by K. Eason
She resolved to stay quiet, and to let Jaed himself set the tone of the encounter. Say nothing, unless he did.
Her guards, however, suffered from no need for impassivity.
“Great Mother,” Thorsdottir murmured. “He’s taken a beating.”
“Mm.” Zhang pursed her lips. “Look at his hands.”
Thorsdottir understood immediately. Rory took a moment longer, having little experience with beatings.
“There’s nothing wrong with his—oh.”
“An ambush,” Thorsdottir offered. “From behind.”
“His brother,” said Zhang.
“Merrick? No way. I mean, he just seems—” Rory censored the vapid nice she had been about to utter, and said instead, “Jaed’s his little brother!”
Thorsdottir and Zhang side-eyed her. Then Thorsdottir, who had been raised one girl child amid many boys, said, “Older brothers can be a special kind of monster. Besides. Anyone else who laid hands on Jaed would be in prison, and the incident would be all over the media. So it happened somewhere private, which limits the perpetrators.”
“Ambush.” Zhang made a little clucking sound in her throat.
Rory considered that. She also considered the reasons an older brother might do that to his own sibling (she bore no especial love for Jacen, but she had never seriously entertained notions of doing him harm). She hypothesized several causes, and concluded that she would simply have to violate one school of etiquette, risk Jaed’s ire, and simply ask.
Thus resolved, she sped up, striding with purpose across the plaza. It was a long walk. Jaed had chosen a table near the bulkhead, a freestanding unit that, from the bright lines on the decking, had been a meter closer to its neighbors in the very recent past. She pretended not to notice observers, or the sudden flicker of handhelds as diners adjusted their screens for potential 2Ds or perhaps even recordings. She smiled, just a little, as Zhang twitched toward a particularly quick movement, frightening the holder of the handheld into dropping his device and pushing his chair back a screeching half-meter.
Jaed stood, rather stiffly, to greet her. Rory noted that he held his right arm very carefully, as if the shoulder itself could not move, the hand curled into a solid fist. She noted the especial bulk of his sweater today, and how the knit and cable might conceal a wrap. She wondered where the alchemists were, and the chirurgeons, to leave him in such discomfort.
Perhaps they had not. Perhaps he had chosen it. Pride, perhaps.
He tried to come around the table, with obvious designs on pulling out her chair.
“I have it,” she said, waving him off. “That’s not a Tadeshi custom, is it?”
Jaed frowned at the chair, and at the Princess settling herself into it. Then he sat back down. “No. Yes. Only among the aristocracy. It’s an archaism.”
“Ah.” Rory looked around at the neighboring tables. She glanced at Thorsdottir and Zhang, who were in the process of dragging an unoccupied table to a strategic point from which they could observe, and intercept, anyone approaching.
“It’s the same on Thorne. An archaic custom. It’s also rather widespread among the population at large, between those romantically associated, as a sign of regard.” She folded her hands on the table and smiled. “On Kreshti, everyone oversees her own seating, unless one is an infant or an invalid.”
She watched Jaed turning that over. “Neither of which applies to you.”
“Indeed. Nor are we romantically associated. I prefer other demonstrations of regard.”
His mouth—bruised and a little swollen, on the same side as the black eye—quirked up at the corner. “Such as?”
“First I must earn the regard, no?”
She sat back and looked around at the plaza. Then she whispered, under her breath, a tiny optical hex, which bent the light in her immediate vicinity in such a way that any images would be blurry. She whispered another, to introduce static to any recording.
Jaed watched her intently.
“You’re doing it. Hexing. Arithmancy.”
“I am.”
“I can see the shimmer. What’d you do?” He smiled: a flash of real, unguarded delight.
Rory was startled by how young it made him seem. She found her own face responding, and admonished it to withdraw into cool dignity, with mixed results. “Gave us a little privacy, assuming no one’s got hexes on their handhelds or a ’bot.”
Jaed’s face also appeared to have remembered its task as indifferent mask. He sat back. The smile settled into a crumpled little shadow of itself. “What a convenient
I want to learn that
skill.”
Rory inclined her head, said nothing, and allowed him to interpret her silence in whatever manner he chose. She used the time to study his face. The bruise on his cheek was exquisite, appalling, like a storm boiling over the mountains, promising agricultural ruin in exchange for a pyrotechnic performance. His eye on that side was a little swollen and a lot bloodshot, and somewhat uncomfortable to look at.
So that was the eye on which she focused, until Jaed realized what she was doing, at which point he dropped his gaze.
She struck in that moment of self-conscious vulnerability. “What happened?”
Jaed, she saw, was undergoing the same dilemma: whether to put forth the polite untruth of nothing, or to tell her. She spared a moment’s wish for the latter and a second moment to wonder why it mattered.
Then Jaed leaned forward onto his elbows (most of the weight on his left side), which brought their faces rather closer than any interpretation of etiquette would deem correct.
“Merrick and I had a fight. Over you, of course.” Jaed’s clear eye flashed like a mirror in sunlight. “He was embarrassed by our discussion yesterday. He thinks you’re up to something.”
