Chapter 21
Talisa
Two large, warm hands folded around mine.
Elio said nothing. He simply covered my hands with his, steadying the candle—and my hands—until it was firmly set in the votive stand, and the flame burned straight again.
I turned my head and looked up at him.
He wasn’t looking at me. He was watching the candle. Its light gilded the sharp lines of his jaw and high cheekbones and made his amber eyes glow.
I love him.
When did this happen?
It wasn’t just today, or because of the comforting warmth of his hands cupping mine.
I loved him for all the times he’d stood in a doorway waiting for me, every time he’d pulled me into his arms and comforted me without being asked, every time he’d said we’ll figure this out like there was no version of my problems that didn’t belong to him, too.
Those threatening mannequins hanging from the tree in front of the dining hall. The infirmary, where I’d woken to find him there. The moment he’d pressed his lips to my bandaged hand and said I thought they’d killed you.
He’d been there for me every time. And I’d been so busy surviving the semester that I hadn’t let myself notice.
I was suddenly terrified of how lucky I was. And how quickly that kind of luck could change.
What if I lose him, too?
When Elio finally looked at me, my mind went blank as a fresh surge of emotion overwhelmed me.
Does he feel the same way about me? My mind frantically reviewed all our interactions. He cared for me. That much was plain. But am I like a sister to him? Or something more?
My throat went dry. I wanted it to be something more… but what if I ruined everything by misinterpreting what might only be friendship, and nothing more?
I held his gaze for a beat longer than was strictly friendly, then looked back at the bank of candles burning in the stand at the Divine Mother’s feet.
A movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. I turned my head and saw Lukhan FitzMurad staring at me… not with his usual hatred but with an expression that I’d never seen before.
Could that really be sympathy?
∞∞∞
Lukhan
I arrived at the chapel before anyone else and chose a seat near the back out of force of habit, positioning myself where I could see everyone without being easily observed. I hadn’t planned to come at all. Sentiment was a luxury I couldn’t afford.
But Remembrance Day was important, and the campus was all but deserted. None of the people whose judgment mattered were here to see me in this moment of detestable public weakness.
Staying on campus over the winter break had been a better option than going back to Demirkalé. My father’s manor was cold in every sense—cold corridors, cold silences, and cold looks from my stepmother and my three stepsisters.
Going there would’ve meant spending ten days being reminded of exactly what I was and wasn’t, in that house where every kindness had evaporated since my paternal grandmother, my beloved Nene Lale, died last spring.
I sat in the back pew and waited for the service to begin.
Nene Lale, otherwise known as the Dowager Baroness Lalek Hanim, had called me Luk since before I could remember.
Not Lord Lukhan. Not FitzMurad, the name that was a reminder of my father’s inescapable mistake with a Fae seductress.
Just Luk, in her warm, slightly husky voice, with her hands cupping my face and her eyes crinkling at the corners.
She’d been the one to teach me how to deadhead the roses in her private garden, and how to read the weather from cloud formations, and she’d never once, in all the years I lived at Demirkalé before being sent away to boarding school, made me feel as though my existence was an embarrassment to the family name.
When the priest had finished his prayers, I stood and lined up with the others to light a candle and offer a private prayer to the Divine Mother.
The incense stung my eyes as I set my candle on the stand beside the others.
Fighting the urge to wipe my face, I spoke Nene Lale’s name in a voice that I kept level through sheer will, so that no one watching me could tell how much I missed her.
Then I returned to my seat, sat down, and felt nothing. That was what I told myself.
I watched my fellow worshippers light their candles with the attention I applied to most social situations—cataloguing, assessing, maintaining the careful distance I’d learned to keep between myself and everyone else.
Most of the others were commoners. A few had already been emotional before the candle ceremony, making undignified displays of grief and even sobbing out loud during the service.
Discipline before power. It wasn’t only a mage’s maxim. It applied to emotions as well, and it was a lesson some people evidently hadn’t mastered.
I was observing a pair of third-year students whispering behind their hands when I noticed that Talisa of Bernswick and her twin sisters were in attendance as well.
But of course they were. And I should have expected them to be here.
The sight of them produced its usual mixed response in me: contempt, irritation, and underneath both, the deep terror I refused to name.
