And, at Frye’s elbow: Lillian DePaul.
Aristide had not seen her since setting foot on Geddan soil. In fact, he had not seen her in five years, not since the lobby of the Grand Ldotho, her face buried in the filthy hair of her son. Stephen, that was his name. Snatched out from under the Ospies’ noses by the oddest pair of rescuers ever yoked together.
Aristide briefly felt the chill of the steppe wind, felt the curve of Cordelia’s small shoulders underneath his hands.
Horribly, his eyes began to burn. He blinked to clear them and looked at Lillian again. Though she was unquestionably alive, and apparently unscathed, the past clung to her like cobwebs.
She would always be burnt into his memory in the bias-cut gown she had worn at their first meeting. It had suited her: traced her tall, svelte figure in a sweep of storm-gray satin. But fashion had moved on, even in cash-strapped Gedda. The piece she wore this evening was cut militarily straight across the shoulders. Padded slightly, unless he missed his guess. The sleeves fell loose to her elbows, then narrowed at her forearms, tightly ruched. The plunging neckline was the only feature of the gown that revealed skin. Not to say that it was modest—aside from the shoulders, the cut was snug. The skirt twined around the curves of her legs in a tight twist of black silk crepe, gathered at one hip with a diamond buckle. The hem hugged her ankles, showing a pair of simple velvet pumps. She looked gorgeous, frightening, and austere.
And she was deep in conversation with Emmeline Frye, smiling faintly, nodding along, looking very much as if things were going right for her.
Cyril was nowhere to be seen.
“Excuse me.” Aristide put an apologetic hand to Daoud’s elbow. “Find us some nibbles?”
“If you’ll eat them,” he said sourly. But by then Aristide was already sinking into the elegant press of people that churned between him and Lillian.
* * *
She didn’t see Aristide coming. Unpardonable. But he approached from behind and she was putting all her energy into appearing attentive without also appearing in print.
Cyril was off her elbow, at least, so they’d be deprived of that story. He’d showed no inclination to attend the gala, and she hadn’t tried to change his mind. He’d stayed behind at Coral Street with Stephen.
The flashbulb throng got most of what they wanted at the ceremony, or on the curb outside the MBS, but there were still a few pen-fencers, and a couple of photographers on Honora’s payroll Lillian didn’t hold above shilling for the glossies on the side.
Frye had thrown them a cursory smile and a couple of lines—too formal, blatantly rehearsed—and begun to circulate in groups where she clearly had friends. Lillian stalked like a big cat after faltering game and caught her in the back corner of the room, sheltered from the press. They were just circling around a concrete time and date for lunch when a large hand closed on Lillian’s shoulder. She jumped and had to play it for laughs.
“Mr. Makricosta,” she said, when she turned and saw who it was. “You nearly made me spill my drink!”
“An egregious offense,” he said, sliding effortlessly into the act. “Though I would’ve gotten you a new one.” Then, as though he had just noticed Frye—she was certain this was not the case—he said, “My goodness, is this who I think it is? Ms. DePaul, do you mind making introductions?”
“Of course not,” she said, quashing her irritation. “Ms. Frye, this is Aristide Makricosta: imports and exports, and an old friend.” She bent the meaning of her words like tent staves, so they would support her manners. “Mr. Makricosta, Emmeline Frye, Neo-Federalist ministerial candidate.”
Frye had a smile like salt flats: dull, arid, alkaline. Even her eyes seemed sun-bleached: faded hazel, like the brush that grew in the Porachin desert. She couldn’t stand up to Saeger’s youthful flash, her passion; the trick would be to play on that spareness, build it into a platform of appealing pragmatism.
“I’m not sure we ought to be talking,” said Aristide. “I’ve got a sizable quote from WCRC sitting on my desk right now.”
Of course he had an agenda. He was not being charming for nothing. Anger froze her into paralysis. Grudgingly, she admired him.
“I’ve pulled all my fingers out of that and wiped them clean.” Frye flicked the relevant digits like they were wet and she had no towel to dry them. “And anyway, if you want to move something through Gedda, you haven’t got many other choices, at the moment.”
