“To be friends, yes?”
He was helpless against that tilted head, that quirk of her mouth. “Yes.”
“Friends take care of one another, Cassian. I would expect as much from you, should I cover the front of my gown with my meal or should my smile reveal a mouthful of green. Surely you’ve had friends before.”
Serenity was perhaps his longest acquaintance, and she’d never have dared brush his crumbs. Roget wouldn’t have cared. “None like you.”
Annalise laughed, bright and merry. The sound of it rang through the empty dining room. “Never a one like me. I am the only me.”
“I need to go.”
“You do. We both do.”
Cassian watched the light fall from the window and across her hair. “I shall see you this afternoon, Annalise.”
“And I,” she told him, spinning on her toe and moving toward the door so he might watch her go, “shall look forward to it.”
He saw her before that, at the noon meal when she again took her place at his table.
“In all the years I’ve been here, nobody has ever dared sit in that chair when I am in this one,” he told her when she put down her plate.
Annalise arched a brow. “I wonder why? Could it have been your disposition?”
“There is a reason for my disposition.” And it wasn’t helped by his rumbling stomach, empty since he’d been unable to finish the morning meal. Looking at his plate of cold sliced meat, a biscuit, a side of greens, he wondered if her presence at the table would cause him to forgo this meal as well.
It hadn’t dampened her appetite. Annalise tucked in with the efficiency of a sailor, managing conversation and chewing with nary a pause between bites—and yet with the most impeccable of table manners. And she talked, oh, how she talked. Of all she’d done that morn in her various studies. Of her friend Tansy, who even now was staring at them from across the room, and who’d begged an explanation from her after the morn meal and whose answer had been waved aside by Annalise, who explained around a bite of biscuit that it was nobody’s business but theirs.
“I am in awe of your ability to run your mouth,” Cassian said at last when she’d paused long enough and with such an expectant look he understood he was expected to reply.
“If you don’t cease your pretty flatteries, I fear I shall become overenamored of my own worth.”
She’d made him laugh again. “And your plate is nearly clean amongst all the chatter.”
“I speak because you will not. Mayhap I eat because you do not.”
He looked again at his plate and carefully folded a slice of beef inside a biscuit. “I’m eating.”
She watched him silently while he chewed, then gave a soft shrug. “Do I so unsettle your stomach that you find it difficult to eat? I don’t mean to.”
“You could eat at a different place, as you used to.” Cassian wiped the corner of his mouth, his appetite flaring to life so that he gobbled the rest of his beef and biscuit.
“And be deprived of your company? No. Besides, I like you when you talk to me.”
He paused with his mug halfway to his mouth, then drank so as not to answer. This didn’t mean they passed the rest of the meal in silence, only that she kept the conversation light for the rest of it. At the end of it, unlike in the morn, Annalise didn’t linger overlong.
She smiled at him over her shoulder as she caught up to a few of the other novitiates, women Cassian knew by sight but not name. They bent their heads together the way women did, and he wondered if the soft rise of their laughter was directed at him.
And he wondered if being the cause of laughter was better than being the reason for tears.
Chapter 16
T
ansy was giving her longways glances, never meeting Annalise’s gaze but looking away every time Annalise lifted her head from the square of linen upon which she was stitching. It was fair irritating the way she did it, as though Annalise wouldn’t notice. Annalise, for her part, had aching fingers, sore eyes, and a headache from squinting at the intricate design she thought would never bring a person a second’s solace, no matter how pretty she made it.
“What?” she asked finally, when Tansy had looked up from her own piecework again. “I know my flower knots are uneven, but truthfully, Tansy, I need no judgment from you upon my handiwork.”
“Oh, no, your work is lovely!”
Annalise watched the deep flush creep from Tansy’s collar up her throat and over her cheeks. Even her forehead pinked. “What, then? You’ve been goggling at me since we began.”
Tansy pricked at her linen square, embroidered ’round the edges with a pattern of leaves and flowers. She looked at every other woman in the room rather than meet Annalise’s eyes. “It’s just . . . you didn’t eat with us today.”
