"That sounds very..."
"Incestuous? Or—that's not the word for it, but let's say the idea gave me pause. If you'll take my advice, fill your time: whether it's a side position with Lord Msrah's administration or writing books or proving some extreme scholarly point, or competitive gardening. Something that can take you out of the role of Bound. Being paid well to present your wrist once a week throws all sorts of perspectives out of balance. Especially when those couple of minutes with the Lord are so impossibly intense."
"There wasn't any difficulty about leaving?"
"No. Don't fret about that. After the initial ten years, you can give notice at any time."
"Is turnover high?"
"Not really. People seem to fall into two groups—those who serve ten years and then leave, and those who stay for decades, until they grow restless. I don't know of anyone who has broken contract with Lord Msrah, though of course it happens elsewhere. I'm second oldest of the Lord's current Bound, and Evie is the youngest, having served two years. We do make a nodding acknowledgement to seniority, though those of us who work with the Lord's administration complicate any attempt to keep a real hierarchy. Oh, good, they've brought up your trunk."
And unpacked it, which was an aspect of a large household that Rian would need to keep in mind. There was nothing written down, but she could risk no hint of her true purpose. Could her target be among the servants? A place this large would have dozens.
"The house was partially wired last year, which is a luxury I most definitely will miss. I'll leave you to dress for dinner. The Lord doesn't always expect us to dine with State guests, but we do make useful table fillers—"
Sccrrrttt. Trrckttt.
Delia Hackett's warm smile dropped away, and she backed toward the door, staring at a large box sitting on the dressing table. "What—?"
The thin, secretive sound came again, and Rian stared blankly at the box, square-tied with coarse twine. But then she remembered a sleek blond head, eyes determinedly lowered, and a box thrust at her during the last moments of the previous day's school visit.
"It's a gift from Eleri, one of my nieces. She's following her parents' profession." Rian unpicked the knot, and lifted the box lid to reveal a layer of tissue paper shifting fitfully.
A wooden arm rose, dragging down the concealing paper, and Rian caught her breath—not so much at the sight of an automaton, but the particular form it took. There was even the faintest scent of turpentine, to conjure memories of sunny afternoons in the studio. Old paint had been refreshed, and posable wooden joints replaced by delicately-worked bronze-gold metal, but this was definitely a former friend, not seen for years.
"My father's mannequin. He brought it back from Lutèce when I was ten," Rian said, pulling away the last of the tissue. "I called him Monsieur Doré, and painted the monocle and moustache on him. I thought he'd been lost years ago. So Aedric had him."
She hesitated, then lifted the now-still automaton out of the box and sat him on the dressing table. Over two feet tall, the mannequin was even heavier than she remembered, but the joints repositioned smoothly and silently, and the wood and metal figure could be sat upright without sliding.
"But it was trying to get out?" Dama Hackett took a step closer.
"Eleri probably added a movement," Rian said. "I suppose it was meant to be a gift for my brother's birthday, and the charge has run down."
"And now I feel a fool," Dama Hackett said. "And have opened wounds. I'm so sorry, child."
With a charmingly inconsequential grace the woman brushed over awkwardness and moved on to instructions on how to reach the dining hall, before leaving Rian to freshen and dress for dinner. Rian closed the door firmly, then looked back at the dressing table.
The automaton now sat leaning forward, the head turned toward the door. The face was merely flat planes marked by the curling moustache and the thin gold circle of the monocle, lacking any eyes at all. Yet Rian felt quite certain it was looking at her.
"Well, Monsieur Doré," she said. "You are a most unexpected development."
The automaton shifted, attempting to stand, but then slumped, tilted, and remained unmoving as Rian returned to the dressing table.
Gingerly, she cleared the box away and then touched a wooden arm, not quite certain whether she should be afraid. There had been stories all through spring and summer of automatons spontaneously activating, running wild. But then, there'd been such stories since the first automatons.
