The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 21

They opened the game room to us on the next evening, which I understood was a thing they did when the weather turned and nobody could be sent outside.

It was a warm, low room with card tables at one end and two chess boards at the other, and it was the first room in that palace that had ever looked to me like it was built for people rather than for occasions.

Eliza sat down at the far table with Rosalie and Isabelle.

She did not do it pointedly. There was a chair beside her for most of the first hour. She did not look over at it. I did not go and take it.

Three weeks ago she would have called across the room to me. Two weeks ago she would have caught my eye and made a face about Rosalie. That evening she dealt cards, laughed at the right places, and every so often I caught her watching the door.

I sat where I could see the chess.

⸻

Cassian played without saying anything at all. He was against an old man from the council. The old man talked the entire time.

Cassian answered about one sentence in five, and beat him twice.

I did not know the game. I knew when somebody was losing, because their hands got busier.

Between the games he looked up and found me watching.

"Do you play?"

"No."

"Would you like to?"

"I'd lose."

"Yes," he said, and set the pieces back up. "That is how everyone starts."

He did not offer to teach me. I noticed that, and did not mind, because it would have been a favor. He told me the truth about losing, then went back to his board.

Later, when the old man had gone off to find a drink, I saw Cassian play a few moves against nobody. Both sides. Working something out.

⸻

Julian came in an hour after everyone else and worked the room the way water finds the low ground.

Rosalie first, because Rosalie was next to the door. Then Isabelle, who went pink. Then a long stop at the far card table where somebody was losing badly. He sat on the arm of the chair, gave advice that made everything worse, and the whole table enjoyed it.

He got to me last, which by then I had worked out was a decision and not an accident.

"You're not playing."

"I don't know how."

"Which one?"

"Any of them."

He looked genuinely delighted by this, pulled out the chair opposite me without being asked, and started dealing.

"It's simple. You have three cards, I have three cards, and one of us is lying."

"How do I know which?"

"You don't. That's the game."

He explained the rules, most of which I believed were real. Half the room was still watching him because half the room always was.

He made no attempt to lower his voice. There was nothing in any of it that anybody could have repeated afterward as improper.

I lost the first hand. I lost the second.

"You're too honest," he said.

"That's usually the complaint."

"It isn't a complaint." He laid a card down. "It's a weakness. I'm telling you about it because it's more fun when it takes longer."

I looked at him. Then I laid down a card I had no business laying down, with my face doing absolutely nothing, and he lost the hand.

There was a pause of about two seconds.

"You've been paying attention," he said.

"You are very loud."

Somebody at the next table laughed. Julian did not. He sat back in his chair and looked at me for slightly too long. Something in his face rearranged itself in a way I had not seen before and still have no word for.

"You are getting difficult."

"You seem to enjoy difficult."

He was quiet.

Then he laughed, quietly, got up, and went to talk to Eleanor about a wager she had apparently lost to a stable hand. He did not look back at me once.

I went over it afterward, twice. There was nothing in it that could have been told to anyone.

But it was the first time he had been the one to leave the table.

⸻

The room emptied out around midnight the way rooms did, in pieces, with people finding reasons.

Eliza went early with Rosalie. She said goodnight to me across the room. It was a perfectly normal goodnight, and it lasted about as long as my name.

I stayed because the fire was still going, and my room was cold.

When I finally got up, Julian was in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame, and I understood that he had not been in the corridor at all.

"You waited."

"I did."

"Why?"

"Because you'd have come out eventually," he said, "and I wanted to see how long it took."

I could have gone past him. He was not blocking it, not properly. He had left exactly enough room for me to leave if leaving was a thing I wanted to do. That was his particular skill, and I understood by then that it was entirely deliberate.

"Say something honest," he said. "You're good at it."

"You're standing in a doorway waiting for a woman who hasn't asked you to."

"That's honest." He came off the frame. "Try again."

He was close enough to touch and did not. That inch he always kept, so that whatever came next would not be something he had done.

Every time before that, I had stepped back.

He tilted his head. His eyes went to my lips. Then he waited, because the waiting was the part he enjoyed, and the waiting was how he won.

I got a handful of his collars and pulled him the rest of the way in.

He stopped.

There was no flinch in it, no pull. He went completely still, his breath somewhere in the space I had just closed, and for the first time since I had known him, he did not appear to know what came next.

I had never in my life had that much power over anything.

I was not certain what to do with it. I was certain I did not want to give it back.