Read Online Beneath the Surface by Lindsay Buroker - Free Book Online

the raised platform. Trampolines and other apparatuses awaited the performers. The ceilings were high, but not that high, and Evrial pictured a much more abbreviated show than usual. As a rural gal, she’d never been into the city for the circus, but she’d heard that the performers skated and performed most of their acrobatics on the ice.
    “ Ouch.”
    “ Erg.”
    “ Terribly sorry,” Maldynado said, pulling Evrial in his wake. He apologized as he went but continued to elbow his way along the wall until he found a shady nook near a support pillar. People grumbled, but nobody attempted to stop him. The flames in the wall lamps burned so low that one couldn’t make out faces back there, but it was hard to miss Maldynado’s height and breadth.
    More grunts and curses came from along the wall on the other side of the door. The enforcers pushing their way through?
    As Evrial followed in Maldynado’s wake, she tried to spot Akstyr’s spiky locks. They needed to get him out of the room before the enforcers found him.
    Drums started up somewhere behind the stage, and the conversations grew softer.
    Maldynado found his nook and pulled Evrial into him, her back against his chest. Before she could decide if she wanted to protest this familiarity, he pointed over her shoulder toward a cluster of tables near the stage. The colored lighting illuminated those first few rows, revealing faces. Evrial groaned. Another pair of men occupied half of one table, men she also recognized from the steamboat battle.
    “ Definitely not a coincidence,” she said. “Or medical leave.”
    Maldynado sighed, his chest expanding against her back. “I suppose not. Though I’ll take some pride in that one’s eye, more precisely the sickly yellow bruise around it that hasn’t quite healed.”
    “ Are you sure that’s one you thumped?” That whole event had been so chaotic that Evrial scarcely remembered specifics. “Basilard and I were defending the railing too, as you’ll recall.”
    “ I recognize my handiwork.”
    “ The bruise is on the large side. It might match your fat fingers.”
    “ I’m not sure whether I should reject the notion that anything on me is fat—stout or muscular perhaps, but not fat—or simply be pleased that you’re developing a sense of humor.”
    “ We’ve discussed this. I’ve always had a sense of humor. You people just aren’t funny.” Evrial thought she glimpsed someone with a prickly ridge of hair making his way along one of the side walls toward the stage. “Is that your man? Or just someone with a hat stranger than most of yours?”
    The drumbeats increased in speed and intensity, and Evrial didn’t hear Maldynado’s answer. It sounded indignant though.
    “ Welcome to this special showing of our traveling circus,” a voice rang out, amplified somehow to echo throughout the dining hall, “in which we shall entertain, mystify, and impress you with feats of dexterity and skill. We’ll follow this with a theatrical reenactment of the infamous Drunken Valley Battle from the Second Border War.”
    “ That should prove interesting on that tiny stage,” Maldynado said. “I’m surprised they’re performing here at all. Their usual milieu is a frozen lake.”
    “ It’s probably how they’re paying their way.” Evrial leaned to the side, trying to track the movement of the figure she thought might be Akstyr. “Did you just say milieu?”
    “ Dear ancestors, I believe I did. What a dreadful word. I’ll have to thump Books later. He’s the only one who would have cursed my vocabulary with such an addition.”
    “ Make sure to smack him in the eye, so I can compare his bruise to the one on that enforcer, and see if your stout, muscular fingers truly can claim that blow.”
    For a moment, Maldynado didn’t respond. She hadn’t offended him, had she? That hardly seemed possible.
    Then his breath stirred her hair—not a breath, a soft laugh. “You do have a sense of humor. That’s