When her cautious prodding produced no response, Rian laid the mannequin face down, and puzzled out a way to unfasten the back. The mechanism she exposed, intricate and cramped, centred around a globe of faded purple crystal.
Her eyebrows rose. "Now this is beyond excessive."
Lifting the globe out of its casing, she held it toward the window. Fulgite had transformed Rome's lightning into a workable force they called fulquus—the lightning horse—capable of hauling the world into a new age of machines powered by crystals. Which it had then promptly stranded, as supplies of fulgite ran painfully short.
An automaton the size of Monsieur Doré could be comfortably powered for weeks with a crystal a quarter the size of Rian's smallest fingernail. This globe, as large as a pigeon's egg, was tantamount to pulling a wheelbarrow with an Iron Dragon's steam-forced engines. It represented a considerable amount of money, especially since the theft of Prytennia's last fulgite shipment had led to a tripling of already intolerable prices. The shape was unusual: smooth and rounded instead of faceted, and it offered a puzzle, and a new layer of complexity to her investigation.
"You might have mentioned this, Eleri," Rian murmured, and suspected her greatest challenge was not murderers or vampires, but three children who considered her a stranger and an interference. Perfectly true, of course, but they at least shared the same goal. Now did the gift represent a last-minute decision to trust—or a challenge?
"First step, a portable dynamo," Rian said, since she could hardly send such an unusual piece to be charged with the rest of the household crystal. But a dynamo should be a simple enough request in an establishment the size of Sheerside House.
That decided, Rian fastened Monsieur Doré's back, buried the fulgite in her tin of bath salts, and turned her thoughts to suitable dress for a dinner with the First Minister.
Two
With over thirty people at table there was little chance to get to know the rest of Lord Msrah's Bound during dinner, but Rian found nothing to object to in her position between Evelyn Carstairs and an Alban man with cut-glass cheekbones that Evelyn introduced as Lyle Blair, an attaché to Alba's Lord Protector, Prince Gustav. Prince Gustav provided a looming presence at the far end of the table, sitting to the left of the Queen's sister, Princess Leodhild herself. First Minister Aquila was a muted presence beside two such vivid personalities, and Lord Msrah absent altogether.
"I knew Sheerside House's reputation," Rian said, "but this is exceeding my expectations by an order of magnitude. I didn't realise one of the Suleviae was here."
Her tone was light, but ghosts from Rian's childhood stirred, conjuring the shadow of seemingly-insurmountable walls, that sense of standing at the bottom of a well, ankles sunk into mud. Here she was at the same table as royalty, including one of the three living avatars of the goddess Sulis, and no-one considered her out of place. So why could she not keep herself from remembering an impossibly embarrassing conversation? Why did her mind dredge up that terrible realisation of inadequacy?
Perhaps it was because she was back in Prytennia, where strangers would not first and foremost position her as 'foreigner', and could instead reduce her to an ignorant village girl with a notable mother and no worth of her own. The imposter at the table.
"Not quite an ordinary day," Evelyn was saying. "And unsurprising that Princess Leodhild would be particularly concerned with these events." He shot a quick smile past Rian to Lyle. "And Prince Gustav, of course, is always ready to find himself necessary."
The
Alban's professional aplomb was unshaken. "Alba is suffering along with the south, so naturally His Highness is anxious for a solution to be discovered."
"Invited himself along," Evelyn translated. "How are you enjoying being run ragged, Lyle?"
"It's fulfilling." The blond man's voice deepened on a note of sincerity.
"I didn't expect you to enjoy all that Swedish energy."
"Neither did I, truly. But—" Lyle glanced toward the end of the table as a golden prince threw back his head in a gust of laughter. "Don't be fooled by the bluff and bluster. There's a mind there worth following. And if I can steer the Swedish ship in Alba's favour, all the better." He added a hint of a smile to Rian: "Though, of course, I didn't say that, Dama Seaforth."
"Please, call me Arianne. And steer away. I take it you two know each other well."
