Chapter 11
Prominence
Elloven didn’t feel like she’d slept more than a few hours, but the twilight beyond the wispy curtains told another story.
Had she really lost an entire morning?
A day?
She pulled herself from the warm bed with a halfhearted stretch as she made her way to the loft balcony. Jesstin was already awake and clothed. He was looking out a window on the bottom floor, his arms crossed.
It took her a few minutes to work up the nerve to say anything. “I didn’t mean to oversleep.”
Jesstin glanced up. “Haven’t been up long myself. Half tick of the sun at most.” He blew out as he looked back at the window. “What sun?”
Odd for both of them to have slumbered so long, but they’d each struggled with restful sleep on the road, and time apparently ran differently in Rivenholde.
What didn’t make sense was Taven. He should have been pounding down their door hours ago, accusing Elloven of hiding away with her “secret lover.”
“So many fucking lanterns,” Jesstin muttered to himself.
Elloven didn’t know what else to say to bridge the distance between them, so she shuffled back to her bedside in anxious silence and dressed herself in the clothes left for her.
The leather was softer than it had looked on everyone else, smooth like a second skin.
Her sleeve had seven glittering gold bands.
A knock on the door came minutes later. Jesstin answered, then hollered her name.
“We’re being summoned,” he said when she came down. Whatever he said next was muffled by the clang of him roughly fastening his scabbard. The clothes they’d left for him were in a heap on the floor.
She joined him outside in the violet dusk. A dazzling line of people carrying lumens, winding all the way from the village to the sept, drifted by. The esguard who’d come for them indicated they should join. He handed them each a lumen.
“Great. More ghost lights.” Jesstin lifted his out and away from him with nose-curling disgust. “Oh, and who’s this then? Aunt Mathilda?”
Elloven almost laughed at his orneriness but was feeling too sensitive to risk him turning the same annoyance on her.
She could hear her mother saying, Not everyone’s bad mood is about you, but it could be said a thousand times, and she still couldn’t help personalizing any change in temperament around her.
“Maya and Farquin, blood-kin,” Ryquin said, stepping out of the line. Behind him trailed a pale-faced, towheaded individual with a gentleness that seemed incongruous next to the dark mischief Ryquin seemed spun from.
“Where’s Sesto?” Jesstin demanded.
“He’ll be along,” Ryquin said.
“Is this a friend?” Elloven asked, looking past Ryquin at the shy man hanging back.
“Daire, my consort,” Ryquin said with a flippant wave, not bothering to turn.
“Hello, Daire,” Elloven said with a light bow.
Daire smiled and offered one in return.
“We are well met.”
“Don’t bow to him, Aelloven, he’s not a noble.” Ryquin’s assertion stole the joy from Daire’s soft face.
“Where I come from, we pay respect to everyone,” she said curtly. Her cousin didn’t exactly exude familial warmth.
Jesstin sank into a bow even the king would have felt was overdone. “Daire, it is an honor of magnitude.”
Daire flushed pink.
Elloven buried a grin in her fist.
Ryquin fumed but said nothing more about it. “Aelloven, I’ve come to escort you to Palatium Mori, where my father is observing rehearsals for the opening ceremony of Cirque Calliope. He’d like you to join him.”
“I would like that as well,” she said, brightening at the thought. “Forgive us for sleeping in. We didn’t mean to waste an entire day.”
“Don’t forgive me,” Jesstin said with a roll of his shoulders. “I’m not sorry.”
Ryquin’s gaze lingered on Jesstin, though it wasn’t annoyance in his eyes but intrigue.
“You’ll find daylight has little quarter in Rivenholde.
It lasts but an hour, and in that hour, anyone requiring light brighter than what the lumens and torches offer makes use of it.
You didn’t sleep in. You’ve risen right on time. ”
“The Golden Hour, we call it,” Daire said, chiming in. His voice was as soft as his smooth, childlike face, and almost feminine. “It’s when most construction in the village is completed. Farmers, too, make good use of it.”
“I already explained it,” Ryquin snapped.
Jesstin raised a finger. “I would love, and find riveting, more information about the Golden Hour, Daire.”
His behavior reminded her of his smooth handling of Taven the night he’d escorted her home. It was heartening seeing his humor returned, but it also left her feeling strangely detached, an outsider to his antics instead of a conspirator.
It made her long for the Jesstin and Elloven of the Night Soul.
Daire looked downright anxious at Jesstin’s request, deferring to Ryquin, who closed his eyes and shook his head. The shy consort shrank into himself.
