14. Chapter Fourteen #2
Rafi shook his head and took his wrist from his sword hilt, where he tended to rest it whenever he wore a weapon. “But I have no intention of using it.”
The other nex smiled in a friendly way. “Maybe if young nobles and swersoldi could show off jewels and velvets instead of swords, there would be less trouble.”
Rafi opened and shut his mouth on his first response, then finally nodded.
The nex, the probable actor, used poetry in speech, so Rafi tried to respond as if Viau were there.
“My friends and I are here on what they have decided is a mild adventure—to find someone, except we know we won’t find them.
We aren’t going to start anything. We aren’t the sort anyway. ”
The other nex seemed intrigued, leaning in. “An adventure?”
“A quest, they call it,” Rafi confessed, sober enough from his walk to feel silly for saying it but drunk enough to say it anyway.
The other nex clapped their hands together, grinning. “A quest! Such whimsy. Perhaps you do belong in here, pretty one, you and your friends. This quest is to find someone? Someone in particular?”
“A missing aertotius,” Laure declared, sliding around Rafi to pick up the tray of cups and the bottle Rafi had paid for.
Laure must have had more than Rafi had seen him have, because he snorted at his own comment and only then seemed to notice Rafi was talking to someone.
He dared to look offended when Rafi frowned at him.
“We were simply hoping to visit someplace new, and thought perhaps we thought we might find a friend of ours here.” Rafi was clear enough that even a starry-eyed Laure should have understood him. “They thought. I didn’t.”
The other nex looked up to Laure, then back to Rafi. “A friend?” The question was so pointedly delicate that the nex must have guessed why anyone would cross a city to look for someone. When Rafi thought of it that way, he supposed it was obvious.
He hadn’t realized, but then, he was new to these things.
Laure put the tray down to pour some wine into one of the cups, then shoved the cup into Rafi’s hand.
“A lover,” Rafi admitted after downing the wine much too fast and handing the cup back.
Then he jerked his shoulders straight and his head up as he had the realization that he was being ridiculous and possibly rude, if the nex actor frequented this pub and was trying to welcome them.
“Pardon me. I’m tipsier than I usually get.
I should have asked if you’d like to join us, or at least to have a drink with us.
It’s nameday wine,” he revealed, and was pleased with himself for the manners and for not reaching for the nice nex’s aer.
The nice nex smiled back at him. “What mannerly creatures swersoldi are.”
“Not always,” Rafi admitted with a heavy breath. “We just learned from the ideal.”
Laure looked ready to offer him more to drink, which Rafi did not need. The pub smelled like sweat and the river, overwhelmingly so, and the noises were much the same. Any more wine and Rafi would start getting confused.
“The ideal swersoldi?” The nice nex glanced up to Laure again, frowning slightly.
“There are few of those. Very few, and most of them dead for a century at least. Hmm, I think I should introduce myself. I suspect I’m in the presence of those who might matter someday, if you know what I mean.
One hangs around a royal court long enough, one starts to get a sense of these things.
” Having stunned Laure into silence and Rafi into a painful hiccup, the nex held out a hand the way nobles did.
“I am Bellai Theo, known as Bellai. Incidentally, were you at the play tonight? What did you think of it?”
Laure, quicker than Rafi, balanced the tray so he could take the offered hand and kiss the air above the back of it, though Bellai was no noble. “Uh, we didn’t see it, although I’m sure we’ll return to do so.”
“Was it a success?” Rafi didn’t think he was nearly as graceful as he kissed his first noble hand—not noble hand. Playwright to the king was something, surely, but it was not noble. “Viau thinks you’re brilliant.”
Bellai patted his braided hair. “Did he say so? Well, people seemed to enjoy it, but whether or not it remains popular is the real proof. You should come for a performance….” He paused deliberately, putting Rafi in mind of arms instructors waiting for new students to get their weapons up and ready.
Then Rafi realized why Bellai was waiting and jumped as he belatedly introduced himself. “Oh. Rafi. That is, Rafeli Tizzan. This is Laure Virske.”
“Rafi,” Bellai echoed with a tiny, satisfied shimmy.
“I don’t want to take you from your friends but perhaps you might help me carry things to our table?
Since handsome Laure here seems to have your drinks well in hand?
” He glanced up to Laure again, raised an eyebrow, then gestured.
