The Price {Completed}

Chapter Twenty-Four

The next stop on our journey was Ferdinand's apartment. Apparently, when Mr. Lennox reinstated him to the Lennox Company, a room was no longer thrown into the bargain. His residence now lay miles from our own boarding house, and just as far from the theater. I couldn't imagine walking the entire way in the frigid morning and back in the evening after a full day's worth of rehearsals and performing. He must have been dead tired this whole time. And yet he still took that walk in order to dance with us. With me. I quickened my steps to catch his hand in mine. He didn't look down but I felt his fingers tighten around my hand.

The boarding house he'd rented a room in was not one of the finest degree. It was just barely nicer than the old rooms Mr. Lennox and I lived in until our Crown Commission, though perhaps run by a more concerned landlord than ours. I suspected a woman as we entered the hallway and started up the stairs—a vase of flowers sat on a sidetable, and the mirror on the back wall was clean and polished.

Ferdinand led me down the upstairs hallway all the way to the back, where a door painted a deep blue stood. He unlocked it and let me through into an apartment of three tiny rooms. Two large windows overlooked the street, letting in the dim sunlight. We walked to one of the upholstered chairs and Ferdinand sat me down, taking my things through to the bedroom where he dropped them off on the mattress and proceeded to strip the bed of its quilt and heavy blanket. I watched as he took the bed clothes to the windows and draped them over the curtain rods, blocking the light but also making it impossible for anyone walking on the road to glimpse the interior of our rooms.

When they were in place, he lit a candle and brought it to me in the murky common room. I looked down at the chair I sat on, for lack of anything else to do with my eyes, and saw that it was worn and a bit dirty, but otherwise pretty and perhaps expensive. I remembered his mention of a baronetcy, and glanced over at him.

"You said you're a Baron?" I asked, while he rummaged around in a chest that also served as a small table. He looked up, his mouth a thin line.

"Yes."

"That's all you're going to say?"

"Do I need to say more? I'm twentieth in line for the throne, and I highly doubt that after tonight we'll even have a throne."

I hadn't realized he was even that close to ruling. "There's much to say," I replied. "You're a dancer in the National Rumonin, which is not exactly the normal day job for a baron. One expects to see someone of your title sitting in a bank or running some business. Not dancing for the enjoyment of anyone who buys a ticket."

"The lovely thing about the devaluation of the Rumonin titles is that barons are no longer expected to be the high and mighty royalty that they once were. There's so many of us now that I suspect we're more common than bankers," he said.

"There may be an unprecedented amount of barons, but it does not lessen the fact that most are still wealthy enough to live in the apartments on the palace side of the city."

"My family is barely above the middle-class, and our house may have been on the fashionable side of town, but there were steep debts that came with it. My father kept the collectors off by cashing in favors with his political ties, and by working at the bank. So you guessed partially right. Had I followed what my father and mother wished, I would be a baron sat behind an office desk, pushing around money to try and make it seem like the State had more than the pittance it spreads thinly over the populace."

"And you rebelled against your family?"

"It's nothing like those romantic novels, which I'm sure you're imagining. I didn't declare to the gathered royalty at a ball that I was denouncing the lifestyle and going to dance with the ballet. I simply packed my things one night and set out to make my own way. No one knew I was Baron Popov, and I used the money I earned from odd jobs to pay for everything. My parents knew that I was out on my own, though I never told them exactly where I was holing up in the months it took me to earn a spot in the National."