Chapter 3 #2
I huff a laugh, because damn it, he keeps catching me off guard.
He leads me onto the dance oval—a circle of pale stone polished so smooth I can see the lanternlight rippling across it like water.
Guests part without a word; it’s a well-oiled machine, the noble choreography of getting out of the way for the heirs.
Somewhere, Sneed hums in satisfaction. I can hear it even when I can’t see him.
Kaspian sets his right hand at my waist with precise decorum, not a fraction lower.
Safe. Respectful. Expected. Our fingers lace at shoulder height, and we start to turn.
The quartet slides into a low, sighing waltz.
Under the music, I catch the clink of cut crystal, a waiter’s soft apology, a burst of laughter that sounds a shade too bright.
“You grew up with courts like this?” I ask, keeping my voice dry to brace the tremor.
“Tragically,” he says. “And you?”
“Born into one. Drafted into another.” I tip my chin toward the cluster of dignitaries near the fountain, where Mom laughs at something Father says, her hand on his arm. “Felt like I never had a quiet thought unless I stole it after midnight.”
“That sounds lonely.”
He says it simply, not pitying. It lands somewhere tender.
I study his face as we turn: the practiced smile, the bright eyes that flick around the crowd the way mine do—measuring, filing, planning routes of escape.
He’s handsome in a brochure way, the kind you see on recruitment holos and think, oh, that man stands up straight.
But as we circle, his smile tugs wrong at one edge, like a thread caught under a ring.
“You’re nervous,” I say.
“Only charmingly so.” He grins, then drops it, the honesty showing. “All right. Very. I kept imagining you with horns.”
“Same,” I deadpan. “But the tailor hid mine in the bodice.”
He barks a laugh, quick and real, and I hate the little flash of satisfaction that zips through me when I make him do that. He doesn’t deserve my grudging delight. None of this does.
The music swells; my skirts shiver against his trousers as he turns me.
The lanterns tilting overhead make the world swing.
He smells faintly of cedar and some oceanic note I can’t place, like wind over salt.
I can almost see the mountain house he grew in, the etiquette tutors, the rooms that smelled like waxed floors and disapproval. He is not a villain.
It is, somehow, worse.
“May I confess something?” he asks, voice low enough that the quartet doesn’t drown it.
“If it’s something scandalous, absolutely.”
“I meant harmless.” His mouth twitches. “I don’t like being paraded. I don’t like being an emblem, or a treaty you can pour a drink for. I told my mother this was indecent. She said that’s what nobility is.”
“That sounds exactly like something a mother would say.”
“You know she’s terrifying.”
“I can tell from your posture.”
He laughs again, and this time the sound does something awful to me, because it warms the space we occupy and I don’t want warmth here. I want to be hard granite. I want to be impossible to hold.
My throat tightens. I drag my attention away from his face and let it snag where it always does: the edge of the lanternlight, where shadows stack into a deeper night.
Arms crossed. Jaw a hard line. Rayek leans against a fluted pillar half-swallowed in ivy like he’s part of the architecture, but he’s the only thing that looks honest out here.
He isn’t dressed for the ceremony; he’s in formal guard black—fitted jacket, high collar—polished boots that make no sound.
The floodlights etch silver along the scars at his temple, catching on the rim of his left horn ridge.
He’s not wearing his weapons, but he doesn’t need them. His eyes are enough.
My pulse stumbles so hard the step goes wrong. Kaspian adjusts instinctively, steadying me without a blink, and that tiny kindness makes me want to scream.
“You all right?” he asks softly.
“Shoes too tight,” I lie. The bodice, too.
The future, too. I make my smile polite.
If I look south, past the wisteria arch and the hedged labyrinth, I can feel Rayek’s gaze the way you feel sunlight when your eyes are closed, a warmth with weight, a line drawn across my bare upper back.
I should not turn. Every lesson in my bones says: do not turn.
But my body is already leaning, my attention is already there.
“Your guard,” Kaspian says, matter-of-fact. “He looks like he’d rather be flayed than at a garden party.”
“He would.” The answer comes out on a shaky breath I hope he doesn’t hear. “He’s not much for…this.”
“The spectacle?”
“The pretending.”
Kaspian considers that, then gives the smallest nod, like he files it away under Useful Truths. “He watches you like a man reads a map when the bridge is out.”
My laugh is too quick and too loud; a couple turns to look. Kaspian squeezes my fingers, subtle, pulling me back into the rhythm. I want to say don’t, you’re nice, and I don’t want your niceness, but my teeth are clenched on a scream I can’t let out.
“Lady Star?” Sneed is suddenly there as if conjured from ivy, moving with that precise, noiseless glide he has, a tray appearing on a waiter’s hands behind him like he willed it. His elongated pupils gleam politely. “A word regarding the procession order for the toast.”
