He couldn’t get the trick quite right.
 
Acton blew a frustrated breath through his teeth, stirring the wild tangles of his forelock that draped across his eyes, down the black mask along his nose. It had been a long while since he’d worked at a new card trick – his attention had been focused on…other things. Bloodier things.
 
And now he was out of practice.
 
After a few more tries that kept turning up the wrong card – the queen of hearts when he’d wanted spades, or a two in place of an ace – he set down the deck with a thwack. The buckskin stretched, glancing as he did so out the window, where weak spring sunlight tried to coax growing things from dark soil.
 
Caligo bless the arrival of warmer weather. But he wondered (not with worry; Acton was not a fretful nor guilty creature) just what skeletons the melting snows might reveal. He’d usually been able to slip away from punishment like the magician he was, but rarely had it not come for him at all.
 
A gathering in the courtyard caught his eye, beyond the usual rag-tag symphony of life in Denocte. He recognized a few of the horses from the Dawn Court festival, back before the snows, and a smile creased his dark mouth. He’d heard that they were coming, Oriens’ merry group of mediators, and though he scoffed at the idea of it (and the need; they could solve their own problems, they always had) he was curious as to just what they knew.
 
Like a swaggering shadow he breezed down the corridors, intending to join a few of his fellows in the courtyard, but in the yawning mouth of the entry hall a sheen of silver caught his eye. Acton tilted his head toward the stranger, finding eyes are fire-bright as his own, a spark waiting for powder. The eye he ran deftly over her was practiced but not unimpressed. Her coat, when it caught the sunlight that slanted in through wide doors slung open to welcome the spring, reminded him of the harbor he’d grown up alongside, white sails and the shimmer on the water, sailors with colorful curses who were happy to teach.
 
Luckily he did not think she would be altogether much like the sea: she did not look like she smelled of fish.
 
It was a thought verified when he crossed to her, heedless of anyone she was with. Instead, there was something warm and sweet about the scent of her, something like summer. He didn’t have to fake the grin he wore.
 
“Are you one of the Dawn peacemakers, come to tell us to behave?” His tone was not outright mocking, though there was a laugh in it – a hint of that laugh there, too, in the quirk of his lips and the shine of his eyes.
 
Maybe he wouldn’t mind being reprimanded by someone like her. In either case, it was more entertaining than spending his day failing at card tricks. 


@Liesel 

these violent delights have violent ends