* 𝖉𝖚𝖙𝖞 / 𝖉𝖎𝖗𝖊.

honored  to  bring  you  this  witcher  NPC  on  a  budget,  also  going  by   MATTHIEU   SAMUEL ,  Calandre's  horse  girl   &   simp  extraordinaire.  around  these  parts  we  call  him  the   poster  child  for   fuck   around   and   find   out.  in  fair  val  faim  where  we  lay  our  clowns,  he  can  be  caught  strutting  down  the  summer  palace  like  his  own  personal  fancam,  talking  to  the  horses  in  the  royal  stables  as  if  they're  free  estate  therapists,  mansplainng  patrons  in  the  lion's  mane.  sources  of  inspiration  include  geralt  of  rivia,  dragon  age's  alistair  theirin,  black  sails'  charles  vane  with  a  smidge  of  james  flint,  &   all  the  rats  in  the  dishonored  franchise.  yea,  the  literal  rats.

━━     ❛❛    full  bio. ━━     ❛❛    skeleton. ━━     ❛❛    muse tag. ━━     ❛❛    pinterest. ━━     ❛❛    playlist.

when: twenty-second of maccius. where: the empressian gardens.  who: open.

it was simple really: victoire did not have time to go for a drink, to parade around the lion’s mane, to rest — he did not have time for such a thing, but the night was quieting. his shift had ended. there was breath in his lungs, and the thick smell of flowers was settling on his skin with an ease he could almost appreciate. ( almost. he so did love to complain about the flowers on occasion. ) maybe he would have time tonight. 

victoire was walking away from the summer palace, but he could not help it; his eyes roamed over the bushes, seeking danger. expecting it. and as if not to disappoint him, he heard the sudden footfalls of another. 

“i’ll bet half my pay it’s another assassin,” he muttered to himself. “alright,” he called with a flourish of his hand. please don’t be heading to the summer palace. “step forward, if you please. let’s get this over with, yes?” 

***

Matthieu's easy gait was cut at the stem, a double-take shaping up on his face. He sidestepped the Empress' guard and hitched an eyebrow. "You alright there, de Chevin? Sporting blades in the shadow?" The mockery was close to hand. He kept his scorn winched around his fingers like a scabbard two sizes too big, knotting if you sat down faster than you could swing it. For Fortin's pets - Fortin's own leeches - he could even give it a particularly sharp thrust.

Though perhaps courtly bites, and courtly bitternes, were more akin to arrows. In that case, all Matthieu had to do now was reach into his quiver. Jam packed with snide remarks as it was, he could whip any one of them out for the evening's benefit. In the many-tiered gardens, there were no spectactors; just the gravel, ground thin and even; just the sun-swept petals, already turning rotten with sugar in their bough.

He could even have pretended to be an assassin for a moment longer, if he'd timed it right. As it is, the best way to wring some fun from this was to pretend the guard acted skittish, jumpy, amateurish.

The hell of it was, Victoire had a point. These days saw everyone jumping half to hell at the nearest whoosh. Each creak and crackle had been gaining monstrous proportions, both in court and without. It was often how it went, when it came to the toppling of a throne. And what were gathering spies and mounting bombs if not the telltale signs of one?

For the tenth time that week, Matthieu thought about where his loyalties lie, and where is head would if he made the wrong call. For the tenth time, he batted it away. Instead, he jerked a tight gesture over his shoulder. “There’s a hole in the hedges. Some twelve feet from the main fountains. I figured, yeah, no bloody use in locking those gates every night if you’d just let any fucker cut their path through the briars.”

He imagines himself a legionary, dressed in laurels. The reality is less illustrious; more like a wooden doll, pulled in all directions by marionette strings.

The man is clever, tricky as the shape of sin, capable of coaxing just about anything from somebody’s person. Secrets and dreams. Memories. He loosens tongues with something far more peremptory than cups of ale, offers his service with the civility of a boy scout and then makes sure to invoice the sum unpaid. His wiles are persuasive, like the penny whistle of a snake charmer. He offers cunning tirades where else there are only civil windfalls, cuts the stench of nobility cleanly off from him, and forges his own federation with two bare, bruised hands. Such things are well known. Degaré Lambert offers polemic first; all else comes second.

Were this a measure of intellect, Matthieu would dither beneath the knife.

It’s not. Here, things go a little differently. A man’s stamina necessarily depletes itself when he wastes it, posturing all cocksure over a thing he knows nothing about. True enough, when he thinks about holding a cutlass in his hand, turns over its silver ridge in his mind, follows its edge with two dark eyes, it brandishes a certain amount of power. When he actually settles it in his hands, however, struggles to steady his grip—less so. After a while, the cocksure must prove their mettle; when he can’t, his dignity splinters. Degaré can handle a dagger with no issue: he knows exactly how to wield one, how to cut with one, owning to all the careful precision of one of Calandre’s physicians, carving along the tissue. Featherlight, discreet, like him. But he is not like a sword: he is not strong, tall, broad. He is quick and artful, hidden like some secret in the dark; the conspicuousness of a broadsword betrays him. He is not knightly. He was not made to be one.

All this was his own idea, he only half grants. Matthieu’s mocking is of his own making, orchestrated by his own hand. It brings him close to physical recoil. Smarts, like a flesh wound, reopened.

It’s humiliating enough that he’s unable to steady even a practice blade in his hands. Let him not give his instructor the satisfaction of feeling him bridle next to him, too. When Degaré feels the breath of Matthieu’s laughter at the back of his neck, his jaw only clenches. He stares ahead, determined against meeting the rise. He might call it quits there and then, promise the man his weight in ale for a year, in spite of the financial loss, just so he won’t have to hear another word on it. It’s not something he’s likely to get in any case, so here he is, cheeks pink, doing his best to conceal the affront as the Chevalier rearranges his posture. Feet plied apart, hands steadied, head repositioned. He fights against it in his own way: grunts indignantly, tightens his jaw-bite, refuses to meet Matthieu’s eye. For the most part, however, he acquiesces.

“I’m not blubbering.” His eyes dart irritably behind him. “All I’m saying is, if this is how you train all the hapless gallants unfortunate enough to call you teacher, it’s no wonder you’re resorting to soldiers who—ah, what was it?” He spins on his heel, raises his brow, as if recalling something. It might be the most impressive manoeuvre he’s managed the whole session. “Have nothing else going their way.” He settles his fingers above the pommel, muttering under his breath all the while. “Little clemency might be nice. Appreciated, even.” Degaré doesn’t even much listen to the counsel Matthieu offers him. Open stance, high outside, wide arc. He’s far beyond listening, now, over taking orders, following commands, only to be met with the coarse, uproarious laughter of a bloody soldier. Now, he is only interested in getting through this little lesson without permanently annexing his name to the loss of face.

When Matthieu anchors his thumb between bone, presses there until the muscle relents, follows his ordinance, shifting under it, Degaré almost winces. Almost. The severity of the act is familiar. Loathe as he is to admit it, he’s quite used to being manhandled by the man: some brawl in the Lion’s Mane, nursing a few drinks too many, swinging fists over nothing at all; some callow scuffle above it, entirely against the bastard’s will, when they’ve had nothing to drink at all. There’s violence to Matthieu Samuel, a certain brutality, that he’s never quite sure belongs to the Chevalier or the man. Degaré understands. What man is not born gnashing his teeth? What man, in a lather, does not eye wildfowl from behind a curtain? The act is almost tender.

Again. Almost.

