Page 5 of Sword Dance

“Oh, it’s Aristokles’s servant,” Nione murmured. “He danced for us yesterday, Damiskos, before you arrived—I’m sorry you missed it. He’s very good.”

“Ah,” said Damiskos, unable to think of anything else. He had seen many different kinds of dancing in Zash, but found it hard to picture any of them taking place in Nione’s old-fashioned Pseuchaian villa. The idea of the Zashian being put on display like that was distasteful, but not surprising.

“Hello, my dear,” said Nione as the eunuch came around the fountain to approach their bench. “Does your master need something?”

Aristokles’s slave gave a slight, elegant bow and presented something in his open palms over the table. It was a small, round box, carved with stylized flowers: probably another product of the trade agreement, like its bearer. Nione’s expression clouded slightly.

“Oh. How lovely. Do convey my thanks. Tell him … he needn’t have, but I’m sure I will like it.”

She set the box down on the table without opening it. The eunuch bowed again and retreated.

Only when he was gone into the colonnade did Nione lift the lid of the box. She looked into it for a moment, then pushed it across the table to Damiskos with a miserable expression. A pair of earrings lay jumbled inside. Zashian style, with long pendants of enamelled beads.

“A generous gift,” Damiskos said neutrally. “But you look as though you’re not happy with it.”

Nione sighed. “No—though they’re lovely.” She lifted one earring out of the box, then dropped it back with distaste.

They weren’t the sort of earrings that a respectable Zashian woman would have worn; the colours were flashy, and, in Zash, would have been considered masculine. Damiskos did not say that, but he thought of Aristokles’s slave with his nose-ring and henna. Clearly the Boukossian knew nothing of the kingdom he professed to admire.

“I am trying not to encourage him,” Nione said, “but … I don’t seem to be very good at it.”

“Perhaps you need to go so far as to discourage him.”

“Well, one cannot insult a guest … ”

“Of course.” That was an iron law, and one a woman as sweet-natured as Nione would have a hard time even bending.

“But he isn’t really in love with me. He’s only been here a few days.”

“You don’t believe one can fall in love in the blink of an eye?” He said it with a smile, because he didn’t suppose it was something she would even have formed an opinion about.

“No,” she said, more seriously than he had expected, “no, I wouldn’t say I don’t believe it, exactly—I think sometimes one can … can develop an attachment very quickly, but only if you come to know the other person intimately in a short space of time.”

“Yes,” he said, feeling the need to back away from this topic now, though he wasn’t exactly sure what he feared. “Yes, I expect you’re right.”

“And Aristokles doesn’t know me at all.”

“Right.”

He ate a couple of spoonfuls of yogurt and said, after what he hoped was a suitable pause for a change of subject, “So your factory is down by the shore, I suppose?”

“Oh. Yes. I’ll take you on a tour later.”

They finished their breakfast and talked business, but Damiskos’s mind kept wandering from the discussion of prices per barrel and volume discounts and fish varieties.

“Men line up to marry ex-Maidens,” she had said. He could believe it. If nothing else, the retirement allowance they received could serve as a generous dowry. Damiskos would have pitied Aristokles Phoskos, pressing his embarrassing and futile suit, if he hadn’t already felt such disgust with the man. And an uncomfortable thought occurred to him. What if Nione thought Damiskos was here now, on the pretext of business from the Quartermaster’s Office, because he secretly harboured the same hope as Aristokles?

He had changed in the years since they had known one another; perhaps she thought his understanding of their friendship had changed too. Perhaps she thought it might have included this all along, that he had been waiting for her to be free from the Maidens’ House so that he could ask her to be his wife.

She knew he had been engaged to another woman, but she also knew he had broken it off. What if she thought that had been for her sake? What if she was planning to accept his inevitable proposal out of pity?

He was no kind of a match for an ex-Maiden, though, and she had to know that. She knew his family’s fortune was gone along with their reputation, sacrificed to his parents’ lavish lifestyle and bad business decisions.

Damiskos himself had risen to command of one of the most famous legions of the Republic by the time he was twenty-six, but he had only held the position for a year, and well as he liked what he did now—and he did like it, despite what everyone thought—he knew he no longer cut an impressive figure in the world.

He didn’t think Nione would enjoy being married to him, either.

They had both completely finished their meal by the time Tyra and Phaia came out to the table to remind Nione that she had promised them a game of Reds and Whites that morning.