Chapter Fourteen #2
And then, at some cue Adeline was unaware of, the two of them seemed to realise they were still clinging to each other and quickly peeled apart, abruptly sober.
Alun dropped to the ground and busied himself with retrieving the toppled wineglasses.
Ceri shot a rather frantic look around the garden over his crouched form.
“Well, I have to find, erm—Os. Yes.”
She nodded briskly, then picked up her skirts and weaved off in the opposite direction from the throng of the party just as Alun shot to his feet.
“And I have to find more wine,” he said morosely. Adeline gave him a half-grimace, and he returned it tenfold before he wandered off the other way.
Painful, she thought.
“What on all of Adhlas was that about?”
Although it had never come up, Adeline had always been under the distinct impression that—no matter how obvious it was to her—Kai had absolutely no idea how his closest friend felt about his younger sister.
Which is why, at the sound of his voice behind her, the reflexive flutter in her stomach was muffled.
Bollocks.
“Oh,” she said quickly. “Bit too much wine, I think.”
“I’m not surprised,” he was saying as she turned. “They’ve been drinking it like wat—”
Kai’s voice choked off as they came face to face; his bristled jaw went slack.
And Adeline grinned.
“Like water?” she guessed.
Kai frowned, dragging his gaze from her dress to her face. His throat bobbed, and his voice, when he spoke, was dazed.
“Like what?”
Goddess, she loved the way he looked at her. It was an effort not to sound as giddy nor as pleased as she felt when she told him, “You’re staring again.”
“Adhlas,” he muttered, then nodded absently. “Yes, I am. You look—”
“Do I?” Adeline tilted her head, delighting in the way his eyes darted to catch the tumble of her curls over one shoulder.
He reached absently to sweep them back behind her ear, and when she shivered at the warmth of his hand, he let his fingers trace her jaw and come to rest beneath her chin, tilting her face toward his own.
“Adeline,” he said, in a voice that sent butterflies aflight inside her.
A voice far too low and intimate for a public function.
But when the hollow clang of metal cut the thick air between them, whatever he’d wanted to say was drowned out.
For just a moment, they watched each other blink away the haze in their eyes.
Then, reluctantly, Kai turned toward the insistent clanging, and Adeline followed.
“Friends,” called a laughing voice from the top of the garden. “If I could have your ear.”
Kai laced his fingers through hers, and though the world throbbed in time with her swooning pulse, Adeline managed to drag her attention to the speaker.
Eleni stood framed before the gate to the Silver Meadow, a small, gleaming bell dangling from one hand, and a slim copper wand in the other.
When silence settled over the gardens, she turned and handed the instruments to an attendant at her side, taking a glass flute from him in their stead.
“You all know why we’re here tonight; we have so very much to celebrate.”
A little whoop rose up from a corner of the garden to a chorus of bubbling laughter.
Eleni grinned.
“Well, exactly,” she said, pausing to allow another giddy swell before she waved the noise down and went on.
“We have been blessed with a new friendship, and that friendship has brought us something our ancestors only dreamed of. I won’t dwell on the implications of this gift; we’d be here all night, and I can already see some of you clutching empty cups. ”
More laughter rose, then rolled away when Eleni placed a hand over her heart and set her lips in a solemn, earnest line.
“I will say this: Dhalias will not soon forget the support of its Merrow allies. For the first time in centuries, we can sail our own waters. We fear Isa Koemi no more.”
Adeline had no idea what Kai had been doing in a graveyard of all places, but at the roar of approval exploding all around them, she felt him go rigid at her side; that posture she knew so well from his time in her Mother’s court, oh so civil and refined.
She bit her lip against her growing smile and watched as he gave a few humble nods in each direction, a wave to Papou, who had yelled something indecipherable at him, then reached for Adeline, claiming her hand again mid-clap.
Heat swept through her in a flurry of embers when he tugged her close and leaned down to whisper in her ear—
“And of course,” Eleni went on, and Kai sighed quietly before he straightened. “We’re here tonight to formally thank our guests. And so, Your Majesty, I would be delighted if you would open the floor for our honourary ball.”