“Something your infrastructure plans would fix, I’m sure.” Aristide examined his nails, campy and casual. “Doing your competitors a good turn. Very altruistic. Of course West Cultham would benefit from an improved and expanded railway system as well. And you’ll be well ahead of the pack coming around the bend.”
Frye shrugged. “Throw corn for the flock, each goose gets a crumb.”
That farmland, black earth, flat-vowel relatability—that was what would get her votes. Though where it came from, Lillian wasn’t sure. Frye was a suburban Nuesklender born to well-off middle-class types. Nothing close to a farmer. She’d been at university in the state capital and built a small fortune dealing in commodities—enough to throw in with a couple of partners, build a successful railway company, and buy them out just in time for the Ospies’ rise to power.
WCRC had been nationalized by the Ospies, then brutalized by the Catwalk. Frye had gone to ground—Lillian didn’t think she’d been out of the country, but she certainly hadn’t lifted her head. When the dust settled, she showed up to take the reins of her company again. While the rest of the rail companies floundered in a mess of missing money and twisted steel, Frye sank staggering borrowed and personal funds into rebuilding—and privatizing—key lines across the country. She made the balance back within months.
Opponents called her a gouger if they were feeling polite. Lillian had also heard her called a cold-hearted, calculating, dry-bite bobtail. But she looked and sounded folksy, if she leaned into it. People liked that kind of thing. They bought it, brought it home, and ate it up for dinner.
Except for Aristide, who had a sly look on his face that said he wasn’t falling for the affectation. Of course not: He was constructed of the stuff. Frye couldn’t hope to fool him with his own tricks.
“I was just on my way to the bar,” said Aristide, watching Frye through narrow eyes. “Is there anything I can fetch for either of you?”
Damnation. Lillian could feel the thing that passed between them: a frisson that held some hidden invitation, and its acceptance.
“I’ll come along,” said Frye. “I don’t trust you to order for me. You seem like the kind of man who likes a girl better when she’s drunk.”
“I’m the kind of man who likes everyone better drunk. Especially myself.” He offered his arm, and Frye took it.
Lillian killed the impulse to stamp her foot. But then Frye tilted her head over her shoulder as she departed and said, “DePaul, my house. Not tomorrow, but … the next day? Half past noon.”
She smiled and said, “I’ll put it in my diary.”
* * *
Saeger was harder than Frye had been.
For one, she was the center of attention. Though she hadn’t spoken at the ceremony, everyone knew she had been close to Lehane. The brains behind the Catwalk’s strategy. A little older, a little better-organized, with experience wrangling disparate folk to a singular cause. Cordelia had been the Spotlight, but Opal—Gaffer, clandestine code name now worn like a badge of honor—had shone it on her. And now it was Saeger’s turn onstage.
It was Jinadh who gave Lillian an avenue of approach. With the flypaper memory and smooth manners of a courtier and gossip columnist, he glad-handed with professional skill. Nobody would guess how deeply he despised the entire enterprise—provisional government, dedication, gala, upcoming election—for its hold on Lillian. Tonight, at least, he had drunk enough to put him in a jovial mood. His white teeth gleamed in the frame of his newly trimmed beard, a beacon Lillian could easily keep in sight.
He was chatting with Daoud near the stage—there had been even more speeches, but at least everyone had dry feet during these—when Lillian saw a shift in the flow of the crowd around them: a mass movement of bodies like an incoming tide that bore on its foam the statuesque figure of Opal Saeger.
Tall, raw-boned, with a jaw angled to cut granite, she wore a structural gown in matte white silk. She did not look like she knew how to move in it, and Lillian scented bad advice. On someone a little less blunt, it would have been a statement. On Saeger it looked like cardboard. They should have put her in a suit, or at least something a little simpler.
She drew up to the third point in what was now a triangle, offering her hand first to Daoud, and then Jinadh. Lillian plucked two coupes from a passing tray and slipped sideways through the crowd, careful not to spill.
“Spice cake,” she said, deliberately watching her hands as she approached. “I got you a—oh.”
