“Reserved,” Iris corrected. “He keeps to Briar Hall. He sends his regrets to nearly everything. He has gone rather quiet since—” She paused, and a delicacy entered her voice. “Well. Since last Season.”
“I am not surprised,” Mariselle commented.
Pinklet pawed at Kazrian’s shin, and Kazrian discreetly offered another small piece of meat before straightening. “Hadrian?” he asked.“Reserved?”
He could not reconcile one with the other. The Hadrian he remembered—and he remembered him well, given that the man had been one of Jasvian’s closest friends since the two of them were boys—had been all easy warmth and good nature, the sort of man who could put an entire drawing room at its ease within the first few minutes of entering it. The idea ofthatman going quiet and keeping to his country estate was rather like being told that the sun had taken up a hobby of setting at noon.
“It does seem unlikely, doesn’t it,” Rosavyn said, spearing another potato. “I’ve been saying for months that he and Jasvian have essentially swapped personalities. Jasvian’s gone all soft and domestic”—she gestured with the potato at her eldest brother, who folded his arms—“and Hadrian’s become the brooding grump of the pair. It’s really very tidy. The universe abhors an imbalance.”
“I was never a brooding grump,” said Jasvian.
The silence that followed was damning. Then the entire table erupted into laughter, with Mariselle turning her face into Evryn’s shoulder and Lady Rivenna hiding a laugh behind her napkin.
“What?” Jasvian looked, if anything, more affronted than before. “I was notthatbad.”
Iris patted her husband’s hand. “Do not fret, my love. You are still brooding enough for me.”
“That is not—” Jasvian began, and then evidently reconsidered the wisdom of arguing the point. He cleared his throat. “Regardless. Hadrian is unlikely to be in Bloomhaven this Season, and I think we ought to respect that.”
“And who can blame him?” Rosavyn said. “Ever since that strumpet broke his heart?—”
“Rosavyn Rowanwood!”Lady Rivenna’s voice cut across the table. “One does not use such a word when speaking of a lady, no matter how questionable her conduct.”
“Well, now I really must know what happened,” Kazrian said.
“Did I not tell you to return sooner?” Rosavyn said. “Look at all the things you have missed. And this one isquitethe story. I’m surprised you did not hear of it in the Shaded Lands. The lady in question?—”
“The lady in question,” their grandmother interjected smoothly, “was discovered to have formed an attachment to a gentleman she had knownbefore Lord Blackbriar’s courtship began. An attachment which had, it transpired, never entirely concluded, even after she accepted Lord Blackbriar’s suit. It was discovered when the two of them were …” She paused. “Well. How does one put it delicately?”
“Quite literally attached to one another on a settee in the gentleman’s private library?” Rosavyn offered.
Lady Rivenna gave her a withering look. “That is not what I meant bydelicately, and you know it.”
“More delicate than the gossip birds’ version.”
“Good stars,” Kazrian said. “Poor Hadrian.”
“Iknow,” Rosavyn said with feeling. “It was dreadful. Now you understand my use of the term?—”
“A dreadful scandal indeed,” Lady Rivenna said, cleanly and firmly, before the term in question could make a second appearance at the dinner table. “It was a great blow to Lord Hadrian, and most undeserved. I have always liked him.” She paused to consider her wine. “Though I confess I have never once managed to get an accurate read on the boy. The leaves have always been muddied where he is concerned. Most unsatisfying.”
Kazrian could not help the smile that tugged at his mouth, first at the notion of Lord Hadrian Blackbriar, who must be close to thirty years of age by now, being referred to as ‘the boy,’ and second at the fact that his grandmother still consulted the tea leaves, a tradition that much of modern Bloomhaven society had long since dismissed as quaint superstition. His grandmother, naturally, considered modern Bloomhaven society to be wrong.
“And is Hadrian aware of this reading?” he asked gravely. “That his leaves are ‘unsatisfying’? It seems the sort of thing a man would want to know about himself.”
“Do not be impertinent,” said his grandmother.
“To return to the matter at hand,” Iris said, “Hadrian has become rather withdrawn since it all happened. He seems to have taken this most recent disappointment quite hard. Understandably so. Everyone thought the match so promising before the lady proved herself to be rather … well.”
“Severely lacking in judgment?” Mariselle said. “It makes little sense to me. By any reasonable accounting, he is one of the most eligible fae lords inthe whole of the United Fae Isles. Good family, good fortune, good looks. What on earth was some lady doing throwing away a match like that?”
“Was there not someone else, too?” Kazrian said, frowning slightly. “The Season before I left for the Shaded Lands. Was he not engaged? Or—no. Was he?—”
“Almost engaged,” Mariselle supplied. “A promising match, I believe.”
“Yes.” Kazrian nodded. “And before that—” He broke off, fixing his gaze carefully on a point among the bread rolls and holding it there by force of will instead of allowing it to land on Iris. The rest of his words died a quiet and sensible death in his mouth. He had been only sixteen at the time, and the details had been above his head, but he knew that Hadrian and Iris had been engaged, briefly, before Iris and Jasvian had found their way to one another.
It had all seemed perfectly amicable—at least as far as Kazrian could tell. Jasvian and Hadrian were still the closest of friends, after all. But seeming amicable and being a subject one raised cheerfully over dinner were two rather different things. Three years ago, Kazrian would almost certainly have blundered straight through the thought and out the other side before it occurred to him to stop. He was rather better now at recognizing a sentence he ought not to finish.
