Page 68 of Acedia

“How did your meeting with your brother go?” Iris asked, beaming at me from across the table. Was she as happy to bereunited as I was? I wished I was sitting closer. Beneath her, would be ideal.

“Oh, fine. He was happy to hear about the progress we’d made this afternoon and how the plans are coming along. Harlow, it would probably be useful to meet him after dinner.”

“Coming into your own,” Ruvyn repeated under his breath, sounding impressed.

“It’s kind of intimidating, you know,” Harlow remarked. “Meeting royalty.”

“I’m royalty. You don’t seem very intimidated by me.”

“Is your brother like you?” Harlow asked.

I snorted. “No, not at all.”

Harlow looked around the room. “Everyone here is, like, fancy, right?” Her gaze fixed on Ruvyn. “Are you a Shade duke or something?”

“I’m not a duke.” He frowned. “I’m a scholar. My brother is the duke.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “I was joking. Are you guys still running the feudalism OS here?”

“I don’t know what that means,” I admitted.

“Neither do I,” Meera said, her lips twitching slightly as she looked at Harlow.

Ruvyn cleared his throat. “The shadow realm more closely mirrors the human realm at one point in your history, but we didn’t have the wars and revolutions the human realm had, which tend to overhaul society at a more rapid rate. Change here happens slowly, though it’s faster now than it ever has been.”

I stared at Ruvyn, wondering if I’d ever heard him speak so much.

“But there must have been some level of change in the realm when the Huntedleft,” Harlow pointed out, leaning forward and looking intently at Ruvyn. I expected him to shy away from such direct conversation, but he was staring right back.

“It appears that much of that information—the whats and whys of their leaving—was scrubbed from the historical record. We can only speculate why.”

“And what do you speculate, scholar?” Harlow asked, blinking up at him.

Were they…

Were they flirting?

Was I witnessing a strange, intellectual, and very public form of foreplay?

Iris had her lips pressed tightly together as though she was trying not to smile, her head tilted to one side to listen. Meera was glancing between Harlow and Ruvyn with every word spoken.

“I theorize that our Shade ancestors expunged the records out of shame. Because they looked back on that sordid part of that history and regretted their actions. Though, in trying to hide what they’d done, they only made life more difficult for their descendants to achieve any kind of reconciliation.”

“And what about their descendants?” Harlow pressed. “What about Shades now? Have they learned from their ancestors’ mistakes?”

“I am confident that Shades now would treat the descendants of those Huntedverywell,” Ruvyn replied smoothly. The faint scent of desire drifted across the table, making Ruvyn straighten while I did my best not to inhale any of it. Only Iris’s desire smelled appealing to me.

“Damen,” Iris whispered, leaning across the table. “Tilly is getting restless. Would you mind walking me out—”

“Of course not.” I jumped to my feet, immediately striding around the table to her. Somehow, this history lesson had turned into a conversation that felt inappropriate for me to be part of, and I usually reveled in inappropriateness. Maybe it was just that I knew Ruvyn was lonely, and if there was even a slimchance of him and Harlow connecting, I didn’t want to get in the way of that.

“Thanks, guys,” Meera muttered, shooting me an unimpressed look as I ushered Tilly out from under the table.

I gave her what I hoped was an apologetic smile. “I’ll tell Verner to hurry up if we run into him.”

Iris tucked her hand into the crook of my arm so easily it felt like it was meant to be there, holding on to Tilly with the other as we made our way out of the dining hall.

I’d sort of assumed that Iris also just wanted an excuse to escape the awkwardness, but Tilly was actually restless. The moment we were on the palace steps, Iris let her go and she shot into the garden, peering at us through a gap in the bushes as she did her business.

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