MB Chapter 31

"...Where did you send the dining table? Don't tell me it's gone to the Avalanche."

"It isn't a stray cat. I have no particular interest in feeding mountain monsters."

"Do you feed stray cats, then?"

"In truth, I'm rather occupied simply feeding myself."

Lukurue stepped in before the conversation could drift any further from shore, intervening on behalf of his employer.

"My apologies, my lady. We had prepared a modest supper among ourselves and neglected to move it along to the staff dining room. The master was kind enough to see it along."

"Is that so."

"You're the one who sent it, yet you speak as though it were someone else's affair entirely."

"A correction, then."

Entzi snapped his fingers. Somewhere deeper in the mansion, the vanished table materialized in the servants' dining room. This was now the truth, and so Entzi said it with impeccable composure.

"As Lukurue says."

"So it seems."

Anyone looking at the two of them could see, plainly, which was master and which was bondsman.

Goiyo found herself momentarily struck dumb, and then found herself wanting to laugh, which was nearly the same thing. Perhaps the Bethelgius estate truly did carry some enchantment for brazenness, as she'd once suspected. The evidence continued to accumulate.

Entzi drew out her chair. She sat.

He settled immediately into the seat beside her rather than across—he had performed the courtesy of distance exactly once, on her first day here, and had not bothered since. She'd long ceased to notice. This, now, was simply where he sat.

Red wine, a sip. The steak yielded cleanly to her knife, juice rising slow and dark from the cut. She lifted a piece to her mouth and became aware, without looking up, that Entzi was watching her.

"Is it to your taste?"

"Yes. Tuverang has outdone himself tonight. It's delicious."

"Delicious."

He repeated her word back to her, and then the corners of his long eyes curved into something that looked very much like a smile. She hadn't said anything that should have produced one.

Goiyo considered the meat she'd already swallowed with fresh suspicion. The meat itself had committed no crime. She let it pass.

They ate and talked of small things, trading wine through the intervals. By the time the meal drew to a close, her cheeks had gone faintly warm.

"And now." Entzi set down his glass. "The third—or rather, the continuation of the second—choice."

"So dinner was a choice after all."

Entzi affected not to have heard.

"Which would you prefer, my lady—the mansion's central hall, or the imperial palace?"

"Those options are rather far apart in scale. What exactly are you planning?"

What do you imagine I'm planning. His expression was pleasant. It was also entirely untrustworthy.

He clearly had no intention of answering. Goiyo assessed her options and chose the one where disasters could be most easily contained.

"The hall."

"As you wish."

He bowed with elaborate grace and offered his arm—theatrical enough that he might have been performing for an audience of one. She placed her hand on it.

The long dining table dissolved.

The world opened wide.

The central hall of the Bethelgius mansion.

The chandeliers cast gold in long, gentle waves across the floor. Above, the ceiling had been painted the color of deep water meeting a night sky, and across its surface a scatter of silver—not quite stars, not quite light, something hovering between—floated thick and close. Among them, the fixed stars of Capricorn burned with unmistakable clarity.

The floor was laid in tiles of deep blue glass, stacked in translucent layers that brightened toward the surface—as though one stood upon the very skin of a sea, looking down into its depth. Each step felt like standing on something vast and moving.

Across the blue, red petals lay scattered. They were not still. Each one caught the light from within, pulsing faintly, the way embers do when a wind decides to pay attention to them.

Goiyo blinked.

Until an hour ago this hall had been beautiful in its usual way—elaborate, entirely assured of itself, predictable in its extravagance. Now it had been made into something else altogether.

Music arrived without warning. She turned, searching for an orchestra that wasn't there. The sound came from a jewel set at the center of the chandelier, a warm-toned resonance that filled the room without appearing to originate from anywhere in particular.

An acoustic artifact.

And this piece —

"I heard this at the imperial ball."

"You remember." Something in his voice was quiet and deliberate. "Yes. The moment we first met."

"The first..."

She let the word trail without following it to its end.

He came toward her and held out his hand.

'One dance, if you would, my lady.'

"You might have come before dinner, at least."

"Why is that?"

"I ate rather more than usual tonight. My body is heavy. Something vigorous would be—"

"It needn't be vigorous." His voice was unhurried. "It needn't be perfect. I only want to dance with you. If you'll simply move with me, however slowly—" he paused, "—and if it truly feels like too much—" his hand drew back slightly, "—you needn't at all."

Goiyo watched the retreating hand.

She exhaled, once, quietly.

"Slow dancing I can manage. Even if the music won't agree."

"One is never required to conform to something simply because it was made that way. The honor is mine."

His arm came around her waist, and the distance between them closed. Close enough that their breath mingled.

