“At a boarding house near the docks, sleeping in a bunk room with a dozen others. He tracked down all of his mother’s dismissed servants and invented reasons to bring them back. He hired my mother to teach him the lute. She was playing in the tavern for a bit of coin at the time.”
So that’s how he learned to play. “Why did he do that? Just to be kind?”
“Maybe. But maybe also to keep his mother’s memory around for a bit longer. When the war began, my mother served with him, in his army.”
I can guess how the next part of the story goes. “She died in the war?”
Stella nods, looking at me out of the corner of her eye as she examines the desk in the corner. “With her gone, they let me stay in the palace as long as I did some chores and stayed out of the way. After the war, I asked Ronan to train to be one of his guards. I didn’t want to be a maid, but I wanted to be around him. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think it was for the same reason that he saved us: to keep the memory of my own mother alive a while longer. He still plays her lute sometimes.” She smiles as she says it for a quick moment before straightening her expression and returning to the task at hand.
She loves him, like they all love him.
And I’m beginning to understand why. The thought of him playing Stella’s mother’s lute just to make Stella happy is almost unbearable.
Everything I thought about him was wrong.
I think back to the time he told me that everyone loves him. I’d dismissed it as the sort of cocky nonsense that someone like him would say, someone who had been brought up to believe that he was better than everyone else by nature of his birth.
But he was right: everyone does love him. And they love him not because they have to or in spite of who he is or what he does, the way that I love Adria and Seth. They love him because he cares for them. Because they all have a story just like this one, a moment where he saw something he could do to help, and he did it. Because he’s kind and good. They choose to protect him because they believe he’s worth protecting.
I’m beginning to believe it as well, and that thought scares me more than anything that’s happened tonight.
We search the room until the bells chime the next hour, finding nothing. It’s like Hermes and his companion never even came in here.
“Come on, Sylvie,” says Stella. “There’s nothing here. Let me take you back to the palace.”
I let her, thanking her for helping me even though we failed and asking her to keep quiet about it to anyone other than Ronan. I’m heading towards Ronan’s chambers to wait for him to give him the news about Hermes when Adria finds me in the hallway.
She’s wearing one of our mother’s dresses, a navy-blue gown that fits awkwardly on her muscular shoulders, and it looks like she’s coming from the party. “I heard you put on quite a show tonight before I arrived. Titus and then Ronan. They say Ronan was furious when you left the dance floor together.”
“Somewhat,” I admit.
“I really have to hand it to you, sis. You arefarbetter at this than I expected.”
She’s been drinking heavily, by the smell of wine on her breath and the sway of her step.
I change my plans. I can tell Ronan in the morning about Hermes if Stella doesn’t tell him first. But I have a chance here with Adria while she’s drunk.
A chance to get some answers out of her.
“I have so many things to tell you,” I say. I stop a servant and ask for another bottle of wine to be sent to our chambers.
We change into our nightgowns, and I pour us each a glass once the bottle arrives. She drinks hers indulgently, but I merely sip mine.
I start by congratulating her on her victory over Quinn.
“It was too easy, really,” she tells me. “Titus was a better fight. I bet he’d be a better fuck too.”
She never talks to me like this. Either she’s really happy with me or truly drunk, but either way, I take it as a good sign.
“I think Quinn has a bit more experience than Titus on both counts.”
“He’s a baby, isn’t he? Same age as you, I think. You’re twenty-two?”
Almost. My birthday is in a month, right at the end of the Festival of Arts. I hadn’t even thought about it. “Twenty-one until next month.”
“That’s right. Quinn’s twenty-seven, same as Seth. I’m surprised her father didn’t force her to marry with only Typhon left to inherit.”
“I don’t think there’s much forcing that you can do with her.”
