I.
The Boxes
In Room Nine of the west wing, nobody wanted to get up.
It was the bed.
That was the problem.
For nine weeks before the Wall, the beds in Room Nine had been narrow and hard and cold, and every morning they had been glad to leave them for the Thousand Steps.
Then there had been the Twelfth Tower’s bunks, and the frozen tents of the Hollowmere, and two nights of no bed at all.
And now, after the Starwell, after the feast, after twelve hours of the deepest sleep any of them had ever slept, the narrow beds of Room Nine had somehow become the softest, warmest, most perfect places in all of Aethoria, and the frost-bear quilts weighed exactly as much as a person’s whole will to live.
“No,” said Hilde Aarn, into her pillow, to nobody.
“No.
No.
Not getting up.
Never getting up.”
Nobody argued with her.
Senna Vaar had pulled her quilt right over her head.
Mira Halvard was lying on her back with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling, apparently calculating something, and not moving any part of herself at all.
Isolde Frostmere, who had come down the corridor from her own room at the far end before any of them were awake and would not say why, lay perfectly straight and perfectly still across the foot of Lyra’s bed, with her silver braids undone and the faint new moon on her brow catching the morning light, and was pretending, with great dignity, to be asleep.
And Lyra lay curled on her side with the quilt pulled up to her chin, and did something she could not remember having done since she was a small child.
She lay in bed after waking, and did not think about anything.
No ache.
That was all.
For three years she had woken every morning to the cold, clenched fist behind her ribs, and her first thought every day had been about holding it.
This morning she had woken, and there was nothing to hold.
Only her own breath, and the warmth of the quilt, and the light coming through the window.
She did not want to get up either.
She wanted to lie here and feel this for a long, long time.
Then there was a knock at the door.
It was a very particular knock.
Two taps, light and precise, then a pause, then a third.
Every girl in Room Nine knew that knock.
They had heard it on the first morning of their training, nine weeks ago, and they had learned very quickly what it meant.
It meant Mistress Agathe Rennick.
Hilde made a sound like a dying rabbit and went under her quilt.
The door opened.
And it was not only Mistress Agathe.
* * *
The whole corridor outside Room Nine was full of maids.
They stood in a line along the wall, in their blue and white, perfectly still, stretching away down the west wing as far as the eye could see: two maids for every door, and in front of every door, waiting, as though they had been standing there since before dawn and would happily stand there until sunset.
Every one of them was holding a box.
They were long, flat boxes of pale grey card, tied with midnight-blue ribbon.
And on the lid of every box, in silver ink, in a fine, flowing, beautiful hand, was a name.
Mistress Agathe stepped into Room Nine with her great ring of keys and looked round at the four lumps under the four quilts, and the one on top of Lyra’s.
“Good morning, young ladies,” she said.
“Up, please.”
The lumps did not move.
“I have,” said Mistress Agathe pleasantly, “a bucket.”
Room Nine got up.
* * *
The maids came in two by two, each pair to a bed, and each pair set its box down on the quilt, and untied the ribbon, and lifted the lid.
Hilde Aarn looked into hers, and forgot to complain.
Inside, folded in sheets of white tissue as fine as frost on a window, there was a dress.
It was not a training tunic.
It was not Frostweave.
It was not anything any of them had worn in nine weeks of the Thousand Steps and the Sword-Pond and the Frozen Land.
It was a day dress, and it was the most beautiful thing that Hilde Aarn, tower archer’s daughter, had ever seen in her life.
The maids lifted it out of the tissue and held it up to the light.
It was made in the colours of House Eisenhardt.
Every one of them was.
Not the cold colours of the banners and the masonry, but the same colours made soft, the way the dawn makes a mountain soft: the deep midnight blue of the citadel’s basalt, the pure white of its marble, the bright burnished silver of its ironwork.
Hilde’s was a soft dusk blue, the colour of the sky over the Wall in the hour after sunset, deepening at the hem toward midnight.
The bodice was fitted close, shaped to the body from the shoulder to the waist and then flaring gently over the hips into a long A-line skirt that fell almost to the ankle: full enough to move in, full enough to walk fast, to climb a stair two steps at a time, to dance.
Somebody who knew exactly what these girls did all day had designed it.
The sleeves were short and softly puffed, gathered at the edges, and they sat off the shoulder, so that the neckline lay in a smooth, simple line across the collarbones.
Down the back ran a row of tiny round buttons, covered in the same blue silk, so small and so neat that they almost disappeared into the seam.
