“I think that went quite well,” Francesca said.


    I stared at her, ale halfway to my mouth.


    “It did!” she insisted. “You found out you have allies amongst the Perfezionamenti, despite knowing or at least strongly suspecting your heritage, and at least one of them wants to do a little more than ally, it seems.”


    “I discovered my secret is out,” I replied hollowly, “and you didn’t find a husband.”


    Francesca blew a raspberry at me. “You’re not looking at this the right way.”


    I drank my ale and did not dignify this with a response.


    “I’ll go back tomorrow,” she continued, “and get the ladies’ inside knowledge on all the most eligible bachelors that maintain a mysteriously tight hold on their eligibility.”


    “You think they’re going to have better insight on the proclivities of specific Queen’s University students than their own classmates?”


    “It’s the best anyone can do on short notice, short of lounging about naked in the University’s gymnasium’s showers, Leo, which you won’t do—”


    “You’re right. I won’t.”


    “—and I am not equipped for.”


    “You just want to see Miss Lucrezia again,” I accused.


    “Also that,” she replied, unapologetically.


    But when she returned to my dormitory for a farewell the following afternoon, she actually had a list.


    “How on earth did you manage that?” I asked, astonished.


    “Oh,” Francesca replied airily, flopping down on my bed, “It was easy. I just told the truth.” She coughed; her voice was now verging on the distinctly feminine.


    “The truth!”


    “Yes.”


    “What, right there in your mustache?”


    “I took it off.”


    “In front of all of them?” I cried, aghast.


    “No, silly, just Lucrezia.”


    “They let you into her room?”


    “We were in the garden.” Francesca grinned. “Alone. Their chaperones are terrible.”


    “They really are,” I agreed.


    “And then we kissed.”


    I put my hands over my eyes. I’d set a vixen on the henhouse. “Before or after the mustache removal?”


    “After, of course.” Francesca sounded mortally offended. “I wouldn’t kiss under false pretenses, Leo. That would be awful. What do you take me for?”


    I removed my hands from my eyes to hold them out placatingly. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I just don’t understand how you do it.”


    “She was moved by my plight, and admired my drive to overcome it. And she thought I looked devastatingly dashing in my waistcoat.”


    “I mean I don’t know how you identify your willing kissers in the first place.”


    She just smiled and tapped the side of her nose.


    I didn’t bother to ask her what her number was now. “So you have your list of eligible bachelors. Your next move is to… what, exactly? Approach them here?”


    “No, I don’t think that would work very well.” She coughed again. “I’m losing my Franco voice, for one thing. For another, now that I have their names, I can simply approach them as Francesca. I think…” She tapped her chin. “I think I’ll invite them all to the ball.”


    “What ball?”


    “The ball I’m going to throw as an excuse to suss them all out. Early in the summer season.”


    “And half of Perfezionamento?”This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    “Don’t be ridiculous. A third will suffice. I’ll invite you too, of course.”


    “Assuming I survive that long,” I muttered.


    ??


    I survived.


    It was a close thing. My studies kept me safely busy and largely nocturnal for much of that term, but I still had fencing lessons twice a week with Paffuto. And though it cost me every ounce of pride I had, I did the smart thing: whenever we faced each other on the piste, I made sure I lost.


    At first, I thought he would grow suspicious. He was the only opponent against which I always lost, including against students who were capable of beating him four times out of five. I wasn’t the best fencer—that honor belonged to a taciturn young man with a shock of red hair and a prominent Adam’s apple—but I was close. Paffuto, however, was blessed with an impenetrable cocoon of ego that kept him safely inured from questioning his own supremacy. If any of the others noticed, they didn’t care to bring it to his attention.


    And as the snow melted into chuckling rills that made the campus footpaths downright dangerous, and the forest fungi effervesced so heartily it was impossible to make it to class without one’s necktie coming back powdered purple, I began to court Teresa.


    Or, more accurately, she began to court me.


