Dissolution
The first thing Hailesa Grosvenor thought when Kian Lozanth told her he loved another woman was that she would no longer have to attend tea with his mother on Thursdays. The second was that this was probably not the reaction expected of a woman whose engagement had just been publicly dissolved three days before graduation. So she kept it to herself.
Across the receiving room, Kian stood rigid beneath the enormous painted portrait of his grandfather, one hand curled at his side as though he were preparing for battle instead of announcing what half the academy had known for months. Beside him stood Serise Franchesi, glossy chestnut curls gathered with a pale blue ribbon, fingers laced through Kian’s as if the gesture needed to be seen to be believed. Hailesa lowered her gaze to their joined hands, then back to Kian’s face.
He swallowed. “Hailesa.”
“Yes?”
His expression tightened, and she wondered, not for the first time this morning, whether she had missed some cue she was supposed to answer to. Perhaps he expected her to speak first. She let her eyes move once around the room instead — the Marquis and Marchioness of Lozanth on the long sofa beneath the eastern windows, his face ten years older than it had looked yesterday, hers arranged like a woman who’d been served spoiled milk in a priceless cup and told to drink it anyway. Her own parents sat opposite. Her mother, serene — which was dangerous. Her father, not serene at all — which was considerably more dangerous, one boot planted forward, both hands resting on the silver wolf’s head of a cane he didn’t need and had brought anyway, because the wolf’s head was heavy and he liked the weight of it in an argument.
Her brothers had been forbidden from attending. Both of them — though Valen, typically, hadn’t needed to be told twice. He’d sent word instead that he’d be at his desk at the Ministry if anyone required him, as if the dissolution of his sister’s engagement were a matter that might reasonably wait for the end of a working day. Her sister Mirelle had not technically been forbidden, only warned that if she came within a hundred paces of House Lozanth carrying her dueling staff, their mother would personally throw her in the Grosvenor pond. Mirelle had decided, wisely, not to test whether that was figurative.
Two solicitors and an academy representative rounded out the room, along with an elderly man from the Royal Office of Noble Contracts, whose presence alone told Hailesa this was not going to be an embarrassing confession. Kian meant to end it formally.
“You were saying?” she said.
A flush climbed his neck. “I said that Serise and I have fallen in love.”
“Yes. I heard that part.”
“I don’t want you to think —”
“That you have been sleeping with Lady Franchesi?”
A strangled sound came from the sofa. Kian went scarlet. Serise’s eyes went wide, and Lady Lozanth went very still indeed. Hailesa considered, a beat too late, whether that had been rude. Probably. Her etiquette instructor would have recommended conducting an improper attachment instead. But they were all adults, and everyone in this room had known for months.
The affair had started sometime after Midwinter — possibly earlier. Hailesa had been certain since early Frostwane, the night Kian missed a scheduled supper and sent an apology claiming he’d been reviewing accounts with his father’s steward. She’d spent that same evening with the steward. Reviewing the accounts. Kian had been at the Lantern District with Serise instead, and the strange part — the part that still unsettled her when she let herself think about it — was that the discovery hadn’t broken anything. She’d waited for the grief to arrive. Rage, humiliation, something suitably catastrophic. Instead she’d stared at the report her attendant had reluctantly handed her and thought, so that explains why he’s been smiling lately, then gone back to her notes on tenant irrigation rights. For weeks afterward she’d wondered if something was wrong with her.
Kian was staring at her now as though she’d slapped him. “You didn’t need to say it like that.”
“My apologies.”
Her mother covered her mouth. Hailesa suspected it was not for the reason everyone assumed.
Serise looked between them. “We didn’t mean for anyone to be hurt.”
“I don’t believe you did,” Hailesa said, and watched that land harder than the accusation had — Serise blinking, caught off guard by simple honesty in a room built for careful phrasing.
There had always been something disarming about Serise. At the academy she’d floated through the halls trailing friends and laughter loud enough to turn heads, remembered every servant’s birthday, once spent an entire afternoon helping a first-year hunt down a lost rabbit. Foolish, maybe. Certainly romantic. Never cruel. Which meant Kian had told her an edited version of the engagement — we were promised as children, true; there was never love between us, also true, though Hailesa had once believed fondness might eventually harden into something sturdier; and somewhere in there, unspoken but plainly felt, Hailesa only ever cared about becoming Marchioness. That would explain the look Serise sometimes gave her. Not hostile. Pitying. How fascinating.
Kian stepped forward. “I know this puts you in a difficult position.”
She nearly laughed. Twelve years of training kept her face still instead, her hands folding neatly over her skirt. “Does it?”
“Hailesa.”
“Forgive me. Continue.”
“You have spent years preparing for Lozanth.”
“Twelve.”
Something flickered across his face — guilt, maybe, or the first honest thing he’d offered all morning. Good. At least he could count.
“I know,” he said.
Did he? She wondered whether he knew about the four mornings a week she’d risen before dawn to drill Lozanth territorial law before sword practice. Whether he knew she could recite production averages for every major grain district in his family’s holdings, the names of the senior household staff, his aunts’ birthdays, his grandmother’s medical limitations, the wine preferences of seventeen neighboring nobles, the tariff terms on the western trade road, and exactly how many silver marks the northern estates had lost to flooding two years ago. Whether he knew Lady Lozanth had spent seven consecutive Thursdays teaching her to host a formal luncheon because she disliked Hailesa’s “military mannerisms.” Probably not. Kian had been excused from those lessons — he was the heir, he had other responsibilities — and Hailesa had quietly absorbed several of those too.
She looked past him, out the tall windows, to early summer sunlight spilling across the Lozanth gardens. Graduation was in three days. Her final examination had been yesterday. After the ceremony she was meant to move into full-time residence at the estate, marriage negotiations concluding before autumn, the wedding tentatively set for Bloomtide. Nine months of dress fittings and household transition meetings and regional tours and formal introductions, three more of them under Lady Lozanth’s supervision.
Her gaze slid to her former future mother-in-law, mouth compressed into a flat line, and something small and dangerously close to joy moved through her before she could stop it.
Three more months of Thursday tea.
She crushed it. There would be time for inappropriate emotions later.
“Kian,” the Marquis said quietly, “perhaps you should finish what you gathered us here to say.”
Kian straightened. “Yes.” He looked at her, and for the first time uncertainty crossed his face — as if this had gone differently in whatever version he’d rehearsed, as if she’d been supposed to cry by now. “Hailesa Grosvenor, I formally petition for the dissolution of our engagement contract.”
There it was. The room went very quiet. Even her father moved — only his thumb, stroking once over the silver wolf.
Hailesa looked at him and, unbidden, saw him at nine, sulking beside a fountain while their fathers hammered out the contract. At thirteen, sneaking sugared almonds into her hand through an endless royal banquet. At sixteen, refusing to dance because he hated being watched. At nineteen, telling her she looked strange with a sword strapped over a ball gown. At twenty-three, smiling at Serise Franchesi in a way he had never once smiled at her. There should have been tragedy in that collection. Instead there was only a peculiar, unbecoming sense of closure. Kian had never been cruel to her — lazy, self-absorbed, uncomfortable whenever anyone praised her swordsmanship, but not cruel. They had simply spent years walking toward a marriage neither of them had been brave enough to question, and he had finally questioned it, badly, and after starting an affair to do it.
Still. “You are correct,” she said. “I will.”
Serise looked at her — not pity now, something closer to uncertainty.
“I didn’t want it to happen this way,” Kian said.
She almost asked how he had wanted it to happen, then decided she didn’t care, and found the not-caring unexpectedly freeing. “So long as the necessary documents are completed, I see no reason for further difficulty.”
“The compensation clauses,” Lady Lozanth said, eyes sharpening, and both solicitors developed a sudden and profound interest in their papers.
Hailesa had nearly forgotten. Her mother had not. The original contract carried substantial penalties for unilateral dissolution absent misconduct on the other side — land rights, investment reimbursement, a ceremonial estate, several trade concessions, and, if she remembered correctly, twelve breeding horses. She remembered the horses specifically because Mirelle had spent years insisting they were the best part of the whole arrangement.
The Marquis closed his eyes. “The clauses will be honored.”
“Naturally,” her mother said, her voice velvet, and Hailesa nearly felt sorry for House Lozanth. Nearly.
“How substantial are the clauses?” Kian asked, and no one answered right away, which was not encouraging.
His father turned toward him slowly. “You don’t know?”
“The contract was negotiated when we were children.”
“It was amended when you reached your majority.”
“I remember.”
“Do you?”
“Father —”
Hailesa decided she had witnessed enough. She dipped into a formal bow. “My lord. My lady.” Then, to Serise: “Lady Franchesi.”
Serise startled. “Hailesa —”
“Lady Grosvenor,” Kian corrected automatically, and the whole room seemed to hear it land — some habits, apparently, survived betrayal. His ears went red.
“Lady Grosvenor,” Serise said, catching herself. “I… I hope someday you can forgive us.”
There were kinder answers and crueler ones. Hailesa settled on the truth. “There is nothing I need from either of you now.” Then she bowed again and walked out — through the receiving room doors, down the corridor, past three footmen, across the central hall, through the enormous front doors of Lozanth House, down twelve marble steps to the waiting carriage, where Aeron was leaning against the door in his black-and-silver Crown Mage-Knight uniform, very obviously not on duty.
She stopped. “You were told not to come.”
“I didn’t.”
“You are standing outside their house.”
“I’m standing on the street. The Crown owns the street.”
“Aeron.”
“I didn’t go inside.”
The footman opened the carriage door. Aeron’s eyes moved over her face, and the humor dropped out of his all at once. “Are you all right?”
There it was — the question everyone would ask for the next month. She opened her mouth. Nothing came.
“If he hurt you —”
“No.”
“If Serise —”
“No.”
“Mother said I couldn’t challenge him, but technically —”
“Aeron.”
She looked back at Lozanth House, windows gleaming in the sun, and thought about twelve years. Twelve years of preparation. Twelve years of becoming somebody’s future wife. Twelve years of Thursdays. Then she turned back to her brother.
“I don’t have tea with Lady Lozanth next Thursday.”
He stared at her. Something trembled loose in her chest, and then it escaped — a small laugh first, and when she pressed her fingers over her mouth to stop it, that only made it worse. “I don’t have to attend her seasonal embroidery salon. I don’t have to spend three hours every fifth day answering Kian’s correspondence because he refuses to open his own letters. I don’t have to learn which spoon his great-aunt prefers for citrus pudding.” Aeron’s mouth had started to twitch by the second one; by the third he was laughing too, and she grabbed his sleeve. “I don’t have to plan the wedding.”
That did it. The laughter came hard enough to hurt, and he hauled her into a hug, and she laughed against his uniform until actual tears came, though not for any reason the people inside Lozanth House would have guessed.
Eventually he pulled back, grin gone wicked. “Do you know what this means?”
She wiped beneath her eyes. “No Thursday tea?”
“Besides that.”
“I can sleep until seven.”
“Scandalous.”
“Half past seven.”
“Father may disown you.”
She laughed again, and then he asked the question that stopped her cold. “So what are you going to do now?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. The street suddenly seemed enormous. Behind her lay Lozanth House and the life that had been planned for her since childhood; ahead lay nothing at all — no schedule, no engagement, no wedding, no title waiting at the end of a carefully built path. For the first time she could remember, nobody had told her what came next, and the exhilaration of that faltered the moment she actually looked at it.
Aeron’s face softened. “You don’t have to know today.”
She glanced toward the carriage. “No.” She breathed in — summer air, horse leather, sun-warmed stone. Freedom, apparently, smelled remarkably ordinary. “No,” she said again, and climbed inside, and for once in her life there was nowhere she was required to be.
Hailesa Grosvenor found the sensation absolutely terrifying.
And, beneath that terror, exhilarating.