And all over it, very lightly, there were stars.
They were embroidered in silver thread, scattered across the skirt and over the bodice as though somebody had stood on the battlements of Frost-Crest on a clear winter night and copied down the sky.
Not many.
Not crowded.
Dainty, and small, and placed with great care, so that they only caught the eye when the light moved.
A thin edging of white lace ran along the off-shoulder neckline and round the edge of each puffed sleeve and in a narrow band just above the hem.
And at the waist, worked right into the dress so that it could not come loose, a long sash of the same silk tied at the back in a soft bow, its ends falling down over the skirt.
“It’s…” said Hilde.
She stopped.
She tried again.
“It’s got stars on.”
“Yes, miss,” said her maid, a freckled girl not much older than she was, beaming.
“Her Grace’s design.
Every one in the house colours, and every one a little different.
The tailors from the Archipelago have been at them for five weeks.” She lowered her voice.
“And all of last night, miss.
You all came back from the Starwell…
changed.
Everybody’s measurements were wrong this morning.
Mistress Agathe had the tailors up till dawn letting things out and taking things in.”
Hilde looked down at herself in her nightgown.
She had not noticed.
She looked again.
She had grown.
Not much.
A finger’s breadth, maybe.
But her shoulders had changed, and her arms, and the way she stood.
Across the room, Senna Vaar was staring into her box without moving.
Hers was the colour of a winter morning: a very pale silver-grey, almost white, like frost on the Kharn passes at first light, with the silver stars barely showing against it, and the white lace like a breath of snow.
She had been brought up in a stone house in the passes where everybody wore wool and leather and the same coat for ten years.
She had walked four days alone through the Kharn to get to Frost-Crest.
She had never, in her whole life, owned anything that was only for being beautiful in.
She reached out one hand to touch it, and stopped, an inch away, and looked at her own fingers, which had held a spear and a butchering knife all her life, and did not dare.
“Go on, miss,” said her maid gently.
“It’s yours.
It was made for you.”
Senna touched it.
Then she sat down very suddenly on the edge of her bed and put both hands over her face.
Mira Halvard’s was a clear, cool glacier blue, the colour of the heart of the ice on the Starwell stair, with the stars worked in silver and a sash of deep midnight.
She looked at it for a long moment with her scientific expression, as though it might be a trick.
Then she said, in a small, strangled voice, “I have never in my life worn anything with lace on it,” and her maid said, “Then it’s high time, miss,” and Mira did not argue, which in itself was a kind of miracle.
Isolde Frostmere’s was white.
Pure white, frost-white, the white of the marble of Frost-Crest polished to a mirror, and the stars on it were not silver but palest blue, so that against the white they looked like ice, and the sash at her waist was the deep midnight of the banners.
Isolde had worn beautiful things all her life.
She was the heir of the fourth-oldest house in the North.
She looked at the white dress in its box, and then at the faint silver crescent on her own brow in the looking-glass across the room, and understood at once, as she understood all things, that somebody had chosen white for her on purpose, after yesterday.
After the moon.
She did not say anything.
But she touched the stars on it very gently, one at a time.
And Lyra’s was midnight.
The deepest blue of all: the colour of the citadel’s basalt, the colour of the sky above the Wall at the darkest hour of the night, so dark that in shadow it was almost black and only showed its blue when the light touched it.
The silver stars on it were thicker than on the others.
Not crowded, but more of them, running from the hem up across the skirt and over the bodice in a long, slow, sweeping drift, the way the stars run across the winter sky in the great river of light the northern folk called the Dragon’s Spine.
The lace was silver.
The buttons down the back were tiny silver stars.
It was her mother’s design.
She knew that at once.
Nobody else would have dared.
* * *
Then the maids went to work.
They did not ask permission.
That was not how the household of Frost-Crest did things.
They simply began, two to each girl, with the quiet, practised, implacable efficiency of a Legion company drilling on the parade ground.
There was water, first: basins of it, warm and scented with something that smelled of night-blooming jasmine from the Glass Conservatory.
Then there were the dresses: lifted over heads and smoothed down and settled on shoulders, and the tiny silk-covered buttons done up the back one by one, every single one, by fingers so quick that they seemed to fly.
Then the sashes, tied.
Then the mirrors.
Then the hair.
Room Nine’s hair had been a legend in the west wing for nine weeks.
