Chapter Text
The ballroom held its breath. It did that for her. It always did. Selene had felt it happen so many times that she no longer noticed it consciously, the way you stop noticing the weight of a ring you have worn for years. It was simply the nature of things. Rooms went quiet for her.
She stood at the centre of Lord Haemar’s gilded stage and she was, without question, the most arresting thing in it. She was tall, as are elves, and slender in the way of her kind, drawn with a fineness that made the humans in the room seem somehow approximate by comparison, like rough sketches beside a finished painting.
Her skin was very pale, the pale of winter moonlight, with the faint blue undertone that marked her elvish blood. Against it her hair fell like liquid silver, long and unbound save for two slim braids pulled back from her temples and pinned with small white gems that caught the light when she moved. It reached her waist and when she turned it moved like water.
Her gown tonight was white — not the ivory or the cream that human women so often favoured but true white, stark and pure, the silk so fine it seemed almost to generate its own faint light. It fell from her shoulders in clean elegant lines, fitted close through the bodice and flowing at the skirt, and at the neckline and the cuffs and the hem it was edged with deep blue gems, sapphires and something darker than sapphires, stones the colour of deep ocean water or of a sky at the last moment before full dark. They sat against the white like stars against snow. Around her throat, on a fine silver chain, hung a single stone of the same deep blue, and it rested at the hollow of her collarbone and drew the eye the way a flame would.
Her face was the kind of face that poets reached for and fell short of. High cheekbones. A mouth that curved with the particular ease of someone accustomed to being looked at. A jaw that was delicate without being weak. And her eyes, her eyes were the colour of moonshine on still water, grey bleeding into blue bleeding into something that shifted when the light did.
She was performing the old elvish lament now, one she had translated herself into Common so that every human in the room could understand exactly what they were losing. Her voice was a low soprano, rich and unhurried. The melody wound through the gilded room and curled into the high corners and settled over the gathered nobility of Baldur’s Gate like snowfall, soft and total and impossible to ignore.
In the third row a woman had pressed her fingers to her lips without realising. In the back a very old man had closed his eyes. Near the tall windows that looked out over the dark harbour, a man in black had not moved at all. Not since the first note. Not even, she would later think, to lift his glass to his mouth.
The last note hung in the air like smoke from a dying candle. She held it, really held it, let it stretch until the silence itself became part of the performance, and then she released it, and the applause came rolling in like a tide breaking against stone. It crashed over her in waves, loud and warm and familiar, and she let herself breathe for the first time in four minutes. She dropped her chin to her chest for just a moment before lifting it again and giving them the smile.
The smile was its own instrument. She had been perfecting it for the better part of a century — wide enough to feel genuine, angled just slightly upward at the left corner, the kind of smile that made every single person in a room feel as though it had been made specifically for them. She had practised it in mirrors when she was young and now it came as naturally as breathing. It was one of her finest pieces of work.
Lord Haemar’s ballroom was something out of a painting. The ceilings soared thirty feet above her head, coffered and gilded, dripping with chandeliers that held what had to be five hundred candles between them. The light they threw was honeyed and warm, catching the crystal glasses and the jewels at every throat and wrist, making the whole room shimmer like something submerged in amber. The walls were panelled in dark cherrywood and hung with portraits of people who all had the same long nose and expression of mild dissatisfaction, and the floors were white marble veined with gold that clicked softly under the heels of Baldur’s Gate’s finest.
And they were here in force tonight. She could read a room the way a sailor reads weather — she always knew exactly who she was performing for before she ever opened her mouth. There were the new-money merchants in their too-bright silks, colours slightly too saturated, jewels slightly too large, laughing a little too freely with the wine to compensate for the fact that they still felt like guests in rooms like this rather than inhabitants.
There were the old nobility, quieter, more contained, wearing their wealth like a second skin because it had always been there. There were the diplomats and the guild masters and the younger sons of great houses trying to make connections, and there were the wives and the mistresses and the companions who had perfected the art of being decorative while being absolutely nobody’s fool.
She had given them three ballads and a walking song and the old elvish lament, and by the end she had them completely.
