The Earl and the Executive

by Kai Butler

  Instead Zev raised his glass of sparkling wine and glanced away. When he looked back, the widower had faded into the crowd, having perfectly understood his message. Zev had been serious when he’d told Nosre that none of his dalliances were ones that he wanted to pursue as permanent alliances. Most of the time his affairs barely lasted a full season, some ending within a month or less depending on what his partner was like outside of ballrooms where the restrictions of politeness kept most tongues civil.

  Zev’s eyes caught on Lady Socis where she stood at the edge of the crowd. She was talking to someone that he didn’t know, and from the look in her eye, the conversation was interesting. He’d always respected her, from the moment they’d been introduced and she’d treated him as an equal though he’d offered no title. Her tongue could be cutting, but she was kind to most of the newly out misses and sirs. From what Zev gathered, Lady Socis was quite smart and had taken the Socis Estate from relative backwardness to one of the most advanced farming systems in the Empire. She was animatedly talking to her partner using both hands.

  He watched as she paused, listening while her companion spoke. Lady Socis’s face was expressive, even as she moved to hide it behind her fan. Zev was curious what could make the unflappable lady look so shocked. When she abandoned her partner, the man turned, and Zev finally got a good look at him.

  The man was tall, maybe only a couple of inches shorter than Zev, and he was darker-skinned than anyone from Central or the Core Estates would be. Pleasingly, his eyes had slight smile marks at the edges as though he was used to laughing. His hair was a deep brown, not black, matching his eyes. When the man interrupted his own uncomfortable scanning of the room by plucking a glass of wine off the tray of a passing servant, Zev saw that his hands were clean but bore no trace of a manicure.

  For a moment, Zev suspected that somehow the man had snuck into the party, perhaps a low-level Laft employee who’d been rewarded with his name on the guest list. But the clothes the man was wearing were clearly expensive. Although they were out of fashion and so conservative that he suspected they’d been chosen by an older relative with no ideas of modern aesthetics, he could tell that the man belonged in this world.

  His obvious discomfort marked him as a younger son, Zev decided. Perhaps here at his parents’ urging to find a spouse during the season. He still wondered what the man could have possibly said to offend Lady Socis, but he pushed that curiosity aside and looked around the room for someone he might consider asking out after the party. Someone here must be willing to provide an easy flirtation.

  When he glanced back, the man was still there, pulling at his cuffs uncomfortably and looking as though only the knowledge that the ship was about to take off kept him from sprinting for the gangway. He glanced over and Zev was once more captivated by his eyes. They seemed shadowed, as though he was used to being more expressive, more friendly, and somehow this entire event had weighed him down into unhappiness.

  The man looked away and bit at his lips, as though berating himself for staring. He took a long drink of his wine and Zev couldn’t resist. He made his way through the crowd, greeting and smiling where appropriate. It was slow going, to move without making waves, but by the time he got to the edge of the room, the man was still there.

  The ship rose, cresting the clouds, and the entire room was bathed in starlight. The lights dimmed momentarily, and the collective party gasped and applauded. It was the reaction he was hoping for— the stars expansive and the room making one feel as though one was walking through them rather than in a vehicle. The lights rose and conversation resumed.

  The man glanced up at Zev and smiled a brief friendly smile, seeming to brace himself.

  “Quite the crush,” he remarked, after a moment. His accent sealed Zev’s earlier opinion, speaking easily of private tutors and a good education.

  “Hopefully a few are here to see the ship and not just Detzev,” Zev said, equally blandly.

  “Oh, no,” the man said. “The food is quite good, too. I’m sure that the chef’s reputation has filled out most of the guest list.”

  The earnest statement surprised a laugh out of Zev. When he glanced over, the man was smiling slightly, as though unwilling to trust that Zev was genuinely amused, but unable to help himself from continuing the jest.

  “I was told that last year was also quite well attended. I’m sure most of those who came back merely did so to try to steal the chef.”

  Pulling his mouth down into mock seriousness, Zev said, “Ah, of course, the ton’s notorious game of servant theft must be the reason.”

