"It seems very unlikely," Rian said, blinking at the complex array of emotions that near proximity revealed. Genuine entertainment, a note of desire, but also a distinct sense of pride, and of challenge.
"Are you, perhaps, thinking of constraining me in some way, Mademoiselle Serpent?" he murmured.
Threat. Excitement. Determination. Even if she had sufficient Tears to extract a binding promise, Rian would not pursue it with this one. He would most certainly seek a way around the terms of whatever she asked, and exact revenge for her effrontery. But she was now sure he wouldn't let the matter drop, even if she didn't push him to retaliation.
Wanting a little more time, Rian said: "No need to loom over me. Why not sit down, so we can talk?"
D'Argent snorted, but moved to obey, and Rian took the opportunity to focus on the threads and ribbons wavering around him, making another attempt to delve into them. This time she was rewarded.
D'Argent, face unveiled and alight with a kind of savage pleasure, leaned out from the engine of an elderly steam train and shot at an autocarriage crowded with people. He handed his empty pistol to a woman with short-cropped hair – perhaps a sister, from the strong resemblance – and took from her a loaded replacement.
Interesting, but not useful. As D'Argent sat down, Rian tried again.
Gustav of Sweden: big, blond and grand in furs, at the centre of a crowded hall. He faced a woman whose long brown hair was unbound, restrained only by one of the elaborate Swedish marriage crowns. Ceremoniously, he offered her a sword with a golden armlet balanced on the hilt. No joy or dissatisfaction disturbed an expression of perfect neutrality. Her dark eyes were steady.
Rian blinked away the scene and looked across at the person now settled in the chair opposite. No stranger to the art of cosmetics, she mentally darkened brows and lashes, and made comparisons to two very different visions.
Heloise. This was Princess Heloise.
Rian had met women who dressed as men to escape walls that kept them small, and she'd also known people who used clothing to express a true reflection of their heart. Either could be true for Heloise, and it helped Rian not at all in taking her next step. She had been given a clear illustration of two very different futures for the princess, but did not even know which choice would lead to which outcome. Or how much the Duke of Balance had guided what she saw.
Turning, Rian frowned at Alexandrine, waiting patiently by the room's door. "It occurs to me that it's always worth asking whether your clever gambit was someone else's move all along."
Alexandrine didn't respond. Princess Heloise said: "Now you're being mysterious."
"I am being annoyed with myself. A short while ago someone very grand called me 'a power in the process of becoming', and I was pleased, and complimented, and did something he wanted. I liked the idea of being the one making the decisions, instead of a tool dragged this way and that by larger forces. But here I am, with a small decision to make, putting off making it because I don't know what will happen next, or how much of this situation has been created. I feel out of my depth, and I've never liked that."
Heloise-D'Argent propped her chin on one hand in a show of boredom. "You make yourself sound most intriguing," she said, in a tone to suggest the opposite.
Rian gazed back at France's Princess Royal, and found herself setting aside calculation in favour of simple fellow feeling.
"Your brother is a chrysalide."
A bald statement that left Princess Heloise utterly still, with not even a flicker of an eyelid to betray her reaction. Rian wondered if it was possible that the princess had already known – but, no, chrysalides were indistinguishable from humans until their wings began to develop.
While she watched, the ribbons and threads around the princess changed – some shrinking away, while others grew longer – and Rian's extra sense brought her a shaft of piercing hurt. Whatever else she felt about the news, the revelation had wounded the Princess Royal. For the silence of her mother, or the loss of her brother?
Rian wondered whether any of it mattered. Was this even the small decision that would have large consequences for the women of France? And, even though she was the daughter of a Frenchman, did Rian truly have any business trying to change a whole country to better suit her own sensibilities?
To better suit Martine and Milo, on the other hand...
"I would like to see your face."
Rian glanced from the princess to Alexandrine, only to find the member of the Tower of Balance had turned her back. Her business was to arbitrate forfeits, not small-large choices.
