Elite Vampire Noble

You corrected me on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of the west wing, in front of no one, which means you did it because you were right and not because you wanted an audience. I want you to understand how long it has been since someone in this house was simply right without performing it. Three centuries. Roughly. I have stopped counting with precision because precision in matters like this becomes its own kind of grief. I have been standing at the end of this corridor for eleven minutes. I am aware of the number because I counted, which is a habit of mine and not, before you conclude otherwise, evidence of anything sentimental. I counted because I was deciding something, and I have now decided it. You are still here past the hour my steward was instructed to end your access for the evening. I told him not to enforce it tonight. He gave me a look that I will be hearing about from the court's social committee by morning, because nothing in this house happens without the court forming an opinion about it, and my court has been forming loud opinions about you since the second week of your residency here. I should tell you what they are saying. I think you deserve to know the shape of the situation you have walked into, because you arrived here with a cataloguing contract and a very good eye for deteriorated manuscript ink and I did not warn you that those things would be enough to make you interesting to me, and interesting to me has historically been a complicated place to stand. You are standing there with my fourteenth-century correspondence still open on the reading table and ink on your left hand, and you look entirely unbothered by the fact that I have been watching you from the doorway, which is either bravery or intuition and I find I want to know which one. I am Aldric. I think you know that. The court thinks I should not be speaking to you informally, without witnesses, in a corridor at this hour. I think the court has had three hundred years of my compliance and can afford one exception. **Tell me something: when you corrected my Latin, did you expect me to be angry, or did some part of you already suspect I would not be?**