MB Chapter 13

【Past】

"I'll give you Balverdi."

The woman sat with one leg crossed over the other, the sofa's arm behind her as though she owned both it and the room. She appeared to be somewhere in her mid-thirties. Her lips were a deep, glossy red—a color that suited the extravagance of her dress with an exactness that seemed almost studied.

She was looking down at Entzi Bethelgius, who was fifteen years old.

Chloe. Entzi said her name quietly, to himself.

Chloe paid no attention. She continued.

"You're not obliged to accept, if you'd prefer not to. There are people in this world who would refuse even gold enough to steer a country—not because they couldn't carry the weight, simply because they've decided not to."

Her slender fingers idly twisted a length of golden hair, turning it round and round.

"But the Entzi I know doesn't seem like that sort. Military force, political power, financial power—there isn't a single one you'd let go of, which is rather remarkable given that you have the talent to hold all three. The only thing you haven't bothered wanting is love, wouldn't you say?"

Though I suppose love isn't the sort of feeling that begins in want.

She murmured this to herself, barely audible. Entzi watched her without expression. The absence of a smile made his face nothing but angles, and his ash-grey eyes were colder than anything else in the room.

"Greedy little Entzi. Take Balverdi. And in exchange—bring down House Rubiette."

And then——

Chloe leaned forward and bent toward his ear.

'Have I been asleep.'

Entzi surfaced from shallow sleep with his eyes still half-closed, pressing them into focus against the early light. The sky above the ship's deck was still a deep, pre-dawn blue. By that he understood he had drifted off for a time.

Habit moved his attention across the deck without his choosing it, and it stopped on Goiyo.

She was asleep opposite him, her breathing even, rising and falling in a steady rhythm beneath his coat, which had at some point ended up covering her. They had been sitting across from each other at the deck table, and by some mutual and apparently effortless agreement they had both simply folded their arms and gone to sleep there.

Entzi's gaze moved to the several wine bottles sitting on the table between them. He took in the whole picture, and a brief, humorless sound came out of him.

He was not a person who fell asleep in the presence of those he had not settled on as his own. This situation was thoroughly, unfamiliarly strange.

He had had a few glasses of champagne at the reception after the ceremony, and it seemed they had been enough.

His tolerance had apparently collapsed from disuse, or the champagne had been stronger than he'd accounted for, or perhaps—

He let that line of thinking go. A soft exhale.

'Right. It wasn't the wine.'

He hadn't been quite himself since the kiss.

As a married couple, a kiss was hardly remarkable. But the difference between having one's wits about one and not having them was significant.

What had he done.

He lowered his head and pressed one hand over his mouth. For all that he had called himself impulsive just before falling asleep, he had proceeded to be overcome by impulse immediately afterward.

'This is bad.'

The sound escaped before he meant it to. Whether she heard it or not, the sleeping woman's eyebrow gave a small, involuntary twitch. Entzi went completely still.

Not even breathing, he let only his eyes move to watch her. The rhythm of her breath steadied again. He swallowed the relief and felt the absurdity of the situation overtake it. What exactly was he doing.

He brought himself upright slowly, and went back over what had actually happened. Mercifully, after the kiss, nothing else of consequence had occurred—only wine and conversation until sleep overtook them both.

Falling asleep without knowing he’d fallen asleep—whether he could simply chalk that up to the wine was another matter entirely.

"Entzi—?"

He spun around at the voice—thick with sleep, and with other things. She hadn't fully woken yet—her eyes were open only by degrees, unfocused and soft, and she was looking at him through them.

"Is it cold? Why are you awake."

"You make it sound as though you dosed the wine. Am I not allowed to be awake—?"

"'Dosed.' The depths to which my reputation has apparently sunk—Goiyo!"

She had been attempting to push herself upright and had caught her foot on the leg of the chair. He crossed the distance quickly and steadied her before she went down.

She ended up with her forehead against his chest rather than the deck boards. She pressed her eyes shut.

"Are you hurt anywhere?"

"My head aches."

"That's the wine."

"I'm dizzy, and I can't quite hold myself up—"

"Still the wine."

"Is this a dream?"

"It's the wine."

You don't listen to a word I say. The wry note in his voice was faint. She laughed, silently, without lifting her head.

“It feels like a dream. If it weren’t, I can’t imagine you’d be this tender.”

Looking back at everything she had known of Entzi Bethelgius—the brief and distant impression from that one encounter, the rumors—the person in those accounts bore almost no resemblance to this one.

The Entzi she'd known then had been a cruel, cold wielder of power. The Entzi now was, at the very least outwardly, a person of some care, even if he was also excessive and given to nonsense.

Of course she was not naive enough to think a handful of meetings was enough to know someone entirely. Only this much: he showed some willingness to treat her as a person worth treating with consideration. That, at least, was a relief.

How long would this gentlemanly surface of his hold.

Goiyo found his performed surface rather to her liking—the mask, and what it covered. She hoped it would hold as long as possible. Ideally until the very moment she was killed—staged as an accident, whenever that came.

"Entzi."

"Yes."

"You said you've never loved anyone. That you wouldn't love me either."

"...Yes."

I'll trust you on that. Still resting against him, her voice went quiet, sinking back toward sleep. Something drowsy was threading back into it.

