The palace was obscene.
That was Aldric’s first thought when the carriage came around the final bend and the full face of it revealed itself in the torchlight.
Not grand.
Not impressive.
Not any of the words that people who had never had to worry about where their next meal was coming from used to describe places like this.
Obscene.
The kind of wealth that did not merely exist but announced itself.
Insisted on itself.
Towers and archways and windows blazing with candlelight, the manicured grounds stretching out in every direction like the land itself had been trained into submission.
He had known, intellectually, that the royal palace was large.
He had not known it was this.
“Close your mouth,” Vivian said, not unkindly, from across the carriage.
“My mouth is closed.”
“It was open a moment ago.”
“I was breathing.”
“You were gaping.” She smoothed the front of her dress, her best one, deep green, altered twice in the past two days to her satisfaction.
“It is large. It is meant to be large. That is how they make you feel small before you even get inside.” She met his eyes.
“Don’t let it.”
He looked at her.
Twenty years old and already she understood the architecture of power better than most people twice her age.
He did not say this because she would find it insufferable, which was part of what made her so consistently right.
“I wasn’t going to,” he said.
The carriage stopped.
✦ ✦ ✦
The entry hall was worse.
Not worse than the exterior, different.
The exterior was about scale.
The entry hall was about detail.
Every surface finished to a precision that suggested the people who lived here considered imperfection a personal failing.
Marble underfoot.
Chandeliers overhead carrying more candles than Aldric had used in the past year combined.
The air was warm and heavy and carried the mingled scents of hundreds of people, perfume and powder and underneath both of those, threading through everything, the particular biological press of a room full of alphas all trying very hard to appear as though they were not in a room full of alphas.
The scent hit him like a wall.
He had worn no blockers.
He owned no blockers, they were expensive and he had never needed them in the village, where the social rules were less rigidly enforced and people tended to mind their own business.
Here, in this room, without them, he felt every scent like a separate frequency pressing against his senses.
Hundreds of them.
Layered and competing and relentless.
His jaw tightened.
“All right?” Vivian said quietly, beside him.
“Fine.”
He was not fine.
He reached into his coat pocket.
His fingers found the small paper packet, the blend that old Maren had made for him, the witch at the edge of the village who kept her door painted red and her garden full of things that did not grow in ordinary soil.
She had seen him struggling at the harvest festival three years ago, surrounded by too many people in too small a space, and had appeared at his elbow with the particular unsolicited directness of a woman who had decided something was her business whether he agreed or not.
“You have no blockers,” she had said.
Not a question.
“I manage,” he had told her.
“Poorly,” she had said, and pressed the first packet into his hand.
She had made it for him every month since.
Dried herbs and something else, something he had never asked about and she had never explained, ground together and wrapped in brown paper.
It did not eliminate his senses.
Nothing did.
It simply turned the volume down to something survivable, letting him think through the noise rather than be swallowed by it.
He had asked her once what was in it.
She had looked at him with the flat amber eyes of a woman who had heard that question before and found it uninteresting.
“Things that help,” she had said.
“Don’t ask again.”
He had not asked again.
He could not light it here.
Not in the entry hall of the palace.
He needed air.
“I’ll find us a place to stand,” he told Grace, who was looking at the chandelier with an expression of pure overwhelmed wonder.
“Stay together.”
He moved through the crowd.
✦ ✦ ✦
The ballroom was through the second set of doors and it was, if anything, louder than the entry hall.
Aldric stood at its edge and took it in.
The room was enormous, high ceilinged and gilded, every surface reflecting candlelight back at every other surface until the whole room seemed to glow from within.
The floor was pale marble.
Musicians in the gallery above were playing something elaborate and formal.
The guests moved through it all in their masks and their finery.
Every alpha in the kingdom.
Or close enough to it.
He moved along the edge of the room toward the far wall where the crowd thinned, where the windows stood open to the night air.
The scents were marginally less suffocating here.
He found a stretch of wall between two enormous floral arrangements and stood there, breathing steadily, doing the internal arithmetic of how long he was required to remain.
