Page 92 of The Thief and the Traitor Bride

“—don’t know if she will come—”

“—the color of his shirt, I swear he has no taste to speak of—”

“—and her daughter, only newly married, already running around on that old bastard—”

Nore dismissed most of it as common gossip, and though she loved gossip, it was perhaps not what she was after now. She took a couple of slow steps, pretending to be admiring the tapestry on the wall.

“Nore.”

She turned. Gail stood behind her, his right hand fidgeting. “Good evening,” Nore said. “Is it Lord Borrel in this context?”

Gail’s smile flickered. “Unfortunately not,” he said.

That interested her—titles passed by choice, as far as Caspian had explained to her; it was like how Audra Khari did not inherit her father’s title after her ill-advised marriage. Gail’s parents had chosen not to pass the title to him, for whatever reason.

“I suppose I can’t ask to meet your uncle, under the circumstances,” Nore said, turning back to her tapestry. She knew Nestrias was here, as both he and his younger sister had put themselves forward for the High Lady’s hand. He was the only of the High Sovereigns to include himself, with the understanding he would step down if chosen; all others had sent high-ranking nobility.

She ran through the list again in her head, the suitors she’d need to investigate: Nestria: Teineck-Achers and Teineck; Eprain: Aurelian, Senson, Trent; Luthar: Knight, Picantor-Donan. Then there were the unknowns, for Cleoc Strata and Scaela.

“It would not be in good taste, no,” Gail said. He cleared his throat. “If you have need of… a room,” he said softly, “for more delicate conversations, I’ve arranged for one of the clerk’s offices to be left unlocked.” He inclined his head to one of the halls that ran down from the large ballroom. “Down that way.”

Nore raised an eyebrow. She did not often do something so precarious as drawing someone away from the party. An absence was far more likely to be noticed than an intimate conversation. “I will keep that in mind,” she said.

“Then I’ll send you a card tonight—we shall meet for breakfast and discuss,” Gail said. He did not leave room for her to protest or agree before he glided away, weaving through the crowd back toward the dais.

Nore fought the urge to go find him, to insist she was done gathering information for him if he was going to threaten her cover. The association was growing too dangerous to outweigh any advantages Celestine could see in an alliance between the two—and when Nore returned home, she was going to report just that.

She shook the conversation off and went back to the crowd. It seemed the delegations had positioned themselves close to the dais, so Nore went in that direction. Annoyingly, she wished for Caspian—he would probably know what at least one of the suitors looked like and could point her in the right direction.

Instead, Nore had to rely on herself. So she did just that: she wove from conversation to conversation, making introductions, talking about wine, her accent, the weather, the decoration of the room, her accent again, the ever-present and uncanny noise of the wind howling outside. Her hand was kissed, her dress complimented; in the jaunty pattern of a party, she was passed from person to person until she was finally standing in front of a tall, uncomfortable woman who kept shifting her weight back and forth. Her hair was dark as pitch, but Gail was right on one count: she was very, very pale.

“And how did you come to celebrate the festival here?” Nore asked, turning to Jessa Picantor-Donan, the second of the Luthrite suitors. She positioned herself just so, starting the gentle process of extricating the woman from the rest of the Luthrite delegation, of getting her alone.

Jessa smiled thinly. “Duty,” she said shortly. “And you?”

Nore gestured with her wine. “Much the same—I’m here for business.”

“Oh? What business is that?”

And the opening arose, easy as anything. Nore’s smile widened. “Tell me, Jessa: Do you like wine?”

It didn’t take much after that. Jessa did like wine and was all too happy to follow Nore to a table, where she took two decanters; another two minutes and they were installed in the corner of one of the sitting rooms off the ballroom, the glasses spread across the table. Fifteen minutes and an uncounted number of sips later, Picantor-Donan was loose-limbed and smiling, sitting back in her chair, with a more thorough understanding (until she sobered up, of course) of continental wines.

She was also, quite unabashedly, flirting with Nore.

Nore leaned in, angling her chair closer. She topped up Jessa’s glass. “But back to you,” she said. She took in the scabbed scuffs on Jessa’s fists, the tailoring of her tunic. “You said duty brought you here? Are you guarding some lordling or another?”

Jessa laughed, the sound boisterous and clear, and aimed a smile at Nore. “You really don’t know anything about Idistra, do you?” she asked. Nore’s accent had already come up in conversation no less than three times, so it was easy to feign innocence.

“Truly,” she said, “I know nothing.”

Jessa sighed, tipping her head back. “I’m here,” she said, “to marry the High Lady.”

This time, the surprise in Nore’s voice wasn’t fake. “Are you?”

“If I get my way,” Jessa amended, tipping her wine back. “That’s what I’m supposed to do, anyway.”

“And how’s that going?” Nore asked, pitching her voice lower, setting a hand on the table between them.