redoubled, until she couldn’t tell where she stopped and he began.
She pulled herself together and focused. Water. Ripples in the sun. Slowing; quieting; still.
Chapter Five
Gavin decided that the most logical course of action was to kill his father with a knife to the throat in the most public place possible. Judah thought this was absurd. Gavin informed her that patricide was practically a family tradition. “He’ll be disappointed in me if I don’t at least try,” he said, flipping the dagger he’d taken to carrying. It was overly jeweled and too well polished, but the long blade was nasty. “All I need is a chance.”
Forgetting, apparently, his earlier certainty that Elban would never give him one. “Are you liable to catch him here in the staff corridors?” Judah said. Because that was where they were, even though she was going to the stables and he was going to the training field, where he’d spent nearly every waking hour of the last forty-eight practicing with the dagger, and there were faster ways to get both places if you didn’t care about being noticed. Judah used the staff routes fairly often, but Gavin almost never did. “Or are you just avoiding Amie and her friends?”
He slid the dagger back into its sheath. “She was incredibly attractive before I thought I might have to marry her.”
“Has she been disfigured somehow?” Judah said, and he said, “Let’s just say I see her differently.”
They came to the intersection where he needed to go one way and Judah the other. Before he could walk away, Judah grabbed his arm. “Before you murder your father,” she said, “you need to tell Elly what’s going on.” Because he hadn’t; neither had Judah. Being kept in the dark made Elly extremely angry and being angry made her extremely polite, and when Elly was extremely polite, she was formidable. Every icy please and thank you stabbed at Judah, and she felt an uncertain lurch in Gavin’s stomach, too, the moment she spoke Elly’s name.
But all he said was, “Speaking of telling, Cerrington’s telling all sorts of stories about you from the night of the hunt. Which makes you the first woman he’s touched in decades. Congratulations.”
“Tell Elly,” Judah said doggedly, “or I will.”
In the stables, Darid sat in the doorway, braiding rope. He greeted her as normal, but when she picked up the pitchfork and began mucking out the nearest stall, she became aware that he would not look directly at her. “Am I doing something wrong?” she said.
“No wrong way to muck out a stall.” His attention remained fixed on his rope, but something in the tone of his voice told her the sentence wasn’t over. She waited for the rest and finally it came. “Not sure you should be doing it at all, though.”
The words weren’t a surprise. She’d known he’d say them someday. But she hadn’t expected them to come now, when the rest of her life was falling down around her ears. She stuck the tines of the fork in the old wood of the floor. Harder than she needed to; the sound of metal stabbing into the wood was louder than she’d intended. “I’ve been mucking out your stalls for almost a year. You’ve never said anything like that to me.”
“Thought it.”
“Sure. But you never said it. So what’s changed?” Then the connection snapped together in her head, as unnatural as the gaslights. “You heard something about me, didn’t you? What was it? That I was chasing some courtier?”
The strands of hemp wound in and out around his fingers, the long tail of completed rope coiled next to him on the ground. Darid’s fingers could weave rope on their own while his brain did three other things but suddenly the process seemed to require all of his attention.
“More than that?”
His eyes flicked up to her. She had blushed when Gavin mentioned Firo, but she didn’t now. She could feel him searching for either confirmation or denial. She didn’t know how to give him either, but one of her eyebrows wanted to lift so she let it, and a slow smile touched Darid’s face.
“As long as no lord from the provinces is going to show up here with a horsewhip,” he said, and then, “Don’t look at me like that. People do odd things.”
“I do odd things all the time,” she said, “but not that.”
She went back to her muck. He went back to his rope. After a few minutes, he said, “I have people to