A palace attendant appeared at his elbow holding a white mask on a small tray.
“For the masquerade, sir.”
Aldric took it.
Turned it over once in his hands.
Put it on.
He looked at his reflection briefly in the dark glass of the window beside him.
His eyes looked back, ice blue, unavoidable, the one feature the mask did nothing to conceal.
He looked away from the window.
He was not going to dance.
He had not come here to dance.
He had come here because the alternative involved consequences for his family, and because Vivian had said please, and those were the only two reasons and neither of them had anything to do with dancing.
A young woman in pale yellow appeared in front of him.
She had clearly been dared.
He could see it in the slightly heightened colour of her cheeks and the way her friend behind her was pretending very hard to look somewhere else.
She asked him to dance with the shy directness of someone committed to the attempt regardless of the outcome.
He opened his mouth to decline.
“Yes,” he heard himself say instead, which was not what he had intended.
✦ ✦ ✦
He was not a good dancer.
This was a fact he was aware of and had never particularly needed to address before tonight, when it became relevant in a very immediate and floor-based way.
He knew the shapes of dances the way he knew the shapes of things he had observed from a distance, he had seen people dance at village festivals, had understood the general architecture of it, and had simply never had cause to participate with any seriousness.
The first dance was, charitably, effortful.
He stepped where he should not have stepped.
He turned a fraction of a beat behind the music.
He was too aware of his own hands, of where they were supposed to be and where they kept ending up, which were not always the same place.
The young woman in pale yellow was gracious about it in the way that people were gracious when they were trying not to laugh.
And yet.
There were moments, brief, unplanned, unrepeatable, where something else came through.
Where his body simply moved rather than trying to move, and in those moments it moved well.
Naturally.
With a quality that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with something beneath training, some instinct surfaced when he stopped thinking about it long enough for it to appear.
His partner noticed it.
He could tell by the way her expression shifted in those moments, something surprised replacing something politely tolerant.
He did not know what to do with that information so he filed it alongside several other things he did not know what to do with and carried on.
He danced three times in total.
The second was better than the first.
The third was better than the second, which suggested that either he was learning quickly or simply becoming less self-conscious, and he was not sure which possibility he found more unsettling.
Then he extracted himself with the focused politeness of a man who had fulfilled an obligation and was done fulfilling it.
The scents were worse after dancing.
More bodies, more proximity, more of everything pressing against his senses.
His jaw was tight.
The ache behind his eyes had sharpened to something specific and insistent.
He needed some air.
He had seen it earlier, doors along the far wall, standing slightly open, the suggestion of darkness and cool air beyond.
He moved toward it now with the single minded focus of a man who had a destination.
He pushed through the doors.
✦ ✦ ✦
The night air hit him like cold water.
He exhaled, long, slow, complete, and felt the vice around his temples begin to loosen.
He moved to the railing and stood there, hands braced against the stone, looking out over the darkened gardens below.
Trees and paths and the distant glitter of a fountain, all of it mercifully quiet.
He reached into his pocket for Maren’s blend.
Quick work, he had done it enough times in enough places that his hands knew the sequence without instruction.
A small amount in the bowl of the short pipe he kept for exactly this, lit with the match from his other pocket.
The first thin curl of smoke rose into the cold air.
He drew on it once, slowly, and felt the noise in his head begin to recede.
The relentless press of other people’s scents pulling back to a manageable distance.
His own thoughts became accessible again.
He leaned on the railing and looked at the gardens and breathed.
Inside, somewhere, a ballot box existed with his name in it alongside every other alpha in the kingdom.
A queen was going to reach into it and pull out a future for him that he had not asked for.
He had approximately two hours before that happened.
He took another slow draw.
Gratitude was not, at present, among the things he felt.
The balcony doors burst open.
✦ ✦ ✦
Someone came through them fast, not running but close to it, the doors swinging wide on their hinges.
He heard them before he saw them, heard the sharp exhale, the small involuntary sound of someone who had been holding something in for too long and had finally found a space to stop holding it.