    I was terrified. She never explicitly confirmed that she knew I was a quarter Winged, and I did my best to avert any conversation whatsoever on the topic of Alii. I also did my best to keep the courtship aboveboard. I called on her only under the most chaste of circumstances: after Solday services in town; in the Perfezionamento gardens at high noon for luncheon; at the gelateria tucked between the alehouses. The kisses we exchanged were brief, and absolutely no clothing was removed. My deportment tutor would have been at least moderately proud.


    On days when Teresa invited Miss Lucrezia or the Maharani along, I invited Barti. Neither of them were buxom enough to tempt him, but he seemed delighted to be invited anywhere. I got the sense that he was something of an afterthought in Otto’s social life, and had never developed one of his own. It was a shame; he was a delight. Miss Lucrezia and the Maharani thought so as well, and began scheming between themselves to see if they couldn’t find a lady to his tastes.


    “I wish I’d had female friends growing up,” Barti said wistfully, on the last night of the term. “They’re fun.” We were sitting in our common room sharing a bottle of wine. He was already packed; I was procrastinating. Otto was out celebrating in the alehouses, and Paffuto, thank God, was already gone.


    “I only had Francesca,” I replied, pouring myself another glass. “But without her, I would have had no one.”


    “I had no one,” Barti said gloomily. “I just tagged along after Otto.”


    “Well, good thing you came to University, then.”


    He held his glass up to me solemnly before downing it.


    “You’ll be able to make it to Francesca’s ball, won’t you?” I asked, slightly anxiously. Other than the Midwinter Masque, I had never been to a ball. Francesca would be thoroughly occupied—vetting her prospective husbands, or else distracting herself amongst the female guests—and I would be left either standing in a corner by myself or trying to navigate Teresa and her increasingly amorous advances. I desperately wanted Barti there to run interference if necessary.


    It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested. Good God, I was interested. But that was the problem. I doubted Teresa would be satisfied with the same furtive outdoor exertions in which the tightrope walker and I had engaged. At some point, she was going to want my shirt off. And I was at a loss as to how to ensure that, should this come to pass, I could guarantee that it was too dark to see anything damning. Not without contrivances that were themselves so damning that I might as well just leave the lights on.


    Barti refilled his glass. “I really think so. It’s just a matter of making sure there’s a carriage available between my sisters going to the sea with my mother, my father’s annual hunting expedition, and Otto doing whatever it is he does with his friends.”


    “That ball might be the end of me, without you there.”


    “So you’ve said.”


    “I could be exposed.”


    “I think Lady Contarini probably already knows about you.”


    “Then why hasn’t she told me?”


    “Why haven’t you told her?” Barti took a contemplative sip. “Seems to me if you’re going to pursue this, rather than break it off, you’ve already decided she’s going to know. It’s just a matter of when. You’re only torturing yourself with the uncertainty.”


    I played my fingers over the wine glass in agitation. “I don’t want to be expelled,” I said fretfully. “If I break things off with her, and she feels slighted, she could expose me out of spite.”


    Barti raised his eyebrows. “You really think she’d do that?”


    “No.” I swallowed. “But I can’t be certain.”


    “So this entire courtship exists as a result of some sort of... self-imposed theoretical blackmail?”


    It sounded terrible when he put it that way. I made a face.


    “You really don’t like her?” Barti pressed.


    “No, I do! I do. She is charming, and lovely, and smart, and quite thoughtful.”


    “I’m not the one you need to convince.”


    “She is a good person,” I said stoutly.


    “Remind me never to go to you for advice on sonnets.”


    I rested the wine glass against my forehead in defeat. “I don’t love her, Barti. I like her. But I don’t want to marry her. And I don’t want to lead her on. I just don’t know how to… extricate myself.”


    Barti looked thoughtful. “How do you know you don’t love her?”


    I tossed back the entire glassful of wine in one large gulp and poured myself another. Master Fiore, it seemed, had known what he was talking about after all. “I just know.”


    “Have you been in love before?”


    I froze. Memory brushed at me like feathers.


    Barti’s eyebrows rose higher, but he said nothing. We didn’t have enough wine for that conversation, evidently. He simply took another sip and said, “I’ll be at the ball.”


    I drank the last of the wine straight out of the bottle.