He could greet it, but he knows how it would end. Instead, he does as he’s told. Plants his feet properly. Bends his arm back, guided by Matthieu’s tug. When he cuts back, Degaré pivots, swings up. As instructed. It’s not perfect, but it’s better this time. It’s spite that drives him; he whets his appetite on it. He turns to meet Matthieu. “How’s that?”

—

He watches the man's features shift into something bitter, something bitten back. Well—shifting warns of a change. This is only par for course, with Degare Lambert. The lion trades one foul mood for another, like a clothesline snapping in quick succession. The Chevalier imagines there’s a progressive build to it. He imagines there’s a point of no return, too, hidden in those crests of pride and self-possession. He wishes he had the presence of mind not to goad them both to it. You angry little thing. One might almost fear for their ankles.

A tipping storm comes over him with each attempt to fix his stance. At first, it’s turned inward. The younger man swivels to a half-crouch. His jaw seems set into a muzzle, like he’s not giving himself the rein to speak. Then he throws out his sword-arm, a neck’s breadth too far. The blade parries through the air. He rams the hilt forward like he’s gutting some fucking wyvern. Saints, alright. His body bucks with the force of it. Matthieu steps back. Shades his eyes.

By the fourth lunge, the sword has scraped through the sand and reached the hard stone beneath. After Lambert drags it back, he’s surprised there’s no smoke pouring from it. Anger glides from Degare’s fist to the flat metal, flitting over in a tradeoff. It’s shockingly precise. Matthieu thinks he could time his tea by the man’s rage. They should try it, one of these days. Have Degare stare a lukewarm pot into a simmer.

By the tenth lunge, the momentum is streamlined into purpose. Between a stroke and the next, Degare sharpens all that wasted aplomb with direction. He sets it to a straight angle. It slices the orange light head on, a thing of misshapen beauty in the Fiacre sun. He almost waits for a sliver of sky to drift down, like a peal pierced clean off. It catches Matthieu somewhere in the pit of his chest. Surprise, maybe—or the brushed ream of memory, ringing out like a brass bowl.

A long moment, and the world does not fall. In the next, Degare cranes his head towards him. Matthieu watches the sheen of sweat on his neck, the joint where it meets the spine. He smiles, small and satisfied. There is a twitch to his lip. Matthieu Samuel relents praise the same he did that side-splitting laughter: something of abandon, something brutal and not quite. “Not half bad. We’ll make a fighter of you yet. I especially liked the part where you muttered yourself stiff through all of this, instead of shutting up and taking orders. Prime army material, that.”

The truth is, he did not expect to enjoy this. He’s not a man for one-sided activities, and it was obvious this would help him prepare fuck-all for the tourney. Were it anyone else, he realizes, he would’ve called it off hours ago. He wrote it off because Degare needs it, but fucking hell, so does half of Val Faim, and he never bothered to correct their defenses.

Perhaps what puts him on his heels is the intensity of this position. Different than the way it is with recruits, which he told Calandre he can’t be arsed with, but the reality is that he can’t bear training them. With Degare, it’s a different lesson. A different delivery to it. Like a hand on someone’s shoulder, bearing down until they kneel. Like a face looking up from the floor.

Matthieu swallows dryly. He strides off to the edge of the ring. In the shadow, pushed against the double fence, a canteen of water and a wine-skin are crossed at the neck. He goes for the liquor first. Tips it back until the heat burns, the acid stepped sweeter by the sun. It doesn’t cool him, but it smooths down the knots in his muscles, pent up with some stupid need.

Without looking back, he calls to Lambert. “We should be done for the day. You’re welcome to practice til’ you drop, but I’m too old for this shit. Oh, and don’t you bring that sword to the Mane, now. You’re nowhere near ready to swing it about like some noble tosser.”

Despite the uproar that sweeps through court with magnetic force, a wind of iron & rumor,  the days pass easily. They burrow into one another, small, harmless creatures sleeping in the face of danger. It’s as if time itself had shucked its shell. Calandre has thrown a fit, they whisper, Calandre wept openly in front of the northern ambassador. Calandre has ordered the whole palace, the whole city refitted, swaths of organza and crates of pearls filling up the halls. Calandre has ran to the country, fled with her lover, booked a foreign ship. Imprisoned the royal painter for defying her will, for daring to sketch an unflattering profile. No, she merely sidelined them for dragging up the fetid sands of the Obsidienne, for tarnishing the peacemaker’s Eden with the promise of gathering hell.

Fiacre gives way to Maccius, and there is no end to the hearsay. In a way, he supposes there is no end to the heresy as well. Matthieu Samuel, who lives and serves at Calandre’s side, knows most of it is rubbish. Yet he is more worried about the truth hidden in the straws. It’s powdered in grains almost too fine to see, ground thinly even by the mill of Val Faim nobility, which spared no absurdity and no whit of sense. Faint, yes, but not intangible. There’s a kernel of something sharp in all that feathered chaff. Sharp enough that, if he were to clench his fist around, he’d come up with it bloody. He has no need to grow bloodier still.

And so, the Chevalier chuckles at it all. He tips his head and feigns thoughtfulness, feigns listening at all. It’s amiable or scornful, depending on who’s on the other side of the table. He sits through those garden fetes and afternoon teas, standing guard same as he ever did, with a gilded pommel and a scabbard hollowed by death. There’s only the promise of lethality to him, up there in the heart of palace. There’s only the caul of it over his eyes.

When he’s not posturing, when Calandre sends him off as if it’s a party favor, a munificent gift, he patrols the city and keeps up with the crowd. If not... relaxing, it certainly masks it well enough. He’s had little cause to regret it, until now. Today, the sun is too hot on his back, and the swarm of bodies feels more liquid than material. It’s not full afternoon until he has to duck into the nearest shade.

He finds some Hightown terrace narrower than the bend of a waist; likely a baron’s balcony, now deserted for the summer while the city gushes out into the country. He doesn’t see the fact that the table is occupied until he’s already up the stairs. As if this day needed to spew insult over injury. The Chevalier decides to make the best of it. If anything, it’ll save me a future talk. The number of people who trickled in the capital meant a list of new people to charm, investigate, or simply scare off.

when: 25th of maccius where: matthieu’s quarters within the summer palace who: @chevalicr·

he’s heard tell of the bloodiest chevalier in the empress’ retinue through his usual means, and is only remiss to have missed out on the goriest spectacle given life by calandre’s mere whim, second only to the execution of hippolyte. indeed, it seems everything was overshadowed by the latter by virtue of the entire pageantry of it; not unheard of, with paranoid rulers and an abundance of time and enemies, but a great shame. as defined by his devastating precision as he is, karine cannot deny the progenitor of his life lived now, that what had started it all was the stirring within at the sight of a smattering of crimson, damning as a halo.

he missed a good show.

but he does not intend to miss a glimpse of the headliner, as much a luminary, admired and revered, as he is darkened by an umbra of carnage, even if he has to thieve it. 

and so he does. as best he does, when one is embraced by the night. 

and how it loves him so, curls into the wit of his marrow, serpents through his bone and cartilage and nestles into his pulse. doleful creature, the dark; how it tempts him, how it coaxes him into its own agent, separate from crown and usurper. it leads him to knight’s balcony, as easy to scale as a low-lying fence in a meadow, and he finds his perch straddling the windowsill, so still and unmoving as if he’s carved into the frame itself. this is he; a creature of mist and smoke, intangible until he catches candlelight and sinew with his blade.

here he waits, silent even as the chevalier himself stalks through the door, freshly bloodied and pooling at his feet and trailing dirt, like a hound fresh from the hunt. watches the man seethe and bleed another man’s blood. waits while matthieu searches for a light, or a bottle, in the dark, before speaking.

