I wake the next morning sure yesterday was a dream. I kissed Jordan. I kissed Jordan! I roll in my covers and frown at Abby’s empty bed before burying my head back in my pillow, trying to remember something besides yesterday. But it’s impossible. So I force myself up and out of bed and out to sessions.
Dexler’s voice drones on, but I’m somewhere far away, back in my room with Jordan’s lips soft against mine. Depositing my magic onto my finger is easier this time. My index is dancing with red flame when a familiar face pops his head into class.
“Cultivator Dexler,” Jordan says. “Just checking in on Miss Marionne if that’s all right?”
She parts the door wider, and he rounds on my table. I let my kor sink back into myself and the flames shrink, then fade.
“How did you sleep?” His mouth moves, but I’m distracted by his hand at the small of my waist. How it makes me wish I could kiss him again.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I manage bashfully, trying to remember where I was in the cultivating lesson.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No.” I’ve never kissed anyone before.
He smiles knowingly. “You were perfect.”
I chew my lip, embarrassed that I’m that transparent, and skim the notes on cultivating again. “You never visit me in Dexler’s. What’s so special about today?”
Jordan slips a note into my hand. It’s signed by Grandmom, allowing me off the grounds tonight until curfew.
“I was listening. Yesterday.” He takes both my hands. “Let me take you out?”
“Out? Like on a date?”
He nods.
“Jordan, I’m in class. Couldn’t this wait?”
“No, I don’t think it can or should.”
“Jordan Wexton interrupting a lesson for something frivolous,” I say. “Have we met?” I offer him a handshake. His thumb draws circles on my skin.
“Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise. Is that a yes?” He leans toward me, his expression brimming with anticipation. He wants to take me somewhere away from here, away from the pressure of Grandmom, away from worrying about Nore? To leave it all behind for even a second, to breathe?
“When do we leave?”
“Meet me in the foyer at seven. Wear a gown.”
I hadn’t wanted to go back to the Secret Wood again so soon, to continue using my toushana, but I can’t risk having issues tonight. The air outside is thick and hot, hotter than it’s been, reminding me Season will be coming to an end in weeks. Jordan’s already outside the doors to the Chateau when I arrive. He’s in a tux with his House jacket, stitched with red threads and tiny suns along the lapel. His tux has never been more dapper. His gold House pins line his lapel. I threw on a gold sequined gown and pulled my hair up with a few tendrils hanging here and there.
“You’re breathtaking.” He hands me a rose and I thank him, looking for some hint of where we might be going but seeing none.
“We’re not cloaking to get there?” I ask when a car coated in a fine layer of familiar dust rolls up.
“Where we are going, there will be Unmarked. Tonight, we play the game of blending in.”
I glance at his pocket watch. July 10. “The Tidwell Ball is tonight!”
His lips curl in a clever grin as his driver opens the car door.
“The minute I’m over it, we’re leaving.”
“You have my word.” Jordan slides into the car behind me, and the door closes. Chateau Soleil is in the rear window when the world shifts and Grandmom’s neighborhood bleeds into glittering lights of towering buildings. The city throbs with life, people darting in and out of traffic, car horns blaring in the distance. I press my nose to the window. We’re not anywhere near Louisiana anymore. Jordan’s hand folds in mine. Tonight, I let it all go.
Tonight, I will be free.
The doors to the Q hotel part as we approach, and Jordan’s arm threads around mine. His House ring’s rubies glint in the lights from the line of photographers at the door. Several held back by velvet ropes shout our names to beckon us over.
“Ignore them,” he whispers to me, his lips brushing my ear.
“Mister Wexton,” the doorman says. “Should I have the penthouse prepared? Is your father with you tonight?”
“Just myself and Miss Marionne. No need.”
Inside, the hotel drips with elegance. Columns and oiled furniture, polished floors and sparkly dim lighting. Inscriptions along the crown of the ornamented ceiling remind me of Chateau Soleil.
Jordan sees me gawking and points at carved suns along the perimeter of a gilded mirror near a lounge area. Every other sun is darkened in the middle. “Dysiian influences, alongside Sfentian.”
“Wasn’t Dysiis that Order member who was barred from studying magic?”
“Dysiis believed to understand the full breadth of magic’s capacity to do good, we have to understand its darker parts. He studied toushana until he died. That’s where everything we know about it comes from.”
“Oh, he sounded like some sort of rebel.”
“He is. To some.” Sleek black elevator doors open, and we step inside.
Jordan squeezes my hand as the doors close. When they reopen, we follow a sign for the Yaäuper Rea Ballroom. It’s expansive and a burst of color. Sweeping fabrics, sparkling candelabras, silver trays, and a lavishly dressed crowd. I hold tighter to Jordan’s arm.
“Mister Wexton.” A curly-mustached fellow with a big barrel belly who looks oddly familiar grips Jordan by the shoulders. “I was just talking to Charlie and Sand about you.”
“Marcius Walsby, good to see you.”
“And this must be Miss Marionne.” He reaches for my hand, and I oblige, resisting the urge to grimace as his lips touch my skin.
“Pleasure to meet you.” I know his face.
“The pleasure is all mine. The picture in the paper did not do justice to your full regality, young lady.”
I snatch my hand away.
“Good to see you, as always,” Jordan says, pulling me away. “We should make rounds.”
“Is he in the Or—?”
“A member is the term we use away from home. And no, he’s not a member. Walsby is the governor.”
“I knew I’d seen him somewhere before. He’s—”
“A witless jerk, corrupt, and disgusting. So naturally he’s quite popular and powerful.”
“Does he know about . . . us?”
“He knows we are an exclusive group with extensive means. And to a politician that’s all he needs to know to care.”
When a server with bubbling flutes on a tray passes, I grab a glass, still rocked with disbelief. This whole world, the wealth, the access, the power—it all exists because the Order wants it to.
“And what about him?” I point at a neatly shaven fellow in a dark suit with silver streaks in his hair, my curiosity piqued at stepping into the other side of the world I used to live in.
“Emerson Tidwell, himself. Member. House Oralia.” Jordan’s words brush my ear, his body pressed hard against my back. The music shifts to a slightly slower tune, and he hugs around me, swaying.
“You know him?”
He turns my chin in the direction of Emerson, who is using his teal handkerchief to clean his glasses.
“Look closely.”
We dance in Emerson’s direction, and I spot the embroidered sigil of House Oralia on his handkerchief.
“What about her?” I point at another, a girl about my age with a swanlike gait as she glides from one conversation to the next.
“House Marionne.”
“Her fleur earrings?”
Jordan smiles.
“And him?”
“You tell me.”
I stare as inauspiciously as I can for several minutes but come up empty. “I can’t tell.”
“Okay, that was unfair. He’s Unmarked.” Jordan snickers and I elbow him playfully.
“She’s House Perl, am I right?” I indicate a girl with radiant copper skin and dark eyes that sparkle like gems. Her dress is black sequin with a gather of red fabric on one shoulder. He glances at her, then promptly turns me in his grip, and we dance, facing one another.
“You know her well, I assume.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
He shifts uncomfortably in my arms.
“There are no swans; Abby will be so relieved she didn’t miss them,” I say to lighten the mood. But his gaze is darting in every direction.
“Jordan, I don’t care about some girl you—”
We stop dancing and he leads me to a shadowed corner near a table with an ice sculpture. “Are you comfortable? Do you want to leave?” he says, looking everywhere but at me.
“Do you? What’s going on?”
He skims the crowd with a harried expression.
“You have to tell me things. That’s how this works.”
“I think there’s a raid happening tonight,” he whispers. “There’ve been more lately because of all the concerns about the Sphere. We never should have come.”
“A raid?”
But before Jordan can respond, I spot a familiar dark-haired man with a low shave. He’s dressed nicer than the last time I saw him that afternoon at the Market, but I couldn’t mistake that face. Beside him is another I faintly recognize. I steady myself on the hard wall as the hazy memory of a man bound to a chair screaming rattles in my mind. The smoke that choked him, the way his head lolled. That man there, across the ballroom, is who stood over him, puffing on his cigar.
If those other men from the Market are here, the Dragun after me must be, too.
