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She stiffened beside him. “I only meant—”
“Was that your first time there?”
She didn’t need to answer; he could easily guess.
In all the years Rune and Alex had been friends, she’d never set foot in their tenement. Alex had always gone to Wintersea House. Either his brother had been too ashamed to invite her into their home, or he’d invited her, and Rune had declined to come.
“When my parents died, the shop and apartment passed to me,” he explained.
“But why choose to live there? Why not sell it and ask the Commander for an estate of your own? Thornwood Hall, for example, could have been yours.”
Thornwood Hall.
Gideon shivered.
A dark shadow hung over that house. He could still feel Cressida there. Still smell the stench of her magic in the air. The few times he’d gone back, he’d been plagued by living nightmares.
“I would rather sleep beneath a bridge than sleep in Thornwood Hall,” he said, more to himself than to her. “If you found Old Town beneath you, I certainly won’t admit to the neighborhood we lived in before that.”
“I never said Old Town was beneath me.”
Her voice came from several paces behind him, making him realize she’d stopped walking. Turning to face her, he found her edges lit up by the red-gold light of the setting sun and her white sundress whipping around her knees in the wind. They were at the edge of the gardens here. The hedges were lower and less manicured. Wild, like her.
“Your neighborhood is …quaint.”
“Quaintis a word polite people use when they don’t want to be insulting.”
Her cheeks reddened and her hair blew across her face. “Are you so determined to misunderstand me?”
Gideon paused, studying her. If he and Rune Winters were truly courting—which would never happen—this is exactly the argument he would have with her.
“Is itquaintthat the residents of Old Town scrape their pennies together to keep the lights on?Quaintthat parents spend half the year starving, so their children don’t have to? When Penitent children beg in Old Town streets? Or the old and infirm freeze to death in their beds because they can’t afford to heat their apartments?”
These things were regular occurrences in Old Town.
Rune stared in horror at Gideon. Of course she didn’t know about these things. She lived in a different world. One that was only an hour’s ride on horseback but might as well be as far as the moon.
Gideon turned and kept walking, annoyed with himself for bringing it up. Annoyed at her for being …well, her.
“I’m not sure why you’re angry at me,” she said to his back. “If Penitent children are begging in the street, it’s the Republic you should blame. The Good Commander made their families outcasts for aiding witches.”
Gideon stopped.
“Or don’t you remember that the Commander promised us a better world?” she continued before he could respond. “One where no one lives in squalor.”
Despite his anger, she was right. Gideon remembered the rallies. The speeches. The pamphlets hidden in pockets and shoes or between the pages of books passed under the noses of the aristocracy. Nicolas Creedhadpromised to usher in a better world. But that world had yet to fully arrive.
“If people live in poverty,” she said, “you should direct your anger athim.”
He whirled on her.
“You think we weren’t impoverished before? You have no idea what the real world is like, Rune. You live a pampered, privileged existence and always have. I’m not saying that’s your fault. I’m simply stating facts. If you don’t want to look at ugly things, you don’t have to. You can pretend they don’t exist.”
A bright flush of red swept up her neck.
“People like you and your grandmother flourished under the Reign of Witches, when things were worse than they are now. So don’t pretend you care. You didn’t then, and you don’t now. The Sister Queens or the Good Commander …it’s all the same to you.”
She winced, as if he’d struck her.
