“Not to mention the cost of replacing her bloodstained gown. More than my dowry, I’d expect.”
“Considerably.”
We were still laughing when a robust man in a too-tight doublet pushed his way through the crowd to approach us with a broad grin. My companion immediately straightened, tugging his disheveled jacket into some semblance of order.
“Aubrey, my boy!” the man puffed, buttons of his waistcoat straining. Eyes the same warm amber as his son’s glanced over me speculatively. “Finally found a young lady worthy of your sonnets, eh?”
“This is Miss Elivya fen Lazerin, Father,” he introduced pointedly, a fresh note of tension in his voice.
“Good gods, is it really?” the big man spluttered, wide eyes fixing on me in full. He barked a short, sharp laugh. “So it is! My stars, child, I’ve not seen you since – well it’s been a fair mark, that’s for sure – spitting image of your mother, look at that… Perhaps you don’t remember me, young as you were at the time…”
For being the Royal Poet, he certainly didn’t seem particularly well-spoken and I suffered his rambling exclamations for several awkward minutes before my parents appeared out of the crowd.
“Ah, Damien!” he greeted, leaving off the rather uninteresting tale of how he’d saved my father from a mud pit – or was it a creek bed? Either way, it was something that sounded wholly innocuous, but Lord Augustus seemed quite keen on telling me how he’d come to the rescue.
After a barrage of pleasantries, we were enthusiastically invited to join them for supper three nights hence. While our parents worked out the details, Aubrey nudged me companionably and leaned close to murmur in confidence.
“A bargain, dove, if you’ll consider it.”
I knit my brow in sudden suspicion, but he continued on unhindered, eyes fixed on Lord Chamberlain.
“Come study with me, and I’ll teach you a thing or two on surviving at Court.”
“Study with you?”
“With my father,” he clarified, nodding discreetly in the Royal Poet’s direction. “I’ve grown weary of weathering his lessons alone. He might be less inclined to drone on so endlessly if there were another victim in the room.” He gave his brows a suggestive raise. “One needing to keep a schedule, for example.”
“So you’d have me suffer with you?” I challenged, bemused.
He shrugged. “That, or I can leave you to the wolves.”
“How gallant.”
Amber eyes flicked my way. “First lesson, free of charge: there’s no such thing as gallantry here. This city is a den of thieves, and every last one of them will gladly take advantage of your noble nature if it gets them one step closer to what they want.”
“And what is that?”
His lips curved into a sly grin, a wisp of auburn hair drifting across his brow.
“Depends on the thief.”
CHAPTER 5
As the fall marched on, I studied statecraft and intrigue in the morning and had my lessons with Aubrey and Lord Chamberlain in the afternoon. I finally learned the technicalities of the breeding and marketing of our horses, and accompanied my father on several occasions to negotiate contracts with lords and wealthy merchants in need of new stock. Many members of the noble Houses wintered at Court to pursue marriage alliances, business agreements, or favor with the Crown. As such, we received no small number of invitations to various dinner parties throughout the colder months, many of which we accepted.
When I wasn’t being put on display, I devoured books from the immense library of the Chamberlain manor, though Aubrey assured me the collection at their main estate in Cambria was far more expansive. Lord Augustus’s lessons complemented my mother’s rather well, our afternoons filled with debate that stretched my mind to the point of blinding exhaustion. At each conclusion, he would leave Aubrey and I to review the day’s discussions over wine and a well-stoked hearth until my father’s armsman Gabe arrived to escort me home.
Despite his jaded outlook on life at Court, the young heir of House Chamberlain proved to be a genuine and generous soul. Having spent most of his life in Litheria, Aubrey had developed thick skin and a vast treasury of gossip about nearly every member of society. Much of this, he shared with me, though he warned me not to use such valuable leverage frivolously. I found myself with little cause to do so, since no one seemed overly eager to try me at public affairs while the son of the King’s Poet lingered by my side.