She always had them completely. That was simply the nature of things.
She stepped down from the low stage and the crowd folded around her like water closing over a stone. The compliments came from every direction at once, overlapping, earnest, a little desperate in the way that compliments always were when people wanted something in return.
“Extraordinary, my dear, truly — the second movement —”
“I said to my husband, I said, there is nobody in this city who compares —”
“You must come to Evelyn’s nameday celebration, whatever your rate, we’ll match it —”
“The lament. I don’t mind telling you I wept. My wife will confirm it, she was sat right beside me —”
She accepted all of it with grace, deflecting and laughing and touching arms and remembering names, because she always remembered names; it was one of the things she was known for. This part of the evening was its own performance, quieter and more demanding in some ways than the stage.
On stage she only had to be magnificent. Down here among them she had to be magnificent and accessible and warm and just slightly out of reach all at the same time, and she had been doing it so long that it hardly cost her anything anymore.
It was almost tedious, if she was honest with herself, which she rarely was at parties.
She was mid-laugh at something a guild master’s wife had said — genuine enough, the woman was actually funny — when Lord Haemar appeared at her elbow.
He was a small man, Haemar, pink-cheeked and perpetually delighted with himself in the way that men who had inherited rather than earned tended to be. He had paid her very well for tonight and she liked him well enough for it.
“Selene, my dear,” he said, and touched her arm with the familiar ease of a man who had hired her three times and felt that made them intimate. “There is someone who very much wishes to be introduced to you.”
She smiled. There was always someone who very much wished to be introduced to her. “Of course,” she said, and let him steer her.
She noticed the man before Haemar had finished navigating them across the room. It would have been difficult not to. He occupied his corner of the ballroom with the particular quality of presence that made the space around him feel smaller, as though the room had quietly reorganised itself to accommodate him without anyone noticing. The other guests gave him a foot or two of extra space without seeming to realise they were doing it. Even the candlelight, she thought afterwards, seemed reluctant to fully reach him.
He was an elf too. He was tall, taller than the men around him by a clear hand’s breadth, and built along the long fine lines of the high-elven blood, narrow through the waist, broad-shouldered without being heavy, the kind of frame that read as elegance rather than as strength until one paid closer attention and noticed how very little of him was wasted.
His high straight cheekbones cut clean as carved stone. She noticed his long jaw, the narrow elegant nose, the mouth thin at the upper lip and slightly fuller at the lower, set in a harsh line. His brows were dark and straight above deep-set eyes, and his ears — when he turned his head a fraction toward Haemar’s approach, and the heavy fall of his nearly-black hair shifted with the movement — were the long-pointed ears of a high elf, not the shorter softer points of a half-elf or a wood-elf, but the clean drawn line of the old blood, the same line her own ears made beneath her hair.
His own hair was a heavy fall of black, swept severely back from his face and gathered at the nape of his neck, longer than was the current fashion, kept with the unhurried fastidiousness of a man who had no interest in fashion’s current opinions.
It made him look, very briefly and from the right angle, like a portrait from one of the older elven courts, the kind of figure she had seen in faded miniatures hanging in her grandmother’s hall when she was a child. The kind of man who belonged in a room three hundred years ago.
But it was wrong. She did not know yet what was wrong. She knew only that something was, and that the wrongness sat under the elvishness rather than over it, the way a flaw sat under the glaze of a piece of pottery rather than on its surface, visible only at certain angles, in certain lights.
He was very pale. Paler than an elf had any business being, even an elf who lived indoors; the kind of pallor that had nothing of moonlight in it and something of marble, the faint blue undertone she expected at his temples and the long line of his throat replaced by an absence, a quietness beneath the skin where the small visible work of veins and blood ought to have been. He was very still. Not the practised stillness of a courtier holding a pose, and not the easy stillness of an elf who had simply outgrown the human habit of fidgeting, but something deeper — the stillness of a man who did not move when he was not moving for a reason, who did not shift his weight or scan the room or breathe in the small visible rhythm by which living bodies were always faintly fluttering with the work of being alive.