Every morning, without fail, the four of them had woken looking as though they had been dragged backward through the Kharn passes: Hilde’s ginger curls in a great frizzled cloud like a troll’s, Lyra’s black waterfall of hair standing out round her head in a dark static halo like a black dandelion, Mira’s hair crackling up into the precise and alarming shape of Lord Kenneth’s after one of his towers exploded.
And every morning they had fought it into braids and plaits and knots with their bare hands and gone out to the Thousand Steps.
The maids of Frost-Crest did not fight it.
They had combs of white bone and silver, and brushes of soft boar-bristle, and little glass bottles of something that smelled of rosemary and Moon-Frost Lotus, and they simply won.
Hilde’s ginger curls were not tamed.
They were coaxed.
Combed out and shaped and pinned up high at the back of her head in a soft round crown, with a few curls left loose to fall round her freckled face, and three tiny silver star-pins set among them like stars in a ginger sky.
Senna’s short, dark, practical hair, which had never been anything but short and dark and practical, was brushed until it shone like a crow’s wing and swept back on one side with a single silver comb shaped like a feather.
Mira’s was smoothed, gently, ruthlessly, out of its Lord Kenneth shape, and woven into a long, soft braid that wound round the crown of her head like a circlet, with a ribbon of glacier blue running through it.
Isolde’s maids undid nothing and redid everything.
When they were finished, her silver hair was not in a crown of braids for the first time anyone at Frost-Crest could remember.
It was down.
All of it.
Brushed until it fell straight and shining past her shoulders like a waterfall of moonlight, with only two thin braids drawn back from her temples and joined behind her head, so that nothing at all covered the faint silver crescent on her brow.
She looked at herself in the glass for a long time, and did not say a word.
And Lyra’s hair, the black dandelion of Room Nine, was brushed and brushed until it lay down at last and fell in a long, heavy, shining river of ink past her waist, with the faint violet sheen in it that the Starwell had left.
They did not put it up.
They drew back the front of it and wove it into a fine braid on either side, and joined the two braids at the back with a silver clasp in the shape of a frost-lily, and let all the rest fall loose.
Then the faces.
It was not much.
The household of Frost-Crest did not believe in much.
A little powder, so fine it could not be seen, only felt.
A touch of colour on the cheeks, as though they had just come in from the snow.
A little on the lips, soft rose for some, pale coral for others.
A line of something dark and soft along the lashes that made Senna’s eyes look suddenly enormous and Hilde’s look suddenly, startlingly green.
Nothing anyone would notice, unless they had seen these faces every day for nine weeks scrubbed raw by the wind and streaked with Frozen Land and sweat and goblin blood.
Then they would notice.
Then the hands.
That was the part that undid them.
They sat in a row on the edge of their beds, in their dresses, with their hands held out on little white cushions, while the maids filed and buffed the broken, torn, ragged nails of five girls who had spent nine weeks gripping spears and bowstrings and sword-hilts and climbing frozen rock.
The Starwell had healed the cuts and the calluses.
It had not done anything about the nails.
The maids shaped them, and smoothed them, and painted them with something clear and faintly shining, like the inside of a shell.
Senna Vaar looked down at her own hands, lying on a white cushion with their nails gleaming, and her eyes filled up, and she did not know why.
“I don’t…” she said.
“I don’t look like this.
This isn’t what I look like.”
Mistress Agathe Rennick, standing in the doorway with her keys, looked at her for a moment over the top of the room.
“No, miss,” she said.
“It’s what you are.
You just haven’t had a looking-glass long enough to see it.”
* * *
Across the courtyard, in Room Four, the boys were having a very different morning.
The footmen had been at their door too, at dawn, with long grey boxes tied in midnight ribbon.
Inside each box was a suit.
A deep midnight-blue frock coat, cut close through the shoulders and long in the skirts, with silver frogging across the chest and silver buttons stamped with the sigil of the house.
A waistcoat of frost-white silk embroidered with a few small silver stars over the heart.
A white shirt with a soft high collar, and a cravat of silver-grey silk.
Dark, fitted trousers.
Black boots polished until they reflected the ceiling.
And then the footmen had produced razors, and combs, and scissors, and very, very firm expressions.
Sigurd Kell had been shaved.
Rowan Thorne’s hair, which he had been cutting himself with his belt knife for eleven years, had been taken in hand by a valet with a face like a disapproving heron and a pair of silver scissors, and trimmed and combed back from his face until he looked, Finn said in an awed voice, like somebody’s portrait.
