Kasari Ederan is three drinks in, just drunk enough to forget that she doesn’t actually like to be seen speaking with him. That, or Selah’s sudden ascension to power has made her rethink that particular stance. Others might see what they expect to see, but Kasari and Selah have been friends since their first day of undergrad at Luxana Universitas and she’s smarter than most would give her credit for. She knows that working her way into Arran’s good graces both gets her and keeps her in Selah’s. Something that Kasari, the second-youngest child of Bostinium social climbers, knows the value of all too well.
He’d just begun feeling the familiar itch of out-of-placeness climbing into his skin when Kasari found him—three drinks in, and annoyed at being snubbed by Selah in favor of the truly ancient scholars monopolizing her attention. He’d chosen not to point out that his sister didn’t look too thrilled about the arrangement, either.
“But if you tell her,” Kasari is insisting now. The little alcove by the bar has become progressively more crowded as word spreads as to where the younger set is camped out, and by this point Kasari is practically sitting on top of him. “My parents’ villa out in the country,” she says, “is the epitome of max. I’ve invited Marcellus Evers for her especially, everyone who’s anyone will be there, but Selah keeps insisting she has to work, the absolute nag. But I’m sure that if you tell her. She listens to you. And this is fully what she needs right now.”
“Nah,” he tells her. “Let’s not mix motives here. What Selah needs right now is to learn how to do a job she wasn’t supposed to do for another couple of decades. What you need is to escape your creepy cult parents for a weekend so you can get laid.”
Kasari’s eyes narrow, the crime of mentioning her greatest shame clearly warring with delight at such a scandalous answer. “Christianity,” she says, finally, “is not a cult.”
He declines to respond that it is, in fact, the very definition of a cult, and instead says, “It is fragging weird, though.”
“Arran Alexander, I’m about to bona fide curb you.”
“Well, that’s not very Christian of you—Ow.”
Prim as she can manage, drunk as she is, Kasari stands and heads off to join a couple of women she evidently knows, leaving Arran behind to massage the back of his head, the boys to his left eyeing him with blatant curiosity.
“She loves me, really,” he tells them. “Not as much as she loves my sister, but beggars can’t be—”
“Sorry,” cuts in the younger of the two, not sounding sorry at all. “I must have misheard before. I thought Kasari said you were Alexander Kleios’s son?”
“No, you heard right.”
“Arran . . . Alexander, did she call you?” the other drawls slowly, an unpleasant smile spreading across his face. “A patronym, how fully odd. Almost like a freedman.”
It’s not a subtle dig, but neither is it particularly creative. And Arran has spent a lifetime deflecting, a lifetime observing and adapting the sort of casual arrogant grace his peers assume as birthright. They won’t see the tightness working its way through his jaw.
“Like I said. Excellent hearing, both of you.”
Putting some distance between himself and the boys as he approaches the bar, he lets out a breath he wasn’t entirely aware he was holding. A year ago, Arran would have shrugged the whole thing off. Here and now, he’d like nothing more than to just deck the pair of them. But that won’t work, not in the patrician social scene. Freedman may not be a particularly polite or politically correct term to call someone like him, but it’s not the worst. Nor is it technically inaccurate.
“You get that a lot?” asks a voice to his right, and Arran turns to see a young woman with a spray of black curls and striking dark eyes standing next to him at the bar. Clearly she heard the whole exchange.
“What, get smacked by a drunk Christian?” he asks, smile back on. “At least once a day.”
To his great relief, she laughs and extends a hand. He takes it.
“Theodora Arlot. Theo.”
“Arran Alexander.”
“I know,” she says. “I work for your stepmother.”
“Junior. Very junior.”
“And how’s that going?”
He signals for two drinks. Arran doesn’t make it a habit of spending a lot of time around Naevia’s office, but he thinks he would have noticed Theo before now. She must be a recent hire. He doesn’t really make a habit of flirting with Naevia’s staffers, either, but then again he doesn’t actually make a habit of flirting with much of anyone in the Arborem. Not in any serious sort of way.
