Winter's Ball by Giselle Ava (ebook e reader .TXT) 📗

vest over a white shirt. He had a peculiar walk, so even if she wasn’t looking at him, she’d know he was coming just by the sound of his footsteps. Not to mention the sound of jangling clocks, which he wore as necklaces, as adornments across his clothing, and even smaller ones as bracelets, all of varying sizes and designs.

Alyos slapped a newspaper down on the bench, immediately soaking it in melted ice. Tasha glanced at it and slowly stood up, rolling her shoulders.

“What’s that?” Tasha asked.

“Would you believe it,” Alyos started, “a scandal in the court. On the eve of their thirtieth wedding anniversary, Lord Gavrial is caught cheating on his wife with the younger and, need I say it, far more attractive girl—who, mind you had only just turned seventeen—the gorgeous Lucie Samuir. I could hardly believe it myself.”

Names. So many names in the court. Tasha hated them, particularly as most of them were of virtually no significance and just muddied the waters. It was her job to be aware of dangerous names, or at least potentially dangerous ones. Lord Gavrial and the Samuir girl were names which she would file under absolutely not important at all.

She walked over to the newspaper, which was growing soggier by the second, and stood over it as she gently massaged her wrists, her palms and then her finger joints.

“The tragedy,” she said.

“It’s oh-so-disappointing,” Alyos sighed, picking up one of her knives and using it to carefully comb back his good, ashen hair. “I was expecting them to last. But now...Well, I wouldn’t imagine this will end well for any of the parties involved.”

“No, his current wife is not a forgiving person.”

Alyos was much taller than Tasha, and he moved like every bone in his body was made of glass, careful and calculated. He very rarely ran, and he avoided other people as though they were gigantic spiky boulders, but he did very much like the gossip. Tasha did, too, but she wouldn’t consider it a hobby like he did. It was her job to know what was happening not only within the walls of Lavus City and the castle, but beyond it too. Gossip, though more often than not stretched, tossed and turned and detached from actual fact, did not just sprout from anywhere. Even false rumors spread from distant cities offered some information.

Most of that information was still useless, like Alyos’s latest find, and she had already forgotten their names. Feeling a wave of boredom coming over her, she collected another knife from the tin and, without pausing to think, threw it straight in the middle of the archery board with a loud and distinct thwack. Ice leapt off with flakes of red paint. The messenger boy walking near it jumped three feet and looked at Tasha as though she had sprouted wings.

“I do love the winter’s ball,” Alyos remarked.

“I like some of it,” Tasha said.

“I admire the lengths some of those lords and ladies go to make a fashion statement. Some of those gowns are hideously good. Deplorable, even. Yet, somewhat entrancing.”

“I like it when I get to kill people.”

Alyos looked at her with concern, but then apathy. He should be glad. If Tasha wasn’t killing them, they were killing him. Or at the very least ruining his morys yan zhuma, the pretentious man’s way of saying “peaceful state of living and mind.”

Alyos angled himself towards the light and folded his arms. “They say there has been a union of the Satvus and Untruis families. Lady Sofia Satvus has married Lord Yuri Untruis—the oldest son of House Untruis, and also somewhat of a troublemaker.”

These names were a bit more important, considering their volatile relations. The Lavus schools taught this young: everybody hates House Satvus but House Satvus hates nobody as much as they hate the Lavus people, and for good reason. The history was dirty.

“That seems highly unlikely,” Tasha said, throwing another dagger into the archery board. It hit askew of the first one but still inside the red splotch of uneven paint.

“They’re calling it a miracle of love but I’m not so sure,” he said softly. “They married in a private ceremony, and you know what they say about private ceremonies.”

Tasha did know what they said about private ceremonies: either the ceremony didn’t happen at all and the marriage was fabricated for political gain, or the marriage itself was too sudden to invite half the world. The thing about nobility, they liked to make a big deal about things that nobody but them cared about.

Alyos went on: “It was either last week or a week and a half ago. I met with Oga and she said the two met at an arranged dinner organized by Sofia’s father himself.”

“Oga is often wrong,” Tasha said, even though she noted it nonetheless. Oga was one of Alyos’s informers who drank up gossip for breakfast, though sometimes it seemed she also fabricated a lot of it just to stir trouble. Tasha took everything she said half-heartedly.

She slipped the gossip into the back of her mind as she jogged through the snow to collect her daggers and returned them to the tin.

“What annoys me,” Alyos said, “is that nobody invited me to the damn wedding and I have heard that the High Lord Untruis and his wife put on the best weddings in Ivalon.”

“I’m so sorry,” Tasha said as she put the lid back on the tin, using the roll of tape to secure it. Then she tucked it under her arm and looked up at Alyos, who loomed directly over her. “Let’s get food.”

They didn’t get food.

Instead, they found themselves in the other part of the marketplace, which today was busier than normal, thanks to the influx of people from beyond the city. Hawkers shouted their wares, sellers spun about, haranguing potential customers and stuffing remarkably cheap and sometimes counterfeit wares in their faces. One man with a pink hat complimented Alyos on his indigo leggings (“They wonderfully demonstrate your good physique.”)