Chương 105: Chapter 100

Yamato Akemi To say the evening was going well was probably an overstatement. It was going exactly as I had expected, which meant I was managing it rather than enjoying it. That was fine. Managing things was what I did. I stood near the far wall, which I had selected on entry for the same reasons I selected most positions. Clear sightlines to every significant point in the room, my back to architecture rather than open space.

My attendants flanked me in their formal configuration, sleeves bound, blades edge-down, their presence the kind of visible that communicated intention without requiring explanation. Around me, the representatives of the Nigon clans had arranged themselves the way people do when they want to be near me without appearing to need to be. A social dance I had been watching since childhood and had never found less transparent with repetition.

Mirai Fujiwara stood to my left, her formal attire the deep violet of the Fujiwara court tradition, her posture carrying the refinement of a lineage that had spent centuries navigating the space between military power and political grace. Barely twenty, sharp-featured, the kind of intelligence that expressed itself through observation rather than statement.

She had said three genuinely interesting things since we arrived and approximately forty things designed to make me feel that her presence was an asset rather than an obligation.

"The hall is extraordinary," she said, which was the forty-first.

"It is," I agreed. Yuna Shimazu occupied the space to my right with considerably less ceremony than Mirai. The Shimazu heir had the bluntness southern warrior traditions tended to produce, no ornamentation around conclusions she had already reached. She had spent most of the evening assessing the room's combatants with professional interest, though her assessments were undoubtedly incomplete given her lack of context on most of the individuals present. Still, mildly entertaining to listen to.

"Thalos is watching you," she said.

"He has been watching me since we arrived," I said.

"Does that concern you?"

"No." She nodded. Yuna appreciated economy. So did I. Kenji Tokugawa stood slightly apart from the women, which was characteristic of him. The Tokugawa heir calculated proximity with an eye toward what each position communicated to which observer. Twenty-two, deliberately patient, with dark eyes that moved through the room in slow systematic sweeps that missed very little.

"The Ava contingent is larger than anticipated," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"The mercenary formation is professional. The man third from the left in the inner ring is notably more capable than the rest."

"I noticed him on entry," I said.

"Do we have any information on him? I can feel his mana from here." Kenji considered.

"I sent his profile to the Tokugawa Intelligence Network the moment he came in. He is on the top fifty list. His call sign is the Hollow. He runs his own subcontracting group under the Dusk Assembly. Top fifty, confirmed." I considered this. The Dusk Assembly was the largest mercenary organization operating across any of the known Upper Planes. Large enough to constitute a country in its own right, with military capacity, civilian population, and its own immigration infrastructure.

They operated out of a concealed middle-plane tier that neither the Eastern nor the Western Bloc intelligence networks had successfully located, which was a significant part of what made them so dangerous. This was not the Dusk Assembly itself, but a subcontractor. I needed to remember that distinction.

"It appears," I said carefully, "that someone has gone to considerable expense for what is ostensibly a political social function. Engaging even a subcontractor of the Dusk Assembly would not have been inexpensive. Why would that level of presence be necessary here?" Yuna, Kenji, and Mirai exchanged looks. None of them had an answer.

I looked toward Riku Mori, who had positioned himself slightly apart, surveying the room with the easy physicality of a man raised on water, carrying the sea's indifference to formal occasions in how he stood. The Mori heir was nineteen, broadly built, with a quality of warmth that was either genuine or the most sophisticated performance in the room. I had not yet determined which, though I was inclined toward genuine. Some people were simply warm.

"Your brother looks happy," he said, changing the subject cleanly. I followed his gaze. Kaoru was standing with a cluster of tournament competitors on the far side of the hall, animated in the way he was animated when he had found people worth being animated around. Beside him stood Ellara Arcanus. I gave her the attention I reserved for things worth watching closely. She was holding her own in a way that was not nothing.

The competitors around her were children of significant houses and traditions, accustomed to social environments that rewarded fluency in a very specific set of conventions. Ellara Arcanus was a scholarship student from a modest household who had walked onto a white carpet at Mirefall forty minutes ago and had apparently decided she was going to participate in the evening rather than survive it. That decision I respected.

She was well-spoken, attentive, and listened before she responded, which was rarer than it should have been in rooms like this one. She also looked, with her blue-black hair and her precise features, remarkably like her brother. Which brought me, in the unwilling way my mind kept arriving there no matter where I started, back to the subject I had been avoiding since I arrived. Cale Arcanus. Who had not responded. I was aware that men sometimes did not respond to things.

I was aware that schedules complicated communication and that whatever training exercise he was apparently conducting with Knight-Captain Aiden Vanta had presumably created additional complications. I was aware that none of this was intended as a slight. Attributing intention to what was most likely the behavior of someone caught unaware by a situation entirely outside his experience would be both inaccurate and ungenerous. I am, after all, essentially the princess of Nigon.