“Ah,” said Jinadh. Lillian could hear the disappointment in his voice, but only by virtue of marriage. No one else would pick it up. “Ms. Saeger, this is my wife. Lillian DePaul.”
At least he took one of the coupes from her, so she could shake. “A pleasure to meet you, after hearing so much. How is the campaign trail treating you?”
“Better than the Ospies did,” said Saeger, and Lillian would have rolled her eyes if she weren’t on her best behavior. This woman could be the next prime minister. This woman could give her a job.
Torture-surviving resistance hero was a large part of Saeger’s appeal. It played well with angry folk who’d lost something to the Ospies. It got her positive coverage in the Clarion, Morning Bulletin, and on a few of the newer call signs cropping up on the airwaves. It didn’t sing so sweet with the people burned by the Catwalk’s bombing campaigns. Even if the selfsame organization had transitioned in popular assessment from terrorists to liberators, once they started distributing aid along the only rail lines they’d left operational. Aid that went largely to sympathetic towns and cities, or those that could be swayed by a soft hand. Anywhere perceived to have an Ospie majority starved.
The Telegraph reliably took a piece out of Saeger, branding her a disorganized upstart. Lillian was surprised to find herself agreeing with their op-eds for the first time in her life.
But politics wasn’t about agreeing with people; it was about mutual benefits and compromise. So Lillian smiled through Saeger’s grim rejoinder and replied with, “That’s not saying much.”
“No,” said Saeger. “It certainly isn’t. Load of good it did them, in the end. Thanks to Pulan Satri. And the rest of Porachis, eventually.”
The royal treasury had got behind the Catwalk’s bid when things looked likely to swing their way. And it explained Saeger approaching Daoud. Lillian wondered if they’d ever met in person, or if she only knew him by name and reputation.
A camera flashed nearby, capturing their conversation. Lillian fought a wince and won, but barely. “I’d make a comparison to moths and flame,” she said. “But they’re the ones who are lighting up. Can’t seem to shake them, can you?”
“I wouldn’t want to,” said Saeger. “I’m after good press as much as the next sculler on a ticket.”
“Well you won’t get it from him. That was Emil van Nuys. He’s freelance—Honora hired him—but he sells a lot of his photographs to Chester Chandler.” It got her a blank look, badly disguised. Saeger had charisma, but no skills of deception. “The weekend editor. At the Telegraph. It’s just … I’ve noticed they don’t tend to do you favors.”
One of Saeger’s eyebrows went up. They were dark, under short-cropped honey-blond hair. Much like Lillian’s own coloring, though paired with dark brown eyes. She was a first-generation Geddan; Suldatian parents. Both dead before the Ospies, but Saeger often talked about what might have happened to them, if they had survived. What had happened to all the other foreign parents of Geddan children.
Good stuff. If she was canny, she’d use it to segue into talk about immigration policy. So far, nothing.
“You’re with the provisional government right now,” said Saeger. “Aren’t you?”
“Press and public relations, yes.”
Saeger dipped her chin in a scrutinizing gesture that was almost a nod. “I’ll bet you’re very good at your job.”
“I like to think so,” said Lillian, because I am was the truth, and selling that was not her business.
Saeger gave another tip of the chin, this one more affirmative. Then she turned to Daoud and said, “Mr. Qassan, it was very good to meet you. Please tell Ms. Satri how grateful I am, next time you speak with her. How grateful we were. She made a lot of things possible for us.”
Stones, the mash-up of formality and half-shed city drone … it made Lillian itch to ring up a dialect coach. A better one than Saeger already had.
“I will,” said Daoud, and Lillian wondered how often they spoke. She hardly kept in contact with the filmmaker these days. “And, if you’ll excuse me, Mr. Addas…” Half his mouth twisted into a smile. «I think I should find my companion before trouble does.»
Once Daoud had gone, Saeger shook Lillian’s hand again, and Jinadh’s, and then swept off into the thinning crowd. Lillian didn’t see her after that. Things were beginning to wind down.
Jinadh, apparently realizing the same thing, let a little of his glitter fade. “Please do not thank me. I hate myself for letting you near her.”