He was breathing. She could see it, when she looked. But he was breathing as if he needed to remember to do it. Unnaturally. It made the elvishness of him strange. He looked like one of her own and like nothing she had ever seen, both at once, and she did not entirely care for the way the contradiction sat at the back of her tongue.
He was dressed entirely in black. His coat was long and close-cut over the line of his shoulders, fitted to the long lean elven frame beneath. The fabric was very fine. It absorbed the candlelight rather than throwing it back, so that he seemed always to be standing in slightly less light than the rest of the room.
His hands were the next thing she noticed, and the thing she found, on consideration, the most arresting. Long-fingered and very pale, the fine-boned elegant hands of his blood, the kind of hands that should have belonged to a musician or a scholar. There were rings on them — dark stones in dark settings, two on the left hand and one on the right, all of them old, the metalwork of styles she did not recognise from any current Baldurian goldsmith. Some of them, on a closer look, she did not recognise from anything that was being made by anyone, anywhere, this century.
He held his wine glass with the particular looseness of someone who had never once in their life needed to fill a silence, the long stem of it balanced between two fingers and a thumb, the dark wine inside it perfectly still. He was already looking at her when she arrived. They all were, really. But this, she understood with a small uneasy shift somewhere behind her sternum, felt different.
“Lord Szarr,” Haemar said, blooming with the pleasure of a man successfully connecting two important people. “May I present Selene. The finest voice in Baldur’s Gate, I think you’ll agree, having heard her tonight.”
Lord Szarr let his gaze move over her once. Unhurried. The way a man looked at something when he already knew what he thought of it and was simply confirming. His eyes were a dark, unnatural red, deep-set beneath those straight brows, and they did not warm at the introduction the way the eyes of strangers ordinarily warmed at the meeting of someone they had asked to be brought across a room to. They simply settled on her, and remained settled, with the quality of a weight being put down somewhere it intended to stay.
“Indeed,” he said. His voice was slow and smooth, carrying an accent she couldn’t quite place, something old and rich that sat in the mouth like dark wine. It gave away nothing about where he was from or how long he had been anywhere.
He could have been a hundred. He could have been five hundred. He could have been older than that, and the thought caught oddly at her, because she was not yet past a hundred and twenty and she was already, by the standards of her own kind, only a little beyond girlhood.
Haemar beamed between them. “Lord Szarr was most eager to make your acquaintance after your performance. Most eager.” He said it twice, which told her it had not entirely been Cazador’s word.
“You’re too kind,” she said, to both of them, and smiled her perfect smile. Lord Szarr did not react to the smile the way people usually reacted. He simply watched her with those very strange eyes and said nothing, and the nothing stretched out longer than was comfortable, and she felt the faint, irritating urge to fill it.
“I hope the evening was to your taste,” she said eventually. Poised. Easy. She had been making conversation with difficult men since she was a girl in her mother’s court, and a difficult man was, she had long ago decided, simply a man who had not yet been correctly asked to sit down.
“Parts of it.” His eyes did not leave her face. “Some parts more than others.” He let that settle. He did not look away as he let it settle. He did not soften it with a smile or an amused tilt of his glass or any of the small social gestures by which men of his station were trained, in this city, to take the edge off remarks of that kind. He simply held her gaze and let her do the work of deciding what he had meant.
“The first two pieces were exceptional,” he said, before she had quite decided. “The lament especially. Your translation?”
She was mildly surprised he knew that. “It is.”
“The choices you made in the second verse were interesting.” He said interesting the way some people said wrong — not unkindly, simply with precision. “Intentional?”
“Yes.” Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one, private, like a thought he hadn’t bothered to share.
“There is a word in the original,” he said, “in the third line of that verse, that does not translate cleanly into Common. Puin. You softened it considerably.”
She looked at him. She felt the small precise shift of a piece of furniture being moved beneath her, somewhere she had not expected furniture to be.
She had translated that lament alone, in her study, over the course of an entire winter. There was no published Common edition. She had told three people in her life about the translation. None of them were in this room. And the word he had just said.