Which he did, unwaveringly, for the entire season.
We grew close quite quickly over the course of our lessons together, falling in like old friends from the very first day. Aubrey’s sarcasm and brilliance charmed me to my core, and his unfaltering attentiveness to me in public only served to feed the rumors that the Houses of Chamberlain and Lazerin would undoubtedly be joined. I discouraged such gossip whenever it arose, even with Shera, but couldn’t help the flutter in my chest at the thought.
One afternoon in the midst of winter, Aubrey was strangely absent when I arrived at the Chamberlain manor for my daily lesson. The gathering of old Academy friends he’d mentioned the day before must have run late, and – knowing Aubrey – involved quite a bit of wine. He was likely only just dragging himself out of bed and into his trousers, and I looked forward to greeting him with unnecessarily boisterous cheer. Grinning deviously at the thought, I relinquished my cloak to the doorman and wandered up the stairs to his quarters.
I stopped first in his study, half expecting to find him slouched over his desk with a glass of watered wine and a squinty-eyed grimace. Instead, the room showed no sign that he’d even been in it that morning. I was about to turn back to the hallway when a scrap of parchment caught my eye, conspicuously out of place amidst the tidily-kept office. Crossing the last few steps toward the desk, I tilted my head to read the familiar scrawl on the page.
We burn
Flint and tinder
Touch and breath and ache
Colliding in a scorching tempest
Fingertips featherlight
Lips searching
Demanding surrender
Begging to yield
Consume me
Claim me
Reduce me to ash
I’d read Aubrey’s verses before, but this was something far removed from his usual biting satire. This was deeply personal. Intimate. I don’t know how many times I read those words, frozen in place with my head uncomfortably cocked, but a small part of me couldn’t help but wonder if they were meant for me.
The thought left me a bit breathless and heated, the careless drop of ink near the bottom like a piece of his soul on the page, but none of it was meant for my eyes. Perhaps it was a commission; a gift for a noble lord to his mistress, or a token to woo some besotted patron’s intended. Either way, I was a voyeur. A trespasser. I withdrew quickly, careful not to disturb my surroundings.
Though I was tempted to abandon my search, I decided persistence would help clear my head of any lingering haze and forged on down the hall toward Aubrey’s bedroom. Distracted by the passionate words still rattling around in my head, I’d raised my hand to knock before I noticed that the door had been left slightly ajar. Faint whispers of laughter and low voices wheedled their way through the crack.
If Aubrey was suffering the after-effects of too much wine, he wasn’t doing so alone.
I hesitated, but the combined weight of my mother’s training and the jealous nature of a fifteen-year-old girl proved too powerful for good manners to overcome. Leaning close, I held my breath and peered through the slit in the wooden frame.
A tangle of limbs and bare flesh grappled lazily amidst the sheets, the sounds of gasping and moans barely reaching my ears. I flushed to the roots of my hair and knew I should pull away, but I lingered a moment longer in hopes of gleaning the identity of the other figure. A familiar flash of auburn emerged from the confusion, trailed closely by a head of golden hair.
Patricia? I thought with
a sharp sting of betrayal. But no, that hair was too short, the flesh too firm to be-
Wait…but that’s…
Slender fingers wound around the back of Aubrey’s neck, pulling him close for a sensual kiss as I retreated abruptly from the scene. Shallow breath heaving in undue panic, I backed into the table against the opposite wall and narrowly avoided sending a vase crashing to the floor. The sounds inside the room ceased at the audible collision and I froze in place for a long, terrifying moment until the faint murmurs began again. With confusion, hurt, and jealousy battling for control of my racing heart, I turned and fled silently back toward the library.
Augustus immediately apologized for his son’s tardiness and regaled me with some rambling bit of gossip that went in one ear and straight out the other. For a mercy, he took my wounded silence for a byproduct of Aubrey’s lack of courtesy, and chastised him smartly for it when he finally did arrive for our lesson.