“Oh. That.” Annalise looked at the work in her hands and pressed her lips together. “I’m sure I’ll be at your table again. I wasn’t aware you were so regretting the loss of my company.”
Perdita shifted in her chair. Annalise had been wondering how long it would take her to speak. “What Tansy means to say is, why on earth were you eating with Master Toquin?”
“I like him.”
There was nobody in the room who even pretended to work, now. Annalise looked at them all in turn and set aside her own piece. She rubbed at the aching tips of her fingers.
“Is it so difficult to believe I might enjoy his company?”
“Because he made you his assistant,” Tansy put in helpfully with a look ’round at the other women. “Annalise is so well-acquainted with the verses—”
“Yes, yes, we know all about how wonderful Annalise is,” snapped Perdita impatiently. She leaned forward to pin Annalise with a beady glare. “But really, Annalise, what we want to know is how, by the Land Above, did you get him to allow it?”
“What? Sitting with him at his table? I didn’t ask his permission, first of all. I wasn’t aware we had assigned seats.” It was the sort of non-answer that would pinch madness into Perdita, and sure enough, the other woman’s eyes flashed.
“It’s not your proficiency in the Faith, is it?”
“I’m certain I don’t know what you mean.” Annalise spoke calmly, though she felt anything but. She felt like reaching across the space between them and slapping the smile from Perdita’s fat face. “Master Toquin and I are . . . friends.”
Not by her choice, and despite what he’d said, mayhap not by his. She’d tried, by the Arrow, but he’d done his best to stop her. Not with coldness or anger as had been his previous habit, but his implacable resistance to even the most mild of her overtures was disheartening, to say the least. And worse, actually, than his annoyance, for at least then he’d been reacting.
“There’s naught against an instructor and a student sharing a meal,” Tansy said boldly.
Annalise looked at her. “Tansy, you needn’t defend me. If Perdita wishes to make much of my acquaintance with Master Toquin, she might do as she pleases. I’ve no issue with her queries.”
“It seems so sudden, that’s all.” Perdita lifted the gentlemen’s shirt upon which she was sewing. The work was beautiful. Even, tight stitches, soft fabric, a masculine yet fashionable design. Annalise had no difficulty imagining how a shirt such as that might bring a measure of solace to the man who wore it.
“Friendships are never sudden. They grow like flowers,” Annalise said. “Which you seem to have a lovely skill for embroidering, Perdita, but not such a great skill for cultivating.”
Perdita frowned. “I am quite proficient in the garden, Annalise Marony. The roses I grew at home outlasted any others in the garden, and my captain’s buttons were coveted for centerpieces by all my mother’s friends.”
“I’m sure your skill with plants is as impressive as your every other,” Annalise said serenely, focusing on her own work, “but I wasn’t speaking of flowers.”
Perdita looked ’round the room, first to Tansy, then at Helena and even Wandalette. “I have friends.”
Annalise shrugged. “So do I.”
“And you count Master Toquin among them?”
“I do.”
Perdita sniffed. “Master Toquin has never fraternized with the novitiates. It doesn’t seem appropriate, actually.”
Annalise could no longer maintain her placid demeanor. “Speak plainly, or speak not at all.”
“I speak very plainly. What I mean is, that such a friendship between the two of you seems sudden and unexpected, considering the way the pair of you were previously at such odds.”
“How would you know what we were?”
Perdita smiled. “Everyone knows. We all heard about the words you exchanged in his classroom.”
“It was my understanding that Master Toquin was no favorite of any. Whatever words we exchanged were naught but the usual for him, yes?”
“No,” Perdita said. “Nobody ever stood up to him before the way you did.”
At this, Annalise scoffed. “Oh, really? You think in all the years of service he’s provided the Order that nobody, no novitiate, ever spoke back to him? Not a one? The man’s insufferable and arrogant, and not all of us were bred to be meek little lambs led willingly to slaughter.”
