7
BETWEEN STAYING UP late and rising early for my morning routine, I got far too little sleep. I stumbled stoically through my duties, but Viridius noticed me struggling. “I’ll clean your pens,” he said, taking the quill from my unresisting hand. “You are to lie down on my couch and nap for half an hour.”
“Master, I assure you I’m—” A gargantuan yawn undermined my argument.
“Of course you are. But we must have you at full capacity for the Blue Salon this evening, and I don’t feel convinced that you’ve been listening quite carefully enough to my dictation.” He scanned the parchment where I’d been writing down his compositional ideas as he hummed them. His brows lowered and he turned slightly purple. “You’ve jotted it down in three. It’s a gavotte. Dancers are going to be falling all over each other.”
I intended to answer him, but I’d already reached the couch. It pulled me under, and my explanation turned into a dream about St. Polypous dancing a 3/4 gavotte with perfect ease. But then, he had three feet.
That evening I arrived at the Blue Salon early, hoping I might pay my respects, meet Viridius’s protégé, and leave before most people had even arrived. I saw my mistake at once: Viridius wasn’t there yet. Of course he wasn’t; he would likely come late, the old coxcomb. I would get no credit for coming if I ducked out before he arrived. All I’d done was given myself extra time to feel uncomfortable.
I’d always been useless at parties, even before I knew how much I had to hide. Large groups of semi-strangers made me clam right up. I anticipated standing alone in a corner shoving butter tarts in my mouth all evening.
Even Glisselda wasn’t there yet; that was how stupidly early I’d come. Servants lit chandeliers and smoothed tablecloths onto sideboards, stealing surreptitious glances at me. I wandered toward the back of the salon, past the upholstered chairs of the formal sitting area, past the gilded columns, into a wide space with a parquet floor intended for dancing. Music stands and stools were piled haphazardly in the corner; I set them up for a quartet, hoping I was doing something useful and not merely eccentric.
Five musicians arrived—Guntard, two viols, uillean pipes, and drum—and I set a fifth place. They seemed pleased to see me, and not altogether surprised that the assistant music mistress should be here, setting up. Maybe I could stand in their corner all evening, turning pages and bringing them ale.
Wine, that is. This was the palace, not the Sunny Monkey.
Courtiers trickled in, resplendent in silks and brocade. I’d worn my best gown, a deep blue calamanco with understated embroidery at all the hemlines, but what passed for finery in town felt shabby here. I pressed myself against a wall and hoped no one would speak to me. I knew some of these courtiers: the palace employed professional musicians such as Guntard and the band, but many young gentlemen liked to dabble in music on the side. They usually joined the choir, but that fair-haired Samsamese across from me played a mean viola da gamba.
His name was Josef, Earl of Apsig. He noticed my eyes upon him and ran a hand through his wheaten hair as if to underscore how handsome he was. I looked away.
The Samsamese were known for austerity, but even they out-shone me here. Their merchants dressed in browns in town; their courtiers wore expensive blacks, contriving to be simultaneously sumptuous and severe. In case we Goreddis failed to recognize expensive cloth on sight, the Samsamese also spouted great tufts of lace from their cuffs, and stiff white ruffs at their throats.
The Ninysh courtiers, by contrast, tried to incorporate every possible color in their outfits: embroidery, ribbons, parti-colored hose, bright silk peeking through the slashes in their sleeves. Their country lay deep in the gloomy south; there were few colors to be seen there, beyond what they carried with them.
I glimpsed a Ninysh gabled cap in a vibrant green, worn by an elderly woman. She had thick spectacles, which gave her eyes a peevish, bulgy aspect; the heavy creases beside her wide mouth created the impression of an enormous, disapproving toad.
She looked like Miss Fusspots, poor old darling.
No, that was unquestionably Miss Fusspots. That glare could belong to no one else. My heart caught in my throat. I wouldn’t need to travel to Porphyry after all; one of my grotesques was standing right across the room!
Miss Fusspots, who was diminutive, disappeared behind a grove of ladies-in-waiting but reemerged moments later beside a redheaded Ninysh courtier. I began to work my way across the room toward her.