The artifact—whatever mechanism governed it—slowed the music by nearly half. They moved accordingly: unhurried, each step a half-measure behind where the melody would have placed them. The effect was somewhere between dancing and simply having a reason to remain in each other's proximity.

"I've never had a waltz quite this slow before."

"A waaaaaaaltz, my lady." He drew the syllables out until the word had lost all resemblance to itself. "Are you enjoying it?"

"What was that. You could have simply chosen a slower piece to begin with."

"I wanted this one. The way it was the first time we met."

His hand moved in a gentle wave against her back and she turned away from him, their fingers trailing apart and then rejoining as she came back around.

Even that was slow. Even that had no real rhythm to speak of. The absurdity of two people performing a waltz at approximately the speed of a funeral procession made it somehow more charming than precision would have been. They kept smiling. She didn't examine why.

"Why did you ask me to dance that night? The Emperor had just offered you anything you wished."

"Do you remember—just before I went up to the dais, our eyes met?"

"I wasn't entirely certain it was intentional."

"Your expression was like a mask. No expression at all. No light in the eyes. Like a living wax doll, placed very carefully in the room." He paused. "I wanted to crack it."

'I wanted to break through that mask.'

"It was an impulse, in the end. As was the dance. There was little point in requesting something from the Emperor before a crowd—the cost falls to me either way—and I had nothing particular to say." A corner of his mouth tilted. "In retrospect, it was not a bad impulse."

Twirl-rrl. The full skirt barely had time to unfurl before the slow turn folded it back in on itself, the fabric swaying softly.

She caught an edge of balance and nearly lost it—but his arm was already there. Her hand found his shoulder without ceremony.

"Did you know there was talk about that moment?" she said. "About what you said to the Emperor."

"There was talk..." Something in his expression shifted very slightly. "I find I don't particularly want to hear this."

She told him anyway.

"Some of the guests thought, when you requested the first dance of the evening — that you were asking the Emperor himself."

"...I beg your pardon?"

The look on his face was quite worth it. She laughed aloud, which she had not planned to do. In fairness, the rumor wasn't difficult to understand—the angle of the room, the ambiguity of the phrasing, the direction he'd been walking before he turned toward her.

Entzi watched her laugh and produced a sound that was almost a sigh and almost a laugh and somewhere between the two.

"I've been following only the political rumors until now. I suppose I'll need to cast a wider net going forward."

"An excellent idea. And speaking of—what became of the lawsuit?"

They had drifted close again, the music slow enough that it was less a dance than a reason to stay near each other. The chandeliers overhead. The deep glass floor. The soft, persistent pulse of the petals. She became aware, in a distant and belated way, that the warmth in her face was not entirely from the wine.

She tilted her chin up, barely above speaking volume.

And then?

Entzi looked at her mouth.

Tok. Brief. Light. His lips touched hers and were gone before she had quite registered that they had arrived.

"Nothing of consequence."

"...I knew you were about to do it."

He paused, barely perceptibly.

"Did you."

"Your eyes change." She said it without particular emphasis. "Just before you're about to do something..."

He was quiet for a moment. Something moved across his face and then settled into something she couldn't name.

"I see."

"The dance is over."

It was. The music had wound itself to its close—sooner than its slowness had led her to expect. The warmth in her cheeks had spread somewhere below her collarbone. She noticed it now, belatedly.

"Fortunately, the last choice remains." He offered his arm. "The last one, I promise."

"The rose garden," Entzi said, "or Her Imperial Majesty the Empress's private garden?"

"You grow bolder by the hour." Goiyo looked at him directly. "And if I said I wanted the secret garden?"

"You are still underestimating my competence. I have complete confidence we would go undetected."

The truly extraordinary thing, Goiyo reflected, was not that he claimed this. It was that he was almost certainly right. Magic wielded on behalf of purposes this trivial was, in all likelihood, unique to her husband alone. She looked at him with something between exasperation and a laughter she declined to produce, and Entzi, entirely untroubled, continued to be proud of himself.

"I could erase any memory of our visit afterward, naturally."

"You make it all sound very simple."

"It is, rather."

"...You're not going to mention that it's illegal."

"You're not going to mention that it's immoral."

They looked at each other.

Both of them smiled.

"The rose garden."

"A wise choice."

The rose garden at night was the familiar version of extravagance—not the transformed hall, not the night-sea floor, not petals lit from within—but the place itself, exactly as it always was.

It had become, without Goiyo quite noticing when, one of the corners of this house she knew best. The table at the garden's center. The scent of roses moving with the direction of the wind, sweet and persistent. The clean cold of the air that the daytime kept from revealing.

She had said she wanted to grow accustomed to lavish things, once, and so she had kept coming here. One of many small bargains she'd made with herself since arriving.

