“I’ve been practicing,” I reminded him, and smoothed the paper flat out of habit while keeping my body between him and the letter.
“Oh, my dear,” he said, shaking his head so that I noticed he was wearing drops in his ears, some kind of red stones that caught the light and bothered my eyes. At least he was wearing red—had been wearing red, I admitted to myself grudgingly, for a few days. Out of misplaced camaraderie, probably not out of any feelings of nationality he harbored for our homeland. “There’s something dreadfully wrong about this letter.”
“Wrong,” I snapped, eyeing him darkly. If he’d thought joking around was the order of the day when something was wrong back home, then I was going to crack his head open like an egg against the wall before breakfast. Finally, an excuse for it.
I glanced down at Yana’s penmanship, scanning the letter’s contents briefly. Reading was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to be avoiding at the moment, but—well, I didn’t like that look on Caius’s face, that was all. Yana’d never mention if she was sick, or anything like that, but there was always the chance that one of the others…
“Am I reading this right?” I asked, like it didn’t bother me a heck of a lot even to have to ask for an outside opinion. As much as I hated to admit it, though, Greylace was the only other person who’d read one of Yana’s letters, and in my current state I didn’t know if I trusted myself to be the last word.
Caius pushed a hand through his hair, so that I caught sight of his bad eye before the strands fell back into place. Why didn’t he just wear an eye patch? He could even put jewels on it, have different ones to match his every outfit. Hiding wasn’t the sort of thing I associated with Greylace; it didn’t suit him. Nor was he the type to fidget—at least, not so unconsciously. Everything he did—every movement he made—was calculated, planned out for a certain effect to add to the overall appearance. Much like that performance last night, and just as fucking deadly, too.
There were times when I figured he could easily have been raised by the Ke-Han, for all they were similar in most of their insanities.
He reached a hand out as if to take the letter, then withdrew it.
I didn’t like this. Not one bit.
“I don’t know,” he said at last and sighed, producing a fan from inside his voluminous sleeves. He snapped it open in one smooth flick of his wrist and studied its ridged horizon with his one good eye. “Did you know that noble ladies sometimes carry weapons in their fans,” he remarked, as though he imagined I cared. There was something serious in his voice, though, or maybe it was the absence of his usual unflagging delight.
“I didn’t know that,” I said, trying my best to rein in my temper. “I wouldn’t doubt it, though. Women are dangerous. I was asking about the letter.”
Yana hadn’t even mentioned my temper in this one. That was another funny thing, besides. She never missed a chance to correct my flaws. It just wasn’t like her.
In fact, the whole letter was off, like someone else had been writing it. Someone who didn’t come from the country, who’d learned a long time ago the proper way of sentences, who wrote perfectly fine but without any real flavor.
“That’s precisely what I meant, my dear!” Caius’s gaze flicked up to me, that time. He looked wounded that I hadn’t been able to follow the fevered ramblings of his brain. Like that was something new.
“Humor me,” I said flatly.
Maybe he could give words to the feelings I had.
Caius closed the fan again and stepped up on his tiptoes to smack me on the nose with it, like a bad dog who’d made a mess of the kitchen. By the time I’d got over the shock—which didn’t take me long—he’d danced out of range and into the center of my room. He wasn’t laughing, but he’d opened the fan again and was holding it in front of his face.
It wouldn’t’ve surprised me to learn he had a knife hidden in that fan. He was just the type for it.
His one good eye sparkled wickedly, like a chip of green madness in an otherwise mundane marble statue.
“You see before you an ordinary fan,” he called out as