onely,” he repeats. He bites off the word, and he can feel the bitter clench in his jaw, the souring, souring twist of his lips. He looks down; he looks away, out again over the floor. He’s not sure why he said it. He felt it through all of him, as he can still feel it. Shame mingled with anger mingled with sadness.
He’s managed to keep his field indectal, at least. He sees a woman, whose name he can vaguely recall, laughing. Her face is very red; she’s barely managing to pinch her flute glass between her fingers. Her coppery hair is braided back in a shimmery sweep, pinned into place with a flurry of black-and-white ornaments, made to look like the twisted elaborate hands of a clock. Another young woman, tall for a galdor, thin and towheaded, is grinning.
People everywhere. Galdori everywhere, rather; fields everywhere. A woman sweeps by, just out of range, but he can feel the edges of her field, slippery perceptive, brush his own. His gaze catches for a moment on a shimmer of vivid white silk, a spill of black roses on the warp. He feels a jolt, because he thinks for a moment it might be Diana. It isn’t; there are many such dresses tonight.
He finds the lasses again, a little further away from their quiet section by the windows. The redhead is taking a glass of champagne from a passing tray; he recognizes the human’s face, but he can’t put a name to it. She turns away, glancing out over the gallery like she’s looking for someone, and he gets a good look at her profile.
Proulx. He realizes why she’s jumped out at him. Annabelle Proulx, who’s studying the culinary arts at Brunnhold. He doesn’t know her friend. He half wishes he didn’t know her, though he’s spent so many nights clinking snifters with Incumbent Proulx, so many empty decanters, so many sickly-sweet cigars in his place that should smell like sage.
She looks happy. She won’t graduate for a year or so, he knows. Back to red-brick Brunnhold in Intas, he supposes, to learn the ins and outs of cooking.
Cooking.
In the corner of his eye, Niccolette has crossed her arms. The set of her shoulders and the cross of her arms is as closed as a vault. Something tightens in his chest. He remembers the lick of bastly warmth that scattered through his field at her caprise, and the little smile she couldn’t seem to keep from creeping up.
Do you think, he wants to ask, do you think Etienne Merenniano knows how to fry a fucking egg? He wishes he had the strength to laugh. The anger he feels this time is tangled up with a warmth he can’t explain. He wants to say something, to say anything.
He remembers how once, a very long time ago, Aremu described it to him as a dream of freedom – just a dream; maybe he knew, then, better than anybody, how all dreams ended.
He remembers looking at the sleek black hull of it, waiting for two silhouettes to appear above the gunwale. He’s not a man who can picture things, but if he thinks hard enough, he can remember the taste of the coming rain on the breeze. The ache of it in his scars. He remembers the creaking of the Eqe Aqawe, and the ladder he climbed with the blood-taste of fear on his tongue, and the tightening in his throat, and then the feel of the deck underneath his boots.
It wasn’t his life, but he can feel it – as if it might’ve been, maybe, as if he might’ve chosen it, and if he had, he imagines – he doesn’t know what to name the feeling, but it aches. He can still see her in the corner of his eye, and he still doesn’t know what to say.
One more second. He watches the towhead loop her arm through the Proulx girl’s, drag her off into the press. At the other end of the hall, there’s still dancing; they disappear. Not the most well-behaved of schoolgirls, he thinks.
“I believe it was a Clock’s Eve,” he drawls, in his perfect imitation of Anatole’s accent, “that I set a Seventen’s coat on fire. When I was a boy.” He doesn’t look at her, but he smiles a little. “I don’t think I would get away with that at a party like this. Rather more sober is right.”