I didn’t get far, however, because at that very moment Princess Glisselda and Prince Lucian arrived, arm in arm. The crowd opened a wide corridor to let them pass, and I dared not cross it. The princess gleamed in gold and white, brocade encrusted with seed pearls; she beamed beatifically at the entire room and let a Ninysh courtier lead her to a seat. Prince Lucian, in the scarlet doublet of the Queen’s Guard, did not relax until the crowd’s adoring gaze had followed his cousin to the other end of the room.
Princess Glisselda took the midnight-blue couch, where no one else had dared to sit, and began chatting away to all and sundry. Lucian Kiggs did not sit, but stood a little to the side, his eye upon the room; he never seemed to go off duty. In the adjoining chamber, the musicians finally began with a pleasant sarabande. I looked for Miss Fusspots, but she had disappeared.
“Others may doubt it was a dragon. I do not,” said someone behind me in a light Samsamese monotone.
“Ooh, how awful!” said a young woman.
I turned to see Josef, Earl of Apsig, regaling three Goreddi ladies-in-waiting with a tale: “I was part of his final hunting party, grausleine. We had just entered the Queenswood when the hounds scattered in all directions, as if there were twenty stags, not just one. We split up, some following north, some west, each group thinking Prince Rufus was with the other, but when we rejoined, he was nowhere to be found.
“We searched for him until evening, then called out the Queen’s Guard and searched all through the night. It was his own dog—a lovely brindle snaphound called Una—who found him, lying faceless and facedown in the nearby fens.”
The three ladies gasped. I had turned all the way around and was studying the earl’s face. He had pale blue eyes; his complexion was without a single blemish or wrinkle by which to gauge his age. He was trying to impress the ladies, certainly, but seemed to be speaking the truth. I disliked jumping in where I hadn’t been invited, but I had to know: “Are you so sure a dragon killed him? Were there clear signs in the fen?”
Josef turned the full force of his handsomeness on me. He lifted his chin and smiled like a Saint in a country church, all piety and graciousness; around him the choir of cherubic ladies-in-waiting stared at me and fluttered, silk gowns rustling. “Who else do you imagine could have killed him, Music Mistress?”
I folded my arms, proof against charm. “Brigands, stealing his head for ransom?”
“There’s been no ransom request.” He smirked; his cherubs smirked with him.
“The Sons of St. Ogdo, stirring up dracophobia before the Ardmagar arrives?”
He threw back his head and laughed; he had very white teeth. “Come, Seraphina, you’ve omitted the possibility that he spotted a lovely shepherdess and simply lost his head.” The heavenly host rewarded this comment with a symphony of titters.
I was about to turn away—he knew nothing, clearly—when a familiar baritone chimed in behind me: “Maid Dombegh is right. It’s likely the Sons did it.”
I stepped a little aside, letting Prince Lucian face Josef unimpeded.
Josef’s smile thinned. Prince Lucian hadn’t acknowledged the disrespectful innuendo about his uncle Rufus, but he’d surely heard every word. The earl gave exaggerated courtesy. “Begging your pardon, Prince, but why do you not round up the Sons and lock them away, if you’re so sure they did it?”
“We’ll arrest no one without proof,” said the prince, seeming unconcerned. His left boot gave three rapid taps; I noticed and wondered whether I had such unconscious tics. The prince continued, his tone still light: “Unfounded arrests would give the Sons more fodder and bring new ones out of the woodwork. Besides, it’s wrong in principle. ‘Let the one who seeks justice be just.’”
I looked over at him then, because I recognized that quote. “Pontheus?”
“The same.” Prince Lucian nodded approvingly.
Josef sneered. “With all due respect, the Regent of Samsam would never permit a mad Porphyrian philosopher to guide his decisions. Nor would he permit dragons to make a state visit to Samsam—no offense to your Queen, of course.”
“Perhaps that is why the Regent of Samsam was not the architect of peace,” said the prince, voice calm, foot tapping. “Apparently he has no qualms about receiving the benefits of our mad-Porphyrian-inspired treaty without having to shoulder any of the risks himself. He’ll be here for this state visit, more’s the headache for me—and I mean that with all the love and respect in the world.”
As fascinating as this polite, courtly aggression was, suddenly Miss Fusspots arrested my gaze from across the adjoining room. She accepted a glass of tawny port from a page boy. I could not get to her without ducking through the dancing, and they’d just started a volta, so there was a great number of flying limbs. I stayed where I was, but did not take my eye off her.