“My friends and I are right there in that room partially under the stairs. That drooping curtain conceals it from the greater space. Villon’s Room is its name, for a long-dead but once-renowned actor, not that anyone cares these days.
You’re of course welcome to join us there if you wish.
The room is small but there are plenty of seats. ”
Laure nodded as if every fact and request were not unusual, and left them while Rafi considered the slightly more private room and wondered if he was being flirted with.
He didn’t wonder for very long. Bellai handed him several empty cups and a bottle, accepted two bottles for himself, and ushered Rafi toward the area he had spoken of, nudging away the drooping curtain so Rafi could enter the space first.
“Look at the charming stray that followed me home!” Bellai called out despite the fact that he was behind Rafi and Rafi hadn’t followed him anywhere. The handful of people in the room all turned toward him. One of them was Viau.
Viau was at the far end of the room, his back to a wall, or really, to the backing of the large wooden chair he occupied.
The chair might have also once been a throne in a play, though the paint was cracked and faded so it was hard to tell its original purpose.
He had his head resting on his hand with his arm on the side of the chair, his boots on the table, and a long, unraveling curl threatening to fall into his flushed face.
His shirt was loose and he had no sword. He might have been anyone, and perhaps that was who he’d wanted to be when he’d started drinking, which he clearly had been.
But he startled up from his loose posture when Rafi came into the room, blinked rapidly, and then turned his head toward Bellai without taking his eyes from Rafi. “A charming stray? Yes, and a fierce one. A beautiful storm cloud.”
Storm cloud was for aedis, but Rafi was hardly going to bring that up before strangers, especially with his cheeks already stinging. He came forward to put the cups and bottle on the table where they were quickly snatched up, and then stumbled forward to the tired throne and its weary occupant.
“Are you a secret mage, Bell?” Viau gazed up at Rafi as if he didn’t care a jot for Bellai’s answer, though he nonetheless got one.
“I thought he might interest you!” Bellai continued to talk loudly even as he plopped down in an empty seat somewhere to Rafi’s side. “‘She sighed the name of her lover simply to feel her on her lips.’”
Rafi didn’t spare the playwright a glance. “You’re tired again.” That wasn’t what one ought to say to any kind of friend, although he wasn’t sure what would have been better. “Did you enjoy the play?”
“Did you?” Viau continued to stare, sweeping a look up and down Rafi’s body several times, focusing for a moment on Rafi’s wrist which had again fallen to his sword hilt.
He pushed out a sigh and looked back up to Rafi’s face.
“I should have taken you. I can take you. But Bellai is fretful on the first night and requires cosseting.”
“True, I’m afraid,” Bellai admitted, blatantly listening in.
“No.” Rafi stayed focused on Viau and answered his question. “We’ve been—Laure and Katoh and some of the others—we’ve been to the wine shops and a pub.”
“On a quest,” Bellai was annoying helpful, probably not as foxed as some of the others around them, “for someone.”
“Oh?” Viau had to be drunk to scowl so openly.
“For someone to…?” He stopped himself there and fell deeper into his throne as dramatically as any actor.
It made him look like a wicked king, or at least a sulking one.
But the display didn’t last long. Viau’s back was straight again almost instantly.
“Did you want to sit? Sorry, let me….” He moved to get up, gesturing for Rafi to take his seat, then hissing in surprise when Rafi pushed him down and fell clumsily against his side.
The seat was hard wood and uncomfortable but wide enough for two if Rafi turned to face him.
They stared at each other, impossibly close, and then Katoh’s merry voice rang through the room.
“They found each other! A successful quest indeed!”
Rafi was off the throne in the blink of an eye. He turned to consider the room, now full of five or six actors and Bellai, as well as Katoh and Laure, with Cambray peeking in behind them.
“I was the quest? Really?” Viau asked from behind Rafi.
He had no right to ask it so softly when Rafi couldn’t clear his head.
“Did you need something from me?” Now, Viau was concerned as well as soft.
“Something urgent, but not so urgent it couldn’t be put off for a cup or two?
I was going to see you in the morning, Rafi.
Even if my head hurts from my foolish choices tonight, I was going to. ”
Rafi didn’t meet a single eye in the room as he turned around. “I’m not angry. I only wanted….” Lots of things. But the specifics weren’t important. “I wanted,” he said again, just for Viau, and dropped down with he hoped slightly more grace to press himself to Viau’s side.