  “It’s getting quite intense,” the man insisted, warming as he evidently decided that Zev’s amusement was genuine. “I heard from my own butler that Lady Yesej acquired Lord Nastin’s entire household while he slept. He woke up to find himself the only person in his manor.”

  “Shocking. She didn’t even leave a manservant?” Zev queried.

  “Oh, no, she did leave a single chambermaid, who quit on the spot when faced with him in a state of undress,” the man said, smile finally reaching his eyes. Lovely eyes they were, too.

  There was something charming about the man, a sense that, even at play, he was being sincere in a room full of people who’d been trained since birth to be the opposite. Zev wondered how he’d managed it. How, when pressured to fit into the mold of gentleman, this man had managed to find a new way to be. Still proper, still upstanding, but also remaining very much himself.

  “Zev Yuls,” Zev said, sketching a short bow. It was his mother’s maiden name, and thus, not the most obscure of aliases, but no one had discovered him yet.

  “Tiral Oican,” the man said, then shook his head. “Er, that is, Lord Gret.”

  And the final pieces fell into place. Gret itself was no great holding, somewhat farther out than any prestigious estates, though it did provide some form of produce that Zev couldn’t recall at the moment. He’d met the previous Lord Gret several times and the man had been everything Tiral wasn’t: haughty, disdainful to those he deemed “less” than him, and well-spoken enough that his clipped Central vowels made him sound as though he’d been grown in a tube in the Empress’s own medlab.

  Zev imagined it must have been difficult to grow up in the shadow of such a perfect earl. When Tiral’s older brother had succeeded their father, Zev knew enough to grasp that being the “spare” meant that Tiral had no need to sustain social norms and must have managed to find a way out of society’s grasp.

  Zev also vaguely remembered hearing that there’d been some rift between the two brothers, but he could not put his finger on the details.

  “So sorry about your brother,” Zev said, by rote.

  “Quite a tragedy,” Tiral agreed, the light snuffed out of his eyes. The regret seemed genuine, and Zev wondered if their fight had been nothing more than speculation by the fervent gossips who crowded into high society.

  “What brings you to Lus, if you are still in mourning?” Zev asked, curious.

  “Ah, well.” Tiral looked at Zev skeptically and then swallowed. “I find I’m in need of a spouse.”

  “As the new Earl, you need your own heir,” Zev agreed. He felt a pang of sadness and realized that he couldn’t continue his flirtation with the man. It would be cruel to lead him on when Zev had no intention of offering anything more than a passing fling.

  “Heirs might come later,” Tiral said morosely. “What I need now is money.”

  3

  The words left Tiral’s mouth before he could think better of them, and he felt as though he’d turned into a frog in the middle of the room. No one else seemed to notice how badly he’d mangled social norms and Zev seemed less shocked than Lady Socis had by his announcement.

  “A rich spouse,” Zev pondered. “So you are here to meet Detzev Laft.”

  “No,” Tiral said miserably. “I'm here because my social secretary said that I had to come here. If she’d chosen a different party, I’d be there.”

  Zev ra
ised an eyebrow. “So dour! It cannot be that bad. You’re here on Lus, the most beautiful planet in the Empire, with the most beautiful people in the Empire. And that includes you.”

  There was no way such a beautiful man thought he, Tiral, was anything special.

  “I suppose it’s hard to appreciate the beauty when you feel as though you’re an alley cat about to pounce on an unsuspecting mouse,” Tiral said, cutting to the heart of the matter rather than lingering on any polite compliments. The image was grotesque and he knew that it was colored by his own opinions of the ton and the marriage mart. He did feel as though he had to be that ruthless, that focused. Yet he also knew he was in a room full of other, hungrier cats, all more experienced and definitely more bloodthirsty than him.

  “An alley cat? Not so,” Zev said. “Modern manners would prevent any feline life from doing the waltz.”

  “Modern manners,” Tiral repeated. He glanced over at Zev. “I suppose those are why we are all subjected to the marriage mart, trussed up like some sort of livestock to be purchased for the right price.”