“i have never seen a wound walking before. tell me, how long have you been bleeding?”

rot and the writ.

—

There’d been a fight of some sort. Matthieu realizes this in increments, like spokes slotting in a very old wheel. His senses come back through vapors thick as tar, and swallow everything in between the Lion’s Mane and his crawl to the palace. The fight had to do with... well, nothing in particular, he supposes. It went over the way it always did, with him, with every other creature of rage in the realm. The coals are already strewn for the touching.

Tonight, it was a throwaway remark about the Obsidienne. There’d been a circle of believers down at the Mane, spouting nonsense like a thin brew of dirt. Matthieu called them out for the children they were, snidely and loud enough to ensure no one could pretend they didn’t hear. It felt like a challenge to the whole world, at the time; a roar against the tide of events.

The memory is misted over by booze and murk. It’s sultry and looped around his head, and, small mercies, lessening as he hobbles into the hallway. A fight, then. There’s just enough signs to go on: the sting on his knuckles, the slower crackle of their joints when he twists the doorknob, the taste of someone’s blood in his mouth. Like a crown of fog lifting from the battlefield, he imagines he will look down and see the carnage.

The only thing that matters: he'd left his sword at home. It's the same he always does when he knows where the night is headed, because drawing your blade is so damn natural after a tankard or two. It's inconsequential: just a swish of metal, an answer sprung from the extension to your own hand. It hardly feels momentous, until dawn splits up, and the sun bursts like overripe grapes on what you’ve done. Saints know, though: where Matthieu's concerned, the lack of a sword is no guarantee. He could’ve torn out a man’s jaw without any gauntlet or dagger. Lambert wouldn’t have let him, he’d think, but then Lambert’s power was a thing of daylight, for all that the proprietor shrouded himself in dusk.

He waits until he’s inside to assess the damage. His eyes thin at the growing light. He’s let the lamps die out, he thinks. He should start letting chambermaids in here, because, Saints, a broken neck is far more ignoble than an assassin. Matthieu has to bring his fists up to his face to squeeze them, twice, so that he knows the bone won’t give. It could be worse. It would be worse if what he was afraid of happened, if he’d gone into a man and wrung him like a damp cloth. It’s just a scuffle by his usual standards—relief surges out, the last lever that kept him upright. He slumps back against the desk. He is already trawling for another bottle when he spots the open window. The figure filigreed inside it, like a sparrow trapped between the jamb. 

Everything comes ten beats later; everything crashes ten measures too slow. The fucking sword. Where’s the fucking—? He’s too sluggish to put up a fight. He braces up for the pounce, but it never comes: the stranger seems as content as a lover, settled snug beside bedframe and covers. For a second, an absurd and wrenching moment that cleaves the haze in two, he wonders if he’d somehow asked them here. Worse things had been done, when he was in this state. Worse things had been held in the dark.

The bad mood commences, and Michel decides to give up the ghost and let it be. It settles across his shoulders like a long shadow. Furtively, he decides he very much does not want to be here.

Across the way, it seems like Calandre has come to the same conclusion in regards to the page. It all happens very quickly. Her laugh is cut short, her smile drops into a polite, neutral expression, and she dismisses him for the next courtier who is going to come up and plead their case on whatever matter they’ve chosen to waste her time with today. That’s what this all feels like, he realizes. Waste of fucking time.

To his credit, he lets the discomfort of their exchange sit for a while on the floor. It stretches its legs out, and then the arms, until the whole room feels enveloped by the strange pace they have set for each other. To his credit, Matthieu gives as good as he gets – he doesn’t think he’s had the chance to snap at any throats just for the sake of it for some time. He rolls his neck in a short, circular motion, feels the joints pop and release. Some of the pressure is relieved, too, a kinder relief. Michel makes an active choice, then to drag it out. They sit and stand in silence for ten minutes, maybe a little more, the Commander still as stone and the chevalier right next to him.

Must be a cheaper bargain. “We all have our calling; I’m qualified and well-compensated, if you’d believe it.” Michel speaks, finally, vaguely. “I do what I’m asked, same as you. I try not to develop a complex about it.” The halls of the Summer Palace chatter. It’s not talking, not quite, but gossip runs amok much the same as any four-legged beast, drooling all over the floors and getting hair on the furniture, barking at anyone who comes by. He knows what the people say about Matthieu Samuel, and while he is certainly charming when required, bound by code to a nature of obedience–

Michel can’t help but wonder just how much of it is real, and what isn’t. They all have their burdens to carry, but the look behind Samuel’s eyes rings dead to him. It makes him think of his youth, in the aftermath of battles and skirmishes and wars, young men and women dragging their compatriots off of the field, out of the muck and mud, expressions pale. Flat. Soulless. Haunted, trailed after by ghosts that you can’t be rid of no matter how much you beg for them to go away. He knows exactly what that feels like. 

Seeing it here, in these halls, grand and gold and gleaming? It unnerves him. “I don’t quite know what the Ambassador or Lady Lafaille see in you, Chevalier. Must be something good, if I’m keeping your secrets for you.” He nods at Calandre, who is caught up in the midst of another conversation. She doesn’t look bored, but there is a distracted energy rolling off of her in waves so strong he can feel it all the way over here. “What do you think she’d say, if she knew of your late night affairs?”

He comes out of the spell as a man does from underwater, from under something bruised and wine-dark. By now he should know better than to heed this pull—should give it less power than it already has. A single breeze from the past can upturn the entire territory, until he’s left reeling and stumbling. He can spot miles ahead the marshlands it’d lead him into. For all the turns of the world, this map never changed. The frayed ends on it stay the frayed ends on him.

The summoning of Cecile—of Zhenya, position bolted to his name in a way Matthieu never quite credit—offsets Auclair’s. He knows, reasonably, why Cecile is Lady Lafaille; it’s how it started, for them, and it’s likely how it’ll end. But Zhenya is different. The man is... unmarked in the stage of court. He is Matthieu’s thing, Matthieu’s notion of him. When he thinks of Zhenya’s chin molding to his palm, his mouth parting in the light beneath this touch, he doesn’t think of a legate. Saints, he can hardly think any coherent thought at all.

It doesn’t matter. Their names are still powerful enough to slice through the dark, undo the knot in his throat in a searing burst. For a second, they battle with Leon for the hold of him. In rows of soldiers and wisps of silk, they teem into his mind and pelt it like raindrops. He orders it to a halt before the guard can get another word in.

The good thing about his ghosts is that they can still be called to heel.

Matthieu faces about, meeting Fortin head on. It breaks the guard line, but he can’t be arsed with that; he’s not paid for the ways he can stay still. If someone made a lunge for Calandre right now, he’d be as like to stop it from on here as he would from a soldier’s stance.

He gives the man a thorough look-over. “What they see in me?” The words drawl slow. He rakes his eyes over him again, writing up all those hints that a man gives up against his will: Fortin’s hard-tacked posture, shoulders huddled by long years in the field, bowed and scraped on an almost too narrow frame. Not a small man, certainly, but it was hard to forget it. Next to the giants Calandre put on parade, hulls of meat and bones like Hector and Matthieu, Fortin was quick to stand out. He makes note of this. He makes sure it’s visible on his face, a manifest tally of weaknesses. This close ahead, they bob up like fish-heads in a barrel: exhaustion, overworked shifts, vigilance dulled to a habit. No—heightened to a boiling point by Matthieu’s mere presence, like a dog that picked the scent of a boar.