“Illuminating,” she answers him, and leans against the bar. “Terrifying.”
“She can definitely be both.”
“Oh, not the senator,” Theo says, bright eyed. “She’s incredible.”
“An inspiration to little patrician girls everywhere.”
“Plebs, too.”
Arran raises an eyebrow at that. He’s met plebeians who work in government before, certainly, but almost always as aides or bagmen. Not that they’re not allowed in higher-level jobs, per se, but while younger patrician children may not have a specific role to inherit, the very best of what’s left is put aside for them all the same. There are just unwritten rules about that sort of thing. Suddenly the woman in front of him becomes significantly more interesting. More to the point, suddenly she becomes a great deal less out of his reach.
“My father’s patron was a senator as well,” Theo answers the obvious but unasked question. “He took a liking to me, made sure I got what I was worth.”
Ah. There it is.
Always a catch.
It certainly explains a few things. Not only how Theo Arlot—and Arran racks his brain, thinks he remembers an Arlot Perrigam or Perrinal or Perri-something who’s the senator of Veritanium—got to be where she is, but also why exactly Theo Arlot is speaking to him in the first place. She’s a first-gen pleb. The child of a freedman. She can’t be one herself, or she would still be working for another familia. It must have been a parent who earned the patronym Arlot upon becoming a citizen, a parent with a patron who works somewhere in politics and decided to give Theo a leg up. Even then, for their child to rise high enough to work as a senatorial staffer is practically unheard of.
“You haven’t been in Luxana long, have you?” he asks, more resigned than annoyed.
“Couple of months.”
“And you thought you’d rack up points with your new boss by befriending me? Common cause and all that.”
Theo takes this in stride. “Are you always like this, or do you just not like women?”
He laughs, despite himself. “You’re just not as good at this as you think you are.”
“What, flirting?”
That gets her a wry smile, at least. “Okay. Reality drop,” he says. “You’re new in town, so you can have this one for free. People don’t talk to me unless they want something from my family.”
“Is that bona fide?” Theo asks, pitching her voice into a slightly more upper-crust patrician cant, making him choke slightly as he stifles a laugh. She grins. “It’s an interesting theory. But there’s a flaw.”
“Oh, yeah?” he asks, coughing slightly.
“Yeah. I’m already on your stepmother’s payroll, and I do like your sister but she’s not really my type.” She pauses a moment. “Reality drop. All I want is for a cute guy to order me a drink.”
Despite himself, Arran finds that he is very, very into this girl. “You always get what you want?”
Maybe privy to some cosmic inside joke, the serva behind the bar chooses that moment to set two glasses of wine in front of them.
Theo takes a long sip from hers and says, “Usually.”
• • •
Forty-five minutes and two drinks later, and for the life of him Arran doesn’t know how they ended up here, tucked into an anteroom just off the courtyard, but he isn’t going to be the one to end it. Theo squints at him for a long moment before deciding.
“Dare.”
Challenge accepted. “That man by the bar,” he says, pointing out the target through the door back outside. Boisterously loud and red in the face from drink, The Man by the Bar is hard to miss.
“What about him?”
“Get his drink.”
Theo doesn’t hesitate. She takes a determined sip of wine, and Arran’s torn between amusement and finding himself deeply impressed as she saunters up to the man and snatches his glass of whiskey, leaving him open-mouthed and gaping in her wake.
She sets the glass down in front of Arran. “Your turn.”
“Dare.”
“No! You’ve picked dare every time!”
“Is there a rule against that?”
“Yeah. My rule. I just made it.”
“Fine,” Arran replies, rolling his eyes. “Truth.”
A wicked smile grows as she muses on it for a moment. He watches the way her long pointer finger draws little circles on the wooden table as she considers the question, feeling warm and content in a way he certainly hadn’t expected to tonight. He likes Theo. He likes the way she laughs when he speaks—not signaling the usual sense of safety in the accomplishment, but as if leading toward something else. Something bigger, maybe.
