Chapter 34
Alaric had never cared for gentlemen’s clubs.
The term alone felt suspicious. Like a curtain drawn over men behaving worse than usual and calling it tradition.
But he dressed the part. Midnight-blue doublet, high collar, gold cufflinks he didn’t remember acquiring.
Cedric, sitting across from him in the carriage, slipped into quiet amusement watching him fuss with his sleeves.
By the time they arrived, the rain had begun in earnest. Alaric stepped out onto slick cobblestones, the street lanterns hissing faintly with steam as droplets hit their iron frames.
The club itself rose like some overfed relic.
Stout columns, velvet curtains in the windows, and a wrought iron sign that read The House of Merit.
He barely crossed through the door before the scent hit him.
Old smoke, newer cologne, and the telltale sharpness of boredom dressed up as conversation.
The lighting was soft, but not inviting.
Chairs in plush oxblood leather were arranged in uneven constellations around low tables where half-filled glasses, unlit pipes, and careless remarks had begun to multiply.
A waiter in trim attire materialized at his elbow, bearing a glass of something amber. Alaric accepted it and immediately regretted it. One sip and he was rewarded with the burning sensation of what he could only describe as regret distilled in someone’s dusty idea of masculinity.
“Disgusting,” he muttered under his breath.
Cedric had the audacity to reply, “I think it’s aged in the same barrels as their morals.”
Alaric smirked, cataloguing the room. Lords from old Vellesmere houses lounged like lions on borrowed thrones.
One was halfway into a tale involving a hunting hound and a baroness whose name was probably better left unmentioned.
A ripple moved through the chamber as several heads turned in his direction.
A few bowed, just enough to acknowledge rank without enthusiasm. Alaric inclined his head in return.
He was already calculating how quickly he could escape without raising suspicion when one of the men with a crooked top hat turned to him with a smile that had all the sincerity of a forged signature. “Prince Alaric,” he greeted, raising his glass. “Your presence honors us.”
Oh no…
Alaric offered the faintest smile in return. “Ah. Then I hope to keep the evening brief enough to maintain the illusion.”
A few polite chuckles circled the table, but the man who had spoken did not laugh.
Alaric liked him immediately. It was always useful to know who lacked a sense of humor.
So he decided to stay with that table, just because the alternative was an additional hour of hollow pleasantries.
Cedric peeled off to lean against a wall.
The man in the top hat gave a small incline of the head. “Lord Thamior Vale. Trade Envoy to the Eastern Coalition. I believe we’ve corresponded before.”
Alaric gave a slight tilt of his glass.
The older man, who looked as if he’d been born in his cobalt waistcoat, straightened in his chair. “Chancellor Emeritus Corven Maltheon,” he muttered. “May I extend my congratulations on your engagement. A union of such weight will echo far beyond this age.”
“Thank you, Chancellor. It's an honor,” Alaric recited.
The third man with eyes too wide, nearly knocked his goblet. “Sir Renner Tavek,” he uttered quickly. “Your Highness, it’s truly an honor to be seated with you tonight. I imagine your schedule leaves little room for casual company.”
“My schedule,” he said, “is mostly filled with people telling me how busy I must be.”
Alaric might have possessed an enviable memory—events, dates, the architectural details of long-collapsed ruins—but he had already forgotten two of the men’s names.
They blended together into a blur of polished boots, curated opinions, and barely reined-in egos, all puffed up with the assurance that their experience of Aeltheris’s decline was somehow more profound than anyone else’s.
They seemed decent enough, in the way old war dogs sometimes did.
Mostly bark now, with just enough bite left to believe they were dangerous.
But he wasn’t in the mood. He was tired of Edrathen’s voice filtered through the same twelve noble throats, tired of arguing about grain taxes and border tensions with men who hadn’t stood within fifty paces of either in years.
So, he settled on nodding. Occasionally murmuring something appropriately neutral.
The diplomatic version of exhaling through the nose.
He let the conversation melt into background noise.
Corven rasped about Halbraith’s grain markets.
Vale muttered about mountain passes and Kaer’Vosh and the slow crawl of desperation.
Words like “conflict” and “drilling” and “fortifications” floated past, but none of it surprised him.
The same script, delivered in slightly different voices.
