Page 128 of Legacy Ascended

Luke is standing with Soren near the end of the House tables, in black, and he has been watching me since the doors and hasn't bothered to hide it since the soup.

I walk over. The room watches me walk over.

"Luke."

"Jessica."

"Dance with me."

There's about a half-second where the nearest twenty people work out what just happened — that it was me who asked, and that this time nobody in this hall gets to say it was a mistake.

Luke's mouth curves. He doesn't look at Natasha's table. He doesn't look at anybody.

"It would be my honor," he says, and takes my hand.

He is, it turns out, alarmingly good at this.

"You've done this before," I say.

"I've done this since I was six. It was every second Thursday and I hated it." His hand settles at my back, just below the shoulder blade, well clear of the left side, and he moves us into the current of it like it's nothing. "It's the only thing my father ever made me learn that I've been grateful for twice."

"When was the first time?"

"At the last Great House Dinner. Turn."

I turn. He tells me things in a low voice the entire time — small step, my hand is going to move, you're about to be looked at by a councillor, ignore her — and I understand for the first time that a ballroom is a room Luke can read the way Freya reads mud.

"They're all looking at the dress," I say.

"They are." He turns us again. "Last year you didn't know what you were wearing."

"And tonight?"

His hand tightens slightly at my back.

"Tonight you did."

Soren doesn't wait to be asked, which is Soren.

He simply arrives at the end of the song, says, "My turn," and Luke hands me over like a man surrendering territory under a treaty he helped draft.

Dancing with Soren is like dancing with a building that has decided to cooperate. He barely moves. The floor rearranges itself around him and somehow I'm moving perfectly, and it takes me half a song to work out that he is doing every single thing for both of us and making it look like I'm doing it.

"You're flawless at this," I say. "I hate it."

"I was made to learn it at nine. There was an instructor. She counted out loud." His hand is enormous against my back and exactly nowhere near my left shoulder. "I've never enjoyed it before."

Then, after about eight bars:

"The wall's bare," he says.

"I noticed."

"It has been bare my entire life. I've walked past it at this dinner since I was a child and never once seen it." His voice doesn't change at all. "I can't stop seeing it now."

Torres cuts in with no technique whatsoever and absolutely no shame about it.

"I don't know any of this," he says, taking my waist.