Page 144 of Prince of Masks
“Just keep pacing.” He drops onto a stone pew. “The air isn’t stagnant at the border. The more you move, the better you will dry off.”
I do as he says, and when I turn, I give my hips an extra oomph, a swirl of my skirt.
“The heat will work like a hairdryer,” he says, then fishes his hand around the inside of his suit-jacket, fingering around for a pocket.
That isn’t a trick I learned in class.
None of us did. It’s not exactly a chapter in the textbooks of elemental magic.
My shoes are abandoned, caked in dirt and scratches from the walk over the grass to this little nook of stone pews and hedges. So my bare feet pad on the pavers planted in the soil, and I am careful not to step on the grass.
“Did you learn this from Mildred?”
Landon cuts a glance up at me before he tugs out a rolled, white cigarette from his pocket. He hunches on the pew, legs spread, and lights the joint.
“Yeah,” is all he says, a choked word from pinning all that drugged smoke to his chest.
I swish my skirt at the statue; a bust on a tall pedestal.
I start my stroll up to the tall hedge. “You don’t have to stay here with me. You can go back—I won’t tell anyone.”
His mouth circles a sudden billow of dark smoke. He doesn’t look at me, just watches the stream of grey pollute the gardens. “I was hiding out anyway.”
I pause on a square paver and run my toes along its coarse edge. “From all the dances?”
In our one shared dance, both forced into it by our fathers, he didn’t speak a word to me, and looked over my head the entire time.
He plants his forearms on his thighs, his gaze on the lush grass between us. “From my fiancé.”
My toes pause on the paver.
I flicker my stare to him. “Mildred?”
His mouth curls into a bitter smirk, and still he doesn’t look at me.
Landon brings the joint to his full mouth, then draws in a long inhale. As it ribbons out of him, his choked answer comes sheathed in smoke, “Hinewai Mahuta.”
My mind churns on the name, unfamiliar.
His eyes lift—and he looks right at me. “Gentry.”
My lips part around a mute ‘oh’.
“Are you two close?” I ask, though by the bitterness still twisting his face, I suppose I know the answer already.
He shakes his head all the same.
So she doesn’t know about him. About where his fancies lie.
I see it in him, an echo of the same anguish in me.
I swish my dress, side to side. “I don’t know mine.”
A frown nips his brow as he considers the joint pinched between his fingertips.
“I call him Mr Monopoly.”
He blinks, once, then lifts that frown to me.