A trumpet flare brought the exuberant dance to an inelegant halt; the band choked off abruptly, and there were several collisions on the dance floor. I did not take my eyes off Miss Fusspots to see what all the bother was, which resulted in my standing all alone in the wide path that had once again opened up.
Prince Lucian grabbed my arm—my right—and hauled me out of the way.
Queen Lavonda herself stood in the doorway. Her face was creased with age but her back was unbent; she had a spine of steel, they said, and her posture confirmed it. She still wore white for her son, from her silk slippers to her wimple and embroidered cap. Her sumptuous sleeves trailed the floor.
Glisselda sprang up off her couch and curtsied deeply. “Grandmamma! You honor us!”
“I’m not staying, Selda, and I’m not here for myself,” said the Queen. She had the same voice as her granddaughter, but aged and edged with command. “I have brought you some additional guests,” she said, ushering in a group of four saarantrai, Eskar among them. They stood stiffly, as if in military formation. They had not bothered to dress up particularly; their bells were not quite shiny enough to be proper jewelry. Eskar was in Porphyrian trousers again. Everyone stared.
“Oh!” squeaked Glisselda. She curtsied again, trying to recover her composure; her eyes were still large when she rose. “To what do we owe this, um—”
“To a treaty signed nearly forty years ago,” said the Queen, who seemed to grow taller as she addressed the entire room. “I believed, perhaps erroneously, that our peoples would simply grow accustomed to each other, given the cessation of warfare. Are we oil and water, that we cannot mix? Have I been remiss in expecting reason and decency to prevail, when I should have rolled up my sleeves and enforced them?”
The humans in the room looked sheepish; the dragons, discomfited.
“Glisselda, see to your guests!” the Queen snapped, and quit the room.
Glisselda quailed visibly. Beside me, Prince Lucian fidgeted and muttered, “Come on, Selda.” She could not have heard him, but she lifted her chin as if she had, trying to capture her grandmother’s authoritative air. She strode toward Eskar and kissed her on both her cheeks. The little princess had to rise up on her toes to reach. Eskar submitted graciously, inclining her head, and everyone applauded.
Then the soiree resumed, the saarantrai together on one side like a herd of spooked cattle, their bells jingling plaintively, and the other guests milling around them in a wide radius.
I kept my distance, too. Eskar knew me, but I did not care to risk the others smelling me. I wasn’t sure what they would do. I might be taken for a scholar with a bell exemption, or Eskar might tactlessly proclaim my parentage aloud, to be overheard by the whole room.
Surely she wouldn’t. Orma had told me that interbreeding violated ard so egregiously that no dragon would entertain the idea that I was possible, let alone utter it aloud.
“I dare you to ask her to dance,” said a gentleman behind me, snapping me out of my preoccupations. For a moment I thought he meant me.
“Which one?” intoned the omnipresent Earl of Apsig.
“Your choice,” laughed his friend.
“No, I mean which one is a ‘her’? They’re so mannish, these dragon females.”
I bristled at that, but why? They weren’t talking about me—except that, in some oblique way, they were.
“The real difficulty with these worm-women,” said Josef, “is their extremely inconvenient dentition.”
“Dentition?” asked his friend, who was apparently slow on the uptake.
I felt my face grow hot.
“Teeth,” said Josef, spelling it out. “In all the wrong places, if you follow me.”
“Teeth in . . . Oh! Ow!”
“‘Ow’ is understating it, friend. Their males are no better. Picture a harpoon! And they’d like nothing better than to impale our women and rip out their—”
I could take no more; I rushed away, skirting the dance floor, until I found a window. I unlatched it with trembling hands, desperate for air. Eyes closed, I pictured the tranquility of my garden, until my embarrassment had been replaced by sorrow.
It was just a joke between gentlemen, but I heard in it all the jokes they would tell about me if they knew.
Damn Viridius. I couldn’t stay. I would tell him tomorrow that I had been here; there were witnesses. As the patron Saints of comedy would have it, however, I met the old man in the doorway on my way out. He blocked my path with his cane. “You can’t be leaving already, Seraphina!” he cried. “It’s not even ten!”
