As the Crow Falls | ✔

Chapter Twelve

Isaiah's smile wore sore on his face before even half the guests had arrived. The ballroom filled up like a rookery, a mass of rustling skirts and chattering voices that echoed off the high ceiling but fell muffled between the plant-bedecked walls. Navigating the crowd took nearly every sense in Isaiah's possession. In the hours before the clock struck four, he had paced the ballroom in anxious, almost frantic patterns, committing its layout to memory. This at least remained easy without Pekea. Much worse was this rising tide of people: people who could bump shoulders or accost him for conversation with or without his guide dragon. Pekea could help reorient him if he got lost in the crowd. She could ease the mental load of tracking where things were at all times. But unless she started hissing at people, she could not help with the most challenging part of the night, and either way, she wasn't here.

Posting himself at the doorway offered a compromise. Isaiah's smile became difficult to maintain after the hundredth greeting, but it kept him in place, let him identify familiar and unfamiliar voices, spared him an hour or so of dancing, and positioned him perfectly to catch Niccola if or when she came. He was thankful he had pushed his parents to cast their net so broad with invitations. Perhaps it was foolish to expect that Niccola would turn up, much less seek him out, but at least the option was there.

He had many things to ask her if they had another conversation. And something about her intrigued him. He couldn't pin down what.

Yet by the time attendance in the hall passed two hundred, Niccola had not shown up. Isaiah's excuse of staying at the door wore thin, then wore through. He moved to the dance floor before his mother could evict him, took up the hand of the first woman he fell into conversation with, and so the night began.

The enormity of his task soon began to sink in. Isaiah navigated the crowd alert to the conversation choice, method of approach, and intonation patterns of each woman who approached him, or who he approached. The crowd began to sort itself into categories. There were those too shy for him to find—he bumped into them on occasion—and those who approached but devolved into nervous titters when he returned their greetings; those so outrageously flirtatious, he could scarcely stomach their presences; and those who were clearly out to marry into royalty. There were girls too young to be more than teenagers, women twice his age, and every category in between. Isaiah found himself designing patterns of response for each, not to mention escape plans for letting each down as softly as possible when he moved on.

He felt no spark with any of them. Some were easier to talk to than others, and at least a few promising candidates passed across his dance card by the chime of the second hour. But as the response patterns became routine, then entrenched, doubt began to creep in. With it came the fear he had sought to outrun for moons now. That for all the women he could meet tonight, one he would truly want to rule beside may not be here at all.

Focusing on this, though, only snarled his dance steps and dimmed his concentration. Isaiah shoved those thoughts into a back closet of his mind again. This was his ball. His chance, his choice, and the last moment of true power he had in this decision. There was no point in worrying until he had met every woman in the hall.

His memory of Niccola still clung to the back of his consciousness. Perhaps it was the arm's length at which she had held their conversation in the market, he thought dryly, as one particularly determined noblewoman at least a decade his senior cornered him with conversation somehow both loaded and inane. Niccola, contrary to almost everyone he'd met tonight, had not shown a trace of hesitation in stating her opinions or countering his own. That alone was rare enough. "The curse of a pretty face and a royal disposition," his mother had called it, saying she saw the same at his age.

Or perhaps he was reading too far into their exchange. He had not, after all, given her any indication of his true identity, and suspected she hadn't known. As the noblewoman blathered on, Isaiah wondered with a sinking feeling whether learning the truth had scared Niccola off coming. Verde would no doubt have outed him, as the two seemed to know each other. His presence was well-known in the marketplace.