“Are you?”
Gideon flinched at her question, remembering the day he took her measurements in his parents’ shop. He wondered what she’d been thinking as she walked the sooty streets of his neighborhood. Breathing in the smoggy air. Listening to the rattle and hiss of the factories nearby.
“Old Town didn’t impress you, I take it.”
She stiffened beside him. “I only meant—”
“Was that your first time there?”
She didn’t need to answer; he could easily guess.
In all the years Rune and Alex had been friends, she’d never set foot in their tenement. Alex had always gone to Wintersea House. Either his brother had been too ashamed to invite her into their home, or he’d invited her, and Rune had declined to come.
“When my parents died, the shop and apartment passed to me,” he explained.
“But why choose to live there? Why not sell it and ask the Commander for an estate of your own? Thornwood Hall, for example, could have been yours.”
Thornwood Hall.
Gideon shivered.
A dark shadow hung over that house. He could still feel Cressida there. Still smell the stench of her magic in the air. The few times he’d gone back, he’d been plagued by living nightmares.
“I would rather sleep beneath a bridge than sleep in Thornwood Hall,” he said, more to himself than to her. “If you found Old Town beneath you, I certainly won’t admit to the neighborhood we lived in before that.”
“I never said Old Town was beneath me.”
Her voice came from several paces behind him, making him realize she’d stopped walking. Turning to face her, he found her edges lit up by the red-gold light of the setting sun and her white sundress whipping around her knees in the wind. They were at the edge of the gardens here. The hedges were lower and less manicured. Wild, like her.
“Your neighborhood is … quaint.”
“Quaint is a word polite people use when they don’t want to be insulting.”
Her cheeks reddened and her hair blew across her face. “Are you so determined to misunderstand me?”
Gideon paused, studying her. If he and Rune Winters were truly courting—which would never happen—this is exactly the argument he would have with her.
“Is it quaint that the residents of Old Town scrape their pennies together to keep the lights on? Quaint that parents spend half the year starving, so their children don’t have to? When Penitent children beg in Old Town streets? Or the old and infirm freeze to death in their beds because they can’t afford to heat their apartments?”
These things were regular occurrences in Old Town.
Rune stared in horror at Gideon. Of course she didn’t know about these things. She lived in a different world. One that was only an hour’s ride on horseback but might as well be as far as the moon.
Gideon turned and kept walking, annoyed with himself for bringing it up. Annoyed at her for being … well, her.
“I’m not sure why you’re angry at me,” she said to his back. “If Penitent children are begging in the street, it’s the Republic you should blame. The Good Commander made their families outcasts for aiding witches.”
Gideon stopped.
“Or don’t you remember that the Commander promised us a better world?” she continued before he could respond. “One where no one lives in squalor.”
Despite his anger, she was right. Gideon remembered the rallies. The speeches. The pamphlets hidden in pockets and shoes or between the pages of books passed under the noses of the aristocracy. Nicolas Creed had promised to usher in a better world. But that world had yet to fully arrive.
“If people live in poverty,” she said, “you should direct your anger at him.”
He whirled on her.
“You think we weren’t impoverished before? You have no idea what the real world is like, Rune. You live a pampered, privileged existence and always have. I’m not saying that’s your fault. I’m simply stating facts. If you don’t want to look at ugly things, you don’t have to. You can pretend they don’t exist.”
A bright flush of red swept up her neck.
“People like you and your grandmother flourished under the Reign of Witches, when things were worse than they are now. So don’t pretend you care. You didn’t then, and you don’t now. The Sister Queens or the Good Commander … it’s all the same to you.”
She winced, as if he’d struck her.
Seeing it, the fight went out of him.
Fuck. That was too far.
“Rune …” He ran his hands roughly through his hair. “I’m sorry.”
Did he have to be so brutally honest? She seemed so small, suddenly. He wanted to close the space between them but was afraid she might recoil.
“I agree with you: the revolution was supposed to make things better, for all of us, but there’s a long way to go.”
She stayed silent, watching him as the wind whipped through her hair.
I’ve ruined it, he thought. She’s going to turn around, go back, and never speak to me again.
But instead of trying to salvage this—his last fraying thread to his only lead on the Crimson Moth—he gave her that out. He felt sick with himself for insulting her, and the right thing to do was suggest they return to the house.
Before he could, she stepped toward him, stopping only inches away.
“If I thought you were beneath me …” Her eyes were hard as pewter, searching his. “… why would I be out on a walk with you?”
He searched hers back.
Why indeed?
Lifting his hands, he gathered the wild tangle of hair blowing across her face. It surprised him when she didn’t flinch away, when she let him scrape it back instead. She seemed to soften as he held it, allowing him to see her clearly.
He shouldn’t have liked it so much—the feel of her hair against his palms, the way she relaxed beneath his fingers.
“Beautiful heiresses might court common soldiers,” he said. “But they don’t marry them.”
Her mouth quirked a little. “Did you just call me beautiful, Gideon?”
“I’m stating the obvious. Don’t change the subject.”
She looked away.
“You know it’s true, Rune. People of your station don’t marry down.”
In Gideon’s experience, those born into wealth and privilege wanted more of it, not less. Like the first hit of a drug, the moment people tasted power, they needed more to quench the craving.
“I don’t know how to dance to your songs,” he said. “I don’t have the esteem of your friends. I don’t use seventeen pieces of silverware at dinner.” He let go of her hair, and it billowed out, catching in the wind once more. “I have no means of expanding your inheritance.”
He knew he was walking a fine line, reminding her of the reasons they made no sense. That this charade they were playing was a weak one. But if the goal was to be vulnerable, to entice her to be vulnerable, too, he needed to speak the truth.
“People like you are impossible,” she said. “I don’t care about those things.”
He almost rolled his eyes. “Of course you do.”
“Then why are we here? If I’m so shallow—all trappings and no substance—what are you doing with me? Why would someone like you want someone like me?”
Gideon opened his mouth to respond, only he didn’t know the answer.
He studied her, hair ablaze in the setting sun. Gray eyes like molten steel.
In his silence, Rune came to her own conclusions.
“Maybe you’re right.” She stepped around him, lantern in hand, and unlatched the white gate at the garden’s edge, stepping into the meadow beyond. “One of us thinks ourself too good for the other. But it’s not me.”
The gate swung closed behind her.
Gideon stared after her.
What?
From this side of the gate, he watched her follow the footpath through the tall grass, heading toward the woods in the distance. For some strange reason, his thoughts trickled to Cressida.
He’d learned very quickly not to challenge Cress. Arguments with her came with consequences. When he disagreed or disobeyed, she would punish him—and sometimes others. Until he stopped resisting her altogether.