Chapter 112: A Trick of the Light

Two weeks had softened the guest branch into something like a routine. Lilith knew where the sun fell across the terrace by midmorning, knew which servant carried the good tea and which one still flinched at her horns. Meetings came and went, formal and toothless, and the real conversations happened after, in corridors, over wine Elatan poured too generously.

Cassius had not softened. If anything the man tightened by the day, his bows shorter, his voice pitched a fraction higher each time an elven guard told him the council remained occupied. Two weeks of waiting did that to men who measured their worth by how quickly doors opened for them.

Good. A man on the edge made mistakes he wouldn't make rested.

She wasn't going to leave it to chance, though. Her mouth could do a great deal these days, but this called for something with teeth.

"Nyssa."

The fairy appeared from the rafters before the second syllable finished, wings folding as she landed on the windowsill with the eagerness of a hound let off its leash.

"It is time," Lilith said.

Nyssa's laugh came out in a delighted little trill, both hands pressed to her mouth like she was trying to keep the sound from escaping and failing entirely. "Finally. Finally, my Empress. I've had three days of plans just sitting here doing nothing." She bowed low enough to nearly topple off the sill, then vanished in a scatter of dark motes.

Lilith stood and stretched, joints loosening after an hour folded into the reading chair. Her wings shifted against her back, settling.

"Drakul." She glanced toward the door where he stood, as he always stood, close enough to reach her in a single stride and far enough to look like furniture. "Relax."

"I have been relaxing since we arrived, Your Majesty."

"Uh huh." She crossed her arms. "That's an order, not a suggestion. Find something to do that isn't standing three feet from a door for two weeks straight. You've earned a little leisure in four thousand years, I'd think."

His jaw shifted, not quite a smile. "As you command."

She turned to Vespera, who sat near the window with a report half-finished in her lap. "Make sure he actually does it. Both of you. I mean it."

Vespera inclined her head, the shadow patterns along her collarbone rippling once. "Understood, my Empress."

Lilith left them to it and made her way down the guest branch's central walkway, boots quiet against wood grown smooth by centuries of feet. If her sense of the household's rhythm held, breakfast for the Solarian delegation would be arriving about now, carried up on woven trays by servants who'd long since learned not to make eye contact with Cassius.

She found a bench along the outer walk with a clean line of sight to his door, half-shaded by a curtain of hanging vine, and settled onto it with a book she had no intention of reading.

Right on time, three elven servants rounded the bend, trays balanced with the effortless grace bred into everyone in this city, steam curling up from covered dishes into the cool morning air.

They reached the door and knocked.

*

The morning light filtering through the woven walls did nothing to improve Cassius's mood. He stood by the window with his arms folded, watching the servants moving with their maddeningly unhurried grace along the path below.

"Two weeks, Benedict. Two weeks and not so much as a formal refusal." He turned from the window. "A council of children could manage a yes or no faster than these elves."

Benedict sat with his sword across his knees, running a whetstone along the edge though the blade had no need of it. "Wouldn't surprise me if it's the succubus. Her sort finds ways to plant themselves where they're not wanted."

"Precisely my thinking." Cassius resumed his pacing, the hem of his robe brushing the floorboards. "But mark this. When we arrived, the council's slowness had a shape to it. Delays, yes, but always with an answer waiting at the end. Now there's nothing. Just silence dressed up as patience." He stopped, jabbing a ringed finger toward the door as though the council sat behind it. "That reeks of interference. That reeks of some whore whispering in the right ears."

Helena looked up from the portfolio balanced on her knee. "You can't know that's the case, Ambassador. The Conclave has its own pace for these things, succubus or not."

Cassius regarded her for a long moment. He'd wondered more than once, watching her scribble her careful little notes, why the Chancellery had bothered sending her at all. He was hardly a novice at this work. Thirty years of courts far more treacherous than a tree full of elves, and he'd never once required a scribe to tell him how to read a room.

"Then how else would you account for it?" he said. "A woman like that doesn't cross a border to sip tea and admire the scenery."

Helena opened her mouth, but a knock at the door swallowed whatever she meant to say.

"Finally." Cassius was already moving, robes snapping at his ankles. His stomach had been complaining for the better part of an hour, and an empty stomach did nothing for his temper. He crossed the room and hauled the door open himself, before any servant of this household could beat him to the courtesy.

Two elven women stood beyond it, trays balanced on their forearms, the covered dishes trailing threads of steam into the cool corridor air. He waved them through without a word, standing aside as they filed past him toward the table.

At least the elves ate something resembling civilized food. Meat, in modest portions, hunted rather than farmed, but meat all the same. Small comfort, but he'd take it.

As the servants set the dishes down, the door swung wide enough that he caught the walkway beyond, and there she sat. Lune, on the bench beneath the hanging vine, a book open in her lap as though she had nothing better to do with a morning than read.

Damned whore.

Her mouth curved at the corner, unmistakable, aimed directly at him.

He blinked. When his eyes opened again, her face had returned to the page, still and unbothered, as if the smirk had never existed at all.

Wonderful. Now his morning soured before he'd even sat down to eat.

He turned his back on the walkway and crossed to the table, where the elven servants were already arranging the trays into some semblance of order.

*

Cassius settled into the chair with a grunt, spreading the napkin across his lap the way his mother had taught him sixty years ago, folded twice, tucked at the belt. He reached for the carafe himself, since no one else seemed inclined to pour with any urgency.

That was the moment the elf serving beside him caught her heel on the leg of the table.

