The mood had fallen a little dark, and grew darker with the sudden approach of Gregory, who smiled at them as if they were old friends. “Obscurist Hault,” he said. “Your presence is requested. Dominic has missed you during your absences. Please come with me.”
Dominic, Jess realized, must be the red-haired young man who stood a few paces back. He was small, compact, and covered in a spray of freckles . . . and miserable. Jess had been prepared to hate him, but seeing how he avoided even so much as looking in Morgan’s direction, he understood with blinding speed it wasn’t the boy’s choice, either.
Just a duty to be done.
Jess was rising to his feet to do something violent—to Gregory, if not to Dominic—when Wolfe quickly stood, faced Gregory, and said, “I’d have thought you’d have learned some manners at your age, but you’re as bad as you were when I was a child. You’ll have her the rest of her life. Isn’t that enough?”
Gregory straightened to face Scholar Wolfe, and Jess realized there was real dislike between these two. It bordered on hate. For all Gregory’s droll observations, he wasn’t remotely friendly. There was something dark underneath his smile—more like a smirk now. Unpleasant and superior. “Keria’s always favored you,” he said. “Her precious little boy, born a disappointment. She fought to keep you long past the age when you should have been sent away, and when you finally were, she still never forgot you. All her love was reserved for you, and you can’t even give her a kind word in return.”
“She doesn’t look to me for kind words. She has you for that. You were ever the politician. And the predator.”
Gregory’s smile froze in place, and shattered into a compressed, hard line. “What are you implying?”
“Nothing,” Wolfe said. “Except that you take a special, unseemly delight in your job.”
“And what do you think I do?”
“Play God with the lives of children.”
“Obscurist Hault is not a child. She is a young woman of tremendous potential who might one day prove as important as, if not more important than, your own mother. It’s in the best interests of the Iron Tower to—”
“To match her with an appropriate sire for her children? Oh yes. I know the game. I grew up with a mother who loathed the very sight of my father, and he hated her in turn. Odd, isn’t it, that your forced inbreeding has created generations of progressively less powerful Obscurists? It’s as if it doesn’t actually work to force people into loveless unions!”
“You know nothing—”
“As one of your more notable failures, I’d say I know everything,” Wolfe said flatly. “Go away, Gregory. Morgan stays with us.”
Jess stood up. Didn’t say or do anything; just stood up. Khalila stood, too. Thomas. Santi. Wolfe stood still with deliberate calm.
Dominic at last raised his head, and the relief on his face was very plain.
“This is a foolish waste of our charity,” Gregory said. “We’ve offered you safety. Refuge. Care for your wounded. And you’re throwing it back in our faces, and for what? You can’t keep her. She belongs to us. To the Tower and the Library.”
“She belongs to no one. Let me be clear: the girl makes her own choices, for as long as she’s with us. If my mother disagrees with that, tell her to come herself. I don’t listen to self-important lackeys.”
Gregory’s face turned an alarming shade of red. “As you wish,” he said. “Scholar Wolfe.”
He walked back to his table, anger in every stiff motion, and pointedly turned his back to them. Jess didn’t want to do the same. He didn’t trust Gregory not to stick a knife in it.
Dominic was still there. The young man looked scared as a rabbit, but he stayed long enough to say, to Morgan, “I’m sorry,” before he went back to his own table.
Not everyone in the Iron Tower was as content and smug as Rosa.
“Morgan?” Khalila settled back down in her chair and reached for Morgan’s hand. “They haven’t forced you—”
“Not yet,” Morgan said. “Thank you, Scholar Wolfe.”
He shook his napkin out and dropped it in his lap. “Don’t thank me,” he said. “I did it to annoy Gregory.”
“Watch him,” Morgan said. “He’s a snake.”
“I’m immune to his particular poison. We knew each other as children, and he was five years older. You can imagine how that appealed to his cruelty.”
She shuddered. “I’d rather not. And thank you, whatever you meant by it.”