Finally, his face cuts an ugly grin. “I imagine the same they failed to see in any man around here. A cock. A hand. And none of those manners you speak of.”

A shrug; towards the empress, towards the barred double-doors. “She said little enough of all the others.” But this isn’t like the others, is it? Yevgeny is a cord of conflict, of danger not quite bloomed. Cecile, for Odele’s sake, is her closest ally. This is the nearest you’ve gotten to the center of Calandre’s shrine, to the flame and fear of it. This is the nearest you’ve come to threaten it.

He doesn’t let the grin fade. If anything, it dangles to a sharp turn. “Her Highness and I have an arrangement, you see? I keep my best sword for her. Then I can stick my other sword wherever the fuck I please.”

His tongue pops into his cheek, the sound slick and jarring in a throne room. He’s wondered, time and time again, whether he was the first proper brute to stalk these halls, as some nobles cooed about him. Whether there might’ve been a similar upstart a hundred years ago, a man vulgar and vicious from habit to need, who broke the mold with his hands of mud. He supposes there must’ve been; the empire always needed a saintless, voiceless horde to stand upon. It’s too bad. Come to think of it, he quite fancies the thought of being a spearhead.

𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐈𝐑  𝐌𝐀𝐓𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐄𝐔  𝐇𝐀𝐒  𝐀  𝐖𝐀𝐘  𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇  𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃𝐒,  and  the  familiar  timbre  of  his  voice,  the  rhythmic  cadence  and  nuances  to  his  enunciation,  mimic  a  lullaby,  sweet  and  low.  Agrippine  could  listen  to  Matthieu  sum  up  the  ins  and  outs  of  the  court  with  a  sentence  and  a  crass  joke  to  follow;  they’ve  done  it  dozens  of  times  before,  matching  Matthieu  drink  for  drink  and  still  falling  behind  him  in  this  way  and  that.  Only  Matthieu  can  claim  to  see  the  Empress’  champion  jockey  trip  over  their  own  feet;  only  Matthieu  knows  how  to  elicit  a  sharp  retort  from  Agrippine’s  otherwise  timid  voice.  

It’s  a  matter  of  fact,  a  clear  and  simple  statement  of  being:  Agrippine  is  utterly  fond  of  Matthieu,  moreso  than  they  know  how  to  confess  in  paltry  words  and  turns  of  phrase.  They  settle,  instead,  for  a  sweet  smile,  dashed  with  a  teasing  that  Matthieu  tends  to  bring  out  in  them.  “Ghislain,  actually.  My  real  sponsor,  remember?”  Though  it’s  difficult  to  tell,  even  for  Agrippine,  who  they’re  most  beholden  to:  Ghislain,  who  funds  every  race  and  makes  a  coincidental  talent  into  something  legitimate,  or  Degaré,  who  is  at  the  core  of  all  that  Agrippine  is  today.  

“I  heard  you  fought  a  battalion’s  worth  of  men  this  week.  I’m  sorry  I  wasn’t  there.”  For  Matthieu’s  sake  alone,  at  least.  If  the  rumors  that  kept  the  Mane  in  a  wild  frenzy  that  night  are  as  brutal  as  they  seemed,  Agrippine  is  grateful  to  keep  the  memory  of  Matthieu  as  they  know  him:  more  charisma  in  his  pinky  than  they  have  in  their  entire  body,  who  knocks  back  ale  like  air.  “Which  do  you  think  is  the  finer  sport?  Racing  or  wielding  a  sword?”  Both  are  for  the  Empress’  benefit,  for  her  glory  and  vanity;  Agrippine  wonders  if  he  ever  minds  it.  “I  should  like  to  see  you  try  and  ride  Lune.  She  would  throw  you  off  immediately.”

—

The banter flows easy, light as almost nothing else is, but a challenge floats oddly in their eyes.  It treads the water, the shine and warmth of them, and sinks in Matthieu’s own chest. It’s not the sweetness, not on its own; it’s the familiarity of it, the thoughtless, second-nature way in which they offer it. A person who offers very little without a caution, without a cost. It’s like Agrippine settled into him the same way one does in an animal’s corner. The mock-surprise is so at home on their face, that it shapes the space around it. The off-white ballroom, too sharply lit, could be the soot-stained parlor up in the Mane. He has to wait for this double-sight to subside, dip under like a cork. It’s foam and flotsam, a message from a bottle just out of reach, too far for his mind to bear the trek. A world where that look on them, that trusting and fond smile, could’ve come from a sibling, a recruit—a friend. A world where that look was deserved.

The moment clots up, weighing deeper. He knows it’s his cue to dispel the silence, to careen past it before he’s giving away too much. He knows it’s his cue to let nameless things stay nameless, and so, he obeys. He twists it like those coins Rayne is always fiddling, palming the air until he finds a better side. In any way that matters, Agrippine and Lambert really do feel like obverses of the same, a three-faced jeer which shows Matthieu what he could’ve been. Maybe worse—it shows Matthieu what he could’ve had. Being is easier to admit at a loss. Possession is much harder. Is that not the lesson he’s trying to drill into his lovers, these days and always? Is that not the warning he’s stamping on their skin with every grapple, every faraway bite?

In the end, Matthieu rises to the dare. He goes back to watching the stage as if it were inconsequential, with a cocked eyebrow and a taunting hum. “That gamble, pine”, he crows, tipping his chin up to a cant, “is something I’ll gladly take you up on. What do you say, next Odele’s day? I’ll give you a lesson in holding your own with a knife, and you can saddle the most skittish horse you’ve got.”

He rubs at his cheek, then taps it with a finger. “Though let me wise you up on something Lambert blithely ignored: a horse can throw you down, sure enough. Everyone’s gonna blame its moods, the pull of the moon, some noble pisswater. If you muck about with a sword, though? You’ve nothing to blame it on but yourself. The show of failure is much more prolonged, and, if you ask me, a tad more entertaining to watch.”

He scoffs at the memory of Lambert on the field louder than he has to, like it could cover a deeper truth. He doesn’t say the other part, that their swinging success is bound to attract flies of its own. That a quick rise warrants a quick slash of envy, of enemies and sharp wills in the dark. He doesn’t know how it ended up his bloody business, but here they are. He watches Agrippine sway to the music and thinks, saints forgive him, but he’d murder half this room to get them out of it. As if this was a midnight run, those backalley sprints where Matthieu held them in check as they charged down the cobblestones, or held their bags when they leaned to be sick into some Hightown vase, he feels the need to escort them home now. As if something rotten is about to take place, some vicious design inching up with the sunset.

He wishes he brought his sword, but it was a pointless argument. They’ve gone through it a dozen time, his empress and him. Calandre would’ve only nipped it in that soft tone of hers. A knight’s ballroom attire is not that of an army general, not that of a commander; there are no weapons but a decorative scabbard, a garish blighted thing, as if to soothe nobles that brute power can never quite turn on them. As it is, Matthieu’s hand clenches on the empty sheath.

𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐍: 13th of Maccius (night) 𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄: Site of the explosion 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐒: Closed, @chevalicr

His first visit to the rubble with Cecile, who the Empress had practically ordered to go with him, had been helpful but not enlightening enough. Perhaps even less so, creating more and more question than it had answers. After a drink at the Lion’s Mane and a couple of hours killed at the room rented just above, Roth makes his way towards the site of the explosion again, walking in the night with the same confidence many took to the day.

