“The heroics ofoneoutguard, too fantastic to be real,” Tiiran corrected quickly, then forcibly lowered his shoulders. “Mattin doesn’t play with the outguards either.”
“Well, no,” Nikoly allowed. “But Mattin has no idea any outguards are flirting with him. You…” He stopped, perhaps realizing that no outguards had ever flirted with Tiiran and he had stumbled into a sensitive area. He began again, slower, “I’ve never seen you alone with any except when I was new here. You were scolding one.”
“Scolding?” Tiiran was vaguely insulted. “I was probably tearing them a new hole. And they probably deserved it.Scolding.” He scoffed.
A smile came and went on Nikoly’s face. He leaned in slightly. “It’s all right, you know.” He’d lowered his voice. “If you don’t like flirtations. If that’s the reason.”
“‘Don’t like?’” Tiiran echoed in disbelief, then hunched his shoulders; Orin would understand if he were there to hear Tiiran’s humiliation. Tiiran looked away, poking at his chipped tooth, then releasing a gust of air more exhausted than angry. “I’m not going to get in the way of the game.”
He could feel Nikoly’s confusion in how he paused. “In the way?”
Tiiran jerked his head up, a snarl at the ready, and then couldn’t do it with Nikoly’s gaze so intent and warm upon him. He could do it if he looked elsewhere, he decided, only to glance down at Nikoly’s chest, get caught staring again, and force his gaze back up.
Nikoly hadn’t lost his warmth.
Some of the snarl emerged anyway. “What?”
“Your eyes are darker right now.” Nikoly’s voice held a kind of dreaminess. “A purple-black. Like a cloud in lightning storm.”
Tiiran looked away. “Fae blood.” He dismissed his inhuman features with ease of practice. “What of it?”
“I like lightning.”
Xenia made a little humming sound.
Tiiran curled his lip in a sneer. “Yeah, you seem like someone who would stand in a field in a rainstorm.”
His reward was Xenia’s quiet cackle and Nikoly’s gaze actually getting warmer, which should not have been possible. It was as if his eyes were smiling though his mouth wasn’t.
Tiiran snarled for that too, though it was somewhat weak. “What?”
Nikoly looked away from him to consider the open book again. “My lessons never extended to poetry. One of my sisters took an interest, but I always preferreddoingto sitting and reading. Would you explain your poem to me? If you have a moment?”
“You probably know it.” It was annoying how often Tiiran stumbled across information he found interesting and new only to find out that most educated people knew it already. “It’s probably included in the histories everyone in the palace seems to know.”
“Tiiran,” Nikoly’s hand was on Tiiran’s knee, then gone, “those histories are usually written by the noble families in them. You’d have to read them all to eventryto get an accurate depiction of historical events. Don’t worry too much about what nobles claim to know.”
“Oh.” Tiiran seemed to be repeating himself today. “That’s… helpful, though no noble will want to hear that. Hmm. I wonder if that’s also why they put too many flowers in their descriptions.” At Nikoly’s blank, then inquiring expression, Tiiran elaborated. “Their language is often flowery, or poetic, and describes everything but what is actually happening or being felt. I thought before it was just noble bullshit but then someone told me to look more closely at the flowery parts because they can hide truths.”
Nikoly seemed to consider it. “Everyone has a bias, or a story they want toldtheirway. But, especially in the old days, the nobles relied on scribes to tell their stories, and the scribes might have had their own ideas.” Tiiran straightened up with sudden interest. Nikoly probably didn’t care about the early scribes but Tiiran did and wondered if Orin knew anything about them. Nikoly bit his lower lip for a moment, then finally shrugged. “I imagine, if you looked at enough of those family histories, you could discern some of the truth. And, if you were a historian and wanted to know more, there are even ruins of buildings or traces to be found on ancient fields of battle. You could find the real background for your poem.”
Tiiran briefly tried to imagine himself amid ruins from centuries ago, books spread out around him, his eyes glazed over like Mattin’s with a rare find in front of him. He then tried to imagine leaving the capital and realized he wasn’t even sure how someone booked passage on a boat.
He frowned. “I don’t… I don’t have time to do that. I don’t even have time to do this.” He picked up the quill he had apparently set down, only to set it down again. “The battles themselves are not my interest anyway.”
“Yet you’re doing this now, when I know you have other things you’re worried about getting done.” Nikoly smiled, the dazzling one. “This is what you do for fun?” His tone was almost wistful. “You’re always in the library. Do you enjoy the sun? Or the snow? Do you sing along with bards in taverns? Or ever go watch the guards as they spar? You don’t likeanysort of battles or acts of bravery?”
“I like the library.” Tiiran glared at the quill.
“I know.” Nikoly said it as gently as Orin would have. “I’m glad it’s not onlyworkto you here.”
Tiiran looked up suspiciously. “Why would that make you glad?”
He got another blank stare, as if he were some sort of oddity for asking a perfectly normal question.
“Because,” Nikoly said at last, watching him closely, “I would like to be your friend, honeybee. So I want to know what interests you.”
“Friend?” Tiiran echoed, baffled. “Almost no one wants to be my friend. Orin says I’m a hissing cat.”
