Chapter 17
seventeen
Nesrina puts beads on a string.
Afew days later, Nesrina found a package addressed to her in the entrance hall. Snatching it from atop the pile, she hardly even glanced at the rest of the delivery, lest Lord Kahoth accuse her of snooping.
Mama mailed her a note and the heartstone necklace she’d requested.
It was part of her backup plan with Lord Kahoth.
Papa gave Nes the necklace when she was young.
While she couldn’t bring herself to part with every bead, the loss of a few was a reasonable price to pay for the chance to attend the symposium.
Directly against her skin, even all nine beads could no longer fully stifle her magic, though they’d make a nice dent in it.
The twins, however, should still be weak enough for three beads each to work like a charm.
In her letter, Mama asked how Nes was faring, and casually mentioned she had an unexpected visitor, Prince Nekash.
Ew. He was passing through Napivol and had offered to take an appointment with Mama in lieu of someone lower-ranking from the king’s staff.
The interview included questions about Nesrina’s upbringing, her father’s background, and more.
Nes figured it was the king checking references since she hadn’t had any written referrals to bring with her to court.
She hoped the Rashoolis spoke well of her too.
She had much to tell Mama in her reply, mainly about the children and her upcoming trip to the symposium.
Mama wasn’t as avidly anti-aristocracy as her father had been, but Nes suspected Tamla Kiappa wouldn’t respond well to hearing of her daughter’s personal interactions with the duke—nor with the departed soldier, for that matter.
Those weren’t the sort of things one told one’s mother.
“It’s not working!” Della’s voice was laced with frustration.
“I know,” Ataht whined.
Nesrina grinned. She’d given them their new necklaces and asked them to create balls and mallets for a game of croquet. They couldn’t do it. “Good.”
“What’s ‘good’?” Akkas’s rumbling voice smashed into her before he followed it into the glade.
“Nothing! We can’t do magic anymore!” Della screeched.
The top two buttons of the duke’s shirt were undone in the heat. With one hound on each side, shirtsleeves rolled up, and a bit of branch stuck in his ever-tousled hair, Lord Kahoth looked how she imagined Vites—the forest god, not the dog—would appear.
“Help, Uncle Kas!” Ataht pleaded before pointing an accusatory finger at Nes. “She did something to us!”
He laughed, unalarmed. “Nesrina, what did you do to my hellions?”
She dragged her eyes up from his chest, her stomach flipping at the sound of her first name on his lips. “The heartstone’s here.”
“Let me see,” he said, sounding giddy . . . over some rocks. Ataht pulled his necklace off and handed it over.
“How does it work?” the princess asked, trying again to create something, and scowling when she couldn’t.
“It shields our magic, blocks it, stops us from drawing on chaos.”
“It works on you too?” Della asked, disbelief widening her eyes.
“Yes. But I need more beads these days.”
Catching her eye, Lord Kahoth smirked, and Nes’s insides tightened. Gently rolling a bead between his thumb and forefinger, he held it up to the light, studying it. “These appear to be hand-faceted, fascinating.”
“Are you testing the quality of the stone?”
With a snort, he said, “It implies they were made somewhere without elemental mages. Hand-chipped.”
She shrugged. “I never considered it, and Papa never said.”
Fatema arrived then, waving to Nes before dragging the whining children away for their afternoon activities. Enoth and Vites—the dogs, not the gods—tagged along eagerly, far more excited by the boisterous twins than by whatever their master had to offer.
“A word, when you have a moment, Miss Kiappa?”
Nesrina gathered her things, her focus split between the god-like duke hovering near the water and a desire to rush inside and climb into bed with a book.
She was exhausted, in no small part from the nerves fizzling and frying her mind each time she considered spending two days trapped in a carriage with Lord Kahoth. What did he want to discuss?
He stood fifteen feet away, gazing out at the dense forest beyond the stream, seemingly unaware of the way the tips of his boots dipped into the rushing water while his heels stood on the crunchy sand.
“Are we back to Miss Kiappa?” she checked, moving closer to where he stood.
“Hmm?” He turned his head an inch in her direction, as if she’d interrupted him and not the other way around.
“You called me Nesrina,” she blurted.
A blush rose to his cheeks, and he reached up to palm the back of his neck. “Ah. Is that all right? You called me Akkas first.”
Affronted, she lifted a hand to her chest. “I did not! I would never.”
“You wouldn’t? Not even when you were shouting at me through an air vent in the library?”
A hot breeze wound itself around her, tickling the hairs at the back of her neck. She scratched at it, and replied, “Perhaps it was a slip.”
“Perhaps I slipped too,” he retorted. “You know, Nesrina, I find it interesting that, despite our best efforts, we appear to be becoming friends.”
She wanted to toss herself into the stream, clothes and all.
“They keyword there being ‘appear.’” She laughed awkwardly.
The duke wasn’t wrong, per se. She’d had a similar thought a few days before.
But something about his words bothered her, triggering a flutter of anxiety in her belly that had her mouth pushing out a silly response rather than agreeing with him, which would have been amenable and far more appropriate.
He was studying her behind those deep chestnut lashes. “Why do you detest me?”
Detest? She stepped back, heel sinking into the silt beside the stream. “I don’t— It’s not—”
It was complicated, confusing, of course, with him being aristocratic and her being common.
The two groups didn’t mingle, everyone knew that.
It wasn’t done. It was inappropriate. Inadvisable.
They didn’t have anything in common: different upbringings, different moral codes, different expectations, different desires.
Finally, she found her words. Trying to convey why their friendship had her all tangled in knots, she summarized, “It’s not done, Your Grace. I’m a tutor. You’re a duke.”
His soft chuckle wound its way over to her, a low sound that for some reason made her crave hot honey on bread. Ignoring her remarks, he pulled a wad of papers from his pocket and gestured to the stump seats. “It’s Kas, by the way.”
“What?”
“Everyone calls me Kas, not Akkas. That’s for when I’m in trouble.”
“Noted.” Baffled, she followed him to sit down. Did he not care about their differences? Had he not understood her words?
“Do you have a few minutes? I thought we might go through the program, see which sessions look most interesting before we get on the road tomorrow?”
Nodding, she joined him. Perhaps a temporary friendship, for the sake of their upcoming journey, was advisable.
“Nes is fine,” she announced abruptly, and caught his quick grin.
They perused the symposium’s program several times over, taking turns reading the descriptions aloud and making little marks beside the ones they planned to attend.
When it was Kas’s turn to read, Nes found she had trouble paying attention to the content.
His voice was like a fine whiskey, and she wanted to drink it up.
“I see Talik Thanin’s article will be discussed in the afternoon, the last event before the gala.” He pointed to a paragraph at the bottom of the page.
Nes leaned in, eager to read the author’s name and blurb with her own eyes.
“Although, I was thinking we could leave before then. It makes sense to skip that presentation and get on the road before traffic becomes unbearable.”
Oh. But Thanin was her favorite author, and the closing gala the most beautiful event of the symposium.
“Nes.”
She looked up at him, lips pulled down in a frown.
“I’m teasing. I know you love that man.”
“I do not love him!” Her cheeks bunched as she fought a smile.
“Mmm, I don’t know, you seem pretty smitten to me. That blush.” He reached up, finger coming so close to brushing her face she could feel static before he pulled away.
“I’m not smitten. He could be an old man, for all I know. Angry and pock-marked with a bulbous red nose from too much drink.”
He snorted.
“What? I can’t say for sure. Not many can, after all.”
“Fair enough.” Kas chuckled. “He’s elusive, that Thanin.”