Page 74 of Ocean of Ink
“Should we open the scroll and see where our fate lies?”
Wren held the rolled paper out. Castien’s dark gaze did not waver from Wren’s face. His eyes pierced her for a breathless moment, the feeling in her stomach akin to when a ship crested a large wave, before he finally reached out to take the paper from her. Their fingertips brushed. Light calluses against delicate skin. A faint flicker stole through Wren. She stifled a gasp. Was that from him? She centered all her focus on him, but felt nothing. Had she imagined it?
Castien unfurled the scroll. His expression was impassive. As stony as the Wall surrounding the academy. Her face grew warm as she recalled his palm against her lips. The same hand that had just gently brushed hers.
“One of your most trusted allies has betrayed you,” Castien read. “But you do not know which one. Combine your Gifts to determine who the traitor is.”
He looked up from the paper and into Wren’s eyes again. There was a softness to his gaze that made Wren feel helplessly transparent. As if he knew her every secret. She briefly wondered if perhaps he was the culprit who stole her journal, but if he had, then he would have done something to stop her investigation by now. Like kill her beneath the moonlight at the Wall. No one was around. His hand was over her mouth. He was skilled with a blade. Yet he let her live and conversed with her as a friend since then.
No, Castien Valengard was not evil, loath as Wren was to admit it. This investigation would be much easier if he were.But heisassociated with something dark, her mind reminded her. She looked away. It was difficult to remember his possible connection to the Order when he looked at her that way. Wren had spent her life starved for understanding. Her brother had been the closest friend she ever had, and even then, she held back for fear of hurting him. The longing for such a connection plagued her. She wanted it desperately, but was also terrified of it.
“How are we–” Wren cleared her dry throat. “How do you suggest we go about solving such a conundrum, oh great Prince of Strategy?”
“I think I prefer when you call me your pompous prince,” Castien remarked wryly.
A smile tugged at the corners of Wren’s mouth. She stubbornly held it back.
“I was appealing to your vanity, but I can return to bruising your ego if it will motivate you to work,” Wren said sweetly.
Castien let out a dry chuckle.
“If you wanted to appeal to my vanity, then you should call me yourdearestCastien again.” Wren’s head popped up. Her cheeks flamed.
“That was not a true endearment. It was to tease you,” Wren hissed.
Anxiety climbed her spine. She couldn’t have him thinking–
“As was my comment, Kalyxi,” Castien said with a smirk. “Don’t blush on my account. I am not important enough for such a gift.”
Wren felt as though she had stood in front of a hearth for too long. Her whole body was blazing hot. There were no other feelings for her to focus on but her own. That was usually aheady notion, but she found herself wishing she could escape into someone else’s emotions until hers dissipated.
“You are wretched,” Wren grumbled as she tugged on the sleeves of her dress. She had the urge to rip them off due to how unbearably warm she felt.
“So I’ve been told.” Castien dipped his quill in onyx ink. “With that in order, shall we get started?”
Castien was going to break. He curled his left hand into a tight fist beneath the table. Recited the Valengard creed, then recited it again but backward. The way Wren had looked at him–the aching longing in her blue eyes–it threatened to undo him. Never had he felt such strong emotion. It was as though he were captaining a ship after the Star of Adira had fallen. He could only white-knuckle the wheel of his mind and hope he wasn’t tossed overboard.
“I confess I am uncertain of where to begin.” Wren’s melodic voice was a wave crashing into the hull of his ship. “Your Gift is much more beneficial to our assignment than mine.”
It would be, if he could gain control of it. In the past, emotion clouded his Gift. Whatever this was made it erratic and indiscernible. He blinked away the flying script that disrupted his vision.
“Though Westover has his faults, his class is known to help stretch our Gifts in a way that improves upon them,” Castien said, though speaking brought him to the verge of pain.
He couldn’t lose control. Not now. Not when the letter with his secret was still in his bag. Not when Wren was beginning to bestow a semblance of trust upon him. He was unworthy of it, but greedy for it all the same. That was the feeling that ravaged him the most. This insatiable, consuming desire to know everything about her. He did not know what her Gift would interpret his emotions as, but he was certain the intensity would shock her and likely push her away.
“I cannot see how storytelling would help us root out a traitor.” Wren twisted the sapphire bracelet she wore on her wrist. The color matched the embroidery on the pale blue sash she wore around her waist. It also complemented her eyes, and Castien had to force himself not to stare at the way they glinted in the candlelight.
“We will have to be creative, but storytelling is a creative art, is it not?” Castien asked. He tipped his journal toward him and began writing out a mathematical formula. “We will think of something.”
“I am skilled in writing comprehensive reports. The ambassador didn’t give any details about the nature of the ally’s betrayal, but one could assume that something had to occur to alert us to the act. So we could interview our allies and I could combine all of their details into one cohesive story.”
Castien’s Gift began to slow and become clear again as he wrote the formula and listened to Wren speak about strategy. He started to write what his Gift presented. Of course, since he knew the truth of Wren’s Gift, many of the suggested solutions involved outing her and using her Gift to get a higher mark, amongst other things. Castien ignored those and forced his focus to using her fake Gift instead.
“In such a case, there are bound to be discrepancies between accounts,” Castien voiced his thoughts as he wrote them. “Afteryou wrote the combined story, I could analyze it for details that didn’t match or stood out from the others.”
Castien glanced up and caught Wren’s affirming nod. She was taking notes as well, her blonde curls hanging around her face. He wished she would wear her hair up more. It distracted him less, though when stray wisps settled around her face his fingers twitched to brush them back.
“That would give us a lead to be sure, but we would have to account for the natural tendency of people to misremember events.” Wren sighed. “Why did Westover have to be so vague? If we had more details, this would be easier.”
