exactly as handsome as the diary had grudgingly admitted.

Tall, dark-haired, and a jaw that had clearly been complimented into permanence. He crossed the yard toward her with both hands outstretched and delight all over his face.

"Lyriel." He took her hands and held them. Viria hated every second of the physical contact, but she swallowed her disgust down the facade she had up.

"Tyrian," she said warmly.

"You look well."

"I am exhausted, but you're too kind." He turned to present the older man descending behind him. Lord Rubelle, Viria assumed. He had grey hair and heavy-lidded lips over a mouth that had settled permanently into mild disapproval. Tyrian looked into his eyes.

"Father, you remember?"

"Princess." Lord Rubelle inclined his head perhaps two degrees.

"You've certainly grown."

"Time is famously relentless, my lord." Thankfully, he didn't catch the insult that was veiled in her words. Tyrian turned back to Viria's direction, "Let's catch up later, shall we? Personally, I am tired from the long journey here." The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Dinner was when Viria officially decided that she despised Tyrian. It was a formal dinner; twenty seated at the long table, the queen herself at the head. Viria was seated to her mother's left, across from Lyriel's older sister, Crown Princess Cielle, whom Viria rarely saw outside of formal events like this one. However, she was also seated at Tyrian's right, where the world could observe just how well matched they were. Viria had prepared herself for a tedious evening.

She had expected Tyrian to play the role of an infatuated, touchy, borderline creepy lover. She had not prepared herself for the possibility that he did not make eye contact with her once. It took her most of the soup course to be certain, because his behavior was skillful. He addressed her. He leaned toward her when she spoke, laughed at the right moments, and even touched her wrist twice for the benefit of the far end of the table. But his eyes never met hers.

They drifted to just below her collar, and settled on her chest. Once Viria noticed his ogling, she noticed how he looked at every woman in the room in turn. He looked not at the Earl's daughter across the table, but at her outfit that exposed the navel. He stared at the buttocks of a serving girl—who could not have been more than seventeen—as she left the hall. Twice, Cielle had reached over to her left, and Tyrian glanced at her briefly exposed armpit both times.

Oh, Viria thought, with a cold and sickening clarity. You're a total creep. No wonder Lyriel hates you. And then his eyes found Ruby, standing against the wall in the line of attendants, holding a pitcher exactly the way Viria had spent two weeks teaching her to hold it. Tyrian's gaze went to her and stayed, and Viria felt something deep inside of her nearly snap. Carmine was fourteen.

Viria knew what was about to happen once it was too late to prevent it from happening. Viria saw him deliberately position his elbow behind his cup of chokecherry juice, and once Ruby was directly behind him, he moved it back. The deep red juice went across Ruby's uniform in a wide dark arc, and Tyrian was on his feet before the glass had finished rocking, all concerned, hands raised in apology, projecting toward the head of the table exactly enough remorse to be witnessed.

"That was entirely my fault. Entirely." He was already turning to Ruby, still not making eye contact, instead looking at the stain, and then up at her chest.

"You can't spend the rest of the evening in that, I couldn't bear to see an innocent servant suffer from a fault of my own." Tyrian smiled, which nearly made Ruby recoil in disgust.

"Listen. I brought a spare travel case up to my room. It was for my servants, technically, but there's more than enough spare uniforms in there. My chambers are just at the end of–""Carmine." Viria's voice cut across the table pleasantly, at exactly the volume a princess used for domestic instructions, and every head turned to her.

"Go and draw my bath. Now. Use water from the hot spring line, not the cistern, and I want the lavender salts, not the rose ones. The laundry maid can take care of your linens." Viria was already rising, one hand at her temple, her smile apologetic and aimed at the head of the table.

"Forgive me, mother. It's been a long day." The queen nodded. Ruby was moving before the sentence finished.

"Of course, my lady." She said, and did not look up to check whether she'd gotten it right. Viria noted with a savage little flare of pride that her two weeks of training had held under actual pressure.

"Tyrian, you're a saint for offering," Viria added, laying her hand briefly on his sleeve.

"But I need her. Surely you understand." He recovered smoothly.

"Of course." Viria curtsied to her mother, walked out of the hall, and did not permit her hands to shake until the hall's doors had closed behind her.

"He was going to–" Ruby was sitting on the floor of the bathing chamber with her ruined apron in her lap, her voice gone thin.

"I'm not imagining that, right?"

"You are not imagining it."

"I–I completely froze. I didn't know if I could say no to him, he's a lord, and Carmine's–" She stopped.

"I don't know what Carmine would have done. That's the part I can't get past. Her body's fourteen and I don't think she was allowed to say no."

"She wouldn't have been," Viria said.

"That's what he was counting on." She sat down on the tiles across from her, dress and all, and looked into Ruby's eyes.

"Listen to me. You did nothing wrong tonight and you will do nothing wrong tomorrow. You do not go anywhere alone with that man. If he speaks to you, you have been summoned by me. I don't care if I'm asleep, I don't care if I'm across the palace, you tell him that you have been summoned by me, and you walk away. I will back you up if necessary. Do you understand?" Ruby nodded, and then, after a moment, laughed wetly.

"Ren said your team were good people."

"Ren talks too much and is usually right." Viria pulled her knees up.

"Now, I have three weeks before this becomes a wedding, no way out that doesn't utterly ruin the girl whose body I'm wearing, and I have to find three people while trapped in a palace in a queendom I can't leave. So let's think." They thought.

Unfortunately, Viria's thinking did not produce much. Every route out of the engagement she could see ran through scandal, and scandal was the one currency Lyriel could not spend. Ruby however, offered a glimmer of hope.

"There might be one thing," she'd said eventually.

"It's not about the engagement. It's about… one of us."

"Go on."

"I've been investigating ever since you found me; mostly asking some of the palace maids if anyone's behavior seemed to suddenly change, and two people gave the same person."

"I think," Ruby lowered her voice.

"That there's another contestant in the palace." Viria sat up straighter.

"Who?"

"The groundskeeper. The one who does the night shift on the outer gardens." Ruby said.

"He's never in the staff hall during the evening, and hasn't drank at all in the past three weeks or so, which is apparently out of character for him. And one of the maids I asked swears that she saw him talk to hedge a week ago." Viria considered the ceiling of the bathing chamber for a long moment.

"Then we go to the gardens," she said.

"Tonight."