"I went to school in Alba," Evelyn explained. "Lyle was my nemesis."
"We competed endlessly for various honours," Lyle said. "All the traditional Alban-Prytennian rivalry, but eventually I began to appreciate the spur to excel."
"More to the point, one of our tutors stepped in and assigned us an unwieldy shared project," Evelyn said. "We had to make peace or fail."
"And almost ran into disaster trying to find a third option. Long story."
"Involves a donkey," Evelyn said.
"An ass." Lyle's utterly correct expression slipped, and he laughed, then shook his head. "Enough. I'd far rather talk about you, Arianne. What would you call the colour of your hair? Caramel?"
"In this light, that's not a bad description."
"Evelyn told me you're here in order to support your brother's children?"
"That's right. Eiliff and Aedric's estate...well, I managed to settle it without leaving any outstanding debt, but nothing remained beyond a handful of keepsakes. The children are all at Retwold—the youngest, Griff, had just started there before the accident—and even one set of that school's fees was enough to make me blink, let alone three. The twins are nearly sixteen, and all three are..." She paused, thinking of the automaton upstairs, the workings delicate and exact. "It would have been shameful, to not give them every opportunity."
"To do this, for your brother's children." Lyle's gaze swept briefly past her, before he added: "You are remarkable to make such a sacrifice."
"Lyle…" A note of reproach shaded Evelyn's voice.
"Whatever one thinks of blood service," Lyle added.
"My brother meant a great deal to me," Rian said neutrally. "So I don't think of it as a sacrifice. Though the routine here will certainly be an adjustment."
"Arianne comes to us from a most distinguished family," Evelyn said, firmly shifting the topic. "You've probably seen at least one of Henri Bordonne's paintings, and Prytennia might never produce another sculptor to equal Charlotte Seaforth."
"I should have recognised the name!" Lyle said. "I only yesterday was studying your mother's statue of the Suleviae at the palace. Incomparable."
"I've never seen that one," Rian said. "Or, at least, not all of it at once. I remember her working on the individual parts, for years, but they were all shipped off as soon as they were done."
"Are you an artist yourself?"
"No. I was thoroughly trained, of course, was given every opportunity to follow in my parents' footsteps, but I had neither the talent nor the passion. Aedric was the creative child, and I the phlegmatic one. I organised my father for several years, then travelled."
"Organised? Was he in such disarray?"
"When my brother was preparing for college we found that my father had allowed the family finances to descend into chaos. It didn't help that his agent was shamelessly cheating him out of most of the profit for his work. Father—he was much older than my Mother—had begun to decline, and even at his best he never could interest himself in anything but art."
Rian briefly reflected on those last years, when her father had displayed increasingly childlike behaviour but had produced some of his most innovative work, then shrugged and passed on to entertaining the two men with descriptions of her travels, of grape-picking in Aquitania, and untangling the Dacian Proconsul's archive.
"You travelled alone so freely?" Lyle said, with faint surprise, then added quickly: "I mean—" He flushed.
"Oh, I had friends and relatives to keep me company," Rian said lightly. "And fortunately I'd returned to Lutèce and sent a note of my new address before the accident happened. My family is scattered across the Continent, but on Eiliff's side there's only a thoroughly cantankerous great-uncle up in the Lake District."
One of the servants leaned in at this point, to place a concoction of strawberries and cream in front of Lyle and Rian, and a sugared pear before Evelyn.
"The clean menu for Dama Seaforth, Tessa," Evelyn said, and the girl murmured an apology and removed the strawberry dish, returning a few moments later with a second sugared pear.
"To never eat strawberries again," Lyle murmured.
"Well, not for ten years," Rian said philosophically, and picked up her spoon.
ooOoo
An evening enjoying the mildly competitive flirtation of two attractive men left Rian reflecting on Delia Hackett's reasons for leaving. Both her dinner companions were perhaps ten years Rian's junior, and in other circumstances Rian would merely be deciding whether and which. But even when she had cleared away the small matter of suspecting everyone of murder, Rian would not be able to ignore the complications of the workplace, or taking lovers who aged when she did not.