The word he had just said in the easy conversational tone of a man asking after the provenance of a wine, in a gilded ballroom in the upper city, in the middle of a polite introduction made by their host — was not a word one said in rooms like this.
It was a word one said in bedrooms. It was the word a wife might say to her husband, in the dark, in the privacy of a marriage bed, in a tone she would not have used in front of the household. It was the explicit elven word for the act itself, the unornamented one, with none of the flowering circumlocutions the high tongue ordinarily preferred when it came near such things, and he had set it down between them in the warm gold light of Haemar’s ballroom as casually as a man laying a glass on a table.
She kept her face entirely still. “You speak the high tongue?” she asked, carefully neutral.
“A little.”
“Not many do.”
“No,” he agreed. “Not many.” He did not elaborate. He did not offer when he had learned it, or where, or from whom. He simply held her gaze and let her notice that he had not elaborated, and she had the brief, peculiar sensation of being a piece on a board across from a man who had already worked out his next several moves and was waiting, with no particular urgency, for her to make hers.
“You softened the word,” he said again, conversationally. “I wondered why.”
“It does not have a clean Common equivalent.”
“It has several.” His eyes had not moved from hers. “The plain ones. Coupling. Bedding. Coarser things, if one wants them. The original word is plain in the same way. The line, rendered honestly, says I would die to lie with you — not yearn for you, not long for you, the cleaner Common verb, the one without bedclothes in it. You chose the cleaner verb.”
“For the room.”
“For the room.” A small pause. “Or for the singer.”
She felt, abruptly, the particular sensation of a fingertip drawn lightly down the back of her neck — except that nobody was touching the back of her neck, and the sensation came only from the inside, and she did not care for it at all. She held his gaze. She did not look away. She had not looked away from a man in a ballroom since she was a girl and she did not propose to start tonight.
“Was the word too plain for you, I wonder,” he said, quite gently, the way a man might wonder aloud about the weather, “or was the act?”
She felt her own breath change. It was small. It was small enough that she did not believe anyone in the room could have seen it. Except for him. Who was watching her face the way another man might watch a candle for the moment a draught reached it.
“Lord Szarr —”
“It is only a question of curiosity. A singer who will not put an honest word in her own mouth is an interesting puzzle. There are, in my experience, two kinds of women who decline such things in public. The kind who finds the word distasteful.” A pause. “And the kind who finds the word so natural to her own life that to say it in front of strangers would constitute an indiscretion.”
She opened her mouth to bite back, but nothing came out. His mouth moved. It was not quite a smile. But it was the closest he had yet come to one, and there was something pleased in it, the small precise pleasure of a man whose opening gambit had been answered, in a game he had been playing alone for some time, by an opponent he had not previously known he had.
“You make a great many assumptions, Lord Szarr,” she said evenly, “for a man I have only just met.”
“Do I?”
“On the basis of one word in one verse of one lament, which I happen to have translated.”
“Translated and sung, and softened with full understanding of what you were doing as you sang it. I do not call that an assumption. I call it a reading.”
“And do you read every singer this attentively?”
“No,” he said. “I do not.”
The half-beat held again. It was, she realised somewhere at the edge of her thinking, the second time he had laid silence down between them and waited to see what she would put in it. She put nothing in it this time either. But it cost her more than the first one had.
Haemar, who had the social awareness of a drunkard, chose this moment to clap his hands together softly. “Lord Szarr hosts the most wonderful private gatherings, Selene — I keep telling him he absolutely must have you, absolutely must —”
“I host intimate evenings,” Cazador said, cutting across Haemar with a quietness that was somehow more effective than volume. “For a small number of guests. The entertainment I choose reflects the standard I maintain.” His eyes hadn’t left her face. “I would like you to perform at the next one.” It was not quite phrased as a request.
“And what kind of standard does Lord Szarr maintain, exactly?”
Something moved in his face. The suggestion of a smile, again, gone before it had quite arrived.
“A very particular one,” he said. “I am not easily satisfied.”
“No,” she said, holding his gaze, “I imagine you are not.”