I watched them make their way through the line, Miss Fishwife in the middle with her sisters pressed close to either side. Ferraro was with them, naturally, because where else would he be? He fell into step at her shoulder with the ease of someone who had long since stopped needing an invitation.
They apparently hadn’t noticed me yet, so I observed them as they took their turn in front of the Divine Mother’s statue.
Within moments of lighting their candles, all three of them were weeping, sobbing and holding each other in that entirely uninhibited way that commoners seemed to find perfectly natural.
I looked away. There was nothing to be gained from watching.
Against my will, an unwelcome memory rose.
I stood in the chapel at Demirkalé. I was nine years old, and my grandfather’s coffin had been placed in front of the Divine Mother’s statue.
I hadn’t cried because I’d always been afraid of the old baron, and I was relieved he was finally dead.
And also Father was standing right beside me, and he thought crying was weakness, and weakness was not to be tolerated in one of noble blood like ours.
All throughout the funeral, with its endless speeches and prayers, I had held myself still, with my chin up and shoulders back, until my neck and back both ached fiercely.
But it was worth it, because afterward Father touched my shoulder and told me, good lad and I felt an immense satisfaction at this rare morsel of praise.
No matter that impassivity had been easy to maintain for an old man who had despised me as a reminder of Father’s fatal mistake.
In a way, it was probably good that I’d missed Nene Lale’s funeral. Because I might have descended to the same undignified depths as those three commoners from the Western Isles who were weeping for their mother with absolutely no care for the spectacle they were making of themselves. In public.
Then Miss Fishwife looked up, her eyes red and swollen, her plain cheeks wet with tears, and our gazes met. And for a moment, I envied her.
What is like to have the freedom to move through the world without caring who’s watching and judging?
To be able to openly mourn the people you loved without worrying about maintaining the proper comportment and dignity required of the heir to the barony of Demirkalé?
I realized what I was doing and looked away. Am I actually jealous of this undisciplined display of sentiment in a public space?
It was the kind of thing one expected from the lower orders, people who’d been raised with no proper instruction in self-regulation. It was the difference between those of us bred to the responsibilities of our position and those who had blundered into spaces above their station.
Grief was always private. Grief was always managed.
Renewed anger jolted through me.
Why in Nemara’s name is she still here?
The fine, the lab, the investigation—all of it intended to make the cost of staying at the academy prohibitive.
Nadia Montoro had been sensible. She had understood the message and drawn the correct conclusion. Talisa of Bernswick had apparently decided the message didn’t apply to her, which was, I had to admit, an extremely irritating quality in an enemy.
She won’t be able to pay the fine, I reassured myself. No peasant from the Western Isles has that much extra money to spare.
She would be expelled at the end of the academy year, and that would be that. I just had to wait. And hope that she didn’t decide to ruin me before she departed.
I was watching her fumble her attempt to put her candle in the stand—and telling myself I was watching the candle, not her—when Ferraro reached out and covered her hands with his.
He kept his hands around hers, steady and unhurried, while she got herself under control. He didn’t make a show of it. He didn’t look around to see if anyone was watching. He just held her until her shaking stopped.
His attention was focused entirely on her, his expression containing a quiet intensity that had nothing performative about it.
Something in my chest twinged, as sharp and uncomfortable as a red-hot needle.
It’s unfair.
Miss Fishwife had arrived at this academy with no connections, no money, no standing, nothing but an outrageous amount of nerve and a ready supply of younger students desperate for someone to tell them everything would be all right.
Somehow, in the space of fifteen weeks, she’d captured a boy who looked at her like that, a circle of fifty loyal followers, and the admiration of all the first-year and second-year commoner students.
Last week, Damien had said goodbye with one of his long, considering looks, the ones that always made me feel as though he were reading something in my face I didn’t know I was showing.
Then he’d taken the ferry upriver to the legionary base where his father currently held command, leaving me alone in a dormitory that echoed.
Damien was the only person other than Nene Lale who had ever acted as though he genuinely liked me. And even he’d never looked at me the way Ferraro was looking at her right now.
I stood abruptly. Closing prayers be damned, I had to get out of here. Now.
Without making eye contact with the priest or anyone else, I left the chapel.
It had started raining again and the drops felt sharp enough to sting. Not caring whether I got soaked, I strode across the deserted campus with my jaw set and tried to gather my composure.