Finn’s own narrow, dark face had been scrubbed and his unruly hair brushed flat and he stood in his midnight coat looking into the glass with an expression of profound suspicion, as though the person looking back at him might be about to ask him for money.
Cedric, who had at least worn such things before, at his mother’s dinners, stood in the middle of Room Four doing up his own cravat and laughing at all of them.
Then he caught sight of himself in the long glass by the door, and stopped laughing.
The Starwell had changed him too.
His shoulders were broader.
His face was harder, older, cleaner somehow, and the grey eyes looking back at him from under the black hair had something in them that had not been there a week ago.
A faint, cold glint, deep down, like ice under water.
He looked, he realised, like his father.
“Gentlemen,” said the Head Butler, Master Osric Vellane, appearing in the doorway of Room Four without having been heard to arrive.
He looked them over, one by one, from their combed hair to their gleaming boots.
Nothing changed in his long, narrow face.
But he gave, very slightly, a single nod.
“Breakfast,” he said.
“This way, please.”
And he turned and walked away down the corridor, without hurrying, and the young lords of Room Four followed him out into the morning.
II.
Starfall Hall
The boys had expected the old dining hall.
The long vaulted room of white stone and dark oak where they had eaten the seafood stew the night before: that was where breakfast had always been, every morning for nine weeks, porridge and black bread at long scrubbed tables, eaten in ten minutes flat before the Thousand Steps.
That was where Master Osric Vellane would take them now.
He did not.
He took them out of the east wing, and across the inner court, and through a gate in the eastern wall that had not been there when they left for the Wall.
It was new.
The stone of its arch was still sharp at the edges, and the star-silver iron of its gates still bright, with the blue mana-inscriptions along the bars pulsing gently in the morning light.
Beyond it, a wide white path ran out along the shoulder of the mountain, between young lilac trees in full spring flower, toward the edge of the cliff where the citadel looked down over the valley and the Winter-Lily Lake.
And at the end of the path, standing alone on the edge of the cliff with the whole valley spread out below it and the azure shimmer of the Formation’s dome arching far overhead, was a building none of them had ever seen.
The young lords of Frost-Crest stopped walking.
* * *
It was the citadel.
That was the first thing.
It was built the way Frost-Crest was built, out of the same stone and the same metal, the same colours, so that it looked as though it had grown out of the mountain the same way the old fortress had.
But the old fortress was a fist.
It had been built twelve hundred years ago by a man who expected war, and every wall of it was thick and every window narrow and every tower made to be held.
This was the same fist, opened.
Turned palm-up to the sky.
Its foundation was the deep-glacial basalt of the citadel, midnight-blue and lustrous, rising out of the living rock of the cliff edge in a great smooth plinth.
But above the plinth, where the old citadel would have gone on up in more blue-black stone, this building rose in white.
Cold-forged white marble, polished to a mirror sheen, in long, slender, soaring colonnades: columns so tall and so fine that they looked as though they could not possibly hold anything up, fluted from top to bottom, each one ending at its head not in a carved capital but in a spray of frost-lilies, open, worked in marble so thin that the morning light came through the petals.
Between the columns, tall windows ran up two full storeys, every pane of them diamond-glass, clear as water, set in tracery of star-silver iron as fine as the frost on a winter window.
The blue mana-inscriptions that guarded the old citadel ran through this iron too.
But here, instead of marching in hard straight lines along the walls, they wound and curled and branched across the glass like vines.
At either end, a slender tower.
Not a fighting tower, but a bell tower, a lantern tower, round and white and crowned with a little silver cupola like an upturned lily.
And over the middle of the building, rising above the colonnades, a dome.
It was glass.
All of it.
A great shallow dome of diamond-glass, ribbed with star-silver, and the silver ribs ran up from the edges to meet at the top in the shape of a star: an eight-pointed star of silver, sharp and bright, standing out against the morning sky.
Under the dome, through the glass, they could see the shapes of chandeliers, hanging high up in the light like frozen fountains.
Above the great doors, carved deep into the white marble of the lintel and inlaid with silver, was the sigil of the house: the frost-veined greatsword through the dragon’s skull.
And under it, in the old high script of the North, a name.
STARFALL HALL.
“That,” said Sigurd Kell, in a very small voice for a very large boy, “was not here before.”
“No, sir,” said Master Osric Vellane.
“We were gone for five weeks.”
“Quite so, sir.”
“How do you build that in five weeks?”
The Head Butler considered the question.
