In the last year, Yeijiro had discovered he had something of a taste for theater. The Golden Palace had no fewer than a dozen performances spaces, from intimate halls to the Imperial Stage itself. It was in the latter Yeijiro found himself tonight, as Vin’s invited guest.

This box belonged to the Griffon royal family, so Vin had every right to use it. It was a sign of just how much Vin loved the theater that he did. Yeijiro was his frequent and—as far as he could tell—only guest.

Tonight, dance was on the program. A Swan company visiting from the City of Lights. Despite himself, Yeijiro had been drawn in by the beauty of their performance.

It was a good distraction to have. Yeijiro had needed a break from his own head. The information he’d skimmed from the folder on Tōru’s desk, had been exactly what he’d suspected, the final piece of a puzzle that, assembled, revealed a web of connections that he knew Elena had been trying to solve for a while. The trick had been getting that information to her without it being traceable to him. Not only because she didn’t trust him, but because she would ask where he had found it, and Tōru was an unacceptable answer on every level.

Fortunately, this last year had been a productive one. He’d been learning from Tōru, yes, and learning from Roderich as well, but he’d been studying on his own, too. Obsessing over every layer, every crack of how the marshals worked and how the organization fit together. He’d figured out the system, both its strengths and its gaps. He’d used one of those gaps to slide a report in, embedded with other information legitimately obtained. Just enough to point Elena in the right direction, trusting that she only needed a nudge.

After that, he’d been exhausted, but still in the state where it was hard to spin his mind down all on his own. So even though he had two letters from Corinne to decrypt, a pile of his own reports to file, and an early morning with the Lord Marshal, Yeijiro had come out with Vin.

Stretched out on the floor of the box, across both Vin and Yeijiro’s feet, Kaveh gave a wide yawn. Vin leaned down to rub the lion’s stomach—a move Yeijiro still wasn’t brave enough to try. “Sorry that you’re bored,” Vin whispered, “but we can’t miss the end.”

“What’s at the end?” Yeijiro asked. As usual, Vin had spurned the idea of programs.

“You’ll see.”

The stage went dark. A spotlight lit the center where a man stood alone. Yeijiro recognized him immediately. Dahle Julian.

Julian stood perfectly still, a statue of flowing silks and almost blinding beauty. One arm was lifted and his face angled up, his eyes following the line of his own hand up to the sky. Time seemed to stretch as he stood there, motionless, surrounded by silence. Even the audience didn’t breathe, not daring to break the moment.

Then came a sweet, pure note from a single flute. It floated out, impossibly clear in the stillness. Soft at first, then rising in volume until it broke into a bright trill. With the trill, Julian began to dance.

He started with just the sweep of his arm, bringing it down and then out, his head following its motion, the rest of his body still. His long fluttering sleeve gave the moment a liquid fluidity.

The flute was joined by a violin, then an oboe. Each instrument seemed to unlock another part of Julian’s body into the rippling, graceful dance. Until Julian lifted one leg and brought it down perfectly timed with the first beat from a drum. And the dance began in earnest.

Vin had leaned forward, his arms folded on the balcony rail and his chin resting on his arms. His attention was locked on Julian in a way it hadn’t been on the dancers who had come before.

And Julian absolutely deserved attention. In a night of exceptional performance, he shone. He was an ideal given life, his every movement, every pose, controlled and refined, pure artistry. His body was an instrument, note-perfect in its performance. By all rights, Yeijiro shouldn’t have been able to take his eyes off him.

Except…there was a coldness to it. An untouchable quality that left Yeijiro unmoved. This was the Swan. Soulless perfection sheerly for the sake of it. Yeijiro couldn’t connect.

So he rubbed Kaveh’s head and looked out at the rest of the audience. Hardly anyone else seemed to be having this problem. Nearly every face was rapt, mesmerized.

Most of the audience were other Swans. From Vin’s box, Yeijiro had a view of not only the general audience, but most of the other boxes and their inhabitants. In the center of the balcony tier, the Imperial box, where Alexia herself was in attendance, with half the Swan clan leadership at her side. Lords Kosuri, Fréneau, and Pavan were with her. In the box immediately to her right, Yeijiro recognized the Swan ambassador, Dahle Kuniko, sitting with her husband, and beside them, General Dmitri and Major Kristoph.