  “Ah, are you one of those nostalgic for the days of yore, when the rich were married off before their bodies even left the comfort of their mothers’ wombs?” Zev asked, indicating his facetiousness with a tilt of his head. “You’d prefer to have been married off by a conniving mother? Or found yourself engaged to someone you didn’t know by a father trying to arrange an alliance of estates?”

  “Oh, yes,” Tiral said. “That would have made this all so much easier.”

  He saw the skepticism in Zev’s eyes and answered with a small smile and a wry shrug. “Only seeing your spouse at formal parties given by her Imperial Majesty. Living in the same house, but only as roommates who share a title. No need to worry about difficulties like flowers or dates.”

  “Hmmm. Yes,” Zev said, clearly humoring him. “I’m sure it was much easier to be married when all that was required was having your secretaries make sure your outfits didn’t clash before a ball.”

  “You prefer the jostling and mercenary tone our modern matrimony has taken on?” Tiral asked, gesturing with his glass at the crowd.

  Shaking his head, Zev said, “Oh, you’ll not catch me there, my Lord Gret. I have no interest in being leg shackled, and have spent a good deal of time avoiding being riveted.”

  “Such ease,” Tiral said, a slightly wistful smile on his face. “I wish I had that freedom.”

  “I thought you came for the chef?” Zev asked, lightly enough that Tiral knew it was a lifeline.

  “Oh, no, I came for the guests, but the ship has been a unique surprise,” Tiral said. “You can see what an amazing job they did to fix the networking issues most ships of this size have.”

  Raising his eyebrows, Zev said, “You noticed that from here?”

  Tiral gestured again with his wine and pointed to where a waiter on the far end of the room was interacting with the system. “You can see there, that he can pull up the whole ship from one console. In other ships of this size, they have to piggyback systems, so that each console needs to tell its message to another who then passes it on to the next. It only causes a few moments of delay, but this system should flow much more smoothly. I’m curious how they managed it.”

  “You know a lot about the technology,” Zev observed, brushing an invisible mote of dust off of his coat.

  Tiral felt his face felt get hot, as though he was standing in a kitchen before a large party. “It’s a hobby of mine,” he managed. He knew he'd revealed too much. It was fine for landed peers to be interested in their estates, but anything beyond that needed to just be an inclination, not a passion.

  Ships had always been more than an interest to him. From the first time he'd taken apart a flyer and put it back together to make it go faster, he'd been obsessed. Perhaps, if he’d been born a first son, it would have stayed as that, a way to pass the time, something to occupy his time when he wasn’t managing the estate or hosting parties.

  Since he wasn’t a first-born child, though, or someone Father paid much attention to at all, the obsession had turned into an escape. Tiral would work with their chauffeur to keep the family’s vehicles running and when he’d been allowed to go to college at 16, Tiral had taken every aeromech class he could. After over a decade of only going to college events and department dinners, he found himself somewhat stuck as to what people who weren’t engineers talked about at parties.

  “Yes, that did give them some trouble as did the fact that having a single central computer meant that emergencies would be more dangerous if any of the lines were taken out,” Zev said. “The solution was to have a computer that ran two lanes so that incoming and outgoing traffic never interfered with each other.”

  “Really!” Tiral squinted his eyes and considered the solution. “Elegant, but what did they decide for emergencies?”

  “A backup computer. Completely stripped down, but able to perform all emergency commands,” Zev said. He paused and a mask seemed to fall into place. “So I’m told.”

  “I would love to talk with the programmers,” Tiral said, and tried to modulate the wistfulness in his voice. He knew better than most that he likely wouldn’t have time to talk to another engineer until the business with his estate was settled and even then, he’d likely never talk to them again as peers.

  Zev opened his mouth and then paused, as though curbing his initial response. He nodded his head. “I see it’s more than a hobby.”

  “A bit,” Tiral admitted, flushing once more. He was off-topic again, and here with someone who actually seemed interested in what he had to say. “Are you settled here?”

