All at once, thought of Kharn Sagara floated to the surface of my mind. Of the way the King of Vorgossos protected himself against death through his clones, through his children, and through the mechanisms to which he had sold his soul: Brethren and the lesser daimons that lurked in his own skull. I realized with a sudden flash just where the Undying had gotten his inspiration, and I felt a chill run through me despite the warmth of the hall.
His greeting completed, the Emperor turned with his Empress hand in hand and retreated the way he had come, passing between the cloud of white-garbed princes and princesses and the rainbowed cavalcade of his retainers back along the avenue the Excubitors had lined on the upper level. As I had told Valka, Caesar would not remain to mingle. He lingered a moment, speaking with an Archprior of the Chantry and two scholiast primates in gilt and green, but then he vanished and the Empress with him. Where proud music had accompanied his entrance, only the chiming of silver bells heralded his exit, as though he were Oberon and the dreamy court of Faerie had dissolved like a midsummer’s dream.
“What was the point of all that?” Valka sneered. Somewhere in all this she’d found another glass of wine, and watched with gleaming eyes the ebony and carnelian door through which the Imperial person had both entered and left.
“They have to show us they are real people,” I said, realizing as I spoke that I echoed something Gibson had told me long ago. “Real people, not some abstract political concept.” It was only after the words had left my mouth that I remembered. Remembered that those words—that lesson—had not been Gibson’s at all.
They were my father’s.
“Is something the matter?” Valka asked.
Shaking my head, I answered her. “Ask me about it later.” But my own words from earlier resounded in my ears. I am one of them.
Valka was wrong to argue that point with me. She squeezed my hand, warm and reassuring. I squeezed back, feeling as she did the strangeness of the bones within and the press of Prince Aranata’s ring: dark reminders that I was also other things. Vorgossos had taken a piece of me, and Aranata . . . Aranata had taken it all, and what I had, I had only by grace of a miracle and a magic I did not understand. That bright hall with its warm music and warm bodies seemed at once cold and remote as the stars, and I felt as a man who walks out on the sands of a desert beneath alien skies.
Alone.
Alone, but for that warm pressure on my hand, and that smiling voice saying, “Do you see Pallino, there?” She pointed.
The old soldier stood upon a step at the edge of the dance floor, the better to see and be seen by the audience of young nobiles that had gathered round him. Elara leaned on the rail nearby, laughing as my chiliarch gesticulated wildly, sketching formations in the air. I fancied almost that I could hear him over the noise of the crowd and the orchestra:
“So there I was!”
“He seems right at home,” Valka said.
I plucked her wine cup from her hands and took a swallow. “People love a good war story, and Pallino knows how to tell them.” With the shock of the Emperor’s arrival ended, the dancing had resumed, men and women proceeding in stately fashion across the tiled floor. Others resumed feasting at the tables around, or else reclined to drink and talk and listen to the orchestra.
“Lord Marlowe?”
Turning, I saw one of the palace eunuchs standing with two of the Martian Guard. He held a white envelope on a silver tray out before him with the wax seal presented face up. He did not speak, but offered the tray.
I took the letter without comment, turned it over. It had no signature, no mark save the Imperial sunburst in gold foil. “What is this?”
The man said nothing, nor either of his guards. Why should a palace eunuch rate an escort? Or were the guards there for me? When the fellow continued to say nothing I broke the seal and pulled out the letter. It was blank.
A formality.
A calling card?
“What is this?” I asked again, glancing bemusedly at Valka.
“The Princess Selene asks the honor of a dance,” the eunuch said.
I felt the flush creep into my face, and again I glanced at Valka. The doctor hid her amusement behind her gloved right hand. I felt a sudden urge to slap the footman’s fez from his head. I looked round, half-expecting to see the Princess standing there, but she was nowhere to be seen.
The footman did not wait for any reply—and why should he? I could not refuse. He gestured instead to his companions, “These men will search your person.”
“I’ve already been searched.”
The Martians advanced anyway and began patting down my boots, my trousers, feeling their way along my sleeves. “Any weapons?” one of the men asked.
“Yes,” I said, remembering one of Pallino’s old stories. “I think I’m wearing a sword.” I rattled the saber for emphasis.
The Martian did not laugh, and the ivory mask he wore was not smiling. “He’s clean.”
Helpless, I looked to Valka. “You all right?”
She leaned toward me, one arm wrapped beneath my cape. “I have my wine,” she said. “Come find me when you’re through dancing.”
I stooped to kiss her, but she raised a finger and—turning—presented her cheek.
* * *
The little toady led me up an arc of marble steps to the platform where the Emperor had made his appearance. The lords and ladies of his entourage by and large yet remained, drinking from fluted crystal and observing the lesser lords below. At once my white outfit—which below had stood out like a star in the black—seemed of little consequence amid the sea of white worn by the royal princes and princesses, and I wished I’d worn my Marlowe black and not the white the Emperor had honored me with.
“You came!” the lilting voice rose to meet me, and the Princess appeared from the crowd of her siblings as if from thin air. She’d been so well camouflaged against the herd of nearly identical royals, and I had not seen her.
