Chapter 7

CHAPTER

7

“Stop!” Luca’s voice cracked. For a moment Matti wondered if he’d actually made the man cry, through sheer incompetence, and what it meant that he didn’t feel particularly bad about it. Was embarrassment at one’s own ineptitude something that you could become immune to? But then Luca scrubbed a hand over his mouth and winced. “I’m parched. I need a drink. Hold that thought. Or don’t, actually—get whatever thought was driving that ”—with a wave up and down Matti’s body—“and grind it into tiny pieces. Then scatter those pieces to the wind.”

“Poetic,” said Matti.

“Sleep deprivation makes me eloquent,” said Luca, with halfhearted waspishness. He went over to the table in search of water.

Matti found himself grinding the dulled tip of his sword down against the top of his boot, and had to pull the blade away hastily before he managed to bore through the supple leather. He had the tense, grumpy alertness that came when one poured a bucket of coffee onto the smouldering embers of fatigue, and he was already anticipating the crash that would come midmorning.

What did Luca know about sleep deprivation? He’d probably been out drinking and gaming, or else had actually been in bed at a reasonable hour and was just whining to hear the sound of his own voice. Matti had spent six hours in bed and had only slept for four of them, his mind holding his exhausted body above the waves of sleep like a gaudy float above a fishhook. No wonder his hands and feet were being particularly stupid this morning. No wonder Luca was discovering new heights of obnoxious impatience.

Luca was still trying, Matti forced himself to remember; Matti could see the effort making murals of his compelling face. He would let his tongue dance in abusive circles, which Matti was learning not to take very seriously, but he would still slow down. He would explain the four quadrants of guard and how each attack or parry was based in one of them. He would show Matti as many times as it took.

And because Luca was bothering to put in the effort, because Matti had stopped believing that Luca didn’t consider him worth the effort, Matti was prepared to do his part. He wasn’t afraid to step in firmly when Luca skipped a step or seven, or when Matti didn’t understand. Matti was prepared to ask for the concept to be simplified again, and again.

Matti’s parents had encouraged him to ask questions from the time he understood language. They’d let him sit in on meetings and conversations and would dissect them afterwards for him, one step at a time. In the afternoons, he would feel grown-up and serious walking the floors of the carding houses, running small fingers through samples at auctions, and letting the sharp warm smell of the dye vats fill his head up with aches. He’d loved to follow the shining end of a pen down a column of numbers while his father took the numbers apart, patient, and shared a smile with Matti that said he was forgiven for pretending to understand, because he would, truly, in time. And so Matti did.

There was no shame in questioning. There was no shame in learning slowly, no matter what Luca thought.

And Matti needed these mornings. They were his haven, a space made safe by the fact that its boundaries were so clearly defined. Here in this room, in the morning light, as the day’s heat took hold. Here where Matti was learning the scuffs and scratches of the floor like those of his father’s desk.

Here where the end point was visible, where a line could be drawn on the calendar on the date when Matti would be married and these lessons would end.

Which was a good thing . Matti was engaged to a girl whose money he would use to drag his House back into prosperity. He had a best man who would prove the gods’ blessing on Matti’s marriage and then disappear into whatever lively stream of swordplay and criminal activity he’d dwelled in before he decided to tug Matti into its shallows.

A best man who Matti wanted with a slow, awful burn of hunger, which he was ignoring as he ignored hunger when he worked through lunch, or when he needed to make Merri smile by sliding oil-dipped bread off his own dinner plate and onto hers. It wasn’t the hunger of the truly desperate; it couldn’t hold a candle to the hunger of the beggars who sat on the bridges by day and curled themselves into doorways by night. It was bearable. It would pass.

It will pass, Matti told himself now, as Luca took a swig from the leather bottle of water. Luca’s exposed throat moved as he swallowed, and Luca’s impossible hair was dark with sweat where it met his skin.

Matti moved his sword to his left hand and wiped his palm, using the friction on his thigh to centre himself so that he didn’t do anything stupid like… ask. Suggest. Oh, why not face it: command his money’s worth, for the pleasure of watching Luca go still.

“Let’s try something else,” Luca said, when he’d wiped his mouth clear of water and offered the bottle to Matti, who shook his head. “Take guard.”

