Selfish Is the Heart Read online

  “There’s naught against an instructor and a student sharing a meal,” Tansy said boldly.

  Annalise looked at her. “Tansy, you needn’t defend me. If Perdita wishes to make much of my acquaintance with Master Toquin, she might do as she pleases. I’ve no issue with her queries.”

  “It seems so sudden, that’s all.” Perdita lifted the gentlemen’s shirt upon which she was sewing. The work was beautiful. Even, tight stitches, soft fabric, a masculine yet fashionable design. Annalise had no difficulty imagining how a shirt such as that might bring a measure of solace to the man who wore it.

  “Friendships are never sudden. They grow like flowers,” Annalise said. “Which you seem to have a lovely skill for embroidering, Perdita, but not such a great skill for cultivating.”

  Perdita frowned. “I am quite proficient in the garden, Annalise Marony. The roses I grew at home outlasted any others in the garden, and my captain’s buttons were coveted for centerpieces by all my mother’s friends.”

  “I’m sure your skill with plants is as impressive as your every other,” Annalise said serenely, focusing on her own work, “but I wasn’t speaking of flowers.”

  Perdita looked ’round the room, first to Tansy, then at Helena and even Wandalette. “I have friends.”

  Annalise shrugged. “So do I.”

  “And you count Master Toquin among them?”

  “I do.”

  Perdita sniffed. “Master Toquin has never fraternized with the novitiates. It doesn’t seem appropriate, actually.”

  Annalise could no longer maintain her placid demeanor. “Speak plainly, or speak not at all.”

  “I speak very plainly. What I mean is, that such a friendship between the two of you seems sudden and unexpected, considering the way the pair of you were previously at such odds.”

  “How would you know what we were?”

  Perdita smiled. “Everyone knows. We all heard about the words you exchanged in his classroom.”

  “It was my understanding that Master Toquin was no favorite of any. Whatever words we exchanged were naught but the usual for him, yes?”

  “No,” Perdita said. “Nobody ever stood up to him before the way you did.”

  At this, Annalise scoffed. “Oh, really? You think in all the years of service he’s provided the Order that nobody, no novitiate, ever spoke back to him? Not a one? The man’s insufferable and arrogant, and not all of us were bred to be meek little lambs led willingly to slaughter.”

  “I haven’t been here as long as some.” Perdita gave Tansy a significant stare. “But it’s my understanding that he has ever been as he is now, and that none dared cross him.”

  “If he were such an evil figure, causing so much grief, why would the Mothers-in-Service allow him to stay? In an Order full of young women, most of them impressionable, bound for service to the Faith? Why on earth would they keep him on if he were so . . . so. . . .” Annalise sputtered on her lack of words. Her linen lay scrunched in a ball on her lap. It was made of ugliness and lack of skill, unfit even to wipe a nose. She wanted to toss it aside but kept it close, so as not to give Perdita the satisfaction of comparison to her own exquisite work.

  “Mayhap because we should get used to such a man.” Wandalette, who’d ever seemed as uncertain and awkward as a mouse, now spoke with conviction. “Because we do need to know this, us. Because it’s what we’ll have to face when we go out among them. To them. The patrons. Because they’ll all be like him, or worse.”

  Silence. Every woman in the room turned to stare at Wandalette, who shrugged and bent back to threading her needle. She licked the thread and poked it through the eye, then drew the strings together with the tips of her fingers and twirled them at the bottom to make a knot. She held it up, the needle glinting, then noticed all the stares.

  “How else would we learn?”

  Perdita, for once, had no comment. The other girls bent back to their work, and in a few minutes the soft murmurs began again, the worthless chatter Annalise despised and had no interest in repeating. In her lap, the square of linen had not been ruined. She could save it. She could thread her needle the way Wandalette had done, and prick it through the cloth. She could imprint colored flowers on the creamy linen and make a pattern where there had been none.

  She could, she thought, make beauty from something that had near been ruined, make something pretty that had seemed just moments before impossible to fix.

  “I believe I’m finished,” she said aloud to nobody and stood. She gathered her sewing basket and materials and put them all away. She handed them to Tansy. “I’m going for a walk.”

  “Do you want me to go with you?” Tansy was already on her feet, but Annalise shook her head.

  “No, thank you.”

  Tansy looked disappointed, but Annalise didn’t care. She needed to be alone for a while, to contemplate this, making something pretty that didn’t seem possible.

  Even a dual-headed calf ceases to gain a second glance from the people who’ve grown accustomed to it, and so it was with the friendship between Cassian and Annalise. She knew he didn’t think so. She could tell by the way he still looked from side to side when she took her place at his table.

  “Loosen yourself,” she told him. “We are no longer the current fashion in gossip.”

  At least he was no longer holding himself from his food while she was with him. He broke off a piece of bread from the small loaf between them and slid it across to her. She looked at it for half a moment but made certain not to react in any way that might alert him to her knowing how charming she found his offer.

  “I never assumed we were . . . fashionable.”

  Annalise sipped sharp cider from her mug, grimaced, and put it aside. She didn’t care overmuch for cider and had poured it from the pitcher without thinking why. “You worry about it. I can tell.”

  When he got up from the table, her first thought was that she’d driven him from his seat. It wasn’t an outrageous assumption to make, considering their past confrontations, and yet she hadn’t meant to poke him. She stared at her plate, stomach knotted, wondering if this would ever be easy, if the effort had reward.

  He returned before she had time to even look ’round. He’d brought a pitcher of water, and a new mug. He filled it for her and pushed the cider aside.

  “What?” he asked, startled at the way her mouth gaped. “By the Land Above, Annalise, are you going to . . . cry?”

  “No, absolutely not.” She shook her head. “Tell me, sir, of today’s lesson, so that I might come prepared to plague you with all the questions those other women won’t think to ask.”

  He spoke for quite some time before noticing she’d made no reply.

  “. . . the passage regarding descriptions of the Land Above and the Void, both . . .” Cassian trailed away. “Annalise, are you unwell?”

  She was very well. That simple act of consideration he’d shown her—something with so little meaning on the surface as to be unremarkable, yet so significant at the same time.

  “I like you when you’re talking about the text,” she managed to say in a voice only slightly scratched.

  “I am well pleased to discuss such matters with you. You know that.” He looked up as the chime sounded. “And the mealtime has ended. It feels so sudden.”

  Mayhap she needn’t try so hard, she thought as they both got up and merged with the crowd leaving the dining room. Mayhap this might happen on its own, should she cease to push so hard for it. In the hallway they both paused, Cassian’s destination in one direction and hers in another.

  “I shall see you this after, yes?”

  She heard the inflection of her own voice in his and found it so charming she wanted to weep again. “Yes.”

  “Annalise.” Cassian said her name slowly without looking even once at anyone passing by them to see if they might be listening. “Are you sure you’re well?”

  “I’m most well, thank you. I’ll see you later. Go, now, else your students re