Dimly, I was aware that I had not seen the girl in fifty years, but she had not aged a day. She was as impossibly beautiful as her Imperial mother, tall as any lord, with hair not red as copper, but as flame. Her skin was of Petrarchan ivory, her eyes green as the forests of Luin. All the art of the High College was in the jeweled porcelain lines of her body, and the majesty of a thousand generations was in her bearing as she smiled at me, and I bowed. “Your Highness called for me. How could I not come?” Bowing, I hid my smile, and kept my eyes downcast, studying the hem of her gown, which I saw was dusted with pale crystal and the blossoms of pale flowers.
A hand floated into view—her hand. She wore a ring this time, a slim thing of Imperial gold set with a gem. This I kissed as she offered it to me, and I drove back memories of the visions I’d seen of her. “I had hoped you would,” she said.
Straightening, I saw she had hidden half her face behind a silk fan. A small knot of onlookers had formed around us, among them the princess’s own siblings.
“He’s shorter than I expected,” said one of the ladies.
Still behind her fan, Selene said, “Hush, Cynthia. Do not mock our cousin.”
I had the sudden impression that I was a specimen under the microscope. A slime or interesting bit of fungus brought before the magi’s probing eye. A cousin I might have been, but I was the least of cousins, the least star in the blood constellation of Victoria, scion of a house great only in its antiquity—and a disowned scion at that.
Selene collapsed her fan and slid it into a sash that matched the color of her hair. “I watched you at your triumph, Sir Hadrian. You were so gallant in your armor . . . and the Grass Crown. But why have you not worn it to this?” She looked round as she asked, taking in the hall and the thousands present.
My childhood schooling in diplomacy and decorum, schooling I had forgotten many a time on Emesh to my peril, answered for me. “My moment of tri
umph is over, Highness. I am not so vain as to prolong it unnaturally.”
That answer must have sated the onlookers—among whom certainly were to be counted those who considered themselves my enemies—for the stillness about grew less hushed, less total as men and women resumed whatever conversations had occupied them before I had been brought upon the stage.
“So humble!” she exclaimed, a glowing smile springing across her face. “Truly, you are a paragon of restraint, Sir Hadrian.”
Bowing my head, I answered, “I am a knight and servant of the Imperium.”
“And my servant?” she asked.
Not raising my head, I rested one hand again on the pommel of the ornamental saber. “And yours, Highness.”
“Good!” She clapped her hands. “Then your Imperial mistress would have you dance with her. Come!” Then she took me by the arm and led me away from the knot of those highest-born eavesdroppers and we descended by way of the very stair I had climbed. “I am grateful to you, you know,” she whispered, leaning ever so slightly toward my ear, filling my head with the heady musk off her perfumed hair.
“Whatever for?” I asked, careful to maintain a composed detachment from her person, as much for my political safety as out of respect for Valka.
Selene answered. “For taking on Alexander. We’ve always been close, and he so admires you. And serving you has given him a chance to be a real knight.”
I did not tell her that most of what Alexander had done was sit locked in his quarters aboard the Tamerlane while I worked the violence as far away from him as I possibly could. Instead, I said, “You know, it was Alexander who suggested we launch a second convoy to Nemavand to bait the Pale.”
“Was it?” She stopped a moment to look me in the face, and I wondered if she had not spent all the years since my departure on ice—so young did she seem. A wide-eyed girl and no woman at all. She jostled me. “Was it really?”
“It was!” I offered a short nod, careful to keep my posture as straight and correct—and my hands as visible—as could be. “It was he who suggested we keep our men on alert to ambush the ambushers.”
Smiling, she resumed our descent, moving carefully on pointed shoes. “I am so glad to hear it. Will you be taking him with you? When you leave, I mean.” I told her that I did not know, that my fate and Prince Alexander’s were alike in the hands her Imperial father. She accepted this as right and proper. We had reached the floor by then, and she turned to face me. By her high breeding and the heels of her shoes, she looked ever so slightly down on me. “I do so wish you’d worn the Crown,” she said, and raised a hand to touch my hair just above my ear. She hesitated, remembering where she was perhaps. Her hand fell.
“There are those at court who would take it amiss if I had, Highness.”
“Who could take such a thing amiss?” she asked. “You are a great hero, Sir Hadrian. A champion of the realm.”
What exactly was going on? Had this princess asked me for a dance out of simple curiosity? Desire? No. No, this was Forum. The wheels of some unseen mechanism moved her—or she had moved them. Echoes of Anaïs Mataro rebounded in my mind, mingled with the visions Brethren had shown me at the Quiet’s behest.
Selene of the Aventine.
And Hadrian Marlowe.
Was this . . . courtship? I felt disquiet and a numb upset at the thought. Had not the Empress inquired after my love life on our brief meeting the day I’d come for Alexander? Lorian Aristedes’s voice cackled in my ears.
Marry the prince, perhaps.
Or the princess.
Was it the Empress’s hand I sensed in this development? I clenched my jaw.
“Sir Hadrian?” she asked, “Why would anyone take your crown amiss?”