Luca probably had unconscious tells that an experienced sword fighter would be able to spot, but Matti knew that he only noticed a signal when Luca was giving it deliberately. He managed to parry a clean lunge and was proud of the speed with which he got in the return blow, even though Luca brushed it aside with the wrist equivalent of an eye roll. The next attack, Matti had less success with.

“Oh for fuck’s—that was just a high cross-strike in autumn! I showed you the block for that last week! You had that.”

“Do it again, I’ll get it this time,” said Matti, but the second time was even worse, and he knew by now that this kind of thing was like damp-rot. It started with him not being able to manage a new move, and then crept its way backwards through his meagre repertoire, infecting everything, making him second-guess even the simplest positions.

At least Luca knew better by now than to suggest they stop.

“Here,” snarled Luca, backing up. “For the tenth fucking time. Front foot pointed across for stability, back leg bent for ability to disengage, you’re aiming to catch and constrain their blade at the third-point of your own, and you hold .”

Matti took a deep breath, let it out, and did what Luca had done. Or so he thought.

“Pata’s blistered hands, you towering dolt, that was even worse . What do I have to do? Translate this into another language? Draw a picture in the dust on the window? No, I’m honestly asking, what do you want from me, when—”

“I want you to be quiet !”

It came out of Matti like beer from a tap, shocking him. He hardly ever raised his voice like that.

Luca was looking at him, eyes wide. As Matti opened his mouth—either to apologise for snapping or to compound the insult, he wasn’t sure—Luca raised a single finger: wait. He lifted that hand and made an elaborate mime of sewing his own lips closed, knotting the thread off at one end and flicking the invisible needle away.

“Yes, all right,” said Matti. “Thank you. Now, think about it. What am I doing wrong? How do I fix it?”

Luca gestured indignantly to his closed mouth.

A crackle of something, an inconvenient thrum of power, found its way under Matti’s skin at the sight. It was absurd. Just because Luca was standing there with his lips held together, making an arrogant show out of his obedience. Matti wanted to push his tongue against Luca’s mouth, force it open, feel those invisible stitches give way. He would almost expect to taste blood. The thought of it made muscles clench at the back of his neck.

“You’ve made your point,” Matti said.

Luca shrugged.

Matti said, “Show me again.”

Luca settled into the position. It was strange not to hear him break immediately into a fluid stream of description as to how the feet should be placed, the weight distributed, the precise angles of elbow and shoulder. Matti watched him uncertainly. Luca gave a get-on-with-it flick of his sword tip.

Matti copied him, trying to hold everything in his mind at once. He concentrated hard on his grip, but knew by the time he’d corrected it that the angle of his pelvis was wrong.

Luca tapped his foot, and looked down at his boot until Matti looked down too. Luca moved that foot a few inches outwards and then bent his knee more deeply. Matti did the same. When Matti looked back up, Luca had a smile on his face; Matti felt himself mirror it without thinking, the muscles of his face just as attuned to Luca’s body as the rest of him.

Piece by piece of anatomy, Luca adjusted, and Matti copied. They held every small change for long enough that Matti’s body settled into it before the next change came. In between, Matti drew his eyes constantly back to Luca’s. After a few minutes he felt that he could have turned away and, if given a box of pencils, sketched every fleck of colour in Luca’s irises from memory. They were an odd kind of hazel. The central ring of amber-brown turned to a cool dark grey at the edges, with barely a hint of green in between.

Finally, Luca drew in a deep breath. Matti followed suit before he could ask if he was supposed to. He echoed the held breath. He echoed the long, nearly vocalised exhalation that Luca gave.

Somehow Matti had forgotten that Luca was the only one making a game of silence; the quiet had layered itself inside his throat as well. Even more than usual, the world was here in this room, in Luca’s insistent gaze, in the moments between Matti’s heartbeats.

Luca made a stay motion with his hand and dropped the stance himself. Matti held it. Luca walked around him in a slow circle. Matti’s legs and shoulders had a heat in them, a fierce ache, but it wasn’t unbearable. He held.