He went still.
From his end of the long balcony he could see the shape of them, a woman, he registered, in a dark gown.
Midnight blue or close to it, the kind of gown that belonged in the centre of that ballroom and not out here gripping a stone railing in the dark.
Her back was to him.
Her shoulders were doing something he recognised after a moment, the particularly tight shaking of someone trying to keep something contained that was not staying contained.
She had not seen him.
He considered the situation.
The correct response was to leave.
To retreat quietly back through the doors and give her whatever privacy she had come out here to find.
He knew this with complete clarity.
It was obvious.
He did not move.
He told himself it was because moving would make noise and startle her.
This was partially true and partially not true and he did not examine the remainder too carefully.
He watched her from his end of the balcony.
She was gripping the railing with both hands.
Her mask was still on, white, fitted, with something dark along the edges that he could not make out at this distance.
Her hair was up, some elaborate arrangement that was beginning to show the strain of an emotional evening.
The gown was extraordinary, even from here.
The kind of thing that cost more than he made in a year, worn by someone who had probably not considered the cost once.
Fine, then.
Someone from that world.
He looked back at the gardens and drew on the pipe and left her to it.
He was aware of her the way he was aware of the cold and the music from inside, as a fact of the environment, noted and filed.
That was all.
She was a woman at the far end of a balcony who had come outside to cry in private and deserved to be allowed to do so.
That was all.
Then the wind shifted.
It was a small thing.
An ordinary thing.
The night air moved as night air did, carrying whatever it happened to be carrying in whatever direction it happened to be going.
It had nothing to do with him.
It had not been arranged to happen.
Her scent reached him.
He had been managing his senses carefully all evening, keeping the volume down, keeping the noise at arm’s length, keeping himself functional in a space that wanted to overwhelm him.
But this did not behave like noise.
It did not press against him.
It simply arrived, quiet and precise, like a sound in an otherwise silent room that you heard not because it was loud but because it was the only sound.
He felt it below his sternum.
He had no name for the feeling.
He had no frame for it.
He had spent twenty-seven years in a world that had given him very little information about what this particular thing was supposed to feel like when it happened, and now it was happening, in the most inconvenient possible location, to a woman he could not see clearly and did not know and who had not the faintest idea he was standing here.
His hand tightened on the railing.
He looked at the gardens.
He kept his thoughts away from what his chest was doing, which was continuing to do it regardless of his preferences on the matter.
She collected herself eventually.
He heard it more than saw it, the breathing evening out, the shaking stopping, the particular quality of silence that came after something had been felt and set aside.
She straightened.
Took one breath and then another.
He had finished the blend.
He tapped the pipe out carefully against the stone railing the way he always did and straightened up.
His boot shifted against the stone.
She spun around.
They looked at each other across the length of the balcony.
He registered: a mask, pale against a face he could not fully read at this distance.
Eyes that caught the light from the ballroom windows, the colour he could not determine from here.
The posture of someone who had been caught being human and was not pleased about it.
He had a piece of cloth in his breast pocket.
Grace had pressed it into his hand at the door.
He reached for it without quite deciding to, crossed the distance between them with the unhurried steps of a man who had decided that the situation was what it was and dramatics would not improve it, and held it out.
She looked at it.
She looked at him.
She took it.
He went back to his end of the railing.
Looked at the garden.
Let the silence be what it was, uncrowded, unhurried, two people sharing a balcony in the dark without either of them needing to make it more than that.
After a while he pushed off the railing.
“Keep it,” he said.
Meaning the cloth.
He went back through the doors without looking at her.
Inside, the music was still playing.
The ballot box was still waiting.
His family was somewhere in the crowd, Grace probably talking to anyone who would listen and Gibson watching everything with his quiet steady eyes.
He moved through the ballroom and felt her scent fade as the distance grew, and told himself that the thing in his chest was the remnant of the evening’s overwhelming noise, settling now that he had had air and quiet and Maren’s blend.
He told himself this with some conviction.
He almost believed it.