“I haven’t been here as long as some.” Perdita gave Tansy a significant stare. “But it’s my understanding that he has ever been as he is now, and that none dared cross him.”
“If he were such an evil figure, causing so much grief, why would the Mothers-in-Service allow him to stay? In an Order full of young women, most of them impressionable, bound for service to the Faith? Why on earth would they keep him on if he were so . . . so. . . .” Annalise sputtered on her lack of words. Her linen lay scrunched in a ball on her lap. It was made of ugliness and lack of skill, unfit even to wipe a nose. She wanted to toss it aside but kept it close, so as not to give Perdita the satisfaction of comparison to her own exquisite work.
“Mayhap because we should get used to such a man.” Wandalette, who’d ever seemed as uncertain and awkward as a mouse, now spoke with conviction. “Because we do need to know this, us. Because it’s what we’ll have to face when we go out among them. To them. The patrons. Because they’ll all be like him, or worse.”
Silence. Every woman in the room turned to stare at Wandalette, who shrugged and bent back to threading her needle. She licked the thread and poked it through the eye, then drew the strings together with the tips of her fingers and twirled them at the bottom to make a knot. She held it up, the needle glinting, then noticed all the stares.
“How else would we learn?”
Perdita, for once, had no comment. The other girls bent back to their work, and in a few minutes the soft murmurs began again, the worthless chatter Annalise despised and had no interest in repeating. In her lap, the square of linen had not been ruined. She could save it. She could thread her needle the way Wandalette had done, and prick it through the cloth. She could imprint colored flowers on the creamy linen and make a pattern where there had been none.
She could, she thought, make beauty from something that had near been ruined, make something pretty that had seemed just moments before impossible to fix.
“I believe I’m finished,” she said aloud to nobody and stood. She gathered her sewing basket and materials and put them all away. She handed them to Tansy. “I’m going for a walk.”
“Do you want me to go with you?” Tansy was already on her feet, but Annalise shook her head.
“No, thank you.”
Tansy looked disappointed, but Annalise didn’t care. She needed to be alone for a while, to contemplate this, making something pretty that didn’t seem possible.
E
ven a dual-headed calf ceases to gain a second glance from the people who’ve grown accustomed to it, and so it was with the friendship between Cassian and Annalise. She knew he didn’t think so. She could tell by the way he still looked from side to side when she took her place at his table.
“Loosen yourself,” she told him. “We are no longer the current fashion in gossip.”
At least he was no longer holding himself from his food while she was with him. He broke off a piece of bread from the small loaf between them and slid it across to her. She looked at it for half a moment but made certain not to react in any way that might alert him to her knowing how charming she found his offer.
“I never assumed we were . . . fashionable.”
Annalise sipped sharp cider from her mug, grimaced, and put it aside. She didn’t care overmuch for cider and had poured it from the pitcher without thinking why. “You worry about it. I can tell.”
When he got up from the table, her first thought was that she’d driven him from his seat. It wasn’t an outrageous assumption to make, considering their past confrontations, and yet she hadn’t meant to poke him. She stared at her plate, stomach knotted, wondering if this would ever be easy, if the effort had reward.
He returned before she had time to even look ’round. He’d brought a pitcher of water, and a new mug. He filled it for her and pushed the cider aside.
“What?” he asked, startled at the way her mouth gaped. “By the Land Above, Annalise, are you going to . . . cry?”
“No, absolutely not.” She shook her head. “Tell me, sir, of today’s lesson, so that I might come prepared to plague you with all the questions those other women won’t think to ask.”
He spoke for quite some time before noticing she’d made no reply.
“. . . the passage regarding descriptions of the Land Above and the Void, both . . .” Cassian trailed away. “Annalise, are you unwell?”
She was very well. That simple act of consideration he’d shown her—something with so little meaning on the surface as to be unremarkable, yet so significant at the same time.
“I like you when you’re talking about the text,” she managed to say in a voice only slightly scratched.
“I am well pleased to discuss such matters with you. You know that.” He looked up as the chime sounded. “And the mealtime has ended. It feels so sudden.”