At the end of his circle, Luca reached out with his free hand. The touch of his fingers beneath Matti’s jaw was almost a static shock. Luca lifted Matti’s chin by a bare fraction of an inch, and his own face broke into a stunning smile. He nodded.

Matti let everything loosen and drop, shaking the aches gratefully from his arms and legs. His hands were sweating within his gloves.

“Now what?” Matti’s voice scraped as if he’d been shouting instead of staying silent.

Luca pursed his lips and made a let-me-think kind of waggle with his head. Then he rolled his shoulders and took up a different position, one that Matti hadn’t seen before. It looked like another high parry, this one with a twist of the torso and oddly grounded feet.

Matti dutifully fell into his best approximation of that position, waiting for Luca to again take him through the details one by one, limb by limb. But this time, Luca straightened out of it, sheathed his sword, and stepped close, as though he were going to circle Matti again.

Matti would have sworn that nothing could make his nerves as musical, nothing could set him on so perilous an edge of sensory awareness, as the mirror-dance they’d been doing.

He would have been wrong.

Luca’s touch started at his elbow and trailed up his forearm, stirring the black hairs there, until Matti felt as though his skin itself were shivering atop the tense block of his muscles. At the wrist, at the edge of the glove, Luca nudged Matti’s arm into a slightly different alignment. Matti swallowed hard and kept his gaze on the contrast of Luca’s pale fingers against his own skin. He had a feeling that meeting Luca’s eyes now would be a match set to powder.

Matti held. Luca touched him again, this time with both hands, one in the small of Matti’s back and one flat and low on his stomach. Matti had to close his eyes. He surrendered to the gentle pressure that adjusted the tilt of his torso. When the hand on his back stroked—slow, gloriously slow—up his spine, he knew what was coming.

Luca pinched his fingers together, right between Matti’s shoulder blades. Imagine a piece of string.

Matti pulled his shoulders back and down. The touch smoothed out, a caressing stroke of Luca’s palm like a reward, and then moved on to prod Matti’s hip.

How long had it been since someone had touched him with real purpose? An empty eternity, sang Matti’s body. His breath felt very loud.

At the end of his circuit, Luca touched Matti’s jaw again, exactly where he’d touched it at the end of the mirror-pose exercise. Like a blow falling onto an existing hurt, the contact was worse—better?—than all the preceding ones. It shot sparks down Matti’s neck, down and farther down, and he felt the air helplessly leave his lungs.

Luca stepped away, and Matti finally looked at his face. Luca had a curve to his mouth that bordered on wicked, and it banished the last of Matti’s flimsy doubt that Luca didn’t know exactly what he was doing. That he wasn’t getting just as much torturous enjoyment from it as Matti.

Matti realised that he was moving. He’d transferred the sword to his left hand and was removing his glove and reaching out with his right. For some reason it was vitally important that he satisfy his curiosity, that he explore that wicked smile, and just looking at it didn’t seem enough. He had to touch it.

Luca’s lips were soft and dry, and under Matti’s touch they slipped open a crack. Matti’s fingers were touching Luca’s teeth, barely. Matti had to concentrate to inhale fully, as though an action that had been easy and unthinking for every moment of his life until this one had suddenly become a matter that required as much effort as a new parry. He had no idea what he was doing, but he knew he did not want to be doing it alone.

“Talk to me,” Matti said.

Luca took a shuddering breath. His tongue flicked out nervously and found Matti’s fingertips, and both of them froze.

After a moment Luca reached up and took loose hold of Matti’s wrist, and—did not push it away. Did not move it at all.

Matti was a man in a trance. Two of his fingers slid over Luca’s lower lip, into the wide mouth, up to the knuckle. All he could think was that he would search out the words in Luca’s mouth, hook them out into the air. But Luca took Matti’s fingers between his teeth instead, scraping gently, no more than a light reminder that he was allowing this intrusion. His tongue made small circles that Matti felt with the heady, ticklish warmth of caramel spilled from the spoon. Luca’s strange greenless eyes held his, and the light circle of Luca’s fingers could have been an iron manacle, for all the possibility that Matti would have been able to pull free.

“Talk to me,” Matti said again, barely hearing himself.

