I took a breath, shaking out my limbs and holding my sore side. Elise looked up as I entered.
A net of gold fine as fishing line held her curls at the nape of her neck. She wore no cosmetics today, and her tunic was plain—long and black, falling in a flow of shadows around her knees, every shade of night mixed within the threads. Pale gold flecked the high collar, and her tightly laced boots covered her leggings. Each movement drew my eyes to the smooth curves of her arms, her hips, and the lines of her crossed legs.
I bowed, flexing my hands.
“I told you,” Elise said with a sigh. “You can stop doing that.”
“They’re teaching me etiquette for a reason.” I stayed bowed, hand out and waiting. Her fingers slid over mine till I could gently grip her wrist the way Erlend nobles did when greeting Erlend ladies. I pressed my lips to her knuckles, shaken by the warmth in her hands and the pleasant brush of her skin against mine. An unfamiliar heat pooled in my stomach. “You smell like lemons today.”
The sharp scent of spring fit her so well.
“I use it to remove ink stains.” She shifted her hand, fingers brushing my lips, and pulled back. “Today?”
“You wore rosewater perfume when we first met.” I took another deep breath, the bite of lemons already fading. “I remember.”
“You remember what I smelled like the first time we met?”
“That night changed my life.” I flexed my hand, off-balance by the prickling feeling coursing up my arm. The warmth of her skin lingered.
She flushed. “That’s a bit of an overstatement.”
“No.” I’d found the poster in her purse for the auditions that night, but thinking I was talking about her would seal whatever feelings she had for me. I needed the history and rumors she knew, and I’d no better way to get them. Wasn’t like lemon was a bad smell either. Pleasant. “It’s really not.”
“Still.” She hid behind a tall book bound in exquisite leather. “We shouldn’t waste time—best to show the Left Hand you’re learning quickly.”
I grinned. “Of course.”
We repeated last night’s lesson with new words, moving through prewritten lists. Halfway through, Elise stopped. She dropped the last word she’d made me read—pretentious.
“It’s odd,” Elise said. “You don’t speak like you can’t read.”
There it was.
I rested my chin on my hands like her. “How am I supposed to sound?”
“Common” was the answer. Merchants and higher-ups said it enough without ever saying it. Rath had been turned down for plenty of jobs he could do because he sounded like an orphaned commoner with no education. Reading was well and good, but people didn’t believe you unless you sounded how they wanted.
And one could sound the part. Spouting off common slang one moment and throwing out old pretentious words the next was part of living in two different circles.
Reading didn’t teach you words like “pretentious” and “hypothetical.” People said them all the time. Seeing them on paper didn’t magically make you know what they meant. It helped, but it wasn’t the only way.
“I’m sorry.” Elise’s fingers tightened in her lap.
“Why?”
“I feel like I’ve insulted you.”
“You have.” I shrugged, pushing the papers we’d been using aside. “The way people talk doesn’t mean anything. Only means you had private tutors and a fancy education that taught you how to talk a certain way, and I didn’t.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
“You keep doing that.” I smiled wide enough so she could see it through my mask even though most of me was still fuming. And confused—Erlends never apologized. “I didn’t know nobles could do that.”
“Could do what?” She narrowed her eyes behind her glasses and tilted her chin up.
“Apologize.” I tapped the table with my right hand—drawing her attention away from her collection of supplies—and swiped a handful of paper and charcoal sticks with my left hand. She didn’t notice. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Elise laid her fingers over mine, dark smudges shadowing her skin. “What? You’ve got the look of someone thinking of what to say.”
I hid my laugh with a cough. “All those names you taught me yesterday worked out well.”
“Really?” She sat up straighter, resting her chin on her other hand. “Did you write them down, or did you recognize them?”
The push and pull, like scamming a mark. Enough flattery to get her to talk but not enough to get her suspicious.
“Really.” I met her eyes and ignored her other hand still on mine. “With all the messengers running around, I recognized a few names. Your handwriting’s better though. And I met Lady dal Abreu. Her husband’s Lord del Contes?”
Elise nodded. “Do you know how to write her name?”
“No.” I pushed the paper toward her, hoping to get her talking about the divide between the nobles.
She pushed it back to me. “I’ll spell it. You write it down.”
Lady, she must’ve been an annoying child.
I spelled the name right at least. She set me to copying letters and words after that, working on my writing. I traced the lines of her name onto the side of the paper.
“You always live here?” I asked.
“No.” She wrote out new exercises for me. The books stacked next were history and medical books, words I didn’t recognize stitched to the fronts. She flipped through one and stopped on a page full of calculations. She must’ve been teaching another auditioner about numbers. “I lived at home until Our Queen requested my presence. She needed tutors and scribes, and I wanted to see court.” She paused, fingers tracing the tear on one page. “I preferred studying with others, and the war left everything…”
She trailed off, the achingly familiar sound of bad memories in her voice.
“Ruined?”
She shook her head. “Damaged. If it were ruined, it wouldn’t have been fixable. I was too young to be a proper scribe, but Our Queen wanted people who remembered the war, and Isidora agreed to take me in. I think she just wanted another sibling, something to focus on that wasn’t grief. Father didn’t think Hinter was a place for me then anyway—a broken land full of broken men back from war. He wants me to go back now, but returning home feels final. I’m still not ready.”
“I remember the sounds—catapults and crashing rock, screaming, bodies hitting the ground.” She shook her head. “I didn’t realize how scared I was until I left. I’m responsible for everyone in Hinter, and I know I could never protect them from that. Not without help, so Our Queen called and I answered.”
The chasm in my heart usually reserved for Nacea pitched. Elise wasn’t old enough to have damned Nacea. Living off the legacy, sure, but she’d no part in it. She’d lost things too—her mother, her home, her childhood.
I reached across the table and squeezed her hand. She returned the touch.