  “On Lus?” Zev shook his head, and an elegant curl of dark hair fell loose. He brushed it back and Tiral followed the move with his eyes, fixated on his long fingers. “No, my work keeps me mostly near Central, although I do travel.”

  At the statement confirming that Zev had a profession and wasn’t simply another idle beauty, Tiral wanted to know everything. “What sort of work do you do?”

  “I work with wealthy people who prefer their privacy,” Zev answered easily enough. Tiral’s eyes widened and he opened his mouth to say something apologetic, but Zev cut him off.

  “No, no, you’re clearly uninitiated,” Zev said, a smile belying his utterly serious tone. He shook his head, the same lock falling loose on his forehead, and Tiral found himself staring again. “You couldn’t know not to deviate from the set list of topics one can discuss at a Lus party.”

  “Of course,” Tiral said. “What sort of topics are appropriate?”

  “Not vocations or wealth,” Zev teased. “Instead it must always be the weather, the Empress’s health, and whatever plays are being presented this season.”

  “In that order, of course,” Tiral said. “I think I have it now, although I’ll grant you, it will be difficult to talk about the weather, given that I’m aware the planet is climate-controlled.”

  “Irrelevant, I assure you,” Zev said, eyebrows pulled together. He looked around, and then pretended to nod at Tiral for the first time. “Ah, Lord Gret, how do you do?”

  “Quite well, quite well, Mister Yuls,” Tiral played along, enjoying the byplay enough to relax some of the tension in his jaw. “The weather is quite stunning, is it not? It truly allows The Hidden Star to show her best attributes.”

  “Truly,” Zev agreed, a smile quirking his mouth. “One wonders if the corporation paid for such perfect conditions.”

  “I was told that they did grease the palms of a few storm clouds,” Tiral said. “It was clearly worth it on their end, look at the turnout!”

  “Such a pity that the Empress isn’t here to observe their machinations,” Zev said pleasantly.

  Tiral forced the corners of his mouth down into mock seriousness. “I hope her Imperial Majesty is in good health.”

  “Yes, her salons are set to run later in the season,” Zev confirmed.

  “Most excellent news,” Tiral said. “As I’ve heard that
Rose of Summer is set to play later and I’d just as soon miss that drama.”

  “We’ve a box seat for Trader’s Daughter later this week. You must come see us during the intermission.”

  Tiral’s eyes widened. “Do you truly?”

  Zev snorted a laugh and shook his head, dropping the act. “No, no, the comedies are a rehash of last year’s and the jokes grow stale.”

  “I did question your taste. That particular comedy was called out by the Somnu press as a tragedy for both actors and audience,” Tiral said.

  “Somnu? That’s a bit far from Gret to get your news, isn’t it?” Zev asked.

  “I like to keep informed,” Tiral said, trying to downplay the oddity of reading a small local paper from a world he should have had no interest in. He held up his glass. “Well, we’ve covered all appropriate topics, so does that mean we have nothing more to discuss?”

  “I’m sure that we can wring a few more minutes of polite conversation out of talking about the party itself,” Zev said.

  The crowd had shifted as the sky darkened and with the ship the highest point on the skyline, the entire city was laid out for the guests to see. Tiral admired the engineering of the observation deck again. Few would see the need for it, since most ships were used for trade and not pleasure, but after this event, he knew no one of their class would dare order anything else.

  He saw Lady Socis across the room talking to an older man and blushed again at his forwardness earlier in the evening.

  “Are you acquainted with Lady Socis?” Zev asked, following his gaze. “I saw you two conversing earlier.”

  “Oh, no,” Tiral said. “Just met tonight. She was quite kind to someone who looked as out of place as I was.”

  “She’s known for her kindness,” Zev agreed. “And frankness.”

  “I fear I may have offended her and perhaps ruined any chance I had to pursue my goals quietly.”

  “You didn’t—” Zev said.

  “I did,” Tiral admitted. His ears felt hot. “I couldn’t continue a relationship without being forthright.”