Chapter 6 #2
“That is not—” Jasvian began, and then evidently reconsidered the wisdom of arguing the point. He cleared his throat. “Regardless. Hadrian is unlikely to be in Bloomhaven this Season, and I think we ought to respect that.”
“And who can blame him?” Rosavyn said. “Ever since that strumpet broke his heart—”
“Rosavyn Rowanwood!” Lady Rivenna’s voice cut across the table. “One does not use such a word when speaking of a lady, no matter how questionable her conduct.”
“Well, now I really must know what happened,” Kazrian said.
“Did I not tell you to return sooner?” Rosavyn said. “Look at all the things you have missed. And this one is quite the story. I’m surprised you did not hear of it in the Shaded Lands. The lady in question—”
“The lady in question,” their grandmother interjected smoothly, “was discovered to have formed an attachment to a gentleman she had known before Lord Blackbriar’s courtship began.
An attachment which had, it transpired, never entirely concluded, even after she accepted Lord Blackbriar’s suit.
It was discovered when the two of them were …
” She paused. “Well. How does one put it delicately?”
“Quite literally attached to one another on a settee in the gentleman’s private library?” Rosavyn offered.
Lady Rivenna gave her a withering look. “That is not what I meant by delicately, and you know it.”
“More delicate than the gossip birds’ version.”
“Good stars,” Kazrian said. “Poor Hadrian.”
“I know,” Rosavyn said with feeling. “It was dreadful. Now you understand my use of the term—”
“A dreadful scandal indeed,” Lady Rivenna said, cleanly and firmly, before the term in question could make a second appearance at the dinner table.
“It was a great blow to Lord Hadrian, and most undeserved. I have always liked him.” She paused to consider her wine.
“Though I confess I have never once managed to get an accurate read on the boy. The leaves have always been muddied where he is concerned. Most unsatisfying.”
Kazrian could not help the smile that tugged at his mouth, first at the notion of Lord Hadrian Blackbriar, who must be close to thirty years of age by now, being referred to as ‘the boy,’ and second at the fact that his grandmother still consulted the tea leaves, a tradition that much of modern Bloomhaven society had long since dismissed as quaint superstition.
His grandmother, naturally, considered modern Bloomhaven society to be wrong.
“And is Hadrian aware of this reading?” he asked gravely. “That his leaves are ‘unsatisfying’? It seems the sort of thing a man would want to know about himself.”
“Do not be impertinent,” said his grandmother.
“To return to the matter at hand,” Iris said, “Hadrian has become rather withdrawn since it all happened. He seems to have taken this most recent disappointment quite hard. Understandably so. Everyone thought the match so promising before the lady proved herself to be rather … well.”
“Severely lacking in judgment?” Mariselle said. “It makes little sense to me. By any reasonable accounting, he is one of the most eligible fae lords in the whole of the United Fae Isles. Good family, good fortune, good looks. What on earth was some lady doing throwing away a match like that?”
“Was there not someone else, too?” Kazrian said, frowning slightly. “The Season before I left for the Shaded Lands. Was he not engaged? Or—no. Was he—”
“Almost engaged,” Mariselle supplied. “A promising match, I believe.”
“Yes.” Kazrian nodded. “And before that—” He broke off, fixing his gaze carefully on a point among the bread rolls and holding it there by force of will instead of allowing it to land on Iris.
The rest of his words died a quiet and sensible death in his mouth.
He had been only sixteen at the time, and the details had been above his head, but he knew that Hadrian and Iris had been engaged, briefly, before Iris and Jasvian had found their way to one another.
It had all seemed perfectly amicable—at least as far as Kazrian could tell.
Jasvian and Hadrian were still the closest of friends, after all.
But seeming amicable and being a subject one raised cheerfully over dinner were two rather different things.
Three years ago, Kazrian would almost certainly have blundered straight through the thought and out the other side before it occurred to him to stop.
He was rather better now at recognizing a sentence he ought not to finish.
“He should marry you, Rosy Posy,” Mariselle said.
Rosavyn’s mouth dropped open. She blinked in apparent horror. Then she pointed her fork at Evryn. “You traitor. I cannot believe you told her that awful name.”
“But it is so sweet!” Mariselle protested.
“I loathe it.”
Mariselle was laughing now. “Loathe? I do not believe you capable of loathing anything, you veritable ray of sunshine.”
But Kazrian’s mind had snagged on Mariselle’s suggestion.
It had seemed absurd for the space of a breath—and then considerably less absurd the longer he turned it over.
The more he considered it, in fact, the more the pieces seemed to fit with the quiet, satisfying precision of a mechanism clicking into place. “She has a point, Rosy Posy.”
“Not you too!” The fork swung in his direction now. “It is not sweet. It has been banned from this family since I was eight years old.”
“Ah, that must be why I have never heard this delightful name before, Rosy Posy,” Iris said, her expression all innocence as she gazed across the table at Rosavyn.
Rosavyn’s eyes narrowed. “Do not.”
“Do cease brandishing the cutlery like a fencing foil,” Lady Rivenna sighed.
“I meant,” Kazrian said to Rosavyn, “that Mariselle has a point about you and Hadrian.”
“Oh. That.” Rosavyn set her fork down, picked up her wine glass, and waved the suggestion away with a laugh.
“Do not be ridiculous. He is Hadrian. How strange would that be? And there is the small matter of my lack of manifestation, which you seem to have forgotten. Even Hadrian, as good a man as he is, cannot overlook that.”
Kazrian had not forgotten, of course. He doubted there was a soul in all of Bloomhaven who was not abundantly aware of the unmanifested Rowanwood daughter.
The gossip birds had seen to that with admirable thoroughness, shrieking it from the rooftops of Bloomhaven every Season for the past several years.
He had even, during his time in the Shaded Lands, sought out a number of older texts on rarer forms of manifestation.
Late emergences, dormant abilities, gifts that presented in ways the standard classifications did not account for.
He had not mentioned any of this to Rosavyn.
She joked about it, her unmanifested status—joked about spinsterhood and freedom and the considerable advantages of having no one’s expectations to meet—but he knew her well enough to hear what sat beneath the jokes.
He would not make it worse by prodding at a wound she had already decided to carry quietly.
In the quiet that followed, Mariselle reached across the table and laid her hand over Rosavyn’s.
Neither of them said anything, but Kazrian watched as a current of understanding passed between the two of them, a look that seemed to fold them into a private room and quietly close everyone else out of it.
Kazrian turned this over in his mind, attempting to make sense of it.
Because Mariselle had manifested—perfectly on time and with magic that had turned out to be most impressive—so it could not be the particular grief of the unmanifested that connected them.
Whatever had just passed between his sister and sister-in-law belonged to some equation Kazrian did not have all the terms for.
People did not balance the way numbers balanced.
That was the trouble with them. Numbers had the great and underrated virtue of always meaning precisely what they said.
A four was a four whether you liked it or not, and it stayed a four, and it never once looked at you across a tea house kitchen as though you were the only thing that mattered and then informed you that you were not.
Hypothetically speaking, of course.
“On the subject of marriage,” Lady Rivenna said.
“Oh, good stars.” Rosavyn closed her eyes. “I had dared to hope we were finished with that particular subject for the evening.” Mariselle withdrew her hand.
“Every Season presents a fresh opportunity, my dear. I see no reason this one should prove any different.”
“I can think of one rather significant reason,” Rosavyn said. “I have advanced a further year without manifesting.”
“All I wish to point out,” their grandmother said, “is that a suitable marriage would go a considerable way toward helping your situation. You are fae, so you would receive a title through the match—Lady someone or other—which is not nothing.”