She saw him when the time was closer to the eleventh hour, when the party had thinned to its committed remainder and the candles had burned to different levels and the music had gone quieter.
He was across the room.
She had been aware of him since approximately the eighth hour — awareness being its own kind of perception now, the thread-sight noting the specific quality of his presence the way it noted things worth noting. But she hadn't looked directly.
Not even once.
Had kept him in her peripheral awareness the way you kept things that were going to require your full attention eventually and you weren't ready for eventually yet.
Now she looked.
He was surrounded. That was the first observation — a group of women, various ages, arranged around him in the specific pattern of people who were ostensibly talking to each other and were actually talking near him. The light in his corner was good and did the things that light did when it found silver hair.
Silver.
Long — the length of it pulled back in a loose arrangement, tied at the base of his neck but not entirely contained, the rest of it falling past his shoulder blades in that specific silver that wasn't white and wasn't grey and wasn't any of the colors she had words for. He was wearing something dark — she couldn't tell the precise color from this distance, only that it was deep and that it suited him in the way that things suited people who didn't need to try.
Tall. Even across the room the height was apparent — not dramatic, not the height of someone who had grown past the rest of them, just the height of someone who had arrived at the right measurement and found it effortless. And the build underneath the dark coat — she catalogued this with the same flat attention — was not what the coat suggested. The coat suggested decorative. The body underneath it, visible at the shoulders and the line of it, was not decorative.
His face from across the room was — she ran out of efficient language for it and noted this as data about the face.
One of the women near him said something and he turned his head to listen and she saw his profile. The jaw. The lashes — even at this distance, even in the lower light of this hour, they were apparent. The specific length of them casting a fractional shadow. An old scar across his eye, a scar from a blade. It only seemed to make him more..?
She looked away.
Who is that? said something in her that was not the analytical part.
The analytical part reasserted itself.
Someone to her left — the pleasant woman from dinner, the lesser baron's wife — appeared at her elbow with the comfortable ease of someone who had enjoyed their table conversation and considered it an established relationship.
"Quite the picture, isn't he," the woman said, with the comfortable frankness of someone who had been married long enough that they could observe attractive young men as aesthetic phenomena without complication.
"Who is he?" Zolani said.
"The Vauren boy." The woman sipped her wine. She was already drunk, her cheeks flushed her lips looser.
"Leith Vauren. House Vauren — Count level, the old families. They've produced beautiful people for three generations, it's practically a tradition at this point." She giggled then paused. "Though I must say this one is particularly—" she appeared to be searching for a word that covered the situation adequately and not be perceived as a creep. "He's seventeen or eighteen, I think. The younger son."
Leith Vauren, she filed. House Vauren. Silver and deep green. The open hand sigil. It was a powerful noble house, their influence stretching even to the Capital.
As though he had felt the specific quality of her attention — and perhaps, she thought, he had — he turned his head.
Across the room. Across the remaining guests and the lower candles and the distance that was and wasn't significant.
Their eyes met.
Gold-blue meeting crimson.
She felt something like a thread connecting them— the slight resonance of it. She forgot how to breath as she felt him study her. Him in the light and her in the darkness. Something felt different. Something that was simply.. Unavoidable. The specific sensation of two people who were both, in their different ways, paying the kind of attention that most people didn't pay, and finding that attention returned.
Two seconds. Perhaps three.
Then he looked away.
Back to the woman speaking to him smiling at the said woman. His profile again. The lashes.
She looked away also.
"Lovely family," the pleasant woman was saying. "Complicated history, of course. All the old families have complicated histories. But lovely."
"Yes," Zolani unconsciously replied then caught herself before cringing.
Wtf?
The vivid golden-blue eyes haunted her.
She sipped her drink, pushing those thoughts away as she sought for a footman who would give her a refill