Highly skilled, a three-core practitioner before the age of twenty-five, and exceedingly attractive by any reasonable measure. It would not be surprising if he had simply been overwhelmed by the request, ill-conceived and hasty as it had been on my part. I was still annoyed. I was aware of all of that and I was still annoyed. The quality of this annoyance was unusual. I had been refused things before.

Declined, redirected, and diplomatically managed by people who understood that telling me no directly carried social costs they were unwilling to pay. I had experienced the full range of responses that people produced when they wanted to avoid committing to something I had asked of them. I had never simply been ignored. The first time in my life that I had taken the initiative and asked a man well below my station to accompany me somewhere, the man had gone off to do drills with the Vanta heir.

How Cale Arcanus even knew Knight-Captain Aiden Vanta was a question that had no satisfying answer yet. None of it made sense. I chose to find it informative rather than personally offensive. It was requiring considerable effort. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

"Lady Yamato." I turned. The man approaching was tall, and he moved like someone who had never once had to wonder whether his body would do what he asked of it. Dark hair, Aurion coloring with the silver-touched edges that the royal line carried, eyes that moved through the room with professional assessment. Prince Rian Aurion. The eldest of the Aurion children, military, the counterpart to Aiden Vanta in the unofficial architecture of how the Dominion actually functioned as opposed to how it presented itself.

He had given up the succession three years ago, which most people read as abdication and which I read, on reflection, as strategy. A man with his capabilities operating without the constraints of a throne was considerably more useful to a Dominion than a king who happened to be a remarkable combatant. He was also, I noticed with the peripheral awareness I extended to things I was not specifically cataloging, quite attractive in the uncomplicated way of a man who had never needed to think about it.

He stopped at the appropriate distance and inclined his head, a respectful bow that acknowledged real standing rather than performing hierarchy.

"I apologize for the interruption," he said. His voice was lower than Ardeshir's, carrying none of the northern roughness, direct without being aggressive.

"I wonder if you would care to dance." Mirai went very still beside me. Something had happened she had not anticipated, and she was recalibrating around it. Kenji's sweep of the room paused. I looked at Prince Rian Aurion for a moment.

Then I looked, without entirely meaning to, across the dance floor to where my brother was standing with Ellara Arcanus and her entirely unreachable sibling was off doing training exercises with Knight-Captains and had not responded to a request I had delivered through his grandmother, his sister, and the simple fact of showing up at his house.

"Yes," I said.

"I would." Rian offered his arm. I took it and we moved toward the floor. The formal patterns of the first set were something I had learned before I could reliably remember learning them, the combination of Nigon traditional footwork and Western Bloc court movement that upper-tier diplomatic functions required. I was competent in the way that I was competent at most things I had been trained to do, which was to say precisely and without flourish. Rian, it turned out, was better than competent.

He moved with a relaxed accuracy. He had learned to dance for function rather than display, so that when the situation called for it the skill was simply present and asked nothing of his attention. He led without imposing, which was rarer than it should have been, and left enough space in the movement for me to make decisions rather than simply follow them. We were not far from where Ardeshir danced with Princess Talena. I had been peripherally aware of that pairing since it began.

Talena moved through the evening with the grace of long practice, which I found genuinely impressive and somewhat concerning, because the grace was carrying something underneath it that was not ease. She was uncomfortable. Ardeshir was the reason. He danced correctly and looked at her like she was something to be acquired.

His gaze was a predator measuring the distance to what it wanted, and the back of my neck tightened the way it tightened on a battlefield when something was moving toward me that I had not yet fully located. He glanced in my direction. Ardeshir looked at me the way someone prices something he has not yet decided to buy. The look was leering, deliberate, entirely inappropriate for the occasion and completely indifferent to that fact. I felt the overwhelming desire to introduce him to my blade.

I did not, because we were at a formal diplomatic event and I had some restraint. Some.

"You are remarkably composed for someone who appears to want to commit violence," Rian said quietly, near my ear. I looked at him. His face was completely neutral. His eyes carried something that was unmistakably amusement.

"Ava's crown prince," I said, keeping my voice equally quiet, "has a quality of attention that I find deeply objectionable."

"I know," Rian said.

"I have been finding it deeply objectionable all evening. You are simply the first person who has said so out loud, which I appreciate."

"Your sister looks uncomfortable."

"Performance always is," he said.

"Especially performance for someone who does not deserve to be in her general vicinity. She is exceptionally good at it when she needs to be, which is both impressive and unfortunate. I have been watching her do it since she was twelve." There was something in that sentence that was more than an observation. I filed it without commenting on it, because some things were more useful filed than examined.

"You gave up the succession," I said.

"Yes."

"Three years ago."

"You are well informed on Dominion of Vera politics."

"Most people read that as abdication."

"I know," he said.

"Most people are wrong." I considered that for a moment.