He wondered if Cedric had found a stronger drink or an unlocked door. He wondered whether anyone here could say the word “famine” without sounding like they were trying to win a debate about it.
But apparently, Alaric must have looked like his soul was preparing to depart from his body, because someone enthusiastically clapped him on the back.
“Ah. At last, I find thee. An age it has been.”
Alaric turned, a polite retort already forming, only to realize he had never seen this man in his life.
He was tall. His dark hair, long and loose, shimmered like lacquered ink. Bronze-brown skin, gold eyes that did not blink often enough. He wore a violet coat that might have been silk, and bore no visible badges, only a slim chain around his neck that disappeared beneath the collar.
The stranger smiled, effortlessly familiar. “You always did look like you’d rather drink fire than endure these diplomatic sermons.”
Alaric opened his mouth, shut it again, and—perhaps for the first time that evening—felt genuinely curious.
The stranger turned briefly to the baffled lords behind them, offering a courteous nod. “Forgive me, my lords. I shall borrow him but a while.”
There was a pause, just long enough for discomfort to bloom.
Alaric gave the seated men a practiced smile, rising to his feet. “Gentlemen,” he said, “it was a pleasure.”
“Come,” the man said, already guiding him away from the ring of weary titles and thinning patience. “There is wine waiting—and company less prone to dust and delusion.”
Alaric let himself be guided. Cedric raised an eyebrow from across the room but made no move to intervene. Either he trusted Alaric’s ability to fend off charismatic kidnappers, or he wanted the rest of his drink to himself. Possibly both.
They walked to a quieter alcove near the far wall, partially concealed behind an intricately carved folding screen.
A low table waited there, flanked by velvet-backed couches and candlelight soft enough to obscure intentions.
A servant appeared almost immediately with a decanter of Zhareshian sweet wine and a tray of glazed figs, dates, almonds, and delicate slivers of salted bread.
The scent alone was enough to uncoil some of the tension in Alaric’s neck.
He sat down slowly, the stranger across from him, still smiling.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” Alaric said, lifting the glass but not drinking. “Most people wait until after I’ve insulted them to drag me into shadowed corners.”
The stranger smiled, slow and warm. “The pleasure was mine,” he said, reclining with the ease of someone who had never once rushed through a sentence in his life.
“I have dwelt in this city but two days, and already I feel the years gathering in my bones. You, at least, bore the look of a man still capable of thinking for himself.”
Alaric quirked a brow. “And who exactly are you?”
“Irashe,” the man replied, with a slight dip of his head. “Emissary of Zharesh, for the wedding’s sake. A merchant, by honest labor. And on some days,” he added, with a playful flick of his fingers, “a Sandteller.”
Alaric’s brows lifted, though he kept his expression composed.
A Sandteller. Rare, these days. Their role was older than most kingdoms—part mystic, part historian, veiled in metaphor and memory.
They read omens in the shifting patterns of sand, believing that motion revealed meaning where words failed.
Once, they had served beside kings as advisors.
Now most were ornamental, used for court performances, if at all.
Alaric blinked. “You mean the kind who tells stories, or the kind who knows when the tides are turning?”
Irashe gave a small, elegant shrug. “Both, should the wine prove worthy of the tale.”
“And you’re saving me from an evening of theatrical grief about the grain markets because…?”
“Because foreigners must keep to one another,” Irashe said smoothly. Then, after a brief pause, his golden eyes scanned the room with a pointed slowness. “Most especially… in places such as this.”
His tone did not sharpen, but it didn’t have to. The House of Merit was the sort of place where native-born rank was inherited and reinforced like architecture. Even Alaric, despite his bloodline and title, could feel it in the walls—the slight stiffness that met his accent.
Alaric leaned back in his seat, finally sipping the wine. It burned less now.
“Go on, then,” he said. “Tell me a story.”
Irashe laughed—a soft, throaty sound, as though he were genuinely delighted by some secret only he knew.
“Once, long ago, there lived a man cursed with questions. He poked where he ought not, pressed where it was impolite, and asked until someone in a robe far too fine for their soul ordered his execution.” He tilted his head, gaze bright with mischief. “Does the bell toll yet?”
Alaric barked a laugh before he could help it, low and rough. “Very funny. My grandfather is still banned from your kingdom.”
“A wonderful man,” Irashe said. “Rare as rain in the dunes.”