“Thank you. So do you…I mean, you look…nice…you also look. Jeez. I’ll stop talking now.”
The corner of his mouth twitches.
I find myself wishing the ground would crack open and swallow me whole.
Lily, oblivious to the small structural collapse happening inside my body, pulls us both toward the table.
The head porter is waiting to seat us. He approaches me with the kind of polite expression that saysI have a job to do.He gestures toward the far end of the long mahogany table — about thirty feet away from where Viktor and Lily are about to sit.
I automatically take a step in that direction.
“No.” Viktor’s voice cuts across the room. Sharp. Final.
The porter freezes mid-step.
“She sits beside me,” Viktor orders.
I blink.
“Tradition dictates that the three of us should be spread across thirty feet of mahogany so that we may shout pleasantriesat one another through five courses. I have already decided we are breaking tradition tonight. If we are breaking it, we will break it well. You both sit beside me.”
I hear a small choking sound from Madam Petrova that might be a laugh.
The porter’s eyes widen but he recovers his composure with a speed that suggests this is not the first impossible thing he has been asked to do in this household tonight. He rearranges both of our place settings at lightning speed.
I walk to my new seat with my cheeks on fire.
The staff is going to begossipingabout this for weeks.
I sit down.
Viktor’s knee is six inches from mine under the table. I take a long, slow breath through my nose.
Behave, Novak.
The next surprise is when I look down at my place setting and discover that I havefive forks.
Beside me, Lily, in her tiny chair on Viktor’s other side, also stares down at her own array of forks. Her tiny brow furrows. She reaches one small hand out and touches one of the smaller forks experimentally, like she is trying to see if it will tell her what it is for.
Viktor catches the look on both of our faces. “Do not worry,” he offers, the corner of his mouth twitching. “I will teach you both how to correctly use the utensils.”
He picks up the outermost fork and holds it up. “You begin with this one. The outermost, first. Then work inward as the courses are served.”
“There arefive,” I say.
“Because there will be five courses.”
“Oh wow,” I whisper.
The first course is served by a silent porter. We are each served a delicate summer soup with a tiny herbed roll on a small plate beside it.
Lily eyes her soup with deep suspicion.
“Try one bite,” Viktor tell her.“If you do not like it, I will ask the kitchen for something else.”
Lily considers. She picks up her smallest spoon and dips it carefully into the soup. She lifts the spoon to her mouth. She takes one tiny, tentative bite.
She considers, then announces, with the dignity of a small queen, “It’s good.”
