Reyn followed her into a cozy room set up with a card table in the center. A selection of fruits, cakes, and wines sat on a sideboard along one wall. Velario stood in front of it, pouring himself a glass of wine. Then, pointedly not looking at her, or in fact any of the other people in the room with him, he carried his full glass to the table and sat.
Selona plopped into a chair next to her cousin, and Reyn reluctantly walked around the table to sit on his other side, across from Selona. Danten poured three glasses of wine, though not as generously as Velario had, and carried them all to the table before sitting down.
Reyn accepted her own glass from Danten with a smile. Selona immediately took a large gulp from hers.
Velario grabbed a deck of cards from the center of the table.
“Wait!” Selona put down her wine and fished about in her reticule. A moment later, she brought out a somewhat battered-looking deck of cards. “We have to play with this deck.”
Everyone looked at her in confusion, even Danten, who seemed to be in on this plan of hers to some extent. Though what her plan was, exactly, Reyn still didn’t understand.
Velario put down the deck he was holding and took the cards from Selona. “Why?”
“Because I want us to use that deck. Might as well ask why we should use the deck you had.”
Velario fanned the cards out on the table, making a point of looking closely at the backs. Then he gathered them back into a pile and began slapping them down on the table in front of him, face up. Reyn could hear him counting under his breath as he went through the entire deck. When he ran out of cards, he left them on the table and looked across it at Danten. “Any objections to using Selona’s deck?”
Danten shrugged. “No.”
“Fine.” Velario gathered the cards up again and shuffled.
“I don’t get a say?” Reyn said before she could think the better of it. The evening would be interminable if she had to watch her every word, so she might as well start as she meant to go on.
“You are a part of Selona’s plot, so no, you don’t get a say.”
“How rude. Master Danten, do you think I am part of a plot?”
Velario flicked the first card across the table to land in front of Selona. “He’s probably a part of the plot, too, so his support will not help your case.”
“I notice you decree I am a part of this plot without equivocation, but your friend is only probably part of it. I’ll have you know that I am a victim of tonight’s scheme, not an orchestrator.”
“The only victim here is me.”
Selona gathered her cards. “You are hardly a victim, Vel. We’re giving you a distraction from your worries for an evening.”
“You barged into my home without invitation. You are trespassers.”
“You may be the heir, but I am still a Ferrini.”
Reyn picked up her cards and leaned toward Danten. “Do they ever get along?”
“On very rare occasions, they team up. It’s terrifying. Pray you never live to see it.”
“Can we just play cards already?” Velario asked.
They played three hands with Reyn and Danten as the only ones making any effort to carry on a conversation. By the fourth hand, Reyn shrugged when Danten met her eyes and they waited to see if Selona or Velario might break the silence.
In the fifth hand, Selona spoke up, her attention on her cousin. “To answer your earlier question, I wanted to play with this deck because it has sentimental value.”
Velario flicked the ragged corner of one of the cards in his hand. “What sort of sentiment can you have for cards?”
“I’ll have you know this is the deck we played with the first night you, Lisca, Danten and I got drunk.”
“It might have been the first time you got drunk,” Danten muttered, “but not our first.”
Selona rolled her eyes. “It was the first time we did it all together. You remember how you spilled the brandy on one card?”
Danten slapped a hand over his heart. “I did not. That was Velario.”