The moonlight draped over the ruins like a weak torch and it reminded Roth of the poorly lit areas he’d found himself at, time and time again, near the border with Widrowem. Memories good and bad are attached to his time away from Val Faim under Calandre’s orders but, at that particular moment, seeing the ruins of a building and the blown out windows of its neighbours, none of the good ones were particularly remembered. Instead, Roth can’t help but draw a connection between what had happened — a building, no doubt full of potential, ruined by one’s actions, just like a certain connection of his had met an early demise due to his own decision to prioritise lies. 

Eyes focused on all he can see, his other senses are sharp at work, picking up on every sensation and sound around him. And one of those sounds are the sound of footsteps, growing closer and closer as the gravel spilled from the explosion increases the noise they make. Roth looks to his side for a fraction of a second and it’s only with a double take that he notices it’s a familiar face.

“Samuel, long time no see. Boring night?” Why else would either of them be there, in the dark, looking for clues that could only be found in the sunlight instead?

—

The rubble, as it ever would, lends nothing. It’s a special sort of man that lives past childhood and still expects crime scenes to give up their killers, rivers to give up their bodies, people their secrets. It’s a stupid sort of man, dewy-eyed and still keeping pulpy novels at their bedside. That man would take up this task with all the diligence of a hero’s myth. He’d descend into the prophet’s tomb like it was the blighted hells of reckoning, ready to scorch the earth clean. That man, of course, would not outlive Calandre’s court.

Calandre’s Val Faim forgives all but naivety. Calandre forgives all but people who think themselves the saviour. Mattheiu is not that man.

Matthieu wades through powdered chalk and granite, wiping his fingers on the front of his coat with a sneer. Every now and then, his lips pull further back, a twist like the wrench of an arm. He knows too well this is dirt without reward. There’ll be nothing here but a stray strip of leather, some wooden chip blown off from the powder keg. He knows this, because he knows murder is... well, indistinct. A hole-and-corner affair, really. If there are smears that remain in its wake, they are no more than the trapping of everyday life, of a touch on your arm and a shoe shoved in the doorway. It’s not enough to mark the guilty. It’s not even enough to mark the ghost.

If this was not intended as some assassination attempt, or the shoddy coverup for one, then it was sorcery. Against that, Mattheiu could not hold his own. If he unearthed anything here, it’ll be the traces magestuff leaves, which he can no more read than an untrained tracker waylaid too far into the woods. She should’ve sent a mage for this—Jaster’s balls, the kingdom’s chock full of them—but then, that skill isn’t expendable. Chevaliers are, because the land can always make more. With this flood of blood and skirmishes, the land will be glad to.

As if the thought hoists him up by the throat, face cropping from the dark like the break of an oar, Roth Babin steps in his way. A moment later, he sees how that’s wrong—it’s Matthieu that walked in his path, too taken with how this task was a dead end to actually stay attuned to the surroundings. Getting sloppy, Samuel. Better men died for less. He can’t tell if it’s Leon’s voice or his own. As is often the way, he doubts he could even if he stayed with it, even if he chased it down all night.

His eyes narrow. He measures the younger Chevalier, a quick up and down, pawing for time as much as for a deeper glance at who the knight is. No. A deeper glance at who the knight is now. He’d known Roth when they were all but children, for all that the law of the realm called them of age; boys with blunted swords and the borrowed scabbards of their betters, palmed off from knights who’d done something of themselves, crossed the chasm between ignominy and glory. They had trained together even though they were from separate regiments, and, because Matthieu’s cohort was older, had often showed theirs the way.

He’d last seen Roth when he still had his own name on his tongue, his old home at his back. When Jessamin was an arm’s breadth away, loafing on a sun-lit rock, Calla’s head in their lap. When the twins were sparring somewhere behind them, swallowed by the periphery like bursts of gunpowder, and Gavriil was eyeing the rival cohort with the look of a hawk ready to plunge. 

He’d last seen Roth when he still thought life was linear. In a way, he’d last seen Roth when he still thought life was anything.

The Chevalier straightens up. His mind stumbles to the beck and call, shakes off the years like dust. “Boring as a Widrowish lay. You’re not gonna find anything in there. Trawl for it all you want, it’s the pit itself.” His brows snap together, and he jerks his head rearward one last time. “We’ve a better chance of finding clues in some academy scion’s bedroom. There was no intention to this, or if there was, they’ve wiped it with the same sorcery that turned them on their arse.”

They’ve been here before, partners privy to the trickiest of waltzes. Each new step more recognition than revelation— familiar enough to hazard a guess as to where the next foot falls. “Don’t you? That’s right,” Iseult remarks. “You gave the lion’s share of it.” He rasps, A night free of the tab in return for a life. “Way I recall it, you’d’ve been lost without me,”almost a snicker in the way he recounts that eve and all it lead to: 

The chevalier with his guard down, and a denizen of the quarter taking to his shadow with ill intent. Iseult, the ever observant, knowing pursuit when he saw it— seeing that one for its lethal intent. The assassin saving the chevalier’s life by taking another— forging a connection in the crook of an elbow, in the fatal wrench of a neck. The observant freelancer calls it saving a life; the astute one calls it an investment.

Iseult twists the blade; it is all he knows how to do. “Owe? Here I’d thought that my reward. An act of goodwill for an act of goodwill,” he purred. Behind the mask, his eyes follow each rasping pass on the blade. 

“S’no matter what I make of it. Clean enough form. Swift. Sword could surely use the grindstone but I doubt Brosseau was so particular.” A smile, more like the baring of teeth. More like a grimace.

“And you? You put on twice the show, and yet you’re bundled away back here, far from the action,” Iseult eyes the open space on the bench beside him. Then he leans against the trellis, arms folded, should half-sunk into enveloping ivy. “What of the adoration? What I’ve been told, a Chevalier would be sooner out there to receive them.” 

—

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃𝐒 𝐁𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐂𝐄 𝐎𝐃𝐃𝐋𝐘 𝐅𝐑𝐎𝐌 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐎𝐖𝐄𝐑 , as if Iseult was a forest God long past his glory. He looks the part, too; shaded in the leaves, humming some self-satisfied nonsense, half ready to go pouncing on travellers with a riddle and a cry. For a second, Matthieu's half minded to tell him this, to conjure this fanciful image as he might for Cecile. But then, theirs was not an acquaintaceship of whims. It could hardly be called an acquaintanceship at all, except—well, what do you call the man who saved your life? What do you call the man you've been drinking with every week since? Even Matthieu Samuel, who kept apart from friendships as sick dogs do from a crowd, had to admit it warranted more than a tip of the hat.

It sits uneasy with him, even so. The thought of owing so much; the thought of owing anything at all. Bloody absurd, that pride, that perfunctory arrogance, given that he owes his life to every noble in this bunch, their mother, and their fucking horse. Tall talk, perhaps, for a man who never earned anything for himself, who had it lapped and lashed upon him from on high. And yet here they are. Matthieu almost scowls at him, like the handed cloth is a slap, an intricate insult. He feels his face changing in the dark.

And then, as if it were a dance, it breaks. He chuckles, low and rough. "What would you know of clean form? Apprenticed with a master forger, did you? I'll have my adoration where it matters, cheers. Fortin can keep the licking of the herd." His laughter climbs, but Matthieu knows better than to follow it for long. The thing is, he has no idea whether Rayne had, in fact, apprenticed anywhere. He has no idea of Rayne as anything but a vague and pleasant presence, a corner folding up, folding open. Something stained of whiskey and understanding that's quite below the threshold of language, sleeping snugly in the back of your head.