With a faint shrug, Rian lifted off the white and gold snake mask, and then untied her veil. Princess Heloise tugged free her own, and they looked at each other.
"I do not thank you for this," the princess said. "Or ask how you know it. But I am…but I have heard it." She stood, replacing her veil, and crossed to Alexandrine. "Return me to the assembly hall, if you may." She looked back at Rian. "I will know you again, if I meet you."
And then she was gone. Rian looked at her hands, then carefully replaced veil and mask before finally returning her attention to the mask of a silver lion, almost forgotten on the table.
She picked it up, and lifted it briefly so she could look through its eyes. Martine's future, clear of another threat. Until the next time Henri wanted something from her.
"Is there somewhere I can put this?" she asked, when Alexandrine returned. "I might have forfeits to pay, and I would hate to have come so far only to lose it again."
Alexandrine touched the mask, and it vanished. "Say my name within the Towers and it will return to you."
"Thank you." Rian stood. She thought of asking Alexandrine how much she had known about the Dauphin's two children, and what choice the Court member would have made, if she had been allowed to interfere. Probably Alexandrine had seen it all before, and from the perspective of a century or so it seemed a minor dilemma.
Rian scooped up the remainder of Heloise-D'Argent's Tears, and attached them to her veil.
"Perhaps I will see you again, if I return next century," she said, and was vaguely cheered by the reflection that she would not necessarily outlive everyone she had ever met.
(xii)
If the current fashions lasted into winter, there would be considerable profit to be made in renting coats to the visitors to the Towers. Rian had recovered the rest of her dress, but tissue did little against a chill wind, and she shivered and winced as soon as she stepped from beneath the canopy of the Hall of Balance.
Holding the Mask of Léon firmly, she began to bounce-skip toward the station. It was a tired time of night, an hour or more before dawn, and the island far less crowded than it had been during her arrival mid-evening. A few drifts of weary revellers stumbled toward the entrance to the train station. Others would wait in sheltered seating areas for the return of normal gravity, which would be swiftly followed by the arrival of autocarriages.
Rian was being followed. She knew it even before her perception of the Great Forest strengthened, and she clicked her tongue in exasperation. Probably they hoped for exactly what she carried curled in her right hand: shell-like silvery disks that had been given to her when she left the Towers in exchange for her remaining Tears. She was not overly concerned about defending herself, but a snatch-and-grab might leave the Mask of Léon damaged.
Warmth dropped over her shoulders. Startled, Rian turned to find a black cat mask atop familiar brown curls.
"There was no need to wait out here in the chill, Étienne."
"You know Tante Sabet as well as I, and yet you say that," he said, fussing briefly with the set of his coat around her. "And they wouldn't let me wait inside the train station. You have it, then."
Rian glanced down at the Mask of Léon, then said: "Let's get out of the wind."
"I do not ask. Remark on that, for it is a feat of restraint."
Étienne swayed, reoriented himself, and managed a slow wallow toward the train station. The true
feat was that he'd managed to stay upright with that much brandy in him.
Even so, Rian no longer felt she was being pursued, and reflected on the value of a visible escort as she steered him down the station ramp and watched him doze during the journey southwest. He roused a little to transfer to an autocarriage, and then slept on her shoulder until they arrived back at the Hotel Lourien.
The front door flew open as they pulled up, and Martine, two porters, and a highly unimpressed Tante Sabet – who was not technically supposed to even know about this expedition, but of course had found out – swarmed over them.
Tante Sabet took one look at the little collection of masks resting on Rian's lap, sniffed, and then told the porters: "Put him in fifteen."
"Good morning, Tante Sabet," Rian said, demurely, but although she earned a second sniff, there was no sharp-tongued lecture. Rian, after all, was a paying guest.
No, this time Tante Sabet would reserve her lectures for Martine, and Martine would accept that as just, and not mind very much. Perhaps she would not even notice.
