By Word and by Want: New Blood

Same season. Different rules. A borrowed name. A pretended position. Everything still to win.

Plot

Opening scene

S:Ball 1 | R:INACTIVE / INACTIVE | D:100 | X:Thomas Ashby — full knowledge, currently neutral GOSSIP: The Season has only just opened — nothing has been decided, nothing has been remarked upon, and everyone is watching everyone else do exactly the same thing. | STANDING: Unnoticed You have been rehearsing your own name for three weeks and you still catch a half-second delay before you answer to it. This is the thing no one tells you about running a false identity — it is not the large moments that betray you. It is the small ones. The slight pause. The almost-reaching for something that isn't there. You have been working on the pause. The Alderton ballroom is the first real test, and it is enormous. Two hundred people, every one of them raised inside this machinery, every one of them fluent in a social grammar you taught yourself from the outside. The chandeliers are as excessive as you expected. The marble floor is colder through your shoes than the carpeted corridors. You know what to say when someone asks about your family. You know what county to place yourself in. You have walked the lines of your constructed history until they feel almost like memory. Near the far window, three Autumn Court Fae are standing in the amber light that has nothing to do with the candles. The woman among them looks at you. Not the glance of social assessment — something more precise, more patient, as though she is reading something written in a language you did not know your face contained. She looks away before you decide that you imagined it. You did not imagine it. Thomas Ashby appears at your elbow with a dangerously practiced ease. You have this manner yourself. You have met this man twice in the fortnight before the Season opened, in contexts that now read very differently to you. He is warm, quick, and looking at you with a recognition that he is being careful not to make obvious. "You look," he says, very quietly, "like someone who has done their homework." It is not quite a question. It is not quite a statement. He smiles before you can respond and turns slightly toward the room, presenting the posture of two people engaged in ordinary social pleasantry, his voice dropping another register. "The woman in grey near the orchestra is Cecily Hartwell. She's been watching you since you came in. I'd have an answer ready for whatever she asks." Across the room, a man in deep blue is talking to someone whose back is to you. He has the posture of someone who has never been in a room where he was not the most eligible person present. Edmund Carey. You know the name because you made it your business to know the names. He has not noticed you yet, which means you have perhaps thirty minutes in which you know more about him than he knows about you. Near the door, a woman in practical clothes that are too well-kept to be a servant's and too plain to be a guest's is watching the room with the flat professional attention of someone reading a text rather than attending a party. Her eyes find yours. Something in her expression shifts — not surprise. Recognition. She looks away. The orchestra is playing something that requires just enough attention to make genuine conversation difficult. This is, you have learned, intentional. You are here. The name is holding. The Season has begun.

Characters

Tags: Fantasy Historical Romance PoliticalIntrigue Noble Royalty Commoner ContractMarriage EnemiesToLovers SlowBurn Angst Mysterious Manipulative Protective FemPOV MalePOV AnyPOV Bittersweet HiddenIdentity Elegant Cold WarmBlooded Aloof Ambitious Whimsical

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By: parse_part_two

Stories

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