Chương 24

The last pin caught against Elara's scalp, and she flinched.

"Sorry," Mirelle said.

"It's fine." It was a poor beginning to a graceful farewell. Elara had prepared several during the night, though none had survived contact with the morning. She watched Mirelle draw another section of hair into place and tried the least embarrassing version again. I understand your reasons. You have my permission to go. Too cold. Your service has been appreciated, and House Vey will— That sounded like a dismissal given to an elderly footman.

"Hold still, please," Mirelle said. Elara stopped worrying the cuff of her morning dress. She had chosen the blue one because it looked proper without requiring Nessa's help with all the little hooks along the back. Nessa had gone to fetch breakfast. That left Mirelle to pin her hair and Elara to consider whether she could accept Cal's departure without saying anything at all. Probably. A nod might do. She practised one in the mirror. It didn't look right.

"You will strain your neck," Mirelle said.

"I was only—" Someone knocked. Mirelle's hands stopped in Elara's hair. One pin remained between her fingers; two others lay beside the comb on the dressing table. In the mirror, Elara saw her own shoulders draw straight. Cal had returned, then. She had expected him later. After breakfast, perhaps, when she would be properly dressed and could receive his decision as his lady rather than as a sleepless girl with half her hair hanging over one shoulder.

"Would you like me to answer?" Mirelle asked.

"No. Um. Please give us a moment." Mirelle met Elara's eyes in the mirror. She set down the pin.

"You needn't—" Elara stopped. If Mirelle stayed, accepting his departure might be easier. It would also make the whole thing public before Cal had finished saying it.

"Please."

"Of course." Mirelle admitted Cal without a word and slipped past him. The latch clicked behind her. Elara kept her back to him. The mirror gave her only part of the room. Cal stood just beyond its edge, close enough that she could see one dark sleeve and the grey wool of his sash. He had dressed for the day. Of course he had. Apparently one of them had possessed the sense to finish.

"Good morning," she said.

"Morning, my Lady." His voice sounded ordinary. That somehow made the feeling in her chest worse. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. Elara placed both hands upon the dressing table.

"If you have come about yesterday, I understand that you have made your decision." A pause followed. His boot scraped once against the floor.

"I have." There. At least he had spared her a speech. She drew in enough air to offer the dignified words she had spent half the night constructing. Every one of them went missing.

"I see," she managed.

"I still think keeping me is a bad bargain," he said.

"You're paying a surety you can't spare for a retainer the Guild has blacklisted. Every noble at that salon will make sure the story follows your name. It's expensive, it's inconvenient, and if I were advising you, I'd advise you against me." There it was. She fixed her eyes on the row of pins and waited for the rest of it, the therefore, the date of his going.

"But it wasn't my bargain to make," he said.

"It was yours. You weighed it, and you made it, and I took one look at the cost and decided I knew better, and started arranging your accounts for you on my way out the door. I had no right to do that. Disagreeing with your decision didn't make it mine." Elara had stopped breathing somewhere in the middle of that. In the mirror, at the edge of the glass, she could still see a sliver of him: grey sash, the notched badge, his hands loose at his sides.

"So," Cal said.

"If you'll still have me, I'll stay. I'll sit Kilhane's review and pass it if I can. And I'll keep the oath for as long as you want it kept." The rehearsed sentences were still sitting there, ready. I quite understand. They fit nothing that had just been said. She reached for something else, anything else, and found the entire language missing, and what happened instead was that she stood up. She didn't remember deciding to. The stool scraped; a loose pin dropped and rolled.

She crossed her bedchamber in four steps with half her hair coming down and put her arms around him. He went rigid. All of him at once, like a man taking a blade rather than an embrace — she felt it through his coat, the sudden held stillness, and some distant chaperoned part of her was already listing everything wrong with this. Her cheek was against his collar. He smelled of wool and cold air and faintly of lye soap. Under her ear, muffled by coat and shirt, his heart was going quickly for a man standing still.

She held on anyway. The relief had simply been too large to keep still through; it had picked her up and carried her across the room, and it was not finished with her yet. Slowly, as if he was handling something that might go off, Cal raised one arm. His hand came to rest between her shoulder blades — barely resting, a careful, uncertain weight, the hand of a man who has been given something breakable without instructions. They stood like that for three heartbeats. Four.

Then her mind arrived, late and out of breath, and reported to her exactly what she was doing. Elara pulled back. Not far — her hands, in retreating, had somehow only made it as far as his chest, where they now sat flat against his coat with no orders and nowhere to go. Her hair was half-pinned and half not; the loose side had come down entirely and was hanging against her cheek. She was in her morning dress. She had crossed her own bedchamber and thrown her arms around her retainer, and she was still touching him.

"That was — um." She removed her hands. Held them briefly in the air, then behind her back, where they could do no further harm.

"I lost my balance."

"Of course," Cal said gravely.

"The stool. It's — the leg is uneven."

"I'd noticed it myself." He was looking somewhere over her head with the studious blankness of a man inspecting the far wall, and there was colour along his jaw, which she found in that moment deeply attractive. Her own face felt like a lit stove. She took a step back, and then, since that helped, another.

"There's a written portion to the review," Cal said, to the wall.

"Conduct codes, the oath, some tactics. The Annex keeps a reading list for it, and I'm told the clerks close the counter at noon. I should go and see about it. Before it — closes."

"Yes," Elara said.

"The reading. You should." He inclined his head, retreated through the sitting room with more speed than his dignity strictly allowed, and was gone. The outer door shut. Elara stood exactly where he had left her. After a while she returned to the dressing table, sat down, and looked at the pins, which she could not put in one-handed and did not call anyone to finish.

In the mirror, a young woman with ruined hair was trying to arrange her face into something aloof and appropriate, and failing, because the mouth kept curving without permission. She pressed her lips together. Ordered them flat. Counted to ten. The mouth curved again. It went on like that for the rest of the morning.

Through Nessa's return with the tray, through the re-pinning, through a breakfast she barely tasted and a lecture she would retain not one word of — every time she got her expression properly composed, some part of it slipped its pins and came down again, and by mid-morning she had privately conceded the campaign. Her face had made its decision. It was, after all, hers to make.