She wondered if it was sharp.
The queen tapped the first gent lightly on either shoulder and instructed him to stand back up to polite applause, then deposited the sword back on the pillow with a little sigh, as though she’d just put in a day’s work at the mines.
Vix took another sip of her champagne to avoid laughing while Mr. Zeller enthusiastically applauded next to her.
Once the first new knight had smiled and waved to his own content and stepped off to the side to get his new order medal pinned to his sash, the queen took a little steadying breath, herfingers brushing the hilt of the sword again, and gestured to Ambrose.
“Approach, Mr. Ambrose Aster,” the herald boomed, looking very pleased with himself despite an exhausted glance from the queen herself. “To receive the honor of knighthood!”
Vix swallowed.
She felt oddly nervous about it as her intended stepped forward.
Ambrose himself had no expression to speak of on his face, the handsome lines of his features kept in neutral respect as he met the queen’s eye once before kneeling down on his left knee and bowing his head.
His hair, Vix noted, looked neat for once, swept into carefully combed order.
She didn’t care for it.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the ruffled frame of Caroline Sedgewick spin toward her husband and grasp his arm in breathless anticipation. The annoyance she felt flare in her body was keen enough in that moment that she briefly regretted inviting them. She tilted herself slightly to the side, trying to keep her focus only on Ambrose, at least for the next few seconds.
The queen drew the sword back up from its cushion and swept it right over Ambrose’s bent head.
Vix amended her earlier curiosity. She hoped it was not sharp.
She tapped him gently on either shoulder with it, looking utterly bored with the entire affair.
“Arise,” she said, at what was likely a perfectly natural volume, though it sounded damn near a whisper after that herald had deafened them all, “Sir Ambrose Aster.”
He winced, just a slight little thing, before straightening his shoulders and coming to his feet.
It was enough to melt every tensed-up, anxious shard of ice in her lungs all at once, each of them plopping into the warm puddles of amusement at how much he very clearlyhatedbeing called Sir Ambrose, even by the Queen of England.
It made her lift her own hands up and join in the applause, if only to goad him.
This time she was certain he actually had found her in the crowd, and this time she was certain he was not smiling about it, even if she was.
“Sir Ambrose,” she mouthed to him from across the room, delighting in the way the corners of his mouth sagged before he shook his head and trudged off to the corner of the platform to get his stupid medal.
She kept watching him all throughout the third and final knighting, smirking at him as he narrowed his eyes in graduating, increasing degrees the longer it went on. She sipped her champagne, an odd little thrill fluttering in her stomach at the exchange, even though it was both perfectly petty and utterly ridiculous.
She felt a little lightheaded about it.
When the whole thing had completed and the queen threw the sword back on the pillow with the relieved finality of a womanwho had just been unshackled after a decade in prison, it felt like the entire room sagged in relief.
The footmen immediately appeared at the corners with trays of cheese and fruit and refreshed glasses of champagne, and the queen beat such a hasty exit that Vix briefly wondered if there was a trapdoor somewhere that shot her directly from the back rooms to her private salon in Windsor.
The other two new knights turned and began an orderly procession down the tiny wooden stairs on the edge of the platform, but not Ambrose. He turned and immediately hopped right off the side of the thing, cutting a direct line through the gasping onlookers toward Vix, his eyes blazing with annoyed mischief.
“You,” he said, coming right up to her toes with a flare of his nostrils, pausing only to sweep his gaze down the line of her dress with a minuscule raise of his brows. He cleared his throat sharply and snapped his eyes back to hers, as though remembering he was meant to be irritated. “You are enjoying this entirely too much.”
“Oh, I am having a marvelous time,” she confirmed, tilting her head at him innocently as she took another sip of her champagne. “Look at you, pinned and sparkling. My gallant Sir Ambrose.”
“Intolerable,” he replied with a curl of his lip. “Where’s the liquor?”
She tittered into the rim of her glass, watching him over the top of it. “I wonder what would have happened if you had simply refused to attend,” she said. “Do you think Her Majesty would have chased you down the streets of St. James, sword aloft?”
“Doubtless,” he replied, dry as a bone. He sighed as though it pained him when she laughed again.