“I’m sorry sir, I—” My voice choked up; I gestured hopelessly at the gathering, hoping he would not perceive the tears in my eyes.
“Lars wouldn’t come either. He’s as shy as you are,” said Viridius, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. “Have you paid your respects to the princess and prince? No? Well, you must do that at least.” He took my right arm with his bandaged hand, leaning on his cane with the other.
He guided me toward Princess Glisselda’s couch. She glittered like a star upon the blue upholstery; courtiers orbited her like planets. We waited our turn, and then Viridius pulled me forward. “Infanta,” he said, bowing. “This charming young person has a great deal of work to do—for me—but I let her know, in no uncertain terms, how inexcusably rude it would be to leave without paying her respects.”
Glisselda beamed at me. “You came! Millie and I had a wager on whether you ever would. I owe her an extra day off now, but I’m glad of it. Have you met cousin Lucian?”
I opened my mouth to assure her I had, but she was already calling the prince to her side. “Lucian! You were wondering how it was that I suddenly held such interesting opinions on dragons—well, here she is, my advisor on dragon affairs!”
The prince looked tense. My first assumption was that he was offended, that I’d been rude without even noticing, but then I saw him glancing over at Eskar and her little group, standing uselessly in a nearby corner. Perhaps he felt uneasy about the princess discussing “dragon affairs” so loudly within earshot of the real, live dragons she pretended not to see.
Princess Glisselda looked puzzled by the awkwardness in the air, as if it were a smell she had never encountered before. I looked to Prince Lucian, but he stared fixedly elsewhere. Did I dare to point out what he did not?
It was fear that permitted the Thomas Broadwicks of the world to flourish: fear of speaking up, fear of the dragons themselves. The latter didn’t apply to me, and surely conscience must trump the former.
I could speak for Orma’s sake.
I said, “Your Highness, please pardon my forwardness.” I gestured toward the saarantrai with my eyes. “It would suit your kindly nature to invite the saarantrai to sit by you, or even if you danced a measure with one.”
Glisselda froze. Theoretical discussion about dragonkind was one thing; interacting with them was something else entirely. She cast her cousin a panicked look.
“She’s right, Selda,” he said. “The court follows our lead.”
“I know!” fretted the princess. “But what am I . . . how am I to . . . I can’t just—”
“You must,” said Prince Lucian firmly. “Ardmagar Comonot arrives in eight days, and what then? We can’t shame Grandmother.” He tugged the ends of his doublet sleeves, straightening them. “I’ll go first, if it’s easier.”
“Oh yes, thank you, Lucian, of course it’s easier,” she gushed, relieved. “He’s so much better at these kinds of things than I am, Phina. This is why marrying him will be so useful; he understands practical things and common people. He’s a bastard, after all.”
I was awed, at first, that she could call her own fiancé a bastard so casually without him minding, but then I saw his eyes. He minded. He minded a great deal, but maybe felt he had no right to say so.
I knew what that was like. I permitted myself the smallest of small feelings. Sympathy. Yes. That’s what it was.
He gathered his dignity, which was considerable; as a military man, he knew how to carry himself. He approached Eskar as one might sensibly approach a flaming, hissing hell-beast: with a wary calmness and extreme self-possession. All around the room conversations trailed off or were suspended as heads turned toward the prince. I found myself holding my breath; I surely wasn’t the only one.
He bowed graciously. “Madam Undersecretary,” he said, perfectly audible across the hushed room, “would you join me in a galliard?”
Eskar scanned the crowd as if seeking out the author of this prank but said, “I believe I shall.” She took his arm; her Zibou caftan was a riotous fuchsia next to his scarlet. Everyone exhaled.
I stayed a few minutes longer to watch them dance, smiling to myself. It could be done, this peace. It just took a willingness to do it. I silently thanked Prince Lucian for his determination. I caught Viridius’s eye across the room; he seemed to understand and waved a dismissal. I turned to quit the salon, happy that I’d helped effect some positive good, but mostly relieved to be leaving the crowd and chatter behind. Anxiety—or the prospect of being free of it—propelled me toward the door like a bubble toward the surface of a lake. The hallway promised me room to breathe.
I rushed into the corridor with such haste that I all but ran into Lady Corongi, Princess Glisselda’s governess.