Eleni stretched out a hand to another round of applause, and the music began at once, bright and triumphant—the sort of music that might open the parade for a war hero returning home. Kai shot Adeline a stricken, sideways glance, and she placed a hand on his back to nudge him forward.
“There are no steps,” she reminded him, beneath the cover of the growing melody. And then, because she couldn’t help herself, “Just don’t run away from your dance partner.”
At this, he paused and twisted to raise a brow at her over his shoulder; “Have I yet to prove I regretted that night?”
She just grinned back at him. “No. But save me a dance later, and you can remind me just how much.”
She gave him another little nudge, and he turned to stride through the still-applauding courtiers and offer his arm to Eleni.
The musicians shifted the pace of their song to something jaunty, and Kai held the Empress’s hand aloft as they cleared a space in the wide stretch of grass and began to dance.
“Agameni,” creaked a voice at Adeline’s side, and she turned to find her grandfather bowed over, nose pointed at the grass, and his hand outstretched. “Will you do me the honour?”
Adeline did not like that her answering smile took some coaxing.
She loved her grandfather, or at least the man he was in her memories.
She might not know him well as an adult, but he’d been good to her all those years ago, and her father had always spoken of him with such tenderness.
That little kernel of doubt sprouting in her belly as she looked at his hand—the same hand that had held out a wilted flower to her only days ago—was not Papou’s fault.
She put the flower and his awkward, expectant stare from her mind.
Then she took his hand, then let him whirl her toward the grassy dancefloor with surprising grace.
The space around them filled out quickly, and Adeline watched as courtiers and Merrow joined them in mingled pairs.
“A great deal to celebrate, for us all,” Papou said, following her eye. “We were blessed the day your Merrow friends landed on our shores.”
“As much as I agree,” she confessed, leaning in with her voice just above a whisper. “I’ve missed whatever it is we’re celebrating.”
Papou laughed. “Isa Koemi, a vast portion of our waters, was inaccessible to us for so long—all throughout my own reign, and longer besides. Ahn, for as long as anyone can remember, in truth. Anyone brave or reckless enough to cut through would never make it back to Dhaliaan shores. But now, thanks to your Merrow King, our trade ships can travel the oceans faster—and safer—than ever before.”
Her Merrow King.
Adeline did not want to address the validity of that observation, even to herself, but she could not help the glow that warmed her cheeks.
Pride and something else, something soft and airy, swelled in her ribcage until she could barely breathe.
She squirmed under her grandfather’s knowing smile and glanced away to find both Eleni and Kai looking her way through the weave of dancers that separated them.
Still hand in hand with Kai, her aunt mouthed something Adeline couldn’t make out between the heads of the other dancers, though the general gist seemed to be; Is everything alright?
She nodded, indulged in the briefest moment under the warm weight of Kai’s gaze, then returned her attention to her dance partner. He offered a grim smile.
“Your aunt is worried I will upset you again,” he said briskly. “I unsettled you, that first day.”
Adeline blinked, fighting back a full wince. She felt her eyes dart away uncomfortably and caught Eleni’s narrowed gaze on her, before Kai twirled them both away. Her own gaze slingshotted back to her grandfather.
“A bit,” she admitted—then, when his brow sagged, she hurried to add, “Only because I didn’t want to disappoint you, Papou. I hate to think I’ve forgotten my own father’s customs—”
But Papou cut her off with a well-timed twirl, and when she spun back to him, a little dizzily, he shook his head, lips thin.
“It is not about a custom, Adeleni. Just an old man reminiscing.”
“Reminiscing about what, exactly? Flowers?”
“Ahn. Just so.”
Adeline tilted her head, but the old man did not seem to notice; he was frowning—quite irritably—at something beyond her.
With a glance over her shoulder, she found Eleni once again watching them with that same narrowed gaze before she pulled Kai to a full stop.
Papou quickened his feet, and Adeline nearly stumbled to keep up; the musicians kept a leisurely beat that allowed the dancers around them to chat, but in her grandfather’s arms, she found herself spinning a half-step too quickly through the rustling skirts of nearby courtiers.
When they slowed, having crossed half the garden, Papou relented to a static turn in the grass.
A nycta bush loomed behind her grandfather’s sloping shoulders, vivid even in the blanched light of the moon.
Reminiscing about bloody flowers, indeed.