"Why?" Rian seemed to consider this genuinely.

"I wanted to operate without the constraints. The constraints of kingship limit what I can do. I am more useful to the Dominion outside that position." A pause.

"Besides," he said, "I am extremely shy." I snorted at that. He gave me a warm smile, then something shifted in his expression, the amusement giving way to something more considered.

"Though I do wonder sometimes if it was the right choice. Talena is smart. She is driven. She can play this game as well as anyone. I wonder if it was fair to leave the burden with her."

"You are rather talkative for a first impression, Prince Rian," I said. He looked at me for a moment longer than the movement of the dance required.

"One of my fatal flaws, I am afraid," he said.

"I have a tendency to be loose-tongued around beautiful women. Think nothing of it."

"If I did not know your situation better," I said, "I might think you were interested in me." The corner of his mouth moved. He said nothing. That was answer enough. The music continued. The patterns of the set moved us in slow deliberate arcs across the floor. Ardeshir's gaze had moved elsewhere, which was the wisest decision he had made all evening, and Talena was saying something to him that had the look of a man being outmaneuvered in a conversation he believed he was leading. Good.

I found my attention drifting, in the unwilling direction it kept drifting, to the empty space in the room where someone was supposed to be. Training exercises with Knight-Captains. The first time I had ever asked a man to accompany me to a formal event and he had gone off to do drills.

"You seem," Rian said carefully, "to be thinking about something that is irritating you."

"I am always thinking about something," I said.

"That is not what I said." I looked at him. He looked back like someone who had spent a great deal of time reading rooms and had decided this one was worth reading slowly. I said nothing.

"Whoever he is," Rian said, after a moment, his tone entirely neutral, "he has poor timing." I looked at him more sharply than I intended to. The amusement in his expression was quiet and entirely genuine.

"I made no reference to a person," I said.

"No," he agreed.

"You did not." I held his gaze for a moment.

"He went to do drills," I said, before I had fully decided to say it. Rian received this without visible reaction, which told me he found it neither surprising nor confusing, and that told me something about his general read of the world that I filed without comment.

"Some men," he said carefully, "operate on a schedule entirely their own and are not always aware that other people are working around a different one."

"So I have been told," I said.

"Does it help?" I considered the question seriously, because he had asked it seriously.

"Marginally," I said. He made a small sound that was not quite a laugh. The music shifted, signaling the transition between sets. We came to a natural pause at the edge of the pattern, the formal conclusion of the dance returning us to standing. Rian inclined his head.

"Thank you, Lady Yamato," he said.

"You are excellent company."

"You are a competent dancer," I said, which in my tradition was a genuine compliment and which I suspected he understood as such from the way the corner of his mouth moved. He returned me to my people with an ease that was functional rather than performed, inclined his head once more to Mirai and the others, each acknowledgment precisely calibrated to what that person required, and withdrew. Mirai watched him go.

"The crown prince," she said carefully, "is significantly more interesting than his reputation suggests."

"He is not the crown prince," I said.

"No," she agreed.

"That is rather the point." I returned my attention to the room. Across the hall, Kaoru was still standing with Ellara Arcanus. She laughed at something he said, genuinely, the way people laugh when they have stopped performing and simply responded. She looked, in that moment, very much like her brother. I filed that and moved on. The hall rewarded attention if you had paid it on entry.

Mirefall's main hall ran roughly rectangular, east to west, the royal dais anchoring the western end and the main announced entrance through the eastern arch. The dancing floor occupied the center, open stone polished enough to catch the chandeliers above it. Tables and seating lined the northern wall behind the column intervals of the northern colonnade, sightlines running clear to the dais between them.

The western colonnade mirrored it on the opposite side, narrower, the columns closer together, running parallel to the dais and feeding into two secondary exits that most guests had neither located nor thought about. Four entry points total. The eastern arch, announced and visible. Two secondary corridor junctions feeding off the western colonnade, easy to miss. The service approach from the north, connecting to the receiving colonnade, which anyone who had done their preparation would know about.

I had mapped all four on entry. It was habit. I noticed the mercenaries. Not the Ava contingent. I had mapped them on entry and their positions had held. These were different. Different colors, different formation spacing. They moved through the room the way water finds the lowest point, without announcement, without urgency, settling into positions along the northern wall and near the secondary corridor junctions, patient, waiting for a signal rather than an opportunity. Seven along the northern approach.

Four near the secondary corridor junction. Others I had partially tracked before losing them in the crowd's movement. I kept my posture exactly where it was.

"Sakura," I said quietly.

"Yes, my lady." She was already at my shoulder.

"How many do you count?" A pause of perhaps four seconds.

"More than I am comfortable with," she said. I nodded once. The music continued. The floor moved. The room performed its careful social evening with complete indifference to what was accumulating at its edges. Something was building. I kept my hands still, my expression composed, and my attention on all of it.