Luca’s teeth sank deeper into the flesh of Matti’s fingers. They were not sharp enough to break skin, or to dent Matti’s nails, but it was painful. Matti gave a low sound and Luca tugged Matti’s wrist away; tugged Matti’s fingertips out of his mouth. Luca licked his lips, looking pupil-blown and wary. He dropped Matti’s hand. He took an abrupt step back, and then halted.

They gazed at each other. Matti felt stunned. His fingers were wet. He was beyond aroused. It felt as though all the blood in his body had divided itself between his cock and the pulse in his neck, where it fluttered demandingly. His lips were parted; he wanted to drink an ocean.

Luca’s chest was rising and falling rapidly and he bit down on his own lower lip, an action that sent another spike of need through Matti, then shook his head as if to clear it.

“I think that’s enough swordplay for today,” Luca said. Matti took some comfort from how raw his voice sounded.

“Right.” Matti inhaled and held it. He forced himself to think past the dizziness of desire. Part of him screamed to address this— talk to me —but he didn’t have a clue where to begin, what he could possibly say to open that conversation. And Luca’s body language now was that of someone seeking an escape. If Matti pushed, or if he said the wrong thing, he could drive a fist through the glass pane of everything. The lessons. The flirting. The lightness of Matti’s chest as he climbed the stairs every day, anticipating the moment when Luca would smile in greeting.

Matti said only, feebly, “Same time tomorrow?” He began to turn away.

“Wait. Matti.” Luca’s gaze was hooded now, and warm rather than hot. He sounded uncertain. “Have a drink with me, tonight.”

“A drink?” Matti felt thrown off-balance all over again. “In a drinking house?”

“Or anywhere,” said Luca. “I don’t—I mean, you’re probably burying yourself in papers, but I thought—wouldn’t you like to see if we can get along any better when we’re not pointing swords at each other?”

This fell precisely nowhere in the contract that Matti had signed, nor in the bordering-on-blackmail agreement that he and Luca had made. He had no idea what fell under Luca’s heading of getting along . He wanted to find out.

“I can’t…” Matti hated, hated the taste of it on his tongue, now more than ever. “I can’t afford it. My bond price isn’t a line of credit, you know. It doesn’t come due until I’m married.”

“I was thinking,” Luca said, like a man walking on a fence, “you could come over to my boardinghouse. I think I can stretch to a bottle of something mediocre.”

Matti would have to tell his family another lie. He would have to leave some paperwork undone. This was probably a terrible idea.

“Yes,” said Matti in a rush. “Yes, I’d like that. Sofia is coming for dinner tonight, but—after that?”

“Right.” Luca touched his own mouth, right where Matti had touched it. Luca’s smile was sudden. “Good.”

“Tell me the address,” said Matti.

A war was taking place in Matti’s head as he knocked on the door of the Cooper townhouse.

Or perhaps it wasn’t anything so grand as a war. A scuffle, or a skirmish. Whatever it was, it had been going all day, since he left Tolliver’s with the phantom heat of Luca’s mouth on his fingertips. Anticipation of the evening to come had been battling everything else that tried to snatch Matti’s attention. He’d nearly made a fool of himself in more than one meeting, thoughts whirling in skittish circles around the prospect of being in a room with Luca with, as Luca had said, no swords between them. Nothing good ever came of wanting anything this badly, but gods, Matti was on fire with the thought of it anyway.

More than the bond price wouldn’t come due until the day of the wedding. Matti would have cut off his own foot before being unfaithful to a spouse, but between business partners an engagement was no more than a statement of intent, and he and Sofia had already established that neither of them had any romantic expectations. Nobody would care if Matti slept with a different person every night until he was actually married. They might talk, but it wouldn’t reflect badly on Sofia.

Nobody would care if Matti—if Luca—

Matti did his best to squash those thoughts down as the door opened. Sofia had a leather bag looped over her shoulder, along with a goldenrod scarf that picked up the pinkish hue of the dusk light. To Matti’s relief, she didn’t ask him to come in. He wasn’t sure his tattered concentration was up to making polite conversation with his betrothed’s parents while fantasising about someone else entirely.

“You really are taller than you need to be, Matti.” Sofia looped her arm through his. “Has anyone ever told you that? I suppose not. It would seem normal in your household. You Jays are a family of giants.”

