Chapter 48: Chapter 48: Something in the Tea
The preparation for the lunar eclipse was going to take all six weeks.
Riven had a list. It was long and specific and several items on it required either significant money or significant connections, both of which Elian had been quietly accumulating since he’d arrived. He spent the morning working through it — what he could source through the trade channels, what Riven could get through his own networks, what Sable could contribute from her eastern contacts.
By mid-afternoon they had a working plan.
Not a complete one. There were gaps — things that depended on information they didn’t have yet, contingencies that required timing they couldn’t control. But it was a plan. Something to move toward.
Elian folded the papers, put them where they wouldn’t be found, and went to the bedroom.
* * *
Caelian was already there.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, still in his formal clothes from the council meeting, looking at the window with the particular stillness of a man who had been thinking for a while and had arrived somewhere.
"I said no to her," he said, when Elian came in.
"I know," Elian said. "She came and told me."
"I imagine that was a conversation."
"It was something." Elian sat in the chair near the window. "You could have told me first."
"You could have told me you were uncomfortable," Caelian said. "If something was bothering you, you could have said it to my face."
Elian looked at him.
"And then I’d have been the jealous one," he said. "The difficult one. The consort making scenes about his husband meeting a perfectly appropriate candidate."
"Yes," Caelian said. "That’s exactly what you’d have been."
"So I was avoiding—"
"You were avoiding a name," Caelian said. "Didn’t work." The violet eyes had a quality Elian was learning to recognize — the faint suggestion of something that was not quite amusement. "If you were trying to not seem jealous, I’ll give you a different description. You seemed like a jealous, bitter person who had decided to make everyone around them quietly miserable for a week."
Elian stared at him.
"You wound me," he said.
"I’m being accurate."
"You are a very cruel man."
"I learned from someone," Caelian said.
Elian opened his mouth. Closed it.
"You made sure," Caelian continued, in the same even tone, "that I didn’t feel good for the entire week she was here. You made sure I understood that you weren’t going to simply allow another person into this situation without — consequences." He looked at Elian. "I notice that. I’m not complaining about it. But isn’t that a little harsh, given that I didn’t choose for us to be married in the first place?"
Elian was quiet for a moment.
"Neither did I," he said. "I didn’t choose any of this." He looked at the window. "But at some point I started choosing to stay. That was a choice I made." He looked back at Caelian. "Don’t make me regret it."
The room was quiet.
Caelian looked at him for a long moment.
Then he laughed.
It was — Elian had heard Caelian’s various non-laughs, the almost-amused sounds, the dry huffs of air that served as amusement in a man who’d forgotten how to do it properly. This was different. Actual. Brief but real.
"So what are you planning," Caelian said.
Elian blinked. "What."
"You have that expression. The one where you’re thinking about something you’re not going to tell me." He looked at him. "What are you planning."
"I’m not planning anything."
"You’re always planning something."
"I—" Elian paused. "I’m not going to tell you."
"Of course not," Caelian said, with the resignation of a man who had made peace with this a long time ago.
A knock at the door.
"Come in," Caelian said.
Edmund entered.
The tea tray. Two cups, the small pot, the particular efficiency of a man who had been doing this for decades and did it correctly every time. He set it on the side table, poured, stepped back.
"Will there be anything else, Your Highness?"
"No," Caelian said. "Thank you, Edmund."
Edmund bowed and left.
Elian reached for his cup.
And stopped.
He looked at Caelian’s cup.
There was something in it.
Not floating on the surface — deeper, suspended in the liquid. A faint shimmer. The specific quality of something that didn’t belong, that had been added to what was otherwise just tea, and that caught the light in a way that nothing natural should.
Elian stared at it.
Caelian reached for his own cup.
"Wait," Elian said.
Caelian paused.
"Can I—" Elian picked up his own cup, held it out. "Swap with me. I want to try yours."
Caelian looked at him with the expression reserved for Elian’s more inexplicable requests.
"Why," he said.
"I’m curious about the blend," Elian said. "Just — swap. You drink mine."
Caelian looked at him for a moment longer.
Then he shrugged — the minimal shrug of a man who had decided life was easier if he stopped questioning certain things — and handed over his cup.
Elian held both cups.
He looked at the shimmer in Caelian’s tea.
Can I see something you can’t, he thought. Is that what this is.
He looked at his own cup. Clear. Normal.
He looked at Caelian’s. The shimmer, faint and persistent.
Only me, he thought. I’m the only one who can see it.
He set Caelian’s cup down carefully.
Reached into his pocket — he always had a small bottle now, one of Riven’s, for collecting samples of things that needed examining. He poured the tea into it. Capped it. Put it back in his pocket.
"What are you doing," Caelian said.
"I want to find out where these tea leaves are from," Elian said. "The flavor is interesting. I’m going to check with the kitchen."
"You could ask Edmund," Caelian said. "He manages the household supply."
"I will," Elian said. "I’ll ask him tomorrow."
He wouldn’t be asking Edmund anything.
He smiled at Caelian and picked up his own cup and drank it and said nothing else about the shimmer in the discarded tea or what it might mean or whose hands had put it there.
Caelian drank Elian’s cup without complaint.
Elian sat with the bottle in his pocket and the weight of what he’d just seen and kept his face as it always was.
Calm. Easy. Like a man who had noticed nothing unusual at all.
But his mind was running fast beneath it.
The tea, he thought. How long has the tea been like this. Every day — tea comes from the kitchen, goes through the staff, reaches the bedroom. How many hands between the leaves and the cup. How many steps. How long has something been in it.
He didn’t know. That was the problem. He’d never looked at the tea before because tea was tea — it arrived, Caelian drank it, nothing seemed wrong. He had no way of knowing if this was new or if it had been happening for months.
Or years, the back of his mind offered.
He looked at Caelian, who had finished the cup and was now looking at the window with the quiet that had become, over these months, a comfortable thing rather than a cold one.
Whatever the shimmer was, Elian didn’t have a name for it yet. Not a spirit. Not anything he recognized from his own tradition. Something Riven would need to look at. Something Sable might recognize. He couldn’t even say with certainty it was harmful — it might be something entirely different, something left there accidentally, something that meant nothing.
But things that glimmered in teacups and couldn’t be seen by the person drinking them did not, in Elian’s experience, tend to mean nothing.
The kitchen, he thought. Multiple people handle it before it gets here. I can’t just look at one person. I need to trace the whole chain.
He thought about how you traced something like that without alerting whoever was responsible. Without letting them know you’d seen it.
He set his empty cup down.
"You’re quiet," Caelian said.
"Thinking," Elian said.
"About the tea leaves."
"Among other things."
Caelian looked at him with the expression that had become familiar — the one that said I know you’re not telling me everything and I’ve decided to accept that for now. The patience of a man who had learned that Elian moved at his own pace and pushing didn’t help.
"Whatever you’re planning," Caelian said. "Be careful."
Elian looked at him.
"I’m always careful," he said.
"You really aren’t," Caelian said. "But the sentiment is noted."
Elian almost smiled.
He sat with the bottle in his pocket and the evening light coming through the window and the warmth of a conversation that had started as an argument and ended as something else, and thought about the shimmer in the tea and how many people had touched it before it arrived here, and how he was going to find the right one without anyone knowing he was looking.