“We’re not toasting yet,” I say, too sweet.
“In eight minutes,” he returns, and something about his smile says he’s known it would be eight minutes since sunrise.
“The chamberlain has a question about your positioning. Closer to the dais will photograph better.” His gaze flits to Rayek’s shadow and back to me with surgical restraint. “And appearances matter.”
Kaspian’s grip loosens; he understands the cue. “Duty calls,” he says, more wry than wounded.
“I’ll find you,” I tell him, and then hate the way the sentence feels like an oath.
He bows and steps back into the swirl of nobility and lanternlight.
Sneed turns with me, steering in that infuriatingly gentle way, never touching, always ushering.
When we pass within ten paces of the pillar, my eyes tilt, traitor that they are.
Rayek is a monolith with a heartbeat. He looks past me deliberately, gaze sweeping the perimeter as if I’m just another shrub to account for in a threat assessment.
I should be grateful. I asked for this when I said anything aloud today.
I pushed him into his mask. But the smallness that blossoms in my chest is vicious.
It feels like being overlooked by your own shadow.
“Seneschal,” I say, stopping dead. “Why does the dais need me closer when the camera drones can adjust?”
“Because,” Sneed says, not missing a beat, “the person you’re dancing with is the guest of honor. And the person you are looking at is not.”
“Have I been looking?” My smile shows teeth; it isn’t friendly.
“You’re very good at it,” he says mildly, as if complimenting a dessert. “One scarcely notices. But some of us do.”
I hold his gaze long enough to register the message underneath the manners.
I hate how deft he is. How impossible to argue with without making a scene I am not allowed to make.
Over Sneed’s shoulder, Rayek shifts—the smallest change.
Arms uncross, recross. The movement ripples along every nerve I possess.
“Fine,” I say, the word clipped. “Let’s talk about photo angles.”
We move through the lanes of white chairs and crystal flutes set on hovering trays.
The quartet swells into a piece that sounds like a leviathan surfacing.
I play my part, answering Sneed’s questions about when I will approach the dais, how long the toast should run, where to stand so the Feldspar crest and the Chambers crest share equal prominence.
I nod and nod until my neck feels like a hinge.
When he’s satisfied, he evaporates back into logistics and servers and the delicate tyranny of protocol.
I could force it—I could pivot suddenly, step out of position, cross to that pillar and say something wild and ruinous like I see you.
But the unsmiling discipline on Rayek’s face stops me.
He is here as a guard. I am here as a bride-to-be.
We are two statues carved for different niches in the same cathedral.
I retreat instead, my breath pushing shallow against the bodice, my chest a birdcage.
A server offers a flute; I take it. The bubbles sting my tongue.
It tastes like coins. The party rolls on without me, as parties do.
Somewhere, Kaspian laughs at something my dad says; it’s a good laugh, a decent man’s sound, and I hate it because it makes me ache in a brand-new direction—toward a life that would be fine and tender and not mine.
By the time the toast is done and the sky has deepened to a violet that looks bruised, I’ve smiled so long my face is numb.
I slip away down the side passage that leads to the east balcony, past a pair of guards who pretend not to see me because they are well-trained and also fond of continuing to live.
The corridor cools, stone releasing the day’s heat in slow breaths.
My shoes click-soft. The music thins behind me, a thread pulled through fabric.
The balcony door is heavy; I shoulder it open and step into a pocket of quiet.
The night air wraps around me cool and fragrant, the spiceflowers less cloying out here, the sweetness cut by mineral wind from the cliffs.
Below, the grounds glimmer with spilled silver, the party reduced to a distant constellation of lanterns and moving shadows.
I sink onto the cold bench built into the balustrade and let my spine curve, the posture police blissfully absent.
I pull the pins from my hair one by one until the tight ache along my scalp eases.
The metal clinks on stone like rain. My hands smell like citrus and champagne; my mouth tastes like laughter I didn’t mean.
I tip my head back and look at the slice of stars between the cypress crowns, trying to remember what it felt like to be a girl who could still run without someone counting her steps.
Out there, everything seems to be moving forward—guests descending, toasts rising, crests aligned, smiles practiced, a fiancé who is kind and funny and a good man in every measurable way—and I am sitting here, feeling like someone pulled me in two directions and forgot to stitch me back together.
It’s all clicking into place around me while something quiet and crucial fractures.
I listen to the music drift up, to the thrum of generator hum far under the stones, to the night insects singing like tiny engines.
The wind lifts the edge of my skirt and cools the sweat at the back of my knees.
I press my palms to the marble and breathe until the sharpness in my chest dulls to something I can wear back into the light.
Everything’s moving forward.
And I’m coming apart.