“We have our uses. Fetching objects pushed to the back of high shelves, for example.”

“Good to know,” Sofia said lightly.

A not-quite-comfortable silence descended. Matti wondered if Sofia was, like him, trying to furnish an imaginary picture of domestic life. Not much would change for Matti, materially speaking. The house was designed to hold multiple generations; the current Jay family rattled around in it, and if times had been prosperous they might have opened the dust-closed rooms and invited some of the closer cousins to live there.

After the wedding, he and Sofia would move into one of the larger rooms. Matti was getting better at imagining it. Sofia would be a valuable addition to his House, with her clear eye for fashion. She would fit into his family’s life. They liked her. He liked her.

But he looked down at her firm brows and the pretty braid of her hair, and nothing stirred within him. The pressure of her hand tucked through his arm did not make him feel both hot and cold at once. He could imagine kissing her, but the thought didn’t turn like a key in the lock of his jaw, leaving his lips parted and famished.

Which would have been fine—expected—even comforting, on one level—if his body had not so recently remembered what all those sensations were like.

It was not a long walk from the Coopers’ to Matti’s house. The Rose Quarter was trapped neatly by the bracket of the river Rozen from which it took its name, unable to creep outwards as the city grew; it remained the same handful of prestigious streets lined with townhouses standing elegantly shoulder to shoulder like a line of spectators at a horse race, all too polite to allow so much as a wisp of lace to intrude on their neighbour’s space. Sofia needed an escort about as much as she needed fashion advice. Still, Matti was doing the done thing. This was a chance for eyes to fall on the two of them, and for those eyes’ owners to remember that Matti Jay and Sofia Cooper were about to ally their Houses.

“I ran into Adrean yesterday,” Sofia said presently.

“How… did that go?”

“Oh, I’m as beautiful and precious a delicate wildflower as I ever was, and he remains just as devoted to rescuing me from the dire fate of a loveless, mercenary marriage.”

For a long time Matti had been operating under the assumption that Adrean knew Sofia rather better than Matti did. He had been even more wrong than he had realised. Sofia looked delicate on first glance, but one only had to spend a single conversation weathering the force of her eyebrows to realise that there were twenty more fitting adjectives in the D section of the dictionary alone.

Matti steeled himself and asked, “Did he say anything about the wedding itself? About challenging?”

Sofia smoothed fretfully at her scarf where the breeze had untucked it from its neat draping. She didn’t answer. Matti returned a nod of greeting from one of the senior clerks from the city council offices as they passed her on the footpath. They turned onto Matti’s street. A lamplighter had done one side of the street but hadn’t finished the other, giving the view a lopsided flush.

“I feel a bit of a failure,” Sofia said finally. “I honestly don’t think I could be more clear, but it’s like everything I say to him gets translated wrong and he hears, I’m playing aloof, I do love you really . And then I get angry and he says I look magnificent and, well, usually I walk away before I slap him. I hope your best man demolishes him,” she added, fierce.

“Yes.” Matti coughed. “So do I.”

“Maha willing.” Sofia touched her fingers to her wrist in a reflexive gesture. The gold chain that dwelled there was delicate as thread. Matti had never seen her without it, but hadn’t realised it might have religious significance.

Sofia followed his gaze and launched into a practiced explanation: the piece of jewellery had been bought when she was born, and dropped into a bottle of moonwater, where it had stayed for a year. At her first birthday the bracelet had been removed from the bottle, and then both bracelet and bottle set aside until her naming ceremony, where she’d donned the one and been the first to drink from the other.

“You drank straight moonwater at your naming?” Matti shook his head at the thought. He liked jenever, but he’d never been quite masochistic enough to develop a taste for the notoriously strong potato spirit.

“I did,” said Sofia with pride. “Mama gave me the world’s most elaborate talking-to about how I had to keep my face composed for the ritual, but apparently I still looked like I’d just sat down in a pile of horse manure.”

