Eleni threw her head back, her bright laughter so jarringly similar to her niece’s that Kai had to glance around just to make certain it wasn’t Adeline’s own amusement. It wasn’t. Adeline was staring down at that same single, wilted flower with empty, distant eyes. She looked so unlike herself, so small and defeated, and—
Adhlas, there was no other word for it. Sad. She looked sad.
It wasn’t until Kai took a step toward her that he registered the weight of a hand on his arm.
“—met my father, Your Majesty?”
Kai tore his gaze from the princess, cleared his throat in a weak bid for time. Eleni’s smile was polite but expectant, and he struggled to grasp at her half-heard question.
“I haven’t had the pleasure,” he said finally.
This seemed to satisfy the Empress, who made a soft sound of delight and gestured broadly for him to join her at the table. Even as he was introduced to the former Emperor, Davide, andto his granddaughter Lyra, it was hard not to notice that Adeline had slipped away; she was now seating herself at the other end of the table, as far as she could possibly get. Kai did not want to watch her, but he couldn’t seem to escape that earth-shifting tug from the other side of the room; couldn’t pull himself out of her orbit as much as he might try. She was a beacon in the corner of his consciousness, bright in his periphery as Eleni poured his wine, and even as the seats around the table filled out and somewhat obscured her from view.
Ceri’s entrance was a relief to his strained neck; he could finally look up when she took a seat at the other end of the table, joining Adeline with Al and Os on either side. The rest of the faces around the table were unfamiliar; some of them interrupted the flow of his polite conversation with the Empress, leaning over to greet Eleni with a hand on her back or a swift kiss to her cheek. She introduced them all in turn; some, her court, and some, her family.
Adeline’s family, too.
“This is quite the welcome, Your Highness,” Kai said, as Eleni waved off a middle-aged man who had paused to say hello—and to stare with open curiosity at Kai’s gills, going so far as to stoop for a better look beneath his jaw before the Empress snapped at him in their shared tongue. With a tut still ringing on her lips, Eleni shifted her seat toward him, settling back in.
“Well, we have all been anticipating your arrival,” she said. He thought that her swift glance down the length of the table was quite as involuntary as his own, but they each looked at Adeline—and then each other. Eleni smiled, knowingly. “We’ve been awaiting hers even longer.”
Kai did not ask what that meant.
One of the few things he knew of Eleni Vanjir was her tendency towards the vague and the cryptic. But he had read the tension in Adeline’s few interactions with her aunt, her stiff demeanour; there was, clearly, some history he was not privy to.
Dinner was a disorienting affair. The Vanjir court was both larger and louder than the Beira’s, though they seemed closer, too, and quick to fold their guests into that closeness. Everyone Kai spoke to was warm, convivial—and welcoming in a way that might have bordered on intrusive had the wine not been flowing so freely. Elenididshield him from several more attempts to examine his gills, but when a question struck her interest, she was much slower to intervene, and much quicker to top up his glass.
“Were you close with her?” asked Eleni’s young niece, Lyra. “The Snow Queen?”
Eleni clucked out a quick reprimand in Dhaliaan, presumably over the title that Selma had so famously loathed—but then took a long sip of wine and watched Kai from beneath her lashes, awaiting his response.
“Her late Majesty was kind to me and mine,” he said, when it was clear that this was something Eleni wanted to hear. “She welcomed me into her home.”
Lyra didn’t miss a beat, raising a brow over her salad.
“But still refused to return you to your own.”
Thick with wine, Kai was slow to train his features, and even slower to recover from the abrupt catch of his breath. The Empress had the grace to look utterly appalled on his behalf.
“Lyra,” she hissed. “That is quite enough.”
Lyra gave a sullen roll of her eyes but scooped up a forkful of olives and leaves and stuffed her mouth, rather pointedly. Eleni mouthed apologies, and though Kai waved her off, he did feel compelled to take another deep pull from his glass. He could see now why Al and Os had been quite so stewed. The wine was light and floral, the cool trickle of it down his throat entirely too moreish in the balmy heat that still rose off the bleached stone walls, even on this side of the sunset. That it loosened the tension in his shoulders was a decided boon, though hewasdistantly aware that it also loosened his tongue.
A fact the Empress was shamelessly aware of, too. She watched him sideways over the rim of her own wineglass as he drank, then set her cup down and reached for the nearest jug.
“Speaking of the Beira, however,” she began, still with that sideways glance. “It is interesting that my niece has joined you here. I thought you seemed rathercloseon my last visit to Eisalaan.”
She reached for his glass with the jug in hand, but at the mention of Adeline, Kai regainedjustenough wherewithal to swiftly set his fingers over the rim, blocking her pour.
“Did you?” he said mildly.
Eleni’s dark eyes glimmered with amusement, unabashed as she hummed and turned the jug to her own glass.
“Oh, yes. But on your arrival, I wondered if I may have read an air of … contention.”
Contention.
Kai loosed a chuckle beneath his breath. He wondered, vaguely, if he would have found the implication half as amusing without the sweet fog of wine clouding his good sense. As it was, he felthis lips twitch into a smirk, and he leaned in, lowered his voice to a conspiratorial hush.