"You look worn to the bone," Rian said, accepting Martine's hand out of the autocarriage. "A night of worry costs more than a thousand dances."
"I should never have let you go," Martine said, looking Rian up and down as if expecting to discover some great wound from an evening of veiled revelry.
"You know I quite like dancing," Rian reminded her.
Tante Sabet had taken care of paying the driver, and Rian smiled her thanks, since Tante Sabet's disapproval of the Gilded Court was genuine and deeply ingrained. The cost would appear on Rian's bill later, of course, but it was still a large concession.
"We might, I think, need to postpone the review of the twins' birthday arrangements," she said. "Perhaps this evening?"
"Bah. You think I need your advice? Even Prytennian chits are no great mystery."
"You were a girl once, after all," Étienne put in brightly, then lapsed wisely back into unconsciousness as the porters carried him away.
Rian followed their lead, and let Martine help her up the stairs, although she was feeling well enough. Even her feet had stopped hurting.
"You had best get this back where it belongs," she said, pressing the Mask of Léon into Martine's hands as soon as they were in the privacy of her room.
"When you have told me everything," Martine said, firmly, following Rian to her bathroom.
"Everything would take a long time," Rian said, "and you were worried about your supervisor's early arrival at the museum. Besides, all I am going to do is sleep – after I wake whoever is in the pipes room." Ruthlessly she twisted taps and heard, distantly, the banging that had been the bane of many of her nights.
"Did he return it willingly?"
Rian wished she could ignore the small, unhappy question, but she had learned long ago that lying about Henri did not help Martine in the least.
"He had lost it in a game, but I won it back," she said. "Perhaps he would have simply given it up, if he'd still had it. But knowing Henri, I doubt it."
She stripped off her four layers of expensive tissue and draped them over a rail, knowing she couldn't hold back another important detail.
"I extracted a promise from him, under the rules of Forfeit," she said at last, as she stepped into steaming water. "To stay out of Milo's career."
"What?" Martine's face became blank with astonishment. "But…he could do so much for Milo."
"And has made clear, over and again, that he won't help him," Rian said briskly. "If nothing else, this way Milo can stand proudly on his own accomplishments."
One thing Martine had never been was stupid. Nor was she truly blind where Henri was concerned, no matter how many chances she gave him to stand apart from his own history. The bones of her face stood briefly stark, then she bowed her head, and a wing of black hair hid her expression.
"Go put the mask back," Rian said softly.
Martine leaned forward and hugged Rian, tight and fierce, before leaving without another word.
Sighing, Rian slid down in the bath. It always ended with Martine hurt. Nothing Rian had ever done could prevent a devoted heart from eating itself away. And Martine was not even the first person to walk away from Rian that night, concealing wounds with a straight back and set face.
Through rising steam, Rian contemplated her increasing capacity for causing people damage while trying to help them. 'A power in the process of becoming'. Was that even a thing she wanted, when she stepped back from her pride and looked with clear eyes?
She had gained so much in such a short time: godly allegiance, money, position, youth. Great good fortune, or cruel snare? She was undoubtedly being used.
But that did not make her a puppet. Whatever decisions she faced as a result of her new 'advantages', it was still Rian who would make them. Her choices, made wisely or clumsily, guided by her own heart. If there were strings, she would cut them, or grasp them, or simply find her way through them, just as she had the whole of her life.
Rian had always been in the process of becoming. She would grow into power.
Death and the Moon
Eluned Tenning had not expected the trip to France to cure her sister of heart-sickness, but she'd hoped it would buoy her spirits. And that first night in Lutèce – when they had revelled in the wonders of the Towers, and then had a dawn adventure – Eleri had sparked up as any person would.