I could feel his eyes on me from the moment he walked in the room, watching me dodge his gaze and offering a mechanical apology for his thoughtlessness. I dismissed the latter with some pitiful attempt at nonchalance and the day’s lesson got quickly underway.
My mother would’ve been ashamed, had she been unfortunate enough to witness the following two hours of ineptitude on my part. All that training at dissembling amounted to naught beneath Aubrey’s piercing gaze, which he kept relatively fixed on me throughout the course of the afternoon. No matter how many times I heard her voice in my head, demanding apathy, commanding calm, I couldn’t bury the whirlwind inside my chest.
Lord Augustus cut our lesson short, no doubt due in part to my lackluster participation that day, and my heart sank to see him heave himself out of his chair. Sharp eyes glanced between his son and I with a keen glimmer.
“Feeling a bit taxed, today,” he sighed. “Best leave you to it a bit early.” Wisp-thin brows raised pointedly at his heir. “I expect you’ve enough to discuss as it is. We’ll expand more on the Hydraxian border disputes tomorrow.”
Clearly pleased with his cat-like subtlety, the Royal Poet strode promptly from the room. When his lumbering steps faded down the hall, leaving us to our usual devices, Aubrey whirled on me with all his tightly-held exasperation finally unleashed across his handsome face.
“For the love of Adulil, Elivya, what is wrong with you today?”
For the first time in months, I wished Gabe would find reason to fetch me early and spare me the humiliation of that question. But if the light outside the windows was any indication, I had at least another hour to go and no amount of evasion could keep Aubrey at bay that long. I turned my attention to him in the beginnings of an effort to dissemble but faltered in the face of those disarming amber eyes, digging for words and coming up wholly empty. Despite my silence, I could tell by the shift in his expression that he understood.
“Oh, hell….”
“I didn’t mean to spy,” I stumbled in a desperate whisper, my face hot and tears welling in my eyes. After hours of restraint, I staggered through my apology, the words tumbling from my lips in a rush. “You weren’t there to greet me, so I went looking for you, and the door was open, and – ah, gods, Aubrey, I’m so sorry!”
As I buried my face in my hands and seriously considered throwing myself out of the nearest window, he crossed to kneel at my feet.
“I know…” he murmured, his warm hands closing on mine. “I told him it was getting late. Please, it was my folly.” When I didn’t respond, a wave of dark hesitation and preemptive hurt flickered across his features. “I’m sorry if it… offends you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I huffed in reproach.
He squeezed my fingers with a soft smile. “Then why are you crying?”
I looked up from my lap to meet his gaze and shook my head. “Don’t you know?”
A long moment passed between us, and understanding dawned on him for the second time in as many minutes. He immediately dropped my hands and sat back on his heels. Of course he would recoil, learning I had thought of him that way. Any reasonable young man would. I was gawky and boyish and more than a little uncouth; no qualities any nobleman would seek in a wife, no matter how familiar we had become. I ignored completely the fact that the young man before me would prefer no wife at all.
“‘We burn, flint and tinder’,” I muttered, and watched the blood drain from his face as the rest of him fell frighteningly still. A bitter smile tugged at my lips. “Not meant for me, clearly.”
“You thought…”
“You intervened, at the King’s gala.”
“I wasn’t about to let-”
“You invited me to study with you,” I interjected, a stiff, defensive edge creeping into my tone.
“I told you why.”
“And you always dote on me in public. You’ve not left my side at a single event all winter.”
Aubrey huffed an incredulous laugh. “To keep the rest of them from eating you alive!”
Embarrassment quickly turned to anger, and I abandoned my chair to put some distance between us. Fabric rustled behind me as he stood.
“I’m sorry, Liv. I don’t mean to make light of it, I just…” A faint hiss told me he was running a hand through his hair, gathering his thoughts. “It was never my intention to mislead you. I do truly enjoy your company.”
Hugging my arms about me, I couldn’t bring myself to face him in my abject humiliation.