“That’s why he hit you? Because I’m up to something?”
“That, and he thinks it indicates a personal preference on your part.”
“Why should that bother him?”
Jaed looked at her as if she had suddenly sprouted a live goose on the crown of her head. “He’s jealous.”
True, said the fairy gift.
There was another why trying to force its way past her lips. Rory swallowed it. She was familiar enough with popular literature to recognize that men were not so different from bulls or rams when it came to courtship, more concerned with each other’s opinions than those belonging to the female of the species. Jaed would no more understand the whys of that than he would the intricacies of the arithmancy behind tesser-hex gate theory, and it would do little good to ask him.
But ancestors, that bruise. It was, upon more thorough inspection, scored with tiny striations, little stitches of blood holding the flesh together. Rory caught herself reaching for it. She stopped when she felt the heat coming off it and when Jaed visibly steeled himself.
“I won’t touch it,” she said, at the same time as he said,
“It’s a carpet burn. I did it to myself, trying to get him off me.” He smiled. It looked like it hurt. “No luck.”
“So he just hit you because, what, we talked?”
“Because I made him look bad. He thinks. He’s just so damned smug. He just assumed he’ll get everything he wants.” Then he added, a little defensively, “You don’t understand.”
Rory made a very un-Princesslike noise. “You have not met my brother. So who won?”
“Merrick.” Jaed’s gaze wandered away. “He’s better than I am.”
Etiquette, courtesy, kindness dictated she offer reassurance to Jaed: tell him that Merrick was not better, that he was morally deficient, a bully, that physical prowess was not the sum of a man’s worth.
The moment passed, and took a handful of its associates with it. Jaed took a visible breath and refocused his attention on her. He was really quite bad at masking his feelings.
In that, he was entirely not his father’s son.
That realization made her like him a little more.
Rory leaned forward and, before Jaed could flinch, broke her promise and traced the edge of the bruise from his cheekbone to the corner of his mouth. The skin felt both spongy and very hot.
Etiquette had a script for moments like this, too: queries so obvious (“Does it hurt?”) that their truth is never in question, designed to allow the responder to (re)assert his own manhood (“Oh, it’s not that bad.”).
Jaed was braced, obviously, for one of those social stupidities. Rory could see him preparing his own polite untruth, his stare drilling past her, his jaw knotted tight enough she worried he might crack his teeth.
She said nothing, and neither did Jaed.
She banished, in that moment, any lingering fantasies about Merrick Moss. Whatever the quality of his behavior toward her—courteous, even kind—this revealed another side of his nature.
That was disturbing. Even more disturbing, her whole chest felt hot. Her heart fluttered, too small for its boney cage, and her lungs felt squeezed into fists by the pressure of that heat. It was not affection. It was not sympathy. It was anger.
It was not at all in her plans.
Jaed cleared his throat, then, and sat back just out of reach, neither fast enough to be rude, nor far enough to declare her familiarity unwelcome. He folded his arms, very carefully, tucking the right fist underneath the left elbow.
“I got your message. Obviously. I took my pass-string out for a little test run.”
She raised a brow. “And?”
Jaed shrugged, left-sided. “They haven’t arrested me.”
“Would your father do that?”
He thought about it. “He might, to make a point. But probably not. It might be too embarrassing to the family. You and I are an item now. People are watching.”
“And everyone’s going to say you and your brother fought over me.”
“True.” Jaed pulled out a very public smile, lips pulled back over his teeth, eyes wrinkled up at the edges. To observers, battling the blur of her hexes, he would seem genuinely happy. “I have something for you.”
She matched his grin, and added a head-tilt. “Oh?”
Jaed shifted onto his elbows again. This time the right hand, still a clenched fist, migrated partway across the table. She noted the white knuckles, unmarked, that her bodyguards had noticed at once. Jaed hadn’t landed a punch.
“Take my hand,” he murmured. “The right one. Do it. Keep looking at me.”
She slid her hands around his. His skin was cool, smooth, stretched rigid over tendon and bone. She noted the raised tendons in his wrist. Guessed there was muscle locked all the way up.
“You holding a live fish?”
“What?” He blinked. The smile slipped a little, then recovered, teeth bared. “No. Here.”
He twisted his fist in her grip, uncurling his fingers, rolling the tiny datastick from his palm into hers. “My father’s code. I lifted it from some private correspondence between him and the Minister of War, so it’s definitely his, not some secretary’s.”
Rory stifled her first impulse, which was to ask what the contents of that correspondence had been, and said instead, “Thank you.”
Jaed’s smile widened, as if she’d said something especially sweet. His eyes held all the warm malleability of diamonds. “My side of our deal,” he said.
Rory flashed him the brightest, most practiced smile in her arsenal. Then she leaned back, taking her hand—and the datastick—with her. She thanked Ursan practicality that her trousers had pockets, easily reached when a young woman’s hands retreated into her lap in a spasm of shyness, or propriety, or whatever an observer chose to interpret. She kept them there, glancing not at all surreptitiously around the plaza, before letting them creep back onto the table.
