The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 14

The ballroom looked nothing like it had that morning.

They had lit every candle in it, which turned the mirrors along the walls into a second room full of people, and for the first ten minutes I kept catching movement that wasn't there and turning toward it.

The Queen sat at the far end with two of her women. She did not dance. She did not appear to be watching anyone in particular, which meant she was watching all of us, and every person in that room knew it because Amara had told us so.

Nobody organized the order. It organized itself.

Celeste was first, because Celeste had been standing in the right place before the musicians finished tuning.

Rosalie went second and had clearly decided on it days ago. Within half an hour there was a queue that nobody would have admitted to being in, made up of women who had each found some reason to be near the middle of the room.

I stayed by the windows, and so my turn kept not coming, which suited me for a while and then began to feel like a different kind of exposure.

It gave me time to watch the lessons take.

Isabelle was better. Genuinely better, moving without apologizing for the space she used.

Clara stayed near the wall for the first hour and then didn't.

Eleanor danced like a woman completing a drill and looked at the clock twice.

Celeste was flawless, which impressed nobody, and I watched her register that.

Then Rosalie went out with Julian, and I understood the difference between doing a thing correctly and doing it on purpose.

⸻

By the time Julian came over, there wasn't much of a choice left.

"You're the last one."

"I'm aware."

"You could have come over."

"I could have."

His hand settled at my back, and I learned that a hand can be perfectly correct in its placement and still make you aware of every inch of your own spine.

We started. It went badly. I knew the steps and my body performed them like a person reciting a language they can't speak, and he could feel it.

"You're fighting me."

"I'm not."

"You are. It's like dancing with a gate." He turned us.

"Do you do this with everyone, or is it only me?"

"I did it with Eliza. She has a bruise."

"That's a relief. I was beginning to take it personally."

"You were not."

"No," he agreed, cheerfully, "I wasn't."

Something came loose in my chest, and I am fairly sure it was temper, and about half a beat later my feet stopped arguing with his.

"There she is," he said, sounding pleased with himself.

I looked up at him.

"I'd have started sooner if I'd known."

The music ended a few bars afterward. He let go without any particular reluctance, and he was talking to somebody else before I'd even finished deciding whether I'd enjoyed the dance.

⸻

Cassian came for me twenty minutes later, and said nothing for the first half of it.

I appreciated that more than I expected to.

We moved through the opening figures in a silence that was almost comfortable, and I spent all of it looking at the floor, because the floor was where my feet were, and my feet could not be trusted.

"You're watching your feet."

"That's where the problem is."

"Watch me instead."

I did not want to do that. I did it anyway, and it turned out to be considerably harder than the dancing, because a man's face at that distance is not a thing you can look at neutrally for the length of a song.

But my feet went where they were supposed to.

"How does that work?"

"You stop trying to arrive before I do." He turned us, and I went, and it did not feel like walking backward across ice. "You were in the history lesson yesterday."

"You weren't."

"No." A pause. "It reached me anyway."

I did not know what to do with that, so I said nothing, and he let the silence sit there for a while, which I was learning he did on purpose.

"The part about neglect," he said. "Was that true, or was it well said?"

Most people pick one and assume.

"Both."

"Yes." He didn't say anything else about it. "I thought so."

The music stopped. He let go, stepped back, inclined his head very slightly, and that was all.

I stood there a moment longer than I should have.

⸻

By the third hour the room had loosened. People had stopped standing where they were meant to stand, the music had gotten faster, and the mirrors were full of movement that no longer startled me.

I wanted to go.

I looked for Eliza to tell her, because she would ask in the morning and I would rather say it once than twice.

She wasn't by the windows. She wasn't with Clara. Isabelle thought she'd seen her near the doors a while ago, and said it in a way that suggested she had not really been looking.

I did a slow circuit of the room without meaning to make it a search, and by the end of it I had worked out two things.

Eliza was not in the ballroom.

Neither was Julian.