“I find that the things worth having are rarely the things one comes by easily.” His glass had not yet returned to his lips since she had been steered across the room. The dark wine sat at exactly the same level she remembered noticing when she had first arrived. “I am, you will find, quite patient about acquiring them.”
“I am not a thing to be acquired, Lord Szarr.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Forgive me, then.” His head tilted, a fraction of a degree. “I had been told you took private engagements.”
“I take private engagements. I am not the engagement.”
“I understand the distinction.”
“Do you?”
“Perfectly.” His eyes moved across her once more, slow, the same unhurried way they had moved when she had first arrived at his elbow. “I am, however, prepared to pay handsomely for the engagement.”
She held his gaze for a long moment. There was something behind those dark eyes that she couldn’t read, which was unusual. She could read most people, it was half of what she did, and the fact that this elf gave her nothing to work with was both professionally irritating and something else entirely that she refused to name.
She thought about saying she would need to check her schedule. She thought about saying her rates for private engagements were considerable. She thought about saying any number of measured, professional things that would put the arrangement back on her terms.
“Have the details sent to my address,” she said instead. “Lord Haemar knows it.”
Cazador inclined his head. A single small movement, unhurried, like a man confirming something that had never really been in question.
“Wonderful,” Haemar said, delighted.
She excused herself with a smile that she maintained all the way across the ballroom.
She maintained it as she retrieved her cloak and made her farewells to Haemar’s wife at the door, and as she crossed the carriage circle in the cold dark air with her breath ghosting white in front of her. She maintained it until the carriage door closed behind her.
Then, finally, she let it go.
She sat very still for a long moment in the dim of the carriage, her gloved hands folded in her lap, watching the lamps swing past the window in their slow yellow rhythm. Her cheek, when she lifted her hand to it, was too warm.
She lowered her hand and considered him. He had been beautiful. She could acknowledge that much without flinching from it; she had been looking at beautiful elves all her life, and it was no particular crime to notice another.
But his beauty had not been the beauty she was used to. The high elves she had known were beautiful the way snow was beautiful, or moonlight on water, clean and cool. He had been beautiful the way certain dark paintings were beautiful, the kind one stood in front of in a gallery for longer than one had meant to and walked away from with the uneasy sense of having been observed back. The long line of his jaw. The pallor of him. The way the candlelight had not quite reached him, or had reached him and not stayed.
She frowned faintly at the window. There had been something wrong about him, and she could not put her finger on what. He had moved with the small unhurried grace of his blood. He had spoken in clean elegant common with the slight foreign cadence of an elf who had lived long enough among humans to pick up their rhythms and not lose his own. He had smiled — almost — once.
By every external measurement he had been a high-born elf of considerable wealth and considerable age making polite conversation with a singer he admired, and she had spent her career in rooms full of such men, and there had been nothing she could point to about him that placed him outside the category.
He had been pale in a way that had not sat quite right. There had been a moment when he had lifted the wine glass to his lips, when the level of the wine had not, she was almost sure, changed. She had noticed the not-quite-rightness on first look and she had noticed it again close up, and at no point in the conversation between them had she been able to isolate it into anything she could have named to a friend afterwards as a reason.
She did not like this not-being-able-to-name-it. She liked, even less, that she found she wanted to look at him again to try.
It wasn’t until the carriage was halfway home that she realised she had agreed to perform for him without negotiating her rate.
She sat with that for a moment.
In twenty years of private engagements in this city she had not once taken a private booking without first naming a number that the host found uncomfortable. She had done it tonight with the merchant who had asked about Evelyn’s nameday and she had performed it last tenday with a baron’s secretary, but she had not done it with Lord Szarr at all. She had simply said have the details sent to my address, and walked away, and not thought of money once.
She pressed two fingers to the base of her throat where the sapphire pendant rested. The stone was warm from her skin. Her pulse, beneath the pad of her finger, was running a little too fast.
She frowned at the window again. A man, an elf, had paid her a compliment and offered her work, and she had accepted. That was all. Nothing had happened that had not happened a hundred times before in her career.
And yet…
By the time the carriage turned the last corner toward her gate, she had managed to compose her face. By the time it stopped, she had even managed, very nearly, to compose herself.