Page 30 of Reckless Heir
I cover her with my body and I press the flat of my cooled palm against the mark on her — not to soothe, I tell myself, because soothing isn't something I do, because soothing implies a tenderness I haven't been trained for — but to confirm the integrity of the impression. To check my own work. This is a technical gesture.
I maintain this for slightly longer than a technical gesture requires.
The Regents disperse above us, their masked faces retreating into the dark of the balcony. The room is very quiet. She says nothing. I say nothing. I am aware of her breathing — slower now, steadying — and the specific quality of the silence between us, which is different from all the silences we've had before in the suite. Those silences are managed, each of us performing something. This one isn't.
After a moment I hand her the dress and move to the far side of the antechamber.
She dresses without looking at me.
She leaves without looking at me.
The door closes.
I stay.
The brazier is cooling. The candles have burned down to stubs. The room smells of hot iron and her fear and something underneath both of those things that I don't have a name for and am not going to try to name in this room, tonight, with the Masquerade music filtering through from three corridors away.
I press my thumb against my forefinger — a pressure point I learned at twelve from the same man who taught me the gun disassembly, a way of returning sensation to the body when the mind is doing something unauthorized.
Three controlled breaths.
Usually one is sufficient. Sometimes two. Three is an emergency protocol.
That's two more than I usually need.
I pick up the iron and set it in its stand. I check the brazier damper. I blow out the remaining candles, which is a thing I don't have to do — the attendants will handle it — but which gives my hands something to do for thirty seconds that isn't the other options.
In the corridor, the Masquerade music swells — strings, low brass, the sound of a hundred conversations performed as power. My world. My design. The system I was built to operate at the apex of.
I walk back into it.
I do not think about the brand or her voice or the particular density of the thing that landed in my chest when she said those two words.
I don't think about it at all.
The corridor is long. My face is controlled. I nod to two Regents as I pass them. I am, by every visible measure, exactly who I have always been.
The problem with measures is that they're external.
The internal accounting is a different matter. I'll get to it later — or I won't, I'll file it away with the other things I don't examine. I'll proceed. The thing in my chest will sit there unclassified until I run out of available shelf space for it.
Tonight: the Masquerade.
Later: everything else.
The fire is still lit in the Convocation Lodge when I leave.
It will burn for another two hours. Tradition: the Masquerade fire is permitted to burn until it extinguishes itself, not extinguished before, a practice that dates to the founding generation and has not been changed since. They kept most things the founding generation did. It's one of the ways this institution announces what it thinks of itself.
I walk out of the Lodge and into the cold. The car is waiting, but I need something to do with my legs.
The Masquerade is done. The fire is done. The brand is done.
I am not done with any of it.
It went as planned. That's the first thing I identify, standing in the courtyard outside the Lodge with my jacket on and the cold working through it. The ceremony went as planned. The Regents were satisfied. Dimitri was present and frustrated and unable to act, which is the correct state in which to leave Dimitri. The Orphan is marked, documented, presented to the council in the form the contract requires.
Everything went exactly as planned.