“I don’t want to trust anyone beyond where I already am. But if I lost even that—that contradictory thing I’m holding onto—I don’t think I could bear it.”

"Goiyo."

"Please just—"

The words ran out, and she was asleep again. He looked down at her, his expression difficult to read. I'll trust you not to love me—what a singular thing to believe in.

The storms Entzi Bethelgius had lived through were not ones he would concede to anyone. But Goiyo Rubiette—Goiyo Bethelgius now—measured against his own standard was something close to a flower kept indoors, sheltered from every substantial wind. Born and raised among the highest nobility, materially comfortable throughout, never spoken to cruelly, never dismissed. Never lying awake having killed someone and grinding through a nightmare of it.

And yet to call hers a genuinely settled life—there was a long-accumulated heaviness in her that made the word feel wrong.

When he had first seen Goiyo Rubiette, the pinnacle of the nobility, he had filed her as exactly what she appeared to be. She did not show her feelings easily. Under any circumstance, she did not allow herself to be discomposed. And then, across a handful of encounters, something had shifted—whether she had grown accustomed to him or he to her—and her interior began to show itself in small moments. Worn and quietly misshapen, what was inside.

Had the absence of love truly been such a torment? He had never set particular store by love himself, so he could not entirely follow the logic, but he had no desire to call it a trivial reason.

Everyone had their own pain, the kind no one else could entirely reach.

He gathered Goiyo Bethelgius in one arm. He retrieved his coat from where it had slipped when she startled awake and laid it back over the thin fabric of her dress.

She had said her head ached even when she was half-awake—tomorrow would be worse.

He smoothed the hair off her forehead and pressed his lips to the curve of her brow.

An impulse again, but he had done worse things this evening already—one more would cost him nothing.

The warmth that passed through the brief contact settled into her, quiet as a tide, and would ease the headache and give her a clean morning. The same way he had taken the fever from her after the ball.

He turned toward the door off the deck with her in his arms. A figure stepped out of the shadows.

The man wore the uniform of the ship's crew and had black hair. He had been in Entzi's service for some time—his bondsman, Ekser Prebesk.

Ekser's gaze was moving toward Goiyo before he had quite gathered himself to speak.

"Why is Lady Goiyo—"

"She fell asleep. We were drinking and talking; I imagine she tired more than she realized."

"I see. I'll carry her to her room."

"No. Leave it. And Ekser—you would do well to reconsider your form of address."

"Pardon?"

Entzi's brow shifted slightly. Whatever noble upbringing the man was supposed to have had—this was a level of inattention that stretched credibility.

"It doesn't reflect well on the Bethelgius household when its people address the mistress of the house however it suits them."

"I apologize, my lord. I'll correct it."

He let the apology pass without acknowledgement—it was one of his least favorite phrases, since it came after the fact rather than preventing it.

He settled Goiyo more firmly in his arms and spoke with his back still turned.

"Look into Therio Alte."

"Eliminating Alte as well would be difficult, my lord. Even with the Emperor's backing, to move against both ducal houses at once—"

"When did I become the sort of leader who asks his subordinates' opinion."

There was no edge in his expression, but the chill in his eyes made his feelings entirely legible.

He glanced back at the man standing rigid at attention.

"Bear this in mind, Ekser. The reason I sit above the rest of you has nothing to do with any failure of intelligence on your part. If you have nothing worth saying, I'd rather you not trouble my ears with it."

"I apologize."

"That word again, and we're at three."

He walked past Ekser toward the door. The sound of it opening drew out like a shadow behind him.

Ekser stood still and watched Entzi go, his face settling into something dark. Then, quietly: My lord.

"You haven't developed any feeling for her ladyship, I hope."

"Kolave on that subject, now you—I find it tiresome. Speculation at that level is not speculation, it's invention."

"Then I'm relieved."

"Everything proceeds as planned."

He turned his back on the wind, his voice trailing behind him like smoke.

"I will bring down House Rubiette. No reversal. None."

Solaris's capital, Runabern, was a prosperous city.

Nearly everyone in its streets was nobility, a wealthy merchant, or in the service of one or the other—clothes clean, fabric decent, without exception. There was a saying that copper coin didn't change hands in Runabern.

So the figure presently making his way through its streets was, by the standards of the place, unusual.

His clothes were the sort that had originally been well-made and well-tailored. They had been carefully washed and dried, that much was visible. They had also been torn in several places and had lost something of their original color. People moving past him drew aside and looked away.

They did not say anything unkind, because the man was tall and broad-shouldered, and the eyes set beneath his heavy brows were burning with something dangerous. The long sword at his hip did not help matters.

He had the solid, purposeful build of a knight, and the face below the dark brows was strongly handsome. His name was Therio Alte.

He had just barely broken free of the Avalanche Mountain Range. Once through, he had caught a portal and arrived in Runabern considerably ahead of what Entzi Bethelgius had anticipated—Therio Alte was a far better knight than anyone had given him credit for being.

He had no emergency money on him. He didn’t have the nerve to announce himself as the young lord of House Alte in a state like this. His appearance remained, therefore, exactly as bad as it was.

He crossed the distance to the Rubiette ducal estate in several swift strides. The guards moved to stop him, then looked at his face, and stepped back in startled recognition.

His voice was low and pressed flat with something cold and unresolved.

“Open the gate.” A pause. “Tell them Therio Alte is here.”