The knight sidles off the bench, joints creaking in the way of caked leather. He scouts out the gift. "That's a shit fucking cloth, mate. C'mon. Let's go up to my room and we'll outfit your daggers, or whatever those little toys are, with something better. And then I'll pay you back for those drinks, hm?" He fixes Iseult with a long look, haughty and just meaningful enough. There'll be drinking, again; there'll be a lot of things, away from the night's questions, away from the winds of this strange and fetid month. Without another word, he turns to head back inside.

𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐈𝐓 𝐖𝐀𝐒. The hound off his leash, feral and wanting the taste of blood before the night has ended. Helene doesn’t take it against him, but makes a mental note of the portrait of rage his body contorts into, a blade with no hilt, ready to bite into whose hand wanted to hold the weapon he had become. Chevaliers were brought about with a strict code of honor, valor, serving the lords and their peasants—shining in armor as they rose across the battlefield into the service of the people. She had not fooled herself into thinking so, of course. Everyone was corruptible, everyone fell on the road to an ideal.

She remembers those days, of unrest and horror—her hands were stained with the memories of them. Helene steps over them as she feels his hand on her waist, the armor of elegance in full view of the court, daring them to say anything to her out of turn. Old hymnals were kept for a god once, a name long forgotten from the bowels of time, prayers turned to incantations turned to spells. Now, she uses them, steel-forged and steel-strong, a transfiguration of the divine. Her blade sings prayers. Her heels sing of terror. Her eyes, turning to Matthieu, sing of danger.

“Don’t get angry, dear.” Her hands caress his face as he pulls away from her ear, a smile cast into a dagger poised at the breastbone. There are threats in the air, the scent of traitorous intent thick in her lungs. It will not do. It simply will not. “It wrinkles the face. That besides, you sound like the spitting image of dearly departed Leon, and I can’t imagine you would ever want that.”

A turn, and she looks perfect, nary a hair in place, no pinch in the fabric of her dress. A flutter of eyelashes, a simple drag across the floor from her partner. Her hand on his arm and a shift of weight on her feet. The brutal arithmetic of the game of nobles, a game of cards played to the death—granted, the remark about Leon was hardly fair, but long days in the game of crowns and coin had taught her that nothing is sacred. If the chevalier was to play, he would experience what she had to offer, every last measure of sin and suffering.

Music is pushed into the back of her mind as she speaks, the sweetness of her voice only contrasted by the biting words that lace them. It is an art, a form of dueling that she supposes that Matthieu has had no time to practice. By battle be joined, then. He will have to learn on his feet.

“Do you know what I do? Aside from the pretty title, the dresses, the way I am at Her Majesty’s beck and call at all times, Ser Samuel?” A twirl, an amused smile on her face, as if the chevalier had made a simple joke before. “Land disputes, politics, matters of crown and diplomacy. Sufficiently boring to a chevalier of your standing, I assume. Titles and petty things, threats under cover of poison and all manner of influential power mongering. Ah, but to the people living off the land, to the merchant or tradespeople along the road? Val Faim is of no consequence, nor are the games that we play, only the lord that has stake in their land. I help shape those lands, give them nobility that would soothe them, and weaken those that would try and ruin them for their own gain. But the changing winds you allude to would uproot fields, and call storms to drown the land in blood, if it so came to it.”

Her eyes catch his, and a hand cups his cheek for a moment, regarding him with an upturned eyebrow. “We serve the throne, but we also serve peace. Order. The idea that all these things that we do will let the people under our care live one more day, one more week in comfort and security,” Helene continues, her mask glinting off the light in the ballroom. “I hope, my dear, that you do not entertain any notions that you will regret, nor do anything that will threaten any one of these ideals. Is that not what chevaliers are good at? Upholding ideals? Or has the code changed since I last read it?”

𝐏𝐄𝐀𝐂𝐄, 𝐇𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒, the word like an echo of sand. He grits it between his teeth and waits for the sound, the lingering bone crunch of eating dirt. Weighted on little stones, Helene’s sentences go easy on the way down. A surprise, that—though perhaps it shouldn’t be. He’s learned his share of doubling back, of sweeping things under the rushes. What’s anger but one more discovery? What’s swallowing it but one more truth learned? Matthieu’s heels roll with the music, and his rage rolls below. Whatever retort he had is floated along with the swell of their clothes.

There’s surprise on Farrow’s face, too. She didn’t expect him talking back. Even with a silken smile, even drowned in the surge of music, Matthieu’s first answer must’ve rang too harshly. The fact that he carried any opinion at all must’ve sounded too much like defiance. How interesting, that he’s said worse to the Empress, worse to the guards, and didn’t receive a glance for it. How odd, that her standards outmatch Calandre’s own. He supposes there’s your old nobility, a coil of vigilance roped hard within. A snapping twig that never quite dies down.

“Angry?” His voice is flat, flatter than his hand on her waist. He slackens the grip before it cramps. “I cannot presume to be. The way of things is the way that made me. What notions are there to entertain against your own life?” A press of his mouth, like cards folding. “Perhaps I overstepped, Your Grace. You see, order and security are quite... topical matters. I imagined you’d be as eager to discuss them as I was, but it seems I was off the mark.”

You’re wrong, he wants to say, you’re wrong about all of it. There has to be a better way to see life. There has to be a better way to serve it. He wants to tell her it’s not his own anger, it’s a whole world’s. He wants to tell her all the things that happened in the name of this land, on the bier of it, but his fist clutches on empty. Like a child running down the beach, claiming he found a spirit in the riverbed, in the downstream sand, but when he cupped his palms around it it was gone. Matthieu’s eyes rise up, and then they shutter. There’s something in her smile that makes his tongue knot up—not bashfulness, not even fear, but a paralysis as deep and old as the earth. It’s the strength she has in that stretch of lip and merit. It’s the fact that she believes it can move the world from within. And so, believing it, she does. The lesson is simple. The lesson is something he should’ve rejected long ago.

Once again, the Chevalier bows his head.

Peace, she says, and he thinks of the tourney, just a few days old in the pit. He thinks of Calandre’s order whispered in his ear, of the way she hoisted her skirts to cross the bloodied grounds. He thinks of that hem, unsoiled after all this years, and how people have lived and died on its golden cut. Peace, she says, and then in the same breath she brings Leon. And why shouldn’t she? He is a suitable companion for the evening, a bunched stick under her soapbox. The man must’ve bought the same rhetoric, if he bought anything at all. That all is worth the price of order; that all can be expended to enact it. That chance is the sickbed of peace, the cot it lies to die on.

The worst part isn’t how it sounds, isn’t what it summons. The worst is that she might be right. Helene and Leon both, gazing at one another over the pall of these lost years, and nodding in recognition. She only needs to point to recent events, by way of fuel, by way of fodder. Matthieu cannot argue. As to Leon’s polished face, as to Calandre’s turned cheek, Matthieu Samuel cannot way anything at all.  

He wonders how she knew, though. Wonders how she knew it would hurt as it did.

On his arm, her ringed fingers catch the candles around them. He lets the glint distract him, carry him until he cannot think. For a moment, there is nothing but this wound of light.

