Chapter 5
Magdala hated royal dances. They made her feel like a wildflower intruding on a cultivated garden bed.
The crowd swirled over burnished marble, a miasma of jewel-bright gowns and winking diamonds as Magdala stood rigid on the periphery.
Her black shirt and trousers accentuated her flame-bright hair and milk-pale, freckled face.
She had dabbed pink stain on her lips and lined her hazel eyes with mika-powder, and perhaps she wasn’t beautiful, but she was a head taller than every other woman in the room—once you saw Magdala, you never forgot her.
Beside her, Angelonia fanned herself, her eyes droopy, her lips tilted down. She yawned.
Peacock-hued dresses with ridiculous lace collars were in style, and even Angelonia was drowning in her voluminous gown. For once, Magdala didn’t mind being out of fashion.
Julian stood at his fiancée’s elbow, a pillar of tense muscle and anxiety.
He searched the crowd, and Magdala wondered if he was looking for someone in particular—or perhaps he was having an affair.
Every now and then, he leveled a threatening glower at Magdala as if he expected her to jump onto the dessert table and shout, “JULIAN LET THE CROWD brEAK THROUGH!”
Angelonia bit into a frog-green macaron and scowled at Julian. “What is wrong, my only love?” she asked.
“I’m looking for someone,” Julian replied absently.
Angelonia froze, and a few crumbs dropped onto her lace bib of a collar. “Who?” she demanded. Apparently, Magdala thought, she suspected him of disloyalty, too.
A half-drunk duke staggered to Angelonia and said, “How is that book coming along?”
“I finished it two years ago,” Angelonia said irritably.
“Aren’t you something?” The duke hiccupped. “Faerie stones, wasn’t it?”
“I need to just catch someone,” Julian said, starting across the room. “I’ll return.”
Angelonia reached for him, but he slipped away, the crowd closing over him like water.
Angelonia crushed the macaron to powder in her fist. Magdala felt a little sorry for her.
As the drunk duke droned on, the writhing dance floor vomited up Huxley, who stumbled up beside Magdala.
“Where is Julian?” he asked.
“Just went to find someone,” she replied.
“Keep your voice down. We are indoors.”
Magdala arched a brow. She thought she was practically whispering.
Huxley raked her with his eyes. “What have you been doing? You look most untidy. And are you wearing cosmetics?”
Magdala patted her wild hair and blushed.
“My dear child,” Huxley continued. “Cosmetics don’t do you any favors.”
Shame burned through her, and she bit her lip against the urge to say what she was thinking—an unflattering compilation of four-letter words—and get herself fired. Besides, she agreed with him. The cosmetics had been a silly, frivolous idea. She was not meant to be admired in that way.
“Go and find my brother,” Huxley ordered.
Magdala stiffened. “I’m working for Lady Angelonia …”
“Yes, go and find him,” Angelonia said. “Huxley can look after me.”
Magdala was not a maid, and she was not supposed to go looking for stray fiancés, but because she was bored and her knees had locked, she shook off her stiffness and dove into the crowd, making for the tall exterior doors.
If Julian had any sense at all, he’d fled the crush of bodies and was strolling in the garden.
Like a drowning woman striking out for the surface of the water, Magdala swam desperately toward the open door and stumbled out onto the dark balcony.
The evening was warm, and Magdala’s hair had gone rogue. She tried, in vain, to smooth it as she retreated into the comforting shadows. The balcony was deserted, except for a tall, young man leaning against the stone balustrade, looking at the garden below.
No, not the garden. If he were looking at the garden, his head would be tilted down. His eyes were fixed upward, gazing at the stars.
His black shirt stretched over broad shoulders, showing off the lean muscles in his back. She admired him for a beat, and just as she realized she was staring, he turned.
Magdala didn't drop her gaze, and his keen, honeyed green eyes met hers. He was very striking and very strange.
If he’d attempted to wax his loose black curls, he needed to find a new pomade, because his hair tangled unfashionably over his brow.
And unlike the sallow gentry twirling across the dance floor, his skin was sun-touched, tanned golden, like he spent much of his time outdoors. A day’s stubble covered his sharp jaw.
He didn’t fit any mold Magdala knew for Largotian gentry, so she deduced that he was a country squire come to the christening to see the city, get drunk, and then sleep all the way back home.
But that did not explain why he was barefoot.
“Royal guard?” he asked without preamble.
“Yes,” she replied.
“What captain?”
“Huxley Davenport.”