“Her Grace the Archduchess sent to the Archipelago for her father’s arcane masons the day you left for the Wall, sir.
Forty of them, sir, and their Craftsmaster, Master Bastien Morel, who built the sea-palace at Port Marigny.
They came by ley-ship.
They raised the basalt out of the quarry with their ley-cranes, and carried it up the mountain by night.
The Matriarch laid the wards.” A pause.
“And the Craftsmaster cut the columns.”
“Cut them?
With what?”
“With a mana-saw, sir.
A blade of pure arcane force, as thin as a hair, which only he in all the Archipelago can hold steady.
One cut each, from the top of the column to the foot, without stopping to breathe.
He said they were the finest stone he had ever worked.”
Rowan Thorne looked at the columns.
There were dozens of them, every one twice the height of a tower of the Wall, every one fluted from top to bottom in perfect, delicate, identical grooves.
He thought of the stone on the log, and of the smallest cut that would do, and wondered whether the Craftsmaster had ever met Lord Lucian, and what the two of them would make of each other.
He did not say anything at all.
Cedric was the worst.
He had grown up in this citadel.
He knew every stair of it and every corridor and every crack in every wall.
And he was standing in the middle of the white path in his midnight frock coat staring up at a building he had never seen, on his own mountain, with his mouth open like a farm boy at a fair.
“Mother,” he said, faintly, to nobody.
“Mother did this.
While we were gone.
She did this, and she didn’t say…”
“Her Grace wished it to be a surprise, sir,” said Master Osric.
“This way, please.”
* * *
The doors were silver.
Two great leaves of star-silver iron, twice the height of a man, worked all over in relief with frost-lilies and drakes and swords and stars, and they stood open.
Beyond them was the entrance hall.
Its floor was white marble, so polished that the young lords of Frost-Crest could see themselves in it, upside down, in their midnight coats.
And set into the marble, in thin lines of inlaid silver, was a map of the sky.
Every star of the northern winter heavens, in its right place, with the great river of light the North called the Dragon’s Spine running down the middle of the floor from the doors to the far end of the hall. This chapter is updated first at novelping(.)com.
The young lords walked in along the Dragon’s Spine, on the stars, and could not stop looking down.
Then they looked up.
The hall rose two full storeys to a coffered ceiling of midnight-blue basalt, and every coffer held a single lamp of frost-glass, so that the ceiling was a second sky, glowing softly.
Galleries ran round the hall at the second storey, behind white marble balustrades.
And from the hall, four ways opened.
Ahead, through a pair of tall white doors standing open, they could see the great room under the dome.
A ballroom: that was what it had to be, though none of them had ever seen one.
It was vast and round and full of light.
The floor was pale ash-wood, polished to a soft gleam, with a single enormous frost-lily inlaid in silver at its heart, its petals spreading almost to the walls.
All round the walls stood tall mirrors in silver frames, so that the room seemed to go on forever, full of light and full of more ballrooms.
A musicians’ gallery ran round under the dome.
And the dome itself was glass, open to the sky, and the chandeliers that hung from it were not crystal but frost: frozen fountains of ice that did not melt, that caught the sunlight coming through the glass and broke it into a thousand slow-turning rainbows across the floor.
“The Moon-Frost Ballroom, gentlemen,” said Master Osric, without breaking stride.
“You will see a great deal of it this afternoon.”
Nobody asked what he meant.
Nobody dared.
To the right, through an arch of dark wood, they glimpsed a long, low, firelit room panelled in oak and hung with old weapons.
Deep leather chairs stood in front of a hearth big enough to roast a frost-boar in.
A long counter of black basalt ran down one wall, with brass rails and tall stools, and behind it, on shelves going up to the ceiling, glimmered row after row of bottles and jars and great casks with brass taps.
Over the hearth hung the skull of a frost-drake, its jaws open, its crest gilded.
Sigurd Kell made a noise like a man seeing the sun for the first time.
“Is that…”
“The Drake’s Rest, sir.
The gentlemen’s room.
It is for conversation, and cards, and the evening.” Master Osric did not even turn his head.
“Not before sunset, sir.
And at your age, sir, cider.”
To the left, through an arch of white marble wreathed in carved lotus flowers, a set of doors stood closed.
Pale blue, with handles of silver shaped like lotus buds.
Faintly, from behind them, came the smell of jasmine and something sweet, like honey cakes.
“And that?” said Finn Brannoc.
“The Lotus Salon