It was a not insignificant problem, and reoccurred to Rian after the meal had broken for an early night in consideration of London visitors who had risen before dawn to beat the morning gale. Pausing in the hallway, Rian was caught by a scene on the stair leading to the next floor.
In her early forties, Princess Leodhild cut a magnificent figure. Her curling black hair cascaded over shoulders left bare by a daring modern inversion of traditional Prytennian evening dress, the criss-crossing gold laces displaying her warm brown skin and full figure to great advantage. Prince Gustav had spent the evening mesmerised by her generous décolletage, and was now apparently determined to fall into it.
For one of the Suleviae, a mortal aspect of the Trifold Goddess, no lover could take primacy over duty, and every affair must be weighed for political consequence. Was this straightforward attraction, or did Prince Gustav think to gain some advantage? What cost to Prytennia in a night's pleasure with the Lord Protector of the realm's nearest neighbour? Should rumours that the Prince was close to an engagement with France's Princess Heloise be taken into account?
A lifetime of questions like that made ten years of remembering not to eat strawberries seem...not trivial, but manageable.
Whatever the case, Princess Leodhild seemed to at least be listening as the pair disappeared around the curve of the stair. Rian looked away, and caught Lyle in the same motion. The Alban offered her a conspiratorial grin.
"My professional duties fortunately have limits."
"Corralling a tom cat would be quite an accomplishment, besides," Rian murmured.
"He's usually a little more circumspect," Lyle said. "But, ah—" Colour touched the Alban's cheeks, his professional poise lost for an instant.
"But it's Prytennia?" Unperturbed, Rian shrugged. "Foreign notions of propriety are unlikely to diminish Princess Leodhild."
"Of course not." Lyle looked around the clearing crowd, and Rian realised he was checking on Evelyn Carstairs, caught up with First Minister Aquila. "Arianne…Dama Seaforth, could I speak to you privately for a moment?"
Curious, since the man's serious tone didn't seem to suggest an imminent proposition, Rian led him to the Bound's day room, testing her ability to find it. The gale beat against the still-closed shutters. No-one at dinner had discussed the persistence and increasing strength of this latest windstorm, but Rian doubted it had been far from anyone's mind.
"I am not—" Lyle began, then shook his head, tugging at the high collar
of his shirt. "I mean no disrespect to Lord Msrah, who is an exemplary man, but, ah, there must be something I can do to help. Will you allow me to speak to the Prince on your behalf?"
At a loss as to what business she might have with a Swedish Prince, Rian tilted her head, studying the young Alban. He was wonderful to look at, the cheekbones matched by a fine physique. And a picture of earnest solemnity.
"I see." Rian smiled. "You're wanting to rescue me."
"To offer at least some possibility of an alternative. We have wonderful schools in Alba. And Prince Gustav would almost certainly take great delight in scoring a point against vampirism in circumstances that don't impact Sweden's current overtures to Prytennia. I'm sure you've thought about this deeply already, but—ah, I can't not say something, can't not offer. Blood service is...is...even if it's possible to reconcile people agreeing to be treated as cattle, there's so much more to it than a business exchange. The fact that the Lord Nomarch chooses not to exercise the control the bond gives him doesn't make it any less real."
"You're the second person to say something of the sort to me since I came to Sheerside." Though the young man from the library hadn't been offering alternatives. "You tried to talk Evelyn out of this as well, didn't you?"
"I almost destroyed our friendship trying to change his mind." Lyle sighed, and sat down at the piano, absently tracing the curved wood hiding the keys. "To give his parents credit, they sent him to Alba deliberately, to allow him to experience a life that didn't revolve entirely around a vampire. But how could a few years erase all the time spent learning this place was normal? You understand that beyond Msrah—that a thing that is far more than a polite and urbane...that it's a human shape with—and it will be literally living inside you—!" He shuddered.
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