“The fault is mine,” I replied in a miserable whisper. “To assume such a thing.”
Any man of quality would rather take House Lazerin’s livestock to bed than its heir.
“I will admit,” he added hesitantly, cutting through the memory of Patricia’s voice, “the thought crossed my mind as well on more than one occasion.” He didn’t flinch from the scathing, doubtful glare I hurled at him over my shoulder. “It’s true,” he pressed with a wry grin. “Would certainly get my father off my back about it.”
“Surely you’d find such an arrangement… unappealing.”
“The bedchamber is not the only arena in life. Any man would be lucky to have you at his side.”
“Any man but you.”
The small, quick breath he drew told me without words that I had wounded him. Biting my tongue, I fought to suppress the bitter disappointment scouring my ego raw. I didn’t resent his choice of partner. Far from it. Alesians hold Adulil’s tenets of love and acceptance dear. But knowing he could never even begin to consider me that way, when I had spent months with it in the back of my mind, stung the proud, jealous girl in me.
I was so painfully young, then. What Aubrey had been to me, my heart had hoped might grow into something more. I enjoyed our time together. We shared common interests and our temperaments complemented one another. What was a good marriage if not that? Ah, gods, I knew nothing of love’s delicate misery.
Aubrey did. It was written all over his face.
“Who is he?” I finally asked after a few uncomfortable minutes.
“Leon. Leon ben Therus.”
“An heir?”
“Third in line for his House.”
I nodded, sniffling and scrubbing tears from my face as I turned, banishing my hurt and clinging to a mask of pragmatic indifference.
“That doesn’t help your situation much.”
“My aunt has two sons,” he replied quickly, suggesting a significant amount of prior consideration. I couldn’t blame him. It was his duty to ensure the continuation of his House, just as it was mine. I envied him a bit, that he could simply step aside and pass the mantle to his cousins. I had no such insurance at my disposal. My father’s only brother had died before marrying, leaving the fate of the dominant Lazerin bloodline entirely upon my shoulders. Despite the weight of that burden, I couldn’t bring myself to begrudge my friend his freedom.
“Do you love him?” I asked.
“…Very much.”
Nodding again, my mask faltered a bit.
“And me?”
I watched his eyes widen slightly in surprise at the question, saw his brows knit as he considered it, noted the small shake of his head as the lines of his mouth softened. I didn’t need to hear it aloud to know.
“Very much,” he repeated, his voice hushed. “Enough to want you to have a chance at a true marriage, with a man who can love you in every way.”
“And if no such man exists?” I asked carefully, all the self-doubt of my fifteen years bubbling to the surface.
He tilted his head as though he were about to scold me for such thoughts, but decided against it. One corner of his mouth quirked in a playful grin, even as he leveled those sad eyes at me.
“If Alesia fails to produce any man worthy of you, then I will gladly take you to wife and raise your bastards as my own.”
Ah, Aubrey. My fearless, amber-eyed poet would live a lie just to save me from disgrace – to save my House from ruin, even at the expense of his own. He was willing to commit heresy for my sake.
To this day, I cannot believe I ever deserved such a friend.
CHAPTER 6
In the spring, we returned to Laezon and I turned sixteen. With no small amount of assistance from Aubrey, my debut and subsequent winter in the White City had been a well-received success by all accounts. Several Houses had expressed their interest in pursuing an alliance once we returned to Litheria after my seventeenth birthday, the age deemed appropriate to begin courtship proceedings. I breathed a private sigh of relief, my bargain with Aubrey one step farther from becoming a necessity.
Though Valor and James both had accompanied us to Litheria, my exploits at Court and my studies at the Chamberlain manor had left little time for recreation throughout the winter months. Now, with the removal of both from my daily schedule, I found my days blissfully empty once again. After my mother’s lessons concluded each day, I spent hours riding the vast grounds of the estate, reveling in the open spaces and fair spring weather.
Traitor (A Crown of Lilies Book 1) Page 6