The face he couldn’t find, oddly enough, was the Lord Marshal. Of all the Swan Lords to be absent, Dahle Roderich wasn’t here to watch his own son perform?

Vin nudged Yeijiro with his elbow, drawing Yeijiro’s attention back to the stage just in time to see Julian spin and leap into the air…

And he didn’t come back down.

Airborne, Julian continued to dance. Now every move had a sweeping, whirling, choreography, like Julian had become the wind itself. Gusting mists of silver-gray surrounded him, flowed with him.

Yeijiro didn’t know enough about akashic magic to judge exactly how difficult a display like this might be, but the fact that Julian was the first dancer Yeijiro had ever seen literally take flight—that suggested this was something truly special.

The music swelled and Julian became a whirlwind, the silvery air around him swirling into a fountain of glittering light. He landed to thunderous applause. Vin didn’t move, his eyes still on Julian, his expression unreadable.

Julian was joined on stage by another young man who Yeijiro knew from a distance. Nita Kyun—a Dragon, and a member of Julian’s inner circle of friends. As they linked hands and bowed, Yeijiro concluded Kyun had been contributing to the magic of that performance.

Vin stood up while Julian and Kyun were taking another bow, with the audience applause showing no signs of tapering off. “Let’s go.”

Outside, Vin set their pace to a comfortable stroll as they moved through the evening stillness of the Golden Palace. “So what did you think?” he asked. “Other than that it was too perfect,” he added with the barest hint of a smile.

“That display at the end—Lord Julian dancing in the air. I’ve never seen that before.”

“It’s something Julian’s only recently mastered. I heard from Kuniko he’d be performing that tonight. It’s an incredibly difficult art. A combination of skills that’s rare. You have to be both an accomplished dancer and a strong, talented akashic. And even then, it’s not something any one akashic can do without help.”

“Nita Kyun.”

Vin nodded, said nothing, but Yeijiro noted the tiny lines of tension at the edges of his mouth. “You don’t care for him.”

Despite Vin’s tendency to keep to himself, he seemed well acquainted with nearly every member of the court. Through him, Yeijiro had learned many names and faces, and had gotten a sense of the ebb and flow of the social order. One of the things that had become quickly obvious was Vin’s dislike for many of the people close to Julian.

“Kyun is a snob, convinced of his own self-importance. But then, he’s a Dragon, so all that rather goes without saying.”

“That’s unfair,” Yeijiro said, thinking of Corinne. Who Yeijiro missed, and who was nothing like the person Vin had just described.

“The world is unfair.”

Clearly, Vin was in a mood, and Yeijiro had no desire to indulge it. He offered a polite bow. “Thank you for the invitation. I enjoyed this evening and look forward to the next.” As he turned to go, Vin caught his arm.

“Yeijiro, wait. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be…” He let go, rubbed his hand over his close-shaved head in a gesture of frustration. “It just reminds me of…choices. Regrets. Things I shouldn’t miss, but I do.”

Vin’s—Prince Naveen’s—mysterious past. Yeijiro had made the intentional decision not to dig into his friend’s history, to give him that privacy. Which meant that after a whole interval together, Yeijiro had no better idea why Vin was here rather than at the Griffon court, why he’d given up his name, how he seemed to exist in this strange space where he was no longer entirely a Prince but neither did he seem to have decided to be anything else.

So instead of prying into all that, Yeijiro simply asked, “If it makes you feel that way, why go?”

Vin closed his eyes briefly and sighed. He didn’t answer the question. Either because he didn’t want to, or because he didn’t know himself what the answer was. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Let me take you to lunch.”

“Of course.”

“Still friends?” Vin asked, holding out his hand.

Yeijiro clasped it in his. “Always.” And as he had been doing for over a year now, Yeijiro consciously let go of the questions in his mind. Vin would share or he wouldn’t, and until then, Yeijiro wouldn’t pry.