He chuckled, unbothered. “But it also wouldn't know which wine to pair with flattery.”
She snapped open her fan to cool her cheek and hide the very real and ridiculous smile threatening to betray her composure.
Above them, the ballroom’s vaulted ceiling glimmered with candlelight reflected off centuries-old frescoes. A thousand guests might have them, but Alaric’s gaze, as always, wandered up.
“What is that?” he asked. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
Evelyne followed his line of sight without lifting her chin. “The Final Convergence. My grandfather had it restored. It spans the entire dome. It was painted around 600Anno Aetherum.”
Painted figures danced across sky and stone. Robed silhouettes caught mid-motion, paired with stags, cranes, wolves. The scenes were dynamic, almost impossibly fluid, the layers of light and shadow creating the illusion of movement: sun and moon intertwined, hands cupping constellations, the ground blooming beneath their feet.
He studied it. “A Varantian scholar would call that magic.”
“A Varantian scholar would call a thunderstorm a divine rebuke if it suited his thesis,” she replied.
His lips quirked. “Touché.”
“It’s interpretation,” she added, watching the ceiling with him. “It represents the moment humanity found its balance. One of the few frescoes still allowed to remain here.”
He glanced sidelong at her. “You don’t think it looks a touch literal? People dancing with wolves, walking between phases of the moon...”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m not starting,” he said, tone mock-wounded. “I’m listening. It just looks like art stripped of meaning. And I’m wondering how many other metaphors your kingdom has gilded onto its ceilings.”
Evelyne arched a brow. “You’re enjoying this far too much.”
“I enjoy mystery,” he explained. “Especially when it’s dressed in blue and pretending it is not interested.”
Evelyne sighed. Quietly, more to herself than to him. She had no strength left to argue. He was his nosy self. With irritating politeness and even more irritating intelligence. And she clearly had to get used to it. At least enough to get through her life without exploding.
Alaric glanced back up at the dome. “You’ve really never wondered if there’s more to it?”
“No,” Evelyne replied, too quickly. Then, quieter: “Not the way you mean.”
He turned to her; brows lifted in surprise. “Why not? Isn’t it interesting?”
She gave him a look—flat, level, too tired to be sharp. “Because if you start pulling at one thread, you risk unraveling the whole tapestry. Some of us weren’t raised in courts that reward curiosity.”
He opened his mouth, but she cut him off gently.
“I was taught to read carefully. To memorize, not reinterpret.”
Over the years, she had sometimes thought she saw things she shouldn’t. Small flickers where the paint had cracked, shapes that didn’t belong. A hand with too many fingers. A glint of color that seemed too alive to be pigment. Once, she had sworn one of the saints’ eyes followed her as she walked beneath it.
She shook her head lightly. “And the truth is that if you looked too closely, you’d see something you can’t unsee.”
Alaric was quiet for a beat.
She kept her eyes on the ceiling, but her focus blurred at the edges. She thought of the symbol in Ravik’s report. The silence in Calveran’s chapel. The strange flicker in the garden air when she’d said the wordred.
Wonder was a dangerous thing. It had a way of slipping past armor, of making you ache for what was better left buried. She had spent years learning to silence it, to press it down until it no longer stirred. Yet even now, when she tried to smother it,something in her still reached for the past, restless and unquiet. That part of her wanted to know what truly happened last year.
And to knowwhy.
Her voice, when it came, was smooth again. Measured.
“It’s a cultural story. The imagery isn’t meant to be taken as spellwork.”