But it never lasted. Even though they had gone to a dozen museums and galleries full of things that Eleri usually found fascinating, Eluned's sister had barely seemed to be attending. She had dealt with their mass of cousins with distracted politeness, and had not cared about the sudden rearrangement of their plans so their Aunt could visit the Gilded Court. Not even the news of the disappearance of the Princess Royal had caught her interest.
Eluned had tried not to be impatient. It wasn't Eleri's fault she had fallen in love, or that her heart had decided on someone they'd be lucky to meet again, even at the same school. But it was hard not to wish that her sister would just get over it.
On the evening before they were due to return to Prytennia, Eleri settled down after dinner to stare out their hotel room window, and rather than show her frustration, Eluned escaped downstairs to look for a more interesting way to spend the last little bit of the visit to France. In the family-run Hotel Lourien, she almost inevitably would encounter a cousin, and she rather hoped it would be cousin Lotti, who was the most bouncing, cheerful girl Eluned had ever met.
If she had not been so determined to hide her impatience, Eluned would probably not have gone downstairs alone. She had met more than one cousin who was not so enjoyable to talk to as Lotti, and if she happened across cousin Emile, she could not be certain cousin Antoine would arrive a second time to rescue her from that too-friendly arm around her waist.
Thankfully, in the storeroom staff used to take breaks she found one of the younger cousins, Milo, memorising lines for an Aquitanian play, and happily agreed to help him rehearse for the Latin performances.
Eluned had only known Milo a few days, and thought him obliging, hard-working and kind, but he had not stolen all her thoughts, and did not make her want to blush whenever he was around, let alone spend all her time morosely staring at nothing. Even so, she did not move away when Milo's demonstration of how actors faked kisses on stage somehow turned into a not at all pretend kiss.
It tingled to touch someone's tongue with your own. No-one had ever mentioned that. Surprise made Eluned go still.
Milo immediately lifted his head, gave her a concerned look, and said: "Too far?"
"It's all right." Eluned's voice was satisfactorily calm. "It was just different to what I expected."
"You didn't expect me to be so rude as to not ask properly first," Milo said, but then offered her a smile that lit up his odd, angular face. "But me, I am not sorry I was rude, if you are not."
"I'm not," Eluned said, which was true, then added daringly: "At my last school it was such a big
thing, to know what kissing was like. I always felt stupid."
"And so you plan to enact a transformation sequence? You shall return to your Prytennia a sophisticate."
Eluned doubted that very much, but she thought that she would be glad, at her new school, to be a person who had at least glimpsed the answer to certain mysteries, even if she still did not properly understand them. All of the descriptions of kissing she had ever read had talked in grand phrases: of being swept away, transported, transfigured. But she was still just Eluned, in a storeroom, with a cousin she had only started to get to know.
"Do you think Tesaire really loves this woman he calls 'the Queen'?" she asked, reaching for the reason they had been talking about kissing in the first place.
Milo's play, Death and the Moon, was all about a French conscript in the old Roman Empire's armies. It was full of harsh army discipline, battles with Hellenic rebels, and a mysterious woman whom Milo's character, Tesaire, meets at night.
"There's nothing in the script to suggest his love isn't true," Milo said. "Why do you think it?"
"He's only spoken to her a couple of times. He doesn't know anything about her other than she spends a lot of time staring up at the moon."
"He knows she is beautiful," Milo said. "For some, that is enough."
"But she could be horrid! She won't even tell him her name! And when he warns her his commander is planning to attack the whole district where the rebels are based, all she does is lecture him."
"Because he says he wants to act, to help the Hellenes, for her," Milo said, and then stepped back and spoke in a voice both compassionate and disapproving:
"My poor boy. Do you think to barter for my affection? Wherever the Fates take you, what point in arriving as anything but your truest self?"
Eluned blinked, because even though the words were the same she had read to him a short while ago, Milo had somehow made the Queen a much better person. Eluned had read her as ungrateful, but Milo had made her wise.
"That's a little like magic," she said. "I couldn't begin to sound so grand."
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