On the table: white wine. Not the red from dinner. The pale green-gold of it in the glass was quietly lyrical in the lamplight, something she noticed and did not comment on.

The night deepened. Ordinarily, a bottle between two people was a modest affair. Tonight the glasses kept coming—something about the good weather, the accumulated ease of the evening, the faint pull of sleep that followed warmth. Her cheeks were warm. Her mood was good. And underneath both, soft and insistent, the first edge of tiredness.

Then Entzi glanced at his wristwatch.

"Nearly midnight."

"Already?"

"Thirty seconds."

She lifted her glass and let the wine settle on her tongue. The wind moved through the roses. Her lashes stirred slightly with it.

Three hands met at the same point.

"And midnight it is."

He held something out to her.

After everything that had preceded it—the hall made into an ocean, the waltz that barely moved, the dinner that appeared and vanished, the choices that were not quite choices—what Entzi placed before her now was a single white rose.

A blue wrapper, plain. A white ribbon tied somewhat carelessly at the stem. The flower itself was good, and its scent was clean and clear even in the cold.

Goiyo took it, puzzled.

"Entzi...?"

"Happy birthday, Goiyo."

She made a small sound, involuntary and immediately regretted.

'Today is my birthday.'

Of course. She had let it pass, as she always had—a day she had long since stopped arranging herself around, never having had particular reason to. But the evening's accumulated strangeness arranged itself suddenly into a shape she recognized. The choices that had not been choices. The music. The transformed room. The dance. All of it had been moving in this direction, and she hadn't seen it until now.

He watched her surprised face and smiled—warmly, which he did not do often, and which she had no particular defenses prepared against.

"Today is the day you were born." Something in his voice was careful and sincere in equal measure. "It's a good day."

Something unnamed rose in her chest, arrived too quickly to be managed.

Too much wine. She didn't know what expression to make. Her face tried several arrangements in succession and succeeded at none of them—something that began like crying and then bent toward smiling and then gave up entirely, her mouth simply pressed shut, her lower lip held still.

The feeling—something close to sorrow, welling up without warning—did not go down easily.

Entzi said nothing. He watched her, and waited, with the patience of someone who had decided not to hurry her along.

Cold wind. The scent of the roses, which she was finding, by degrees, that she did not dislike as much as she had believed.

Five minutes, perhaps. Longer.

When she finally spoke, her voice was lower than she'd intended.

"...Thank you. Entzi."

She said it without entirely knowing what she was thanking him for, or what the thing in her chest had been.

She knew only that it had been good. That tonight had been good.

That was enough.

"There are many things," she added, after a moment, "that I've only ever heard from you."

It's the wine. That's what this is.

She turned the rose stem between her fingers, feeling the texture of the wrapper.

"Entzi." She looked at him. "Would you like to kiss, or to be kissed?"

He blinked.

She had approximately one moment to observe his expression before she made the decision herself: leaning forward to take his face between both hands and pressing her mouth to his, briefly, without ceremony, without anything resembling planning.

It was barely a kiss. Too short for the word. But it held, in it, everything she was feeling—which was to say, something she hadn't examined, offered without examination, because the wine had made the distance between thinking and doing very narrow indeed.

She registered, in the last moment before her eyes closed, that his face was the most deeply flushed she had ever seen it.

Then the tiredness took her all at once, the way it does when the body has been patient long enough. She dissolved, and he caught her before she finished dissolving.

He held her and did not move.

His heart lurched in a way he didn't know how to name.

Affection. That was what this was.

He had simply grown fond of her—the way one grew fond of anything kept near for long enough. Something had accumulated quietly. That was all.

An ordinary accumulation.

A very small one. Inconsequential.

The same, roughly, as what he felt for a servant hired to manage the estate. The same as what he felt for a butler he had employed for less than a year.

Exactly that much. No more.

'Do you also want to kiss Lukurue?'

Kolave's voice arrived in his memory with its usual precise timing. He dismissed it.

He dismissed it, was aware that he had dismissed it, and dismissed it again.

His eyes closed, pressed shut with some force he was not examining.

The rose garden was quiet. Goiyo breathed against his shoulder with the deep, unconcerned regularity of someone who had absolutely no idea what she had done.

The thing he had named and filed and returned to at careful intervals to confirm it hadn't moved—it had, it seemed, been moving for some time. Quietly. Without authorization. Growing past the size he'd assigned it, past the boundaries he'd drawn around it in precise and deliberate hand, past Lukurue and past fond and past every measured word he had used to keep it in its place—into something he did not, at this particular moment, have a name for.

And was not, at this particular moment, disposed to find one.

He held her.

He did not look for the name.