Chapter 123 The Garden

Chapter 123 The Reception
POV: Carly

The east terrace had been transformed.

Long tables draped in white. Candles everywhere, the same candelabras from the ceremony now lining the edges of the space, the flames holding steady in the cold still air. The string quartet had moved from the lawn to the corner of the terrace and was playing something she did not know that felt like it belonged exactly here. Lucien's family mixed with the Monroesons in the specific cautious way of two large groups meeting for the first time at an event that required them to get along.

She stood at the edge of it with a glass of something pale and cold that she was not drinking quickly and watched it all arrange itself.

Freida was radiant.

That was the only word that applied. She moved through her own reception like someone who had arrived somewhere they had been traveling toward for a very long time and was letting themselves feel the arrival completely. Lucien stayed close, one hand at her back whenever they were in proximity, the specific attentiveness of someone who had decided this was the most important room they would ever be in.

Carly watched them and felt something warm sitting in her chest about it.

She thought about the dagger.

She kept coming back to it. The weight of what Niko had told her on the path, the specific object in the small wooden box, the history of it. The fact that the ceremony required its presentation as an act of trust between the joining parties.

She thought about sitting in that row of white chairs and watching Freida take it in both hands.

She thought about the whole family knowing she was there to see it.

She was going to need more time with this. Not because it frightened her. Because it mattered and things that mattered deserved more than a hasty processing between the ceremony and the reception.

Deacon appeared beside her.

He looked at her glass. "You haven't touched that."

"I've been thinking." She said.

"A dangerous habit." He said. He clinked his own glass against hers. "Try drinking instead. It's significantly less exhausting."

She almost smiled. "Is there ever a moment where you are not performing, Deacon."

He looked at her.

Something shifted in his expression. The performance dropped out of it, briefly, and what was underneath it was something more considered than she had expected.

"Not often." He said. Honest and simple. "This house makes it difficult."

She looked at him.

He looked at the terrace.

"He seems good." Deacon said. Quietly. Not the usual register. "Niko. This week." He turned the glass in his hand. "I've been watching him. The way he moves through the house. He's not bracing every time he turns a corner the way he used to."

"What did he used to brace for." She said.

Deacon was quiet for a moment.

She waited.

"Victor." He said simply. "Mostly Victor. The specific quality of a room the moment Victor entered it." He paused. "We all do it. Did it. Recalibrate when he came in. Watch the temperature." He looked at the terrace. "Niko did it more than any of us. He felt it more."

She thought about the fourth floor office. About what Niko had come downstairs with and how he had held it.

"Victor warned him." She said. "About Isabel's plan. He came down from that office and the first thing he did was find me and tell me."

Deacon looked at her sharply. "Victor told him."

"Yes." She said.

Deacon turned this over visibly. Something moving through his expression that she could not fully read.

"Hm." He said.

"What." She said.

"Nothing." He said. Then. "Something. But not for tonight." He looked at his glass. "Victor is complicated. More complicated than Niko believes. More complicated than any of us were allowed to see growing up." He paused. "He and Isabel have been at odds about the covenant for years. I suspect telling Niko was its own kind of move."

She looked at him.

"Not a malicious one." Deacon said quickly. "Just. Victor plays things long. He always has." He finally looked at her directly. "I'm just saying keep watching. All of them. The whole week is a series of moves and some of them are obvious and some of them aren't."

"Including yours." She said.

He grinned. There it was again, the performance sliding back into place like a costume he had taken off briefly and put back on. "Mine are always obvious. That's by design. If everyone's watching my obvious moves they're not watching the other ones."

She stared at him.

"You are." She said slowly. "Significantly smarter than you present yourself as."

He touched his glass to hers again. "Don't tell anyone." He said pleasantly. "It ruins the whole thing."

He moved off into the reception before she could respond.

She stood at the edge of the terrace and watched him go and thought that this family was the most complicated collection of people she had ever encountered and she had grown up in a supernatural boarding school.

She needed Niko.

She found him near the string quartet talking to Harrison, which was a sight she filed immediately, both of them with the same posture and the same quality of attention aimed at each other, something being worked out quietly between them that did not need witnesses.

She did not interrupt.

She stood at a distance and watched.

Harrison said something.

Niko laughed.

The real one. Low and genuine and surprised out of him by whatever Harrison had said, and Harrison looked pleased in the specific way of a younger brother who has managed to do the thing he was trying to do.

She watched Niko's face after the laugh faded.

Open. Present. Exactly who he was.

She thought about Freida saying the performed version versus the real one.