Empty, of course. Both of them. She let Jaed see that. His tiny, real smile reappeared for an instant, too small and too transient to be visible through the hex. That pleased her, for reasons she did not care to examine too closely.
“All right,” she said. “Now it’s my turn. We’ll start simple. Have you ever seen an aura?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In Which A Plan Is Made
The semi-public liaisons between Jaed and Rory continued for a tenday before the Regent summoned Jaed to a meeting in his office. During that span, the Regent’s second son and the Princess of Thorne conducted daily rendezvous, often for several hours at a time, to the delight of the public ’nets and the celebrity gossip channels, which speculated on the romance and on the Prince’s eventual reaction, or whether he knew already, and how this whole business might resolve. The turing nets crackled with footage: 2Ds of the Princess and Jaed in the public dining plaza, live digital of them strolling through the station (attended by the Princess’s guards, who, it was noted, no longer included the one with mecha parts).
There was much excitement about the nature and cause of Jaed’s injuries, which faded from spectacular purple to a more cosmetically concealable green-yellow after several days (and several applications of alchemical lotions). So when Rory and Jaed appeared together at the public recreational facilities, where Jaed accepted lessons from the smaller of Rory’s guards, the one obviously of Kreshti descent, public opinion declared that his injuries must have been the result of a training accident—perhaps with this very guard—which inspired further rumors of extensive private contact, of which the sudden publicity was only the latest stage.
The Regent had discovered Jaed’s injuries along with the rest of Urse, when he saw the footage of his younger son and the Princess sharing a table in the dining plaza. He had watched, fingers steepled, eyes flat. Then he had sent Merrick a terse invitation for a brief before-supper meeting, in which he said only, “You will not assault your brother again. You will, in fact, avoid contact with him, and you are, under no circumstances, to be alone with him. Good night.”
Jaed knew his brother had been summoned, and he knew exactly how long the meeting had taken (five minutes, fifteen seconds). Rory had shown him how to hex Merrick’s pass-string, so that it reported his brother’s movements to him.
“The better to avoid him,” Rory had said, with a wry little half-smile.
And the better to spy on him, thought Jaed, and proceeded to do both.
Jaed guessed, from the meeting’s brevity, that his brother had not been permitted to make any appeals or excuses. He also guessed, from Merrick’s continued activities over the subsequent days, that he had garnered no punishment. That was cause for both relief and worry. Jaed was not eager for another encounter with Merrick, but he also did not trust his father’s intervention. He told Rory as much, under his breath, when they met at the recreational facility the following afternoon.
“My father’s up to something,” he told the back of her hand, as he brushed his lips across it in a gesture performed especially for the recording devices they both knew were concealed in gym bags left carefully open, just so, all over the room.
Rory smiled. Jaed was beginning to dislike that particular expression. It reminded him of alchemically produced gemstones: beautiful, glittering, and ultimately artificial.
“Oh, I’m sure,” she said, scarcely moving her lips. “What, though?”
“No idea.” He released her hand, making note of her unscuffed knuckles. He supposed she was not allowed to train with her guards. He had, so far, only trained with Zhang, although today he was supposed to face Thorsdottir. He eyed her sidelong, and wondered if she would permit him to scuff his knuckles, or if she would beat him flat in front of everyone.
Thorsdottir let him get scuffed, as it turned out, and his knuckles were red and tender when his father’s summons came.
At your earliest convenience, the message said, which was Father for now.
Jaed thought he k
new why. Footage of his lesson with Thorsdottir had topped even the hand-kissing on the boards today. He had scanned through some of the comments and marveled at the sheer volume of experts in martial tactics living on the station. He wondered if Rory ever bothered to read the reviews of their performances, and what she thought about them.
He resolved to ask her, assuming his father didn’t have him under house arrest by third shift. Jaed hadn’t been confined to the family wing of the municipal section since the Arboretum Incident, which had cemented his father’s suspicion that the practice of restricting a child’s freedom as a means of punishment confers as much suffering on those who share quarters with the perpetrator. No. If his father knew he was learning arithmancy, Jaed reckoned he might well end up on a marine transport to some distant colony world. Or to Beo, with Prince Ivar, which would actually be worse, Prince Ivar being as stimulating as a sack of wet socks.
But his father didn’t know. There was no way he could. The Regent was not omniscient, he was irritated, and therefore Jaed could expect a reprimand (not his first) and an extended period of his father’s cold-as-void disapproval (also not his first), after a short treatment of sarcasm and withering disdain (the pattern holds here). All he had to do was endure it in silence, listen to his father’s condemnation, avoid answering back.
He had never been good at listening.
Jaed cycled his turing down and checked himself for respectability. Then he took himself to his father’s office. He could have gone the back way, using private corridors. He chose instead to take the longer, public route: out the main doors, across the promenade in front of the embassies, past a half-dozen ’bots, some of which belonged to Tadeshi security, some of which belonged to their respective embassies. He made a point of cutting close to the Thorne Consortium’s embassy, within range of its ’bot. If his father did decide to discipline him by curtailing his freedom, he wanted a record on systems uncontrolled by the station’s turing, so that Rory would know what had happened.