Page 33 of The Thief and the Traitor Bride

Cas raised an eyebrow, leaning back and crossing his arms over his chest. “I’ve been busier,” he said. “I’m off soon.”

Nore smiled. She’d hoped she’d timed it right, but who knew the intricacies of pub schedules?

“Can I buy you dinner?” Nore asked.

He laughed, and she wanted to bottle the sound. “I should be asking you that, I think.”

Nore shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

He let her buy him dinner. They walked side by side along the harbor, eating hot, spiced meat wrapped in thin bread, drizzled with sauce. “It’s Nadiran,” he’d told her. “My grandmother used to make them. It reminded her of home.”

“I thought you grew up in Idistra?”

“I did,” he said. “My father—he was a Nadiran trader in Luthar on business when he met my mother.” He licked a drop of sauce from his thumb. “My grandmother joined him and lived with us when I was a boy.”

Nore carefully did not ask about how things were now in Idistra. “So if your mother is Idistran, and your father is Nadiran, how did you end up here?”

Cas paused, and Nore sensed the change in tone. “I was thirteen when the war started. The raids… they were terrible, and they were close to home. Luthos, our High Lord, put restrictions on adults leaving—anyone could be conscripted—but my parents wanted me out.” He said it flatly, like he’d explained it so many times with the emotions stripped away that it was now just a statement of fact.

“Cas,” she said softly, laying a hand on his arm. Cas didn’t elaborate, but that didn’t lessen the obvious horror.

“It’s okay,” he said, a touch softer, looking away.

“It’s not,” Nore said.

“No,” he agreed. He cleared his throat, continuing: “There was no chance to send me to family in Nadira, but Lindan was a possibility—it was normal, even in peacetime, to send noble children to Lindan or other continental nations for educational purposes. But space was very limited, and I wasn’t noble enough to foster with the others—”

“Not noble enough?”

He cut a glance over at her. They were near the water’s edge now, watching the dockworkers secure a ship into the next berth. The air was heavy with the smell of brine, weighted with rain not yet rolling in from the sea.

“My mother,” he said. “She was a cousin to the High Lord, but she gave up her title when she married my father.”

“Ah.” She hesitated, thinking, and then said out loud what she never had before: “I’m a lord’s bastard.”

Cas studied her face, like he was figuring out what was best to say.

“It’s fine,” Nore said. “He’s dead now.”

“I don’t know if that makes it fine,” Cas said carefully.

She shrugged. “Between us, I suppose we make one full noble.”

He snorted at that. “I suppose we do.”

“But back to you. You didn’t foster with Lindle nobility.”

“No,” Cas said. He smirked for a second, then withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket. He leaned in, wiping the corner of Nore’s mouth. She flushed, looking down, trying very hard not to think of the way his thumb had not quite been covered by the handkerchief, how the heat of his skin had caught on her lower lip. “A friend of my aunt’s had a bed open in the theater dormitory. I was permitted to come and train as a dancer, if I demonstrated talent, or work in some other fashion if I did not. An indenture, if you will.”

She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to imagine how it would feel to have nowhere else to go, to have the world razed at your back. “And you were good enough to stay at the theater.”

He shrugged, dropping his hand. “For now.”

“And your family?” Nore asked. “Has there been… any news?”

Cas was quiet for a moment, looking out at sea. “They’re alive,” Cas said quietly. “The last I heard from them, they told me not to come back. That there’s nothing good left in Idistra.” He shook his head. “I have to hope that I’ll find them again when it’s over.”

“What do you suppose you’ll do then?”