“I had the same talk before my naming. My mother doesn’t believe in gods, but she does believe in ceremonies. She says that shared behaviour is power, and that even though most of the rituals are weak versions of older, stronger things, as long as they still hold society knitted together, they should be followed.” Matti smiled. Nessanesh Jay lived right on the sceptical edge of the wide range of belief that ran through Glassport, but she delighted in ritual nonetheless. It only seemed paradoxical until you understood how much she enjoyed observing the currents of society, like a bargeman calculating the best way of navigating a river. In this city the depth of your faith was your own business. What mattered was how you acted.

Sofia looked up at Matti. “You never seemed like you had to be told to behave yourself, as a child.”

“I was clumsy, and nervous about it. Dropping the promise-cloth during a naming under Huna isn’t as bad as having your wedding sword-challenged, but it’s not a good sign.”

“Your mother has a point,” Sofia said thoughtfully. “Some Guilds already lean more lightly on the idea of the challenge than others, you know, and one day there’ll be someone who turns and laughs down the challenger in the middle of the Guildhall, and who goes ahead with the wedding anyway. Someone will be first.” Sofia sidestepped a puddle and a dull clinking sound came from the bag over her shoulder. Her voice lowered. “But that won’t be you, Matti, I think. And as long as I’m poised to take your House’s name, it won’t be me either. Neither of us can afford to be shunned as inauspicious.”

“Sometimes,” Matti said, “all I want is a single day where I don’t have to think about what I can afford .”

He felt himself misstep, the panic in his throat communicating itself somehow to his feet; he felt the moment when Sofia’s grip on his arm steadied him and carried him onwards. It was a rose-oil kind of moment and he was grateful for it, but his shoulders had gone tense at the realisation that such a thing could slip out of him.

Sofia said, abrupt, “It’s even worse than you’re telling anyone, isn’t it?”

Matti’s silence lasted long enough to bring them to a halt in front of his own house—not because he was about to deny it, but because he was surprised that she needed to ask the question. The negotiation of his engagement was the one part of House business that he’d been happy to leave entirely up to his parents, to the point where he didn’t even know how honest they’d been with Daniela and Raufe Cooper.

He knew the price that had been negotiated, though. For a moment he could hear Luca’s voice. You’ve paid for me? You own me?

Matti swallowed a sour, unpleasant feeling.

“It’s pretty fucking bad,” he said bluntly, watching her eyebrows. They twitched, but not in an insulted way.

“Then I’m glad I could help,” Sofia said, and then—oddly—burst out laughing, the kind of laughter that shook her whole body.

“You’re clinking,” Matti said, because he didn’t know what to say about the laughter.

“Oh, Maha, look at me. I don’t know what’s wrong. The whole thing’s just so…” Sofia took some gulps of breath and calmed down. She patted the bulky shoulder bag. “Gifts for your table. There’s a whole speech to go with them, but I’ll save it until we’re inside.”

The remnants of the laughter lit Sofia’s eyes, and there was a vivacious shape to her mouth that Matti liked. All of a sudden it seemed important that he should like it; that he prove himself able to feel the way he should, about the person he should. On the uppermost step of the townhouse he turned Sofia with a hand at her shoulder, feeling nearly as inept as if she were a sword, and searched her eyes hungrily for those glints.

Sofia tilted her face up to meet his gaze fully. She looked startled but not displeased, and Matti leaned down and kissed her before he could talk himself out of it.

This close, Sofia smelled thinly of cloves and mirth-flower. Her mouth was gentle and welcoming, and after a moment she put a hand at the side of Matti’s face and kissed him back.

It was fine. It was perfectly fine.

When the kiss broke Matti took a breath, angry with himself in an indefinable way, and straightened up again.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” said Sofia.

“I’m sorry,” said Matti at once.

“No, don’t be.” Her eyebrows wavered, thoughtful, and then she smiled. “We should get used to the idea.”

Somehow her brisk tone was far better than if she’d tepidly attempted to assure him it had been nice . Matti’s annoyance collapsed into gratitude.

“Even so,” he said. “Maybe I should have waited until after dinner.”

Sofia laughed and shook her bag to elicit more clinking. “I’ll take it as a compliment that you didn’t need Maha’s courage to find me worth kissing.”

Matti rubbed the first two fingers of his right hand against the side of his leg as he opened the front door with the other. After dinner wouldn’t have worked, regardless.

He had plans for after dinner.