Promised to His Shadow

Chapter Seven

A Performance for an Audience That Already Suspects



Elianne’s POV

The king decided, three days after Lord Castille’s visit, that the court needed to see its future rulers looking considerably less like two people clinging to a treaty out of necessity and considerably more like a couple anyone might believe in. Elianne understood the reasoning even as she resented it. A kingdom that looked uncertain invited exactly the kind of foreign probing Castille had already demonstrated. A kingdom that looked settled, secure, even happy, gave ambassadors considerably less to work with.

So there would be a formal dinner. Forty guests, carefully chosen from among the families whose loyalty mattered most and whose tongues, the king noted dryly, traveled fastest. She and Gabriel would sit beside each other. They would, the king said, with the particular bluntness he reserved for matters of state rather than family, behave like people who wanted to be there.

"I’m not entirely sure that I know how to do that convincingly," she told Gabriel, the afternoon before the dinner, as a maid pinned the last of her hair into place. "I’ve had considerably more practice looking dignified than looking delighted."

"You won’t need to look delighted. Delighted would alarm everyone, given the circumstances." He was leaning against the door frame of her sitting room, still in his riding clothes, not yet dressed for the evening, and she found herself unreasonably aware of exactly how he filled the doorway. "You need only to look like a woman who has decided to stop fighting the inevitable and found something tolerable in it instead. That, I think, you could manage without much performance at all."

She turned to look at him properly, startled by the observation, more startled by how accurately it landed. "Is that a compliment or an accusation?"

"I haven’t decided yet," he said, and there was something almost warm in it, something that had been creeping into his voice more often lately in the moments when neither of them was actively guarding against it.

* * *

The dinner itself unfolded exactly as these things always did — too much wine, too many toasts to alliance and continuity, conversation that skated carefully around the one subject everyone wanted to discuss and no one dared raise directly. Elianne smiled where smiling was required and asked the right questions of the right wives and felt, the entire time, like a woman performing a role she had not auditioned for in a play she hadn’t read past the first act.

It was Lord Hewitt, three cups of wine past prudent, who finally said the thing everyone else had been too careful to say.

"Forgive me, Your Highness," he said to Gabriel, his voice pitched just loud enough to carry to the surrounding tables, "but I confess myself curious. Does it not feel somewhat — hasty? Burying one brother and marrying his betrothed within the same season? I mean no disrespect. Only that the court does wonder."

The table went quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when everyone has been waiting for permission to listen openly to something they’d only been whispering about before. Elianne felt every eye at the surrounding tables turn, felt the old, familiar heat of being discussed rather than addressed, and reached for the calm, flat voice she used for exactly this kind of moment.

Gabriel got there first.

"The court may wonder whatever it likes, Lord Hewitt." His voice was perfectly even, perfectly pleasant, and utterly without room for argument. "I’d only remind you that the alternative to this marriage was a kingdom without a clear alliance and a border with Castelane that has cost considerably more lives than a single hasty wedding ever could. If the court preferred renegotiating eleven years of treaties to watching two grieving people do their duty with as much grace as grief allows, I invite the court to say so plainly, and I will personally introduce them to the border garrison commanders who’d have to manage the consequences."

It was not gently said. It was not meant to be. Lord Hewitt’s face went a shade paler, and he mumbled something about meaning no offense, and the surrounding conversation resumed at a determinedly higher volume than before, the way conversations always did after someone had been quietly, thoroughly put in their place.

Under the table, where no one else could see it, Gabriel’s hand found hers and stayed there.

* * *

She didn’t pull away. That surprised her more than anything else that evening — not the warmth of his hand around hers, which she’d half expected to find unbearable, but the fact that she found herself, instead, gripping back just as tightly, a small, private alliance underneath a table full of people who had no idea they were watching something far more real than the performance they’d been promised.

"Thank you," she said quietly, once the surrounding conversation had moved safely elsewhere.

"You didn’t need defending. You’ve handled worse than Hewitt without my help."

"I have. That doesn’t mean I didn’t want it." She glanced sideways at him, and something in her chest shifted at the look on his face — not the careful, guilty distance he usually kept, but something more unguarded, the look of a man who had stopped, for just this one evening, performing the role he’d been assigned and simply inhabited it instead.

"For what it’s worth," he said, low enough that only she could hear it, "I wasn’t entirely performing, back there. I find I don’t care for men who question what I’ve already decided to protect."

The word protect settled into her chest and stayed there, warmer than it had any right to be given everything else weighing on her — the conspiracy, the grief, the foreign ambassador watching for weakness. She thought of the garden, of his careful, guilty distance in the weeks since, of the gallery and now it matters considerably more. She thought that whatever this was becoming between them, it had stopped, somewhere in the last several weeks, being entirely about treaties and survival.

She did not say any of that aloud. Some things, she had decided weeks ago, were not yet hers to say out loud, not even to herself. But she let her hand stay in his a moment longer than strictly necessary before the next course arrived, and she told herself that was simply good performance for an audience that was, after all, still watching.

She did not entirely believe herself. For the second time in as many weeks, she found she didn’t have the energy left to argue the point.

* * *

Camille found her in the corridor afterward, on the way back from the dining hall, and for once her smile had a genuine edge of curiosity to it rather than its usual practiced malice.

"That was quite a display," Camille said. "Gabriel defending you so publicly. I confess I didn’t expect it of him. He was never the type to make a scene on anyone’s behalf, even when it might have been warranted."

"Perhaps you simply never gave him a reason to."

It came out sharper than she’d intended, and she watched it land, watched something flicker behind Camille’s eyes that wasn’t quite hurt but wasn’t entirely composed either. For a moment neither of them said anything, the corridor stretching long and quiet between them, and Elianne found herself, unexpectedly, almost regretting the edge in her own voice.

"I didn’t come to fight with you," Camille said finally, and some of the usual brightness had gone out of her tone, leaving something flatter and more tired underneath. "I came to tell you that Lord Hewitt is not a man worth losing sleep over. He says foolish things after wine because he has very little else to recommend him, and the court forgets his foolishness by morning."

"That sounded almost like kindness."

"Don’t mistake it for friendship." But there was no real venom in it this time, only a kind of weary honesty that Elianne hadn’t expected from her. "I spent two years assuming a future that was never actually promised to me, Lady Elianne. I’m angry about that, and you happen to be standing where my anger has somewhere to go. That isn’t entirely fair to you. I know that. I haven’t yet decided what to do about knowing it."

She left before Elianne could think of anything to say in response, disappearing down the corridor with her usual unhurried grace, and Elianne stood alone for a long moment afterward, turning the strange little exchange over in her mind. It was not friendship. It was not even true, not yet. But it was, she thought, the first honest thing Camille had said to her since they’d met, and honesty, however small, was worth noting in a house where it had become so rare.

She walked the rest of the way to her chambers, turning over both conversations at once — Gabriel’s hand under the table, Camille’s strange, tired honesty in the corridor — and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that the evening had left her feeling less like a piece on a board and more like a woman who might, slowly and against considerable odds, be building something of her own inside a house that had handed her to its prince like a line item in a treaty.

* * *

End of Chapter Seven