“I don’t know if it did any good. But I do have lunch with Frye this week.”
He closed his eyes, as if against sun glare, and sighed. “Good luck. Will you at least keep the week of Solstice clear?”
“Of course. Well, as clear as I can. Duty may call, with Honora and the rest.”
“As long as you are at the table,” said Jinadh, casting his eyes afar in a manner she recognized as avoidance. “I do not want to host alone.”
“Host?”
“Yes,” he said. His fingertips pressing on the rim of his coupe were another small tell. «I’ve invited my respected brother Daoud Qassan. And also, Aristide.»
* * *
Since Lillian and Jinadh were out for the evening, Cyril braved the dinner table. Without his sister wrangling the social interactions, the whole thing felt less like an ordeal and more like an opportunity to shovel in some food.
The dining room echoed like the rest of the house, bare of ornaments. The table was not the great sweep of golden oak Cyril remembered, resting on elaborately curled legs. It had been replaced by something square and utilitarian, largely hidden by a plain white cloth.
Stephen showed up a few minutes after Cyril did, flinging himself into his chair with an aggrieved sigh. Cyril waited for the complaint that seemed imminent, but then Stephen’s eyes rose from his plate, snagged briefly on Cyril’s, and fell again. Silence reigned.
Bern, the footman, leaned past Cyril to put a few slices of stuffed cabbage on his plate. He forgot that he was supposed to say stop, and ended up with too many. Years ago, his parents had banished Lillian’s spaniel from the dining room after they realized he was feeding it his scraps. He’d hated the rotten thing, except for its utility under the table. Could have used it now.
Stephen picked at his cabbage. Cyril watched the angle of his head fall, his bony shoulders tucked around his ears.
“What did you think of all that?” asked Cyril, against his better judgment.
“The speeches?” asked Stephen. “The Catwalk?”
“Any of it.”
Stephen shrugged. “Big fuss about something done.” Then a pause, the tines of his fork creaking pensively against the porcelain. “D’you think that’s why they made such a racket about the pencil sharpener? ’Cause it was a bomb, and folk are all het about the Catwalk still? Most I should’ve had was a switching, or even if they’d kept me out of classes. But instead it’s … well they aren’t acting normal about it.”
“How so?” asked Cyril, sipping his water. Magnusson hadn’t brought any wine to t
he table, and there were no glasses for it. Cyril wondered if that was penury or overprotectiveness.
“Mum and Dad have got these letters home from Porks,” said Stephen. “The headmaster. I’m out for all of Leighberth, supposed to do a pile of reading and maybe get back in, and then keep my marks up and no more demerits or else, and it doesn’t seem like it’s about the pencil sharpener at all.”
“What else did you do? Besides the pencil sharpener.”
“How do you know I did anything?”
Cyril stared at him, blinking slowly once. Bern, in the corner, shifted on a patch of creaky floor. Tension rose.
Stephen didn’t break fast—a good sign—but he did break eventually. “All right, I’ve been suspended twice this term for sneaking out after curfew, and I put Duquesne in the infirmary. He didn’t tell anybody it was me, but they knew.”
“You hit him?”
“With a bowling pin, in the shed after practice.”
“Why?”
“He said my family was dirty traitors. The shit Gedda should’ve wiped off its…” It wasn’t modesty that kept him from saying it, but rage. “’Cause of Mum working for the embassy, I guess. Before the Ospies went. And … because of you, probably. And Dad. He got a couple of digs in there about Porachis. I think I broke his nose.”
“And he didn’t name names?”
“He’s bigger than I am. He didn’t want to be embarrassed. And he knew I’d get him back if he told. Plus, even the teachers don’t like a tattler.”
It sounded as though school hadn’t changed much in thirty years.
Cyril gave him a choice. “Do you want to know what they would say if you asked? Or do you want to know why they’re really so upset?”
“Both,” said Stephen.
“Smart.” Cyril turned his water glass pensively in his hands. “If you asked, they’d tell you people could have gotten hurt. And that’s part of it; a bomb is different than a bowling pin to one boy’s nose.”
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