As they began their walk down the valley hill and into the village, Elloven instinctively fell back to Daire’s side, while Ryquin tried—ineffectively—to engage Jesstin in conversation.
“You’re Ryquin’s consort?” she asked when there was enough distance from the others to speak freely.
Daire blinked hard, and a teardrop ran down his cheek. He seemed frustrated by it, squinting again. “Don’t waste pity on me, please. He is good to me, in his way.”
“I’m not the best person to give advice,” she replied. “And certainly not an example to follow.”
With a bashful wince, Daire watched her from the side and said, “The pretor told us about your consort—husband, that is. I doubt anyone would fault you for not trusting yourself anymore.”
She’d said no such thing, but he was right. She didn’t trust herself. “The pretor knew about my marriage?”
“He knows everything,” Daire said with a brief flare of his pale-blue eyes. He seemed to have more to say, but his attention was drawn to Ryquin’s back. His trepidation was vibrant. If not for all the lumens dancing through the twilight, she thought she might even see it glow.
Elloven asked him about Cirque Calliope instead.
“Oh! Now that is a sight to see.” He lifted his lumen higher.
“I won’t spoil it for you. Pretor Estelar would be quite mad and rightfully so.
He was so pleased when he learned you were arriving just in time to see it.
It’s only one night a season, though it is a long one.
” His chest puffed with a sigh. “I’m sad I’ll miss so much of it this time. ”
“Aren’t you coming with us?”
“No, I...” He paused, boring a hole through Ryquin’s back, but the man was preoccupied with a stubborn Jesstin. “I will be doing something else. As will Jesstin.”
Elloven’s heart spiked in reaction to their upcoming separation. But Daire seemed to understand her sudden quiet and reached for her arm.
“He will still be close enough for your bond.”
“What will you be doing?” Her first thought was that Estelar had told Ryquin to occupy Jesstin to distract him, so he could speak with her privately. It would have been simpler to just ask. She was bursting with questions, and it wasn’t like Jesstin was thrilled to be near her.
But that was more than Daire was willing to say.
He nodded at the village below, blazing with illumination.
“I wish I could see Cirque Calliope for the first time again. What a wonder it is. Will you describe it to me later, as you saw and felt it?” He sounded earnest, like a child dreaming of a big adventure.
She smiled at him, despite the unease creeping through her. “I’d be happy to, Daire.”
Sesto hadn’t stopped stewing over the pretor’s assertion that he was harmless, or dreaming of ways to prove him wrong.
He supposed that, to look at him, he wasn’t the most assuming man.
He was hardly a wisp taller than five feet, hairless, and with a high voice that had never been given the chance to drop before he was castrated and sent to the Reliquary to live out his life as an abbot.
He’d still be there if not for Rhiain, who’d enthusiastically folded him into her family almost a decade ago.
He took the honor seriously. He might lack the physical prowess of Jesstin, the cunning of Rhiain, or the intellectual acuity of Asterin, but his intuition was the nearest thing to magic.
In being ignored or overlooked, he was often underestimated.
Is it worth holding their tongue in his presence, reducing him, in their minds, to an animal or a piece of furniture. Harmless. Useless.
For once, he was glad of it. Lady Elloven was mesmerized, perhaps even magicked, and would not be disposed to reason. Jesstin was so full of anger and resentment, his judgment was clouded. And the stable hand was far more involved in the scheme unfolding around them than he wanted them to know.
Sesto would again need to be invisible, innocuous. For Jesstin, he could be that and more.
“This is quite a spectacle,” Sesto remarked to the consort, Daire, as they moved through the fairway of a market called Covent Mystique, described by the sweet man as an “enchanted bazaar.” There were signs advertising animal parts for incantations, cast-iron kitchenry that looked like it had been forged from the dark recesses of the earth, enchanted cloth of silver and gold, and Sesto’s favorite: a stall that was no more than a large blanket covered in random trinkets the proprietor claimed were possessed by the souls of criminals.
For a mere gold piece, add a murderer to your shelf today!
Daire had been assigned child-minding duty when he could hardly mind himself, but he was kind, and Sesto sensed no veneer hiding something more sinister.
“You said this cirque only goes for one night?” Seemed like an unreasonable amount of effort for a single evening of entertainment, but what did he know?
“Yes,” Daire said softly. “Once a season, every twenty-one days.”
“Short seasons.” And quite a lot of effort for an event that happened with such frequency.
“How long are yours, Sesto?”