24. Chapter 24 #2
"I was made to learn it at nine. There was an instructor. She counted out loud." His hand is enormous against my back and exactly nowhere near my left shoulder. "I've never enjoyed it before."
Then, after about eight bars:
"The wall's bare," he says.
"I noticed."
"It has been bare my entire life. I've walked past it at this dinner since I was a child and never once seen it." His voice doesn't change at all. "I can't stop seeing it now."
Torres cuts in with no technique whatsoever and absolutely no shame about it.
"I don't know any of this," he says, taking my waist.
"I know."
"I'm going to hold you and move. That's the whole plan."
"It's a good plan."
He holds me and tries to dance. He's terrible at it. I keep laughing into his shoulder, and he smells like the soap in my bathroom because he's been showering there for a month.
"Last time," he says, "you got humiliated by a girl in blue and I came and got you off the edge of the floor."
"I remember."
"I've been thinking about it all week." He turns us badly. "I asked you because I thought somebody should. Then I spent the whole song working out that I didn't want anybody else to."
"Mateo."
"Don't get weird about it, we're in public." He grins. "Also I'd like it on the record that you asked Draeven first."
"He was closer."
"He was closer."
Natasha waits until Torres has gone to get me water and Soren has been claimed by his own delegation.
She's in emerald tonight and she looks extraordinary and she knows it. She stops beside me, and her eyes go from my dress to the place where Soren's hand was.
"Orange," she says. "That's subtle."
"I wasn't going for subtle."
"Clearly."
She looks around the room. Luke by the doors. Ander at the Ardent tables. Soren with the councillors. Torres coming back with two glasses.
"Yesterday," she says, "you asked the Council not to assume anything it couldn't prove. Tonight you've dressed like they've already restored you."
And there it is, and it lands, because it's true.
There are so many ways I could respond to this bitch. Deep breath, Jessica.
"They haven't," I say.
"I know."
"So do I."
Natasha looks at me for a second longer. Then she inclines her head — not much, maybe fifteen degrees, the exact gesture she once told me I would never be owed — and walks away.
Torres hands me a glass. "What did she want?"
"She was right about something."
"Do you need me to be outraged?"
"Not yet."
Luke finds me later, out on the long stone gallery that runs off the side of the hall, where the air is cold enough to hurt and the music is a wall of sound behind glass.
He doesn't ask if I'm all right. He hands me his jacket and leans on the balustrade beside me.
"You've gone somewhere," he says.
"She's right. That's the problem."
“I hate when Natasha has a point. What did she say?”
I look out at the dark going down the mountainside.
"I stood up in that chamber and told them not to claim anything they couldn't prove," I say. "And then I opened my wardrobe and put on a dead House's colors and walked into their hall in them."
"Yes," Luke says. "I noticed. It was the single most effective thing anyone did this week."
"That isn't the same as honest."
"No." He turns his head. "Do you want it?"
I've been avoiding that question for two days. It has been sitting in the middle of my chest since Wren said the words standing, succession, restoration in the flattest voice in Europe.
"I'm going to ask for restoration," I say.
Luke is quiet for a second.
"Of the House."
"Yes."
"Do you know what you're asking for?"
"No."
That makes him smile — a real one, surprised out of him, nothing political in it anywhere.
"That's not usually how people announce things like this."
"I know what I want. I don't know what all of it means yet."
"Then what do you want?"
"I want it to exist."
Luke waits.
"I want the name back. I want the history corrected where we can prove it's wrong. I want a banner on that wall."
"And after that?"
"I don't know."
"Land?"
"Not until I know who lives on it and what taking it back would actually mean."
He nods.
"Council seat?"
"I don't know that either." I get my hands around the cold stone. "So I want restoration. I want the chance to work out what restoration means."
Luke looks at me for a long moment.
"They're going to fight you on it," he says.
"I know."
"Not quickly and not cleanly. My House will be on both sides of it and I'll be on yours, out loud, at cost." He straightens up off the balustrade. "I wanted to say that before you asked, so you never have to wonder whether I needed talking into it."
"Luke—"
"Also you're freezing and you're wearing my jacket, and if we stay out here much longer Sophia will come and find us and I'm not prepared for that." He offers his arm. "Come back inside. You've got people waiting for you."
Inside, Sophia takes one look at me and confiscates me entirely.
"You have danced with enough men," she announces, hauling me onto the floor. "It is my turn."
We dance badly. Renzo joins in and is immediately the best dancer in the hall, which everybody hates.
Declan, asked directly, turns out to move like a man who has been to a great many Irish weddings, and the entire scholarship section reorganizes around him.
And at some point I look over and Freya — who said at least three separate times today that she was not going to dance — is dancing, with great precision, exactly on the beat, wearing the face of a woman completing an assignment.
"Don't," she says, without looking at me.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to."
Ander doesn't ask either, but for a different reason than Soren.
He appears at my elbow between songs, says nothing at all, takes my hand, and the musicians start something faster than anything they've played all evening — older, with a turn in it every few bars — and it becomes immediately obvious that Ander Ardent has known this dance since before he could read.
"What is this?"
"Ardent set the program. This one's ours." He puts me through the first turn and my skirt goes out and I laugh in surprise. "Four hundred year old dance. I've hated it since age six."
"You don't look like you hate it."
"I don't hate it tonight."
He's good. He's better than Luke and by the third turn he's stopped caring, and by the end of it Ander is laughing out loud in a public hall in front of his own House's delegation with his hand in mine.
I've known him for two years. I have never once seen that.
"They're staring at you," I tell him.
"Let them," he says, and spins me again.
Later on, when the crowd has thinned and I've got my shoes in one hand because my feet gave up twenty minutes ago, I'm at the water table with my back to the room when Jon appears beside me.
He doesn't stand close. He picks up a glass he doesn't want.
"Orange," he says.
"Everybody keeps saying that."
"I was going to say it suits you."
"That's better."
His eyes move over me once, all the way, and come back up.
"Considerably."
"Professor."
"Mm." He turns the glass. "I saw that dress the first time you wore it."
"I know you did. I watched you."
"Did you?"
"You went still and then you went polite. It took about a second and a half." I look at him. "You knew what the color was."
"Yes."
"You didn't say."
"No." Jon sets the glass down without drinking any of it.
"You were a first-year four months into a world you hadn't agreed to join.
You didn't need a professor telling you you'd accidentally put on a dead House's livery in a room with three banners in it.
" A pause. "I went home and sat up until two in the morning about it, if that's any consolation. "
"It's a bit of a consolation."
"Good."
Behind us the music keeps going. Somebody drops a glass and forty people cheer.
"I'm going to ask for restoration," I say.
Jon goes quiet.
"What do you want restored?"
"The House."
"That isn't an answer."
I look at him.
"A name?" Jon says. "A Council seat? Property?"
"I don't know."
"That's the homework."
"I didn't come to a ball for homework."
"No, you came to a ball in the color of your own House and stood under an empty wall where everyone could see you do it." The corner of his mouth moves. "I'd have done the same thing. I'd have been less magnificent about it."
"Jon."
"Go and dance, Jessica." He picks up the glass again, entirely as a prop. "I'm faculty until midnight and for some considerable time after that."
"Saturday still stands?"
"Saturday still stands," Jon says. "Bring the mug."
Torres catches my hand when the music starts again.
"Come on, princess."
"Don't call me that."
"Heir?"
"Worse."
"Jessica?"
I let him pull me onto the floor.
"That'll do."