Book 5: Chapter 39
Kay and Eleniah stayed close together for several dances and Kay enjoyed every moment of it. He wasn’t the best dancer but he’d learned to love moving his body in battle and while less bloody this was an exertion that was close enough to be comparable. He’d learned the basics of several dances from Eleniah and a few others over the last few years, just to have them in his repertoire. While Eleniah had been his main teacher, Amanda had been there to help him with several of the more esoteric dances that didn’t see much use. He’d put that away as yet another thing to not dive too deeply into until it was safe for his Prime Minister to tell him all her secrets and moved on.
The dances on Torotia that Kay had come across weren’t that different than Earth’s dances and many of those had been brought over by this or that Outworlder. There were mostly variants of ballroom dancing at this particular party, with several of what dance-illiterate Kay called a waltz, a few that he was pretty sure were version of a salsa, and what was probably a tango. He was never completely sure which were which, but movies and some dance shows had given him a basic understanding of what different dances looked like from an outside view.
With bodies empowered by tiering up people were capable of incredible feats of acrobatics, adding moves Kay was sure would never be pulled off on Earth for safety reasons but were seen as basic parts of a dance here. The sheer speed of several spins and dips would give any regular person whiplash and pulled muscles. In between the different styles of dancing changing from one to the next, each getting progressively faster and loosing a few dancers from the crowd as the music changed, there were displays of what Kay felt were non-standard dances. They were closer to acrobatics performances with people doing insane flips and aerial spins, all set to music. There were also a few he would have called interpretive dances that more confused him than anything else.
They stepped away from the dance floor completely as one of the interpretive pieces ended and the fastest group dance of the night began. Kay was fast enough to keep up, if just barely in a few cases, but he didn’t know the steps. Trying to learn as he went while tightly packed together at the speed the dancers were moving at seemed like a great way to cause an accident. They weren’t the only pair that stepped away as things began to heat up, with the number of people still dancing less than half as many as there’d been when Kay and Eleniah had joined in.
A few more people took the opportunity to speak to Kay, although only one of them was one of the people Miri had pointed out as potentially avoiding him. That gentleman approached Kay to offer his daughter as a potential concubine. Some of the subtext told Kay that he’d originally wanted to offer her as a wife to Kay, but seeing him dance with Eleniah had made him rethink that. He said more than once that his daughter couldn’t hold a candle to a Selthoran lady, but she was pretty and talented all the same. The thought of someone trying to sell their child to him in any form made Kay want to vomit, though the fact that the man saw it as assuring his daughter had a good life reduced the feeling to Kay only wanting to vomit a little in his mouth instead of a lot all over the place.
Doing his best to politely turn down the offer with a preplanned excuse that he wasn’t going to take any concubines without his future wifes approval, Kay excused them both and led Eleniah, who’d gone silent at the man’s offer, away to their original spot, still held by the Blood Guard. The excuse was a lie of course, Kay had no plans to take any concubines. Stepping back into the protective circle of his guards, Kay took a drink from Miri to wash the acrid taste of disgust out of his mouth.
“You alright?” Kay asked Eleniah, who was still silently staring into space.
“… Alahna said that you’d get offers like that.”
“I’m sure I would have back home as well if Amanda wasn’t there to terrify everyone into backing off.”