She thought about the portrait on the landing and the eyes aimed just barely toward the exit.

She thought about this version of him in this house and how different it was from what she had been told to expect and what she now understood had not always been available here.

She went to stand beside him.

He registered her presence without looking, the way he always did, and shifted slightly to include her in the conversation without breaking it.

Harrison glanced at her. "I was just telling him about the time Deacon convinced Victor that structural engineering was the same thing as architecture."

She looked at Niko. "And?"

"Victor gave a twenty minute explanation of the differences." Niko said. His eyes were bright. "In front of Deacon's entire visiting year group."

Harrison shook his head. "I still don't know if Victor knew what Deacon was doing and did it anyway or genuinely didn't notice."

"With Victor it's impossible to know." Niko said. "That's the whole point."

She thought about what Deacon had just told her.

Victor plays things long.

She filed it.

She picked up a canape from a passing tray and ate it and let the reception move around them and thought that she was going to have a lot to tell Katy when she got back.

POV: Niko

Somewhere between the canapes and the first dance he found himself, briefly, alone with his mother.

Not by accident.

Nothing with Isabel was ever by accident.

She appeared beside him at the edge of the terrace while Carly was with Freida, the two of them in conversation near the far table, and she had clearly timed it to the moment his hands were free.

He looked at her.

She looked at the terrace.

"She's remarkable." Isabel said. Not performing it. Just saying it.

"I know." He said.

"She spoke to me plainly." Isabel said. "In the garden."

"I know." He said. "She told me."

Isabel was quiet for a moment. "I was going to handle this week differently. I had a plan."

"I know." He said. "Victor told me."

She absorbed that. He watched her absorb it and not flinch and not redirect.

"I owe you an apology." She said. "For the approach. For arranging instead of asking." She paused. "For four years of trying to reach you by working around you rather than toward you."

He looked at the terrace.

He was not going to say it was fine. It was not fine. It was a pattern that had been operating in this family for as long as he could remember and it had done damage that was not repaired by one conversation.

He was also not going to say none of that tonight.

"We'll talk." He said. "Properly. After the week. When we're back in our own spaces and the wedding isn't in the room." He looked at her. "Is that agreeable."

She held his gaze.

"Yes." She said. "That's fair."

He nodded.

The string quartet shifted into something slower and the guests on the terrace began to move toward the dance floor that had been set up at the center.

Freida and Lucien took the first dance.

He watched them.

He thought about the ceremony. About Victor's face on the aisle. About the dagger in its box and what it meant that Carly had been there to see it and the family had allowed it.

He thought about trust. The specific architecture of it. The way it had to be built incrementally and could be damaged quickly and required maintenance that most people did not know how to do.

He had been bad at it for a very long time.

He was trying to be better.

He felt a hand at his back.

He turned.

Carly.

She looked at the dance floor. Then at him.

"Dance with me." She said.

He offered his arm.

She took it.

They moved onto the floor as the first dance ended and the general dancing began, joining the other couples and the family members and Lucien's relatives, and he put his hand at her waist and she put her hand on his shoulder and they found the tempo easily the way they had at the Homecoming dance.

She was looking at the lights on the terrace.

He was looking at her.

"Deacon told me something interesting." She said.

"Of course he did." He said.

She looked at him. "He said Victor plays things long. That telling you about Isabel's plan was its own kind of move."

He turned that over.

"He's not wrong." He said. "Victor always has a position. The question is usually which piece of the board he's actually playing."

"So warning you." She said. "Was that protecting you or positioning something else."

"Possibly both." He said. "With Victor the answer is usually both."

She held his gaze. "Are you okay with that."

He thought about it honestly. "I don't know yet." He said. "But I don't think he means us harm. Whatever his position is."

"Me neither." She said. "Which surprises me."

"Me too." He said.

They moved through the song and the terrace lights were warm and the string quartet was finding something that suited the specific quality of a reception that was winding toward its better hours and he thought that this was not the worst place he had ever been on a Friday night.

That was not a thing he had expected to think in this house.

He held her closer.

She let him.

"I'm glad we came." She said. Very quietly. Into his shoulder.

"I know." He said. The same way he had said I know in the gymnasium. With everything it carried.

She squeezed the hand she was holding.

He squeezed back.

They danced until the song ended and then a little longer after that.

Author's Note:

Deacon dropping the most important piece of analysis in the chapter and then sliding the performance back on like a coat and walking away. And Isabel apologizing to Niko properly for the first time and him not saying it was fine because it was not fine and choosing to have the real conversation later in their own spaces. And the dance. Always the dance.