Page 74 of Tarnished Crown
Evander nodded gravely. “Just keep your ears to the ground. If she’s planning something, we need to make sure we know about it.”
He turned his head toward me, and we locked eyes for a moment, long enough for me to know that he had known I was listening and had let me hear anyway.
Because he wanted to make sure I had the sense to be afraid of her?
Or because he wanted me to know that I wasn’t alone?
After over a week of being in Evander’s room, theestatecat finally started venturing closer to me. He rotated between sleeping at the foot of the bed and lazily sunning himself in the window nearest me.
For supposedly not belonging to Evander, the cat certainly didn’t seem to leave his room very often.
He was fairly adorable, as far as cats went, with a small, squashy face, wide eyes, and long orange hair that stood out starkly against the black backdrop of Evander’s room.
“Here, kitty kitty.”
“I wouldn’t.” Evander’s voice floated over from his desk, but I ignored him and tried again.
The cat's ears perked up, and he leapt onto the bed, rubbing his body against the poster near my feet.
“Come here, kitty,” I tried again, pleased when purrs rumbled from him as he inched closer.
But when I reached out to let him sniff my hand, something Avani insisted animals liked, he growled and bit me. I snatched my hand back from the little fiend, who looked entirely too pleased with himself.
“Koshka,” Evander’s tone was mock chiding as he spoke over his shoulder. “It isn’t polite for one of my pets to bite another.”
I narrowed my eyes, but let the comment slide. “Koshka?” I asked, trying out the word on my lips. “Is that a name?”
He sighed, angling to face me. “You really do need to learn at least some of the language, Lemmikki. It meanscat.”
“You named your cat,Cat?” I shot him an incredulous glare.
“I told you, he’s not my cat.”
I snorted a laugh. “Lie to me, but don’t lie to yourself”
Evander raised his eyebrows in a challenge. “What an interesting sentiment, coming from you.”
I ignored him, and he returned to the issue of the language.
“You should at least try to learn something.”
I curled up a little further into one of the overly plush pillows, signaling just how eager I was to begin. “Aren’t there like a hundred different dialects? That feels unnecessarily complicated.”
He leveled a look at me. “There are five, but most people you’ll meet have at least a working understanding of the Old Socairan.”
“Then why don’t you just all converse in that, if it’s so easy?”
“Because when it comes to our armies, the words that tend to differ dialect-to-dialect are the important ones, and better yet, they mean the opposite of each other.”
He sighed. “Can’t very well have soldiers arguing about whether their commander meant left when he saidvaseoor whether he intended to say right but slipped into his old dialect. So somewhere along the way the king decided the military would speak the common tongue.”
“Then I see no need to learn a different language. It’s not like I spend a lot of time out in the villages.” I wasn’t sure why I was so opposed when I had exactly nothing better to do, except that it felt too permanent. Too...something.
Evander made a sound of disapproval, but I cut him off when he opened his mouth to argue.
“I’m quite spent now,” I announced. “Be a good little owner and close those curtains.”
He glared at me for long enough that I began to think he wouldn’t, long enough that I warred with myself on whether it was worth the pain just to do it myself. But, he crossed the distance to the bed and snatched the curtains closed, breathing out a series of increasingly irritable curse words.