Page 19 of A Slipper in the Smoke
“Navarran?”
She nodded. “I came here six years ago.”
“Your accent is still strong.”
She prickled. “It is.”
“I didn’t mean that disrespectfully,” he said hurriedly. “Merely an observation. It’s—I mean, it’s lovely. Always liked the Navarran accent.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Yes, visiting with…”
He must have gone there on a royal visit, his memories of it more recent that hers. Pip seemed to sense something amiss. “It’s a beautiful place,” he added.
“I hope to return to it someday.”
Pip said nothing to that. She set down her tea, gobbled the cake, and returned to her assignment. She expected him to quietly shirk away, never to be seen again, but he didn’t, instead hovering at the side of the room. Not close enough to be a nuisance, but near enough for company.
“I’ve always enjoyed watching skilled people work,” he admitted. “Never much minded what they were doing. Tending cattle, painting, fixing things… all interesting, all admirable.”
Elena knew she should ignore him, knew she should just focus on her work, but aside from her two or three conversations with Snowdrop, she’d had no one talk to her like this for years. Like they cared about what she said next.
She slid a new gear into place and tested the rest of the mechanism by touch alone, raising her eyes to meet his. “And you?” she asked. “You must have a skill.”
He raised his cup. “Aside from my excellent tea-making skills and witty conversation? I’m afraid I draw rather lacking in that department.”
Elena smiled, taking another sip. “Well, the tea is good, I grant you.”
“And the conversation?”
“Still evaluating it.”
He laughed, short and warm, and fell silent for a moment as he drank his tea. “Any other skills you have, besides fixing things?”
Elena paused, wiping her hair back from her face. Once upon a time, she’d been skilled in all manner of courtly pursuits, but it had been so long since she’d played a piano her fingers would crack against the keys. She’d be better at taking it apart.
And she had danced, too, once upon a time, lost herself to music.
But she didn’t want to tell this stranger that, didn’t want to open the lid on the sad little girl who still longed for a ball.
“Inventing them,” she said instead.
“Come again?”
“I like inventing things. Not just fixing them. I’m an engineer.”
Pip regarded her carefully over the rim of his cup. “What sort of things?”
“Well, back on the family farm it was stuff to help plant or harvest, to chop wood, to—” She paused, remembering how none of those things had been enough to save the farm when the investments fell through, how her father had been forced to sell them before giving up entirely. “These days it’s more little toys and trinkets. The odd cleaning bot.”
“And if you had the time or money to create anything?”
Elena smiled, remembering Snowdrop asking her the same question. It hadn’t warmed her as much as when Pip asked, though.
“Something to fix the world,” she told him, “and then travel it.”
Pip stared at her solidly for a long moment, as if she’d suddenly transformed into something else.