He winced. “What horrible sin did you commit to end up with him?” He lifted a glass to his lips. Magdala noticed his hand was trembling. When he’d drained the cup dry, he set it down with deliberate care on the top of the balustrade.
“Are you in need of assistance?” she asked.
He dodged the question. “How is it? Working for Huxley Davenport?”
Humiliating, maddening, akin to slavery.
“Adequate,” Magdala replied.
The man smiled. He wore his devious beauty like a shield.
He was so different from Julian with his waxed hair and tidy uniform or the rest of the gentry in their sashes and diamonds.
Something flashed in Magdala’s chest when she looked at him—a spark no man had ever lit in her before, not even Julian and Huxley with their perfect golden hair and clean jaws.
It was a forbidden, intrusive spark, and it drained the blood from her cheeks.
Mortified at herself, Magdala lashed out. “You’re too intoxicated to be here. I can escort you to your coach so you can return home.”
“Who said I’m intoxicated?” the man said. “I’m stone-cold sober.”
Like hell he was.
“Might I find your friends and take you …”
He narrowed his eyes. “Do you not know who I am?”
Magdala frowned. “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the country manor houses …”
The man threw back his head and laughed. “Is that how I appear? An inebriated country heir, hoping to find some fun in the city? Excellent. I like that. I think I’ll lean into it.”
Bewildered, Magdala frowned at him, her brows bunched.
The man seemed to teeter perpetually on the edge of a wry laugh, like he was keeping his amusement to himself. His eyes sparkled. “You’re very astute. I suppose you must be, working with royals all day and night. For me, I can’t imagine anything more dull.”
She opened her mouth to reply, but he cut her off. “Don’t tell me it’s honorable work,” he said. “The only work that is honorable is that which does not pay. The queen, the captain, the priest, none of it is honorable.”
“I thought the fresh air and trees of the country were supposed to cure cynicism, sir.”
He smirked. “They’ve done their best, but I am a hopeless case.”
“Let me take you inside.” She offered him her arm. He shrugged and took it like he was leading her to the dance floor.
“Do you dance?” he asked, leaning down conspiratorially.
His voice, tickling her ear, sent a shiver through her, and she pulled away from him and placed her hand on his back.
It was a practiced movement, typical of bodyguards, but with him it felt too intimate, perhaps because that small, treacherous spark still burned in her heart.
He was so unlike the ideal man her father had painted for her, with his bare feet and rolled sleeves and untidy curls.
So why this sudden yearning to know him?
“I asked if you dance,” he repeated.
Magdala was a good dancer, but she could never keep her feet and hips in the restrained rhythms of Largotian waltzes. The only way she knew how to dance was around a Russuli bonfire. If she tried that here, Huxley and the rest of the court would be scandalized. Her father would die of shame.
“No,” she replied bluntly.
“I can teach you.”
“I’m working.”
“Work for me for a few minutes and indulge my lust for dancing. What’s your name?”
Magdala glimpsed Julian walking below them in the garden, and she steered the young gentleman toward the shadowy staircase. “I am going to take you down to Julian Davenport and relinquish you to his care.”
He let out a sharp laugh. “He’ll have ideas about my care, I have no doubt.”
Magdala hovered her hand over his back as they descended the broad stone stairs toward the garden. Her palm burned when she touched him, and she pulled it away again.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Devney,” she replied, brusque.
“Your proper name.”
“Magdala.”
“Ah, like the flowers that grow in the Wildlands. So, you’re Ashkendoric,” he said.
Magdala’s eyes snapped up. “No. I’m Russuli.”
The Ashkendoric kings had conquered the Wildlands long ago, but the Russuli still resented being called Ashkendoric. They were culturally separate from the rest of the kingdom, even if they paid taxes to Marwenna, the current queen.
He grimaced. “Never mind, then.”
“Why? Are you Ashkendoric?”
“I don’t know what I am,” was his airy reply. “But my father was. My brother was Ashkendoric, but he grew up in the Wildlands.”
Magdala noted the use of the past tense in both instances and wondered what happened to this man’s family.
The stairs turned sharply, a wall of trees on the right and the stone wall on the left.
They passed out of view of both the balcony above and the garden below.
The only light was a pale shimmer of pink from a stained-glass window in the palace.
The man noticed the shadows and seclusion and jerked away from her.
“Oh,” he breathed. “Oh, I see.”
Confused, Magdala scanned the surroundings. Was someone coming down the stairs? But the man’s eyes, very golden in the pale light, were locked on her.
“Your outfit is clever,” he said with a shaky laugh. “I fell right into your hands.”