The carafe tipped from her hand. Purple wine sheeted across his shoulder and down the front of his robe, soaking through silk to skin in a cold rush.

"Blazes!" He shoved back from the table, the fabric clinging to his chest. "Watch your hands, girl!"

The elf dropped to one knee beside him, already dabbing at the stain with a cloth pulled from her sash. "Forgive me, Ambassador. This has never happened before, I swear it. Let me set it right."

Her fingers moved fast, murmuring some low words he didn't recognize, and the wine lifted from the silk like ink drawn back into a well. Within moments the robe sat dry against his skin, not a trace of purple anywhere on the weave.

He exhaled through his nose. If she'd been one of his own household staff, she'd have found the back of his hand for clumsiness like that. But he had to admit the trick was impressive—wine lifted clean from silk without so much as a stain to mark it. A display of skill bought back a measure of his patience, however small.

"See that it doesn't happen again," he said, and picked up his fork.

The two elves bowed and withdrew from his table, murmuring something about a good meal, and crossed to where Benedict and Helena sat waiting for their own service.

Finally. He speared a cut of the meat, brought the knife down to portion it, and the chair beneath him groaned like a ship's timber in a swell.

He went sideways before he understood what was happening, and the floor came up to meet his shoulder with the chair clattering after him. A yell tore out of his throat, more startled than pained, echoing off the woven walls.

Benedict was on his feet at once, sword clattering against the table edge, hand extended. "Ambassador—"

"I'm fine." Cassius batted the hand away and pushed himself upright, robe twisted around his knees, dignity considerably less intact than his clothing had been a minute ago. He turned and looked down at the wreck of the chair. One leg had snapped clean through, the break pale and fresh at the grain.

Elven craftsmanship. He'd sat in imperial chairs three centuries old that hadn't so much as creaked.

The two elves who'd served him hurried back over, faces arranged into identical apologies. "This has never happened before, Ambassador, we don't understand—"

"Enough. Leave it." He waved them off with more force than the moment required, already stepping toward an empty chair standing near the wall. He dragged it to the table himself and kicked the broken one aside, the leg skittering across the floorboards. "Take that with you when you go."

The elves gathered the ruined chair between them and retreated toward the door, murmuring something about fetching a replacement.

Cassius lowered himself into the new seat, testing his weight on it in stages before trusting it fully. "Splinters and spilled wine," he muttered, reaching again for his knife. "Some hospitality."

*

The knife went in clean this time, no protest from the chair beneath him. Cassius cut a strip of the meat and put it to his mouth.

Cold. Not merely cooled, but cold through, the fat gone stiff on his tongue.

He chewed anyway. Barbarous. Somewhere in his father's house a man would have lost his post for sending meat to table like this, and here he was expected to swallow it and smile.

At least the seasoning had some sense to it. Whatever herb they'd rubbed into the flesh cut through the chill, and he found himself taking a second bite before he'd finished condemning the first.

He reached for the wine to wash it down. The glass met his lips and gave him nothing, no bite of chill, no honest warmth, only that flat nothing temperature that sat in the mouth like a held breath. Worse than cold. Worse than hot. He set the glass back on the table with more care than it deserved and let a long breath go out through his nose.

Across the table Benedict was working through his own plate without complaint, and Helena had her portfolio open beside her cup, pen moving in short strokes between bites. Neither of them so much as glanced at the state of the food.

Cassius allowed himself a small, private satisfaction. Whatever indignities the Conclave saw fit to serve him, his cut was still the larger one, still dressed with whatever herb gave it flavor at all. Benedict's plate looked thinner. Helena hadn't touched meat, only bread and a wedge of pale cheese. Rank counted for something here, even among savages who couldn't keep a chair's legs from splitting.

He looked down to cut another piece and the fork stopped an inch above the plate.

Something moved in the meat. Pale, thin, threading out from the cut edge where his knife had opened it, three of them, four, writhing against the grain.

He shot up out of the chair so fast it scraped back and caught on the floorboard, his knee striking the table edge hard enough to rattle the glasses.

"What in the suns is that—"

Benedict's head came up first, hand already going to the sword at his hip. "Ambassador?"

Helena set her pen down. "Is something wrong?"

"The meat." He pointed at the plate without looking at it again. "It's crawling. It's rotten, it's full of—"

He made himself look.

Nothing. The cut sat where he'd left it, pale at the edges where the knife had gone through, a thread of juice pooling at the plate's rim. No movement. No holes. No trace of anything but a well-dressed piece of venison going cold under the light.

Cassius stood there with his hand still raised, the accusation dying in his throat.

"Ambassador," Benedict said again, slower this time, half-risen from his own chair.

"It's nothing." He lowered himself back into the seat, straightened his sleeve, and reached for the fork with more composure than he felt entitled to. "A trick of the light. This forest has strange lamps."

Helena watched him a moment longer than the excuse deserved before she returned to her portfolio. Benedict sat back down, though his hand didn't leave the sword hilt for a good while after.

Cassius put the next bite in his mouth and made himself chew it, made himself swallow, refusing to look down again.

Lune's face rose up behind his eyes, that same faint curl at the corner of her mouth he'd caught on the terrace, patient, amused, entirely too pleased with something he couldn't name.

He didn't believe in omens. He hadn't believed in them in thirty years of court intrigue, not once, not through poisonings or forged seals or a hundred smaller cruelties dressed up as courtesy.

But he found himself thinking, with the wine sitting untouched at his elbow and no fever on his skin to explain any of it, that whatever came next in this tree-city was going to have her fingerprints on it.