Free Shadowplay by Laura Lam Page B

A lot of my peers were there with their friends or intendeds.
    “She laughed at me.” Drystan put on a falsetto. “‘I can do as I please. And maybe if you bothered to try and speak with me you would have realized this. Do you know my favorite wine, or chocolate? My best friend’s name? Do you even know what color my eyes are?’ she asked.
    “Naturally, I couldn’t answer any of her questions. I remember her eyes were a bright green. ‘Just because you want something does not mean it is yours to take,’ she said. ‘Especially when it is something as complex as a woman’s heart.’”
    I giggled.
    “Yes, she was rather melodramatic, wasn’t she?” He smiled wryly.
    “Those were the last words she said to me, and I have not seen her since. She’s Lady Linda Windbeam now. I wish I could thank her. Her words found something within me that I had dampened with fine horses and expensive cologne.”
    I smiled at him. “So what did little Drystan do next?”
    “My, my, so curious, Micah.”
    I made a face at him, but I hung onto his next words.
    “I continued with university. I wanted to understand people, so I started watching them. I sketched them, trying to see what they felt and who they were. I studied history, religion, and philosophy. I failed classes like law and business. My parents weren’t too pleased.”
    “I’ll bet,” I said, thinking of the austere Lord Hornbeam.
    “I considered studying antiquities, as I was interested in the Chimaera and the Alder, but in the end I settled on philosophy. I stumbled across the teaching of Alvis Tyndall – do you know him?”
    I shook my head.
    “He’s quite obscure, and the monarchy don’t quite… approve of his philosophy. He stressed that nobody could ever truly know humanity without first trying to be the best, and then trying to be the worst. You will find out where you belong on that scale of light and dark, but you will never, truly know until you do.”
    I swallowed.
    “At university, I had been kind and courteous to all around me. I was on my way to being a saint. And so I decided to become a demon.”
    He leaned back on his elbows, the candlelight gilding his eyelashes.
    “I had saved a small fortune from my allowance over the last year. But I stole money from my family as well. I took my mother’s jewels.” His mouth twisted. A blue eye peeked at me. “Some of them had been in our families for generations. I should have stolen their Vestige, or something that was valuable but not sentimental. My father was furious. My mother tried to be understanding – find me help. I kissed another boy at an afternoon tea, in full sight of everyone. I stole sensitive documents from my father’s study and made sure they made their way to the press. I was kicked out of university. I left a young girl with child.”
    “You’re a father?” I gasped.
    He shook his head, his eyes shadowed. “She didn’t carry to term.”
    “Did she miscarry?”
    “No. It would have been too scandalous for her to have a child. But it went wrong and she… died.”
    My breath caught in my throat.
    “I never heard about this.”
    “If I could go back in time to myself at that age, I’d… I don’t know. But I can’t. And it’s why I left. They blamed me for leading her astray. Everyone knows it was an abortion and that I was the father. I was the monster.”
    “No one speaks about it, except in whispers. But they all know.”
    I rested my face on my hands, taking in his words.
    “I hadn’t even loved her. She’d died, shamed and hurting, because I was trying to anger my parents and prove some stupid philosophy.”
    I could go back. It’d be a scandal, but the life of Gene Laurus was not completely gone. But Drystan’s was, or he considered it so.
    “You were young. You didn’t know that would happen. They’d take you back, surely?”
    Drystan shook his head. “Not after what I did when I ran away.”
    My stomach twisted. Worse than this? “What did you