Chapter 1226: An Objection And A Bargain (2)

The name landed like a stone in still water, and Lucavion watched the rings spread.

Before the Rotunda, Isolde had no reason to look at Elowyn Caerlin twice. A minor baroness among a hundred minor names, standing well outside any road Isolde walked. He had put her on that road himself. Crossing the floor before Gervase reached her had spared Elara one immediate pressure, and it had also lit her up before every noble with a taste for gossip, including the Lorian students who would inevitably carry the story back to Isolde.

That was the trouble with the novel. It could tell him what would happen if he left things alone. It could not tell him who would look up when he moved.

’Did I put her in Isolde’s path?’

The question sank in cold and stayed there.

He did not have time for it. Beyond the folded screens, Clubs Day rolled on with its bells and vendors and cheerful, oblivious noise, and in front of him Isolde waited, patient as a tide.

"Relationship," Lucavion said, "is a generous word for one dance."

He let a smile ease onto his face, as comfortable as an old chair. "I asked a lady to dance. She said yes. Gervase discovered he had opinions about it. If that counts as a relationship, half the ballroom is engaged."

Isolde’s smile did not move.

"Half the ballroom did not cross a floor to arrive first."

Lucavion said nothing.

The question he had set aside was waiting for him, quiet and patient, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that it would keep.

So he reached for the old tools.

"Ballroom stories grow with the wine," he said, spreading one hand. "Ask three nobles what happened at a dance and you get four duels and a proposal. Half your witnesses were standing at the wrong end of the room. People see what they came to see."

"They do." Isolde inclined her head, as though conceding a point. "But if everyone is wrong about the same thing, Mister Lucavion, it stops mattering that they are. The mistake simply becomes what happened."

It was a good answer. He disliked how good.

"Then there’s nothing to worry about," he tried. "Gossip burns hot and dies fast. By next week they’ll have moved on to someone’s engagement."

"Perhaps. Perhaps they exaggerate; they usually do." She let the concession sit, and used it. "And yet, I am told, you have been seen at Lady Elowyn’s table, in her corridor, among her friends, far more often than a man unconcerned with her would be. You do not seem to mind being associated with her at all."

"I’m sociable."

"You are. Selectively."

He had no answer for that, and she seemed content to wait. I am told. So the Lorian nobles who had been so generous about the Rotunda had kept watching him afterward. Gossip was thorough. It was still worth learning how thorough.

"So let us take the stories as they were told to me," she said. "If they are true..."

Her face changed.

It was not the polite softness of the salon, the one she wore for Prince Adrian’s court. It was the other one. Her lashes lowered a fraction, and her head tilted, and her lavender eyes went gentle and patient, the look of a woman who already held the answer she expected him to give.

He knew that look.

A small room. Rain against the glass. The faint, impossible ghost of crushed roses, and cold stone beneath his palms, though they stood in open air.

He pushed it down before it could finish forming.

"...then Lady Elowyn is a minor provincial noblewoman who has caught a Warenne heir’s eye," Isolde continued, "and someone ought to teach her how those rooms work. Which invitations to accept. Which ones are traps. How to survive the week after a scandal." She paused. "And if the stories are exaggerated, then you would not mind if I took an interest in her."

The sentence was perfectly kind.

It was also the most dangerous thing anyone had said to him all day, and no one else on the grounds would have heard it that way.

She was offering help. To a girl he had publicly stood beside. In a voice with no edge to it at all.

He could not tell her to stay away from Elara. To do that he would have to admit there was something worth keeping her away from, after telling Isolde a dance was all it had been.

Nothing she had proposed was hostile, which made it very hard to refuse.

Lucavion had one trick left.

It was a small one, and he knew before he used it that it would come to nothing. He used it anyway, out of principle.

"Tell me, Lady Isolde." He tilted his head at the paper in his hand. "Are you joining the Culinary Expedition Society solely because of us? I’m flattered. I would have dressed better."

"How presumptuous."

She said it without any heat, and it did not amount to anything at all, just as he had predicted.

"I read their records before I knew either of you would be near them," Isolde went on. "The society documents regional practice with more care than most of the Academy’s research circles: festival calendars, provincial recipes, the customs behind them. And an exchange student sees very little of the country she is exchanging with. The society leaves the grounds. That alone is reason enough."

Her eyes drifted, briefly, toward the distant tables.

"That you have chosen to hover nearby is a pleasant circumstance. Nothing more."

There was no way to argue with that. Her interest had its own roots, planted well before he arrived, and pulling at it would only bring up more of her.

Then she came around to it, so smoothly that he barely felt the turn.

"As for Lady Elowyn." A pause, weighed to the grain. "It is a society that travels and works in groups. Its members prepare together, eat together, and spend weeks becoming familiar without anyone needing to arrange an introduction. I would be surprised if she did not apply. Her friends seem the sort who would enjoy it."

He watched her sentence take form. Had he known what had happened before he arrived, he would have read it differently. He did not.

"Should she join, we would simply be two members who happened to share a cooking pot." Isolde smiled, faintly, sweetly. "You would not even need to be present."

The form in Lucavion’s hand had grown heavier.

He had decided the society needed only watching. He had not planned on it acquiring a resident danger.

"What do you want from me, Lady Isolde?"

He said it plainly. The jokes had run out, and pretending otherwise had begun to feel like effort.

Isolde considered him with something that might have been approval. "Nothing today." She offered it like a kindness. "There is no bargain to make yet, Mister Lucavion. There is only a choice you have already reached for."

Her gaze dropped to the form.

"You have decided not to join. I saw it in the way you set it down."

He said nothing. It was true, and denying it would have required a lie.

"That is your right." The warmth returned to her voice, light and reasonable. "The society is open to anyone. I would hardly hold it against you."

Then, as if in passing:

"If you have decided not to join, I suppose Miss Caerlin and I will have to become acquainted without you."

She lifted the word Miss just slightly, with the same lilt he used himself, and smiled as she did it. A small act, performed for his benefit alone.

No one within earshot would have found anything wrong with it. A passing student might have thought it kind. A courteous senior seeing to a junior’s welfare. An apology, almost, for the inconvenience.

Lucavion heard it for what it was.

The plan he had made minutes ago rested on a simple assumption: whatever threatened the expedition would appear somewhere ahead, along a route he could watch taking shape.

Isolde needed no dangerous route. She needed a shared table, a cooking pot, and a season of ordinary weeks beside Elara. The society he had decided to leave alone would provide all three.

Lucavion looked down at the application.

Isolde would be beside Elara.

And he was the one standing outside.