Almost I felt I saw the banners looming behind her. Mahidol. Hohenzollern. Bourbon. Still others I could not name. “I’m sure there are several among the great houses who take exception to the honors I’ve received.” I moved closer, taking her left hand in my right, resting my left high on her back. Speaking lips to ear then, I continued, “Particularly when they have been heaped upon one so low as I.”
“But you’re not lowborn!” she protested. “You and I are cousins, though by how many degrees I cannot even begin to guess.” Her chin was nearly on my shoulder then, and the animal and herbal scent of her hair filled my nose. “We are two stars of a constellation, you and I. Who could object to you without objecting to me?”
I led Her Highness through the dance, foot leading foot, her gown belling and swaying as she moved. We whirled deeper amid the crowd of other dancers, falling like a comet toward its star. “I am sure Her Highness knows the story,” I said.
“Her Highness does not,” she replied, a shade tartly.
“I was outcaste,” I said, using the old term for the weight of it. “Disowned, disinherited by my father. What rank and title I have I have purely by your father’s sufferance.”
She was silent then, though she did not pull away, did not break stride in the dance. I was acutely aware of the warmth of her hand and of the flesh beneath my false-boned fingers, and though I did not want to be there, I did not want her to pull away, because for her to do so was to reject what I was entire. In a voice barely more than a whisper, Selene asked, “What did you do?”
“What did I do?” I echoed, adjusting my grip on her hand. “I disobeyed my father. Fled home.” Other lords and ladies danced past us: bright gowns and muted suits contrasting our white-and-white. “I wasn’t always a knight, you know. I didn’t even want to be one. Mine isn’t the sort of life one plans.”
It had been so long since I’d danced, and while I’d had the requisite training as a boy in Devil’s Rest—that had been a lifetime ago. That Hadrian was dead—had died so the Halfmortal might live. How far I had to reach to conjure up the memory of those Gothic spires, those buttressed walls of gleaming black in the silver sunlight, the pencil cypresses and the mighty seawall beneath our acropolis forever holding back the tides. But dance I did, and did not quit or waver much, and if Selene found me an unsatisfactory partner she gave no sign.
“What did you want to be?” she asked.
I supposed I had opened myself up to the question. “I wanted to be a wizard,” I said. She did not laugh, and feeling a bit embarrassed, I gave a better answer. “Or a scholiast.”
“Really?” She did pull away then, and paused in her dance to look at me. “A scholiast? Why?”
Her reaction ought not to have caught me off guard, and yet it did. I had been so long removed from that antique dream that I had forgotten the stigma that hovered over the profession, that ghost trace of the machine in what it was the scholiasts could do. But I smiled at the princess and shrugged. “I’d wanted to see the universe, be one of the Expeditionary Corps.”
“Like Simeon the Red?” She nearly laughed then, and her smile lit her face—though whether she found it amusing or laughed at my expense I was not sure.
“A bit,” I answered, closing the distance between us to resume our dance. “I always liked that story.”
Selene allowed herself to be led. “I preferred Kasia Soulier,” she said, “or Prince Cyrus. Or Kharn Sagara.” My left hand clenched involuntarily. “Ow! Watch yourself, sir.” I had pinched her flank.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Old wounds. My left arm . . .”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know. Does it hurt?”
“Sometimes,” I replied. “It’s nothing, Highness. I apologize for startling you. You’re not hurt?”
The princess shook her head. “Not at all.” We danced together in silence then for some time, staring over one another’s shoulders as the orchestra played in its light and dreamlike way. “Are your companions enjoying the ball, sir?” she asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence.
“Those who were allowed in, Highness.”
“What do yo
u mean?”
It was my turn to shake my head. It was neither the time nor the place for that battle. There were too many eyes on me, too much weight hanging like chains over my shoulders, and too many cords about my feet. “It doesn’t matter,” I said, regretting having opened my mouth. “My officers and low-born armsmen were very grateful for the invitation. As am I.”
“I am glad to hear it,” she said. “I should like to meet them.”
“I’m sure one or two is nearby.” I swept my gaze over the crowd, looking for a familiar face. Pallino and Elara were no longer by the steps, and of Siran, Corvo, and Durand there was no sign. Aristedes was similarly absent—I had no trouble imagining the intus absconding with a bottle of wine to some darkened gallery of the palace to be alone, or else holding court with a collection of older knights and gentlemen, swapping war stories and criticisms of battles and of commanders long dead. But there were Ilex and Crim, dancing together not far off. The dryad was easily spotted with her green skin and woody hair so brown it was almost black. I made a mental note of their location.
The song ended shortly thereafter, and I stepped smoothly back from Selene’s royal person. It would not do to linger close for so many reasons. Bowing, I thanked her for the dance and said, “If Your Highness would like, I believe I saw a couple of my companions. This way.” And taking her by the hand this time, I led her round the dancing lords and ladies and through to where Crim and Ilex stood entwined. They were not dancing the stately dance of the high lords, only stood and swayed, their arms around one another, he in his finest black suit, she in gold-fringed brown with flowers in her hair.
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