THE FOURTEENTH OF MACCIUS AT THE IMPERIAL OPERA HOUSE. closed for @chevalicr

𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐒𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐎𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐇𝐄𝐑 𝐑𝐄𝐆𝐔𝐋𝐀𝐑 𝐕𝐈𝐒𝐈𝐓𝐒 to the Imperial Opera House, Rosalind quite hates the opera. Music, in her opinion, is not made for mere listening. How can the body be contained when the orchestra swells and a masterful aria resounds? The heart cannot stay still in response to it. With painstaking effort, Rosalind manages. If you were to look at her, you might notice the toll it takes: brows slanted harshly over her almond eyes, cheeks flushed with focus, knuckles white against the armrests. She wants to move, she wants to lash out, she wants to dance or perhaps punch a noble across the jaw.

For the sake of decorum, she doesn’t. When the opera ends, Rosalind rises from her seat and barely smiles (that is, she grimaces) at her companion. “Lovely,” she exhales, her tone suggesting the very opposite. She loops her arm through her guest’s, the two beginning to exit when she catches the sight of a truly ugly monster hiding among the heights of society. “Give me a moment, Eloise? I’ll find you in a moment — or just go without me, I don’t mind at all, darling. In fact, just go on. I’ll find you later and we can gossip about our Mélodie then. I have much to share.”

With one last affectionate squeeze of Eloise’s arm, Rosalind glides through the crowd toward the beast. “Matthieu,” her voice wraps around his name with prickling heat, a delighted rancor, “I do hope you had a horrid time. I’m surprised to see that you enjoy the opera. It’s a little elegant for your tastes, no?”

𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐈𝐒 𝐍𝐎 𝐄𝐂𝐇𝐎 𝐓𝐎 𝐇𝐄𝐑 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃𝐒 , which are stifled by the glass dome and sent scattering back like shrapnel. The press of bodies branched and teemed around them, and the rumble kept breaking overhead. If it were any other voice, Matthieu could’ve hardly located it in the din. But this was no stray court bird, was it? He could pick Rosalind from far worse crowds than the Opera. He had, too, plenty of times back when they ran together. No—ran implies a certain verticality. It went over differently with them, with bruised lips and limbs lying down.

In their whatever-the-blight, in that thing of bitter highs and titanic lows they’ve held up until their hands bled, her voice became a tell. He knows that singsong rage it draws from, the slight hitch it gives when it runs away from under her. When the parade of her own designs swells on an emotion she could not control—which is, incidentally, all but the barest of them.

A long way back, eight years. It still seemingly gave her the right of it: cornering him with a snide gotcha, a switchblade smile carving her pretty mask. She needn’t have bothered. If she’d known him at all, she would’ve gleaned as much. He’d never take point on such easy bait. Matthieu turns to her, and his brow knits a moment too long. His tongue prods his cheek like trying to recognize her, pin down the place of this lovely mouth and coming up short. It’s a lie, sure enough, and an unfair one at that. Foul sportsmanship, maybe, but no less than deserved.

It’s more effective than the sting she just tried on him. Cracks at his ancestry, which is to say, the lack of it, were run of the mill. They’ve always been, in fact, ever since his first standing in court. It’s what seeded his legend, ten fathoms and five graves deep: the Chevalier from nowhere, the man of the rabble, vulgar and carnal and always on the prowl. A man perhaps too much like the beasts he cuts down. They gorged on it, of course; each courtier to the last. After all, it’s why Rosalind spread her legs for him. It’s why most of them did. Perversity had a lure of its own, he reckoned, and the dirtier the fuel, the harder the fire spread.

You get used to it soon enough. Cyril’s gaze falls to the ground. 

An acquired taste. Cyril breathes in through her teeth, the idea sharp inside her chest.

The words echo inside her mind as she pretends to be completely enthralled by the dirt beneath her golden shoes. It’s the way Matthieu says it, so naturally and without any sliver of doubt attached, as far as Cyril can hear it, that makes her heart skip a beat and tighten at the idea. It seems impossible to get used to seeing someone get killed, no matter the justification. 

The thought alone terrifies her — she’s gotten used to some sides of court (while others are still a mystery to her), she’s gotten used to being a celebrity, she’s gotten used to so much in such a short while but Cyril knows she will never get used to seeing blood, not like that. “Have you?” She blurts out, still not looking up, “Gotten used to it, I mean.” Cyril finishes the question with her voice barely above a mumble, both curious about Matthieu’s answer and hesitant to hear it.

Cyril hears the gravel shift beneath Matthieu’s feet and she finally looks up. She watches him walk towards her and, in a seemingly slowed down moment and among all the thoughts about what had just happened, the tailor still can’t help but be cautious about letting herself feel at ease around the Chevalier. Inside her mind, there are memories of the times where she met him for a fitting and the times she kept him company at The Lion’s Mane — and both times invoked such different feelings.

Her eyebrows furrow at the unexpected but her hands can’t help but welcome the jacket he drapes over her uncovered shoulders. Her gaze kept itself on the Chevalier, who is so much taller than her and seems especially tall when he stands close to her, even as he steps back. For a few heartbeats, she holds her gaze on him before averting it. 

She looks at the jacket Matthieu lends her, still unaware of how to react to such an action coming from him or the words he speaks in such a calm way. It’s a strange situation and yet Cyril welcomes it — especially after what she had witnessed (even if it was only partially). Her eyes study the fabric as Matthieu speaks, touching the the redness with the tips of her fingers… It’s then that she sees that not all of it is velvet. Her eyes widen and immediately, she draws her fingers back, hiding them under a tight fist. Her stomach tosses and turns inside her abdomen and she feels momentarily nauseous. Whose blood is it?

Cyril clears her throat, ridding it of the lump that had made itself comfortable in it, even if only for a few heartbeats. She attempts a small, polite smile as she looks at Matthieu again. “Thank you. Even though it doesn’t really go with my outfit.” She tries to playfully remark, tightening the jacket around her, shielding herself from unexpected breezes that pass through. “I could make you some, yes, and perhaps make it so it doesn’t get so…” Cyril gulps at the fact that she’s about to bring up the same topic again, “bloody.” Her lips flash another smile, though this one is short lived and not quite reaching her eyes. 

At that moment, the offer she makes is solely what she wishes she had already done — if she had already enchanted the Chevalier’s jacket, then maybe she wouldn’t not be so painfully unaware of what she is wearing over her white gown. She’s still trying to distance herself from the fact that the jacket she wears, so kindly offered to her, had splatters of someone’s blood. Or maybe more than one someone’s blood. Cyril shakes her head, trying not to let her mind go down that road. 

Again, her gaze shows the incredulity of the situation in Cyril’s eyes. They’re not at The Mane, they’re not in a fitting room… It is the first time they are alone outside of any of those situations and it means Cyril has no idea how it could possibly end. Not with the Chevalier, who is unpredictable in the young tailor’s mind. 

His offer can’t not come at a better time, however. She quickly nods. “Actually, yes… Just one, though. Maybe a couple.” Cyril doesn’t really know her alcohol tolerance. “I couldn’t even enjoy the fireworks and I love fireworks.”

Cyril lets out a long, exasperated sigh, trying to gather her own thoughts, trying to calm herself down and readying herself to get a drink. She tells herself that she’s okay now, that no one else is going to get decapitated that night. “Do — do you mean you’re coming with somewhere else? Or, do you — do you have a flask?” 

The tailor clearly is not familiar with the social situation at hand.

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏𝐒 𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐈𝐄𝐑 𝐓𝐎 𝐃𝐀𝐍𝐂𝐄 , now that he knows it’s for her benefit. It’s no longer a social game, but a light of mercy—as dim as it can be, next to the furnace of this night, when Calandre’s displeasure shot like the bellows of a forge. Pretending it didn’t happen is ludicrous. No; pretending it didn’t happen is somehow more dishonorable than wielding the sword. Not to Brousseau’s memory, but to his own. He could care a whit less about the assassin: to snakes the pit, to conspirators the ignoble end. It was... if not deserved, if not judicious, then still the closest thing to balance the Summer Palace has ever shown.

No, this is about his own measure, his own deserving: Matthieu Samuel, who merely stood there, dazed as a votary in some dark ritual. Half-drunk on the fog that came over Fortin as he drove in the blade. He watched the captain’s eyes smoke over, a touch from a world below. He’d been thinking, even as the body slumped, this is a familiar horror. This is a familiar thrill.

And there laid the point, nestled as a hand in the grave: he knew Fortin enjoyed it. Read it on him like a good lay, like a sip of Widrowish brandy after a month on the field. That’s how it got you, the habit of the hunt. That was the worst come of it. He’s seen it on the faces in court, too. Reveling in death’s nearness, earthy-thick, in the edge they imagined they had on it—as if by inviting here, they subdued it. Oh, a good chunk of that harebrained crowd took their pleasure in it, for all they demurred and reached for the fainting draughts.

But not Cyril. He hadn’t even spotted her in the crowd, but it’s enough to look at her now, white-lipped and one brave breath away from keeling over. There were very few circumstances that could’ve convinced Matthieu Samuel to play gallant courtier, just about now. Apparently she was one of them. And so: he dances the same waltz Faim was built on, the volta of willful ignorance. Scrapes out a smile beyond reproach.

“A flask? Oh, sure I do. Lesson of the trade, Lady Beauchamp: always keep your escape close at hand.” He raises an eyebrow to his own coat, now gingerly dipping off her shoulders, and holds out his palm. “There should be a whole canteen in there somewhere. Outer pocket. I’ve long stopped trusting Her Highness’ chilled wines. Their only merit is making one’s head hurt like a son of—”, he trails off, curt in the nick of time. Matthieu winces, smothers the curse into a cough. “Anyway. If you’re brave enough for bourbon...”

When she sketches no sign of having heard him, Mattheiu has to stoop to reach her pockets. On Cyril’s lithe frame, the coat’s length is all but brushing the grass, its hem collapsing into folds and shadows. He leans closer, his grin almost apologetic. The Chevalier has to make a careful point not to brush anything above the pockets, because, well—he can’t say for sure who’d have his throat first, Cecile or Lambert, but he isn’t bent on finding out. When he scoops out the flask at last, he dangles it like a victory. Proffers it to her, then cuts dutifully back.

“You have the first share of it.” Her words are a wreck, the speech disjointed from one segue to the next. There’s something about fireworks, some other bit about outfits. It’s no wonder: she’s still shaken, still shrugging it off any way she knows how. It’s all part and parcel of witnessing your first brutal killing. Matthieu wonders if he should tell Cyril this is what passes for a baptism, these days in Calandre’s reign: a welcome to court as patent as any debutante’s ball. He decides against it. Then the meaning to one of those jumbled sentences lands true.

The Chevalier is taken aback. His smile slides off. For a long second, he blinks in an uptick, like shaking water to clear your sight. And it’s apt, because her offer is about as sudden as a summer rain shower. There’s something so pure about it, it feels naked. It feels easy to tear into: that kindness, pared down before all else. For the second time in this garden tableau, Matthieu coughs his impulses away. He cants his head to the side. “A suit that repels blood, huh? For me? You’d have your hands full, there, d’you know that? Blood is about all that sticks to us these days.” I don’t much mind it, he wants to say, but the words form into a solid mass. It seems that this lie, next to all the rest, doesn’t quite fit. His throat goes tight, tighter than dishonesty can slip through. He has to force his eyes back on his hands, then up to her.

He’ll say it plain: he’s moving his way towards being in a bad mood.

That’s all that it takes with Michel, sometimes, less taciturn and more temperamental but usually smart enough to bite his tongue before there are any real consequences. Here’s the thing, though, about Matthieu: he’s no noble. He holds no real political sway, in Michel’s eyes, and maybe in Calandre’s. He is as good as a hound with the scent of blood, and even then he isn’t always allowed to have it. Michel, at least, has the choice.

Michel’d met Auclair, once or twice. Nasty bastard, even when the days were good and their bellies were full and there were no battles to fight. He’d heard of Matthieu, too, all those other little apprentices he must have run with before they disappeared, lives ended at Matthieu’s sword for the sake of spectacle. Michel pities him, more than anything else, but saying so would mean admitting to it.

Sometimes it’s simple. Sometimes it’s the fact that Michel, for all his ranks and honors and medals and awards, the armor and the blades, would rather rip into any man than prance and preen and bow his head for men and women who think themselves grand for the money in their possession and the houses they reside in in Hightown. Sometimes it’s easier to say that he misses it, and that Hippolyte’s end – no matter how gruesome, how discomforting, how alarming it had been to be called upon to commit – had scratched an itch.

A gauntleted hand scratches at his jaw. Beside him, Matthieu has gone very still, but only for a second. Then: the brief pop and crack of joints. Michel wonders what that says. If he asked, the chevalier wouldn’t answer, of course, and he wouldn’t expect otherwise. “I thought he liked me well enough, considering all his words, but I could be wrong.” He keeps his eyes straight ahead, on Calandre, and the poor boy standing next to her, his face beet red as she inevitably quips something both kind and cruel. “From what I can recall, he certainly handled things more gracefully than you did.”

𝐈𝐓'𝐒 𝐍𝐎 𝐌𝐎𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐋𝐀𝐔𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐄𝐑 , and yet Matthieu feels it settle on him all the same, harsh as early sunlight. He’d spare the other a glance, but that would mean giving an inch. Moving his head would loosen the hold he’s got on himself, tension bottlenecked from heel to jaw. Laughing is an edge, nothing less; it’s the first gate in the dam breaking, and anything could slip in the deluge. A growl, a lunge. A hand on the pommel and a hand on the throat.

He cannot chance it. The Chevalier inhales. He goes at it hard enough it climbs on a hiss. It reminds him of blades in the forge, young metal baptized in water; it reminds him of the knight’s gear baking in the summer, growing hot enough they’d have to splash their canteens all over it. That’s how it must sound, when something nears a tipping point. That damn noise must be inside him every day, now; it’s what would surge out if they cut him open.

He tails the whistle with another hum. “Graceful? I wouldn’t bet my pay on it.” He feels Auclair’s eyes on him, sharpened like slits on the mask of dead kings. His mentor’s palm is on the front of his neck, closing in on a garotte. It’s all there, right down to the finger pads, muscles bunched from archery. He wills his feet not to waver back. How do you get a haunting out of something hollow? A lingering, a ghost, if there was never enough spirit to begin with? It’s an idle thought. He considers the technicalities of it even as he adjusts his stance on standing guard. How little of a soul can you get away with, when it comes to leaving it behind? His father would’ve known. Well. It was beyond asking, now—it was beyond many things.

You never knew Auclair, if you’d take him on his word alone. You never knew a lot of it, Fortin. It’s why they allowed you to live. Strong enough to break the carcass. Dumb enough to gnaw the bone and not ask whose it is. In that room of endless jade, vast enough to show the murals of every Valence scion, Matthieu’s breathing grows narrow. His chest rabbits under Auclair’s eyes, same now as it did all those years ago. It’s like the man is warning him not to speak the thought out loud. He doesn’t know whether it’s for his benefit, to save him a fisticuffs in sight of the Throne, or merely for Auclair’s pride. Speaking ill of the dead, Samuel?