The aesran pressed her lips thin, studying him from across the room.
“I’m going to catch up with Lottie,” August said, moving toward the door, hoping she’d let him pass.
As he drew close, she raised her hand, the quick movement causing him to flinch back. He was too familiar with the sting of her discipline. But she was only motioning for him to wait.
He blinked, urging his pulse to steady.
“The only reason you’re attending is to reassure the public that you are, in fact, still breathing,” she said, not unkindly, only matter-of-fact. “I know you’d rather not go, but if you get through this without drawing attention, you’ll be free to hide yourself away again, as you like.”
Fine lines gathered near the corners of her eyes and lips, the first signs of wrinkles brought on by fake smiles she wore for themasses. It had been so long since he’d been this close to her he hadn’t noticed them coming on.
“If it goes well,” asked August, “can I join Lottie on the days she goes out?”
“No,” the aesran snapped, the sharpness startling him. She paused to soften her expression. “Why would you want to leave the safety of our castle? You remember what happened, don’t you?”
A flash of memory pushed its way forward. The attack in the market square. The guard’s skin melting off his face. The fear that had never fully gone away.
It had been August’s first close-up experience with wielders, and had ended with the City Watch executing four right there on the street.
“It’s not safe,” she added. “You know this.”
She may have been right, and her words were gentle on the surface, but threaded through the tone was a word left unsaid:prison. He would never have her permission to leave. He was stuck here, chained to this fate. Which was worse? The possibility of his death or the inevitability of him on the throne?
His eyes dropped to her arm where her high glove had slipped, revealing strange, inky marks curled around her bicep, like charcoal smudges. His brow furrowed.
A reminder of death’s strength.The thought struck, unbidden.
“Do you understand, Augustus?”
He quickly lifted his gaze to meet hers. “What? Oh, yes, of course.”
“Good. Now go. The guests have arrived. They’ll be admitted to the banquet room shortly.”
Dinner was excruciatingly tedious, though August supposed that was better than catastrophic. The massive tables were arranged in the same U-shape that he remembered, his mother at the centre of the head, he and Lottie one one side, the place where his father’s chair used to sit on the other, the space glaring like an open wound.
August hadn’t paid attention to the names of the guests as they entered. They had filled up the twenty or so chairs on either branch of the U, all lace and frills and layers of jewelry. Painted lips and trimmed mustaches.
A quartet of musicians played in the corner of the room, the music slow and lackluster. Monochromatic compared to the iridescent melodies he’d heard in the market square.
At least the food was good.
August kept his eyes glued to his plate, the clatter of cutlery a dull backdrop to his thoughts.
When the wait staff whisked away the second course, he pulled the ring from his pocket, fidgeting nervously with it beneath the table, needing something to occupy his hands. It was still ice cold.
Dessert arrived, and when August looked up, a handful of the guests were watching him, their lips moving in conversation. He avoided meeting their gazes, his eyes sliding over their heads, landing on the anchored at the edge of the room, their chief butler, Callum, who’d died a few years ago. The familiar face was one he encountered often in the castle, and his presence loosened the knot in August’s stomach, just a little.
Funny that the dead were more of a comfort than the living in his present company.
Callum gave an encouraging nod, and August quickly looked away. Comforting or not, he’d rather not acknowledge the anchored.
His attention caught on the massive portrait of a man with sharp features and green eyes. His grandfather, Aesveran Augustus Henrik Ellingwood.
The corners of August’s mouth turned down as he studied the portrait.
Aesveran Augustus. The name of August’s future. His life sentence.
Suffocating.
