Page 43 of Invidia

For the first time in many years, I wished I had my own residence. It wasn’t something that particularly bothered me in the past—the barracks were clean, comfortable, and convenient—but if I had my own apartment…

Would I have invited Tallulah back there? Would she have said yes? Probably not.

“I wasn’t really going anywhere,” Tallulah hedged, her teeth chattering slightly.

That was all the opening I needed. “Come on. I know a spot in the palace where you can warm up.”

I wouldn’t have risked it if I thought we’d run into anyone, but there was always a lull in the afternoon, before the dinner rush started, from my memories of spending time in the palace with Damen. Tallulah followed me down the quiet corridors and spiral staircases with a gratifying level of trust. That, at least, hadn’t disappeared. On the bottom level were the kitchens, but I led Tallulah through to a spacious room behind them, heated by a shared wall that housed the kitchen’s enormous fire on the other side.

“Oh,” Tallulah breathed, drifting toward the warm bricks, already unbuttoning her coat before crossing the room to sit in one of the mismatched chairs that had accumulated in this space over the years. “This is wonderful. I had no idea this place existed.”

I leaned against the wall next to the door, ready to slip out and preserve Tallulah’s reputation if anyone came in here to warm up.

“Damen and I would sometimes raid the kitchens after a night of drinking. This was many years ago. Before the current cook took up the post.”

I wasn’t sure I’d risk Calix’s wrath in order to steal a few cakes. Old Jethro had never noticed.

“How come you drifted apart?” Tallulah asked, a soft smile playing around her mouth.

“We grew older. Grew apart. There’s no real reason.”

Privately, I suspected my presence had made Damen’s other friends uncomfortable, and they’d encouraged him to avoid me. It had been a little unfortunate—for a few months, I’d experienced an almost regular version of friendship—but also not surprising.

“I hear you have a date tonight,” I said casually. I could thank Damen for that, at least. I wasn’t even sure why he’d told me, unless he’d heard about me intercepting Tallulah’s last unworthy suitor, and thought Vicus deserved the same treatment.

Which he did.

Tallulah raised an eyebrow at me. “Did you now? Nothing is going to mysteriously happen to Vicus, is it?”

“I don’t think it’s mysterious that Vicus has been summoned back to his family estate to deal with an urgent flooding issue on his property.”

Tallulah spluttered in outrage, and I thickened the shadows I was cloaked in, making sure my entirely inappropriate reaction wasn’t on display. “You didn’t… flood his house somehow, did you?”

I laughed. “No, of course not. I’m not risking being thrown into the Pit.”

I really wouldn’t be able to watch over Tallulah from there.

Besides, I hadn’t needed to. Vicus’s estate was built on reclaimed wetlands, and it flooded all the time. It had been something of a source of amusement to my father, who’d maintained a not-so-friendly rivalry with Vicus’s father since adolescence.

Most of the time, I forgot entirely that I was from the same social class as those assholes, but it did come in useful from time to time. Personally, a flood wouldn’t have kept me away from Tallulah, but Vicus had always been of a more fickle temperament.

“I assumed the queen would have informed you about the change in suitor for the evening,” I added, feeling slightly guilty that I’d been the one to break that news to her.

“I haven’t seen her today,” Tallulah admitted. “Is it you?”

Dare I imagine there was a note of hopefulness in her voice? I was probably reading too much into it.

“No,” I said slowly. “It’s Aither. He was also on your list.”

“It’s not my list,” Tallulah shot back, a little defensively. “I haven’t even seen the list.”

“Right. I don’t think you would have put Aither on it if you knew him.”

I was beginning to suspect that the queen—and whoever else was setting up these dates—didn’t actually know Tallulah very well. They didn’t know the Tallulah who snuck away from social events to find a small, dark space to collect her thoughts in. The Tallulah who was being courted by the finest Shades in the realm, but had only sought out the one who’d made her feel safe until I’d let what we’d had slip away by not holding on to it tightly enough. Well, that, and being with me would ruin her life.

Regardless, if someone was going to be choosing prospective mates for Tallulah, it seemed crucial to me that they knew those parts of her. But they couldn’t, if she didn’t tell them.

“Why do you say that?”

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