Finally, she asks, “What did you want to be when you grew up?”
Arran laughs. “What kind of a question is that?”
“The kind of question I can’t ask anyone else.” She tucks a loose curl behind her ear. “Literally. Architects’ children become architects. Fishermen’s children become fishermen. Plebs’ lives are set out for us before we’re even born. But you? That’s gray area. You’re lucky, you know.”
“Spoken like someone who has no idea what they’re talking about,” Arran responds, surprised at his own good humor. He likes Theo, he really does. She’s practically a stranger still, but in the last hour he’s learned that she’s scrappy and ambitious, and does exactly what she wants and when, and is utterly unafraid to speak her mind. More to the point, being with her is easy. Easy in a way he doesn’t think he’s ever been with someone he met in the Arborem.
“That’s fair. I don’t.” She shrugs. “I never got to think about what I wanted to do with my life, just what would happen anyway. How to move the needle, do something interesting in the field instead of getting stuck as a paper pusher in some bore of a bureaucrat’s office.” Then: “Answer the question.”
“A sorcerer. But to be fair, I was about five at the time.”
“Stop that,” she snaps, surprising him into a laugh.
“Stop what?”
“That—that. Be real for five minutes, yeah?”
Slightly unnerved, Arran takes a long drink. She’s treading dangerously close to territory he doesn’t speak about, not with anyone—not with Fagan and Enyo, not with Selah, and certainly not with someone he met barely an hour ago. Only the once with Dad, and Terra knows how well that turned out. But where earlier in the evening his defenses may have been higher, the combination of alcohol and Theo Arlot’s easy sort of irreverence have done their work well.
“When I was a kid . . . I actually sort of assumed I’d be the next Historian,” he finally admits. “Then I realized two, uh, pretty important things.”
“Which are?”
“I’m a premie client,” he tells her. “Found that out when I was about ten.”
Again, not exactly a politically correct term, but also not technically inaccurate. Just a tiny detail that’s derailed his entire life. Because Phineas Halitha, that smug bastard, had been right all those years ago on that summer day at the Arborem shore. Children follow the mother when it comes to class. Someone’s got to raise them, after all, or so the theory goes. So Phineas had been right.
Well, half right, anyway. Arran may have been born a verna, but he certainly wasn’t one by the time Phineas said he was. And that, it turned out, had actually been a problem.
Vernae are apprenticed young so that they’re ready to take on a trade and qualify for citizenship at eighteen, an escape from the life of service inherited from servae parents. But a verna boy whose patrician father pulled a few strings with the higher-ups to free him at barely two years old? There’s a reason you’re not supposed to do it. Arran now couldn’t do an apprenticeship; those are for vernae only. He could take elementary levels, but not superiors, and taking on his parents’ trades the way a pleb would had always been out of the question. His mother had been a serva, and only a patrician like Selah could have Dad’s job. Gil may have cobbled together something halfway between superior levels and Tair’s apprenticeship for him, but that doesn’t mean his haphazard education actually qualifies him to do anything aside from sit around and hope his family doesn’t get sick of him. There’s a reason the legions had appealed beyond his mandatory year, and it has nothing to do with the glory of the Imperium. It’s the only option left.
“So,” Theo says, evidently reading along the same lines, “basically you’re fucked.”
“Basically.”
She raises her glass to that. He meets her toast, and her level gaze. It’s not a moment of pity, for which he feels a rush of profound gratitude. Just the frank facts of life and two people headed toward something. When she puts her glass back down on the table, she lets her hand linger there, resting against his. Then she says, “So what’s the second thing?”
“Hm?” he asks, enjoying the sensation of her warm fingers faintly resting against his and the feeling as though his heart’s jumped up a few inches toward his throat, the way the candlelight plays in her hair. She bites her lip when she smiles.
“Why you can’t be the Imperial Historian. You said there were two reasons.”
“Oh. That,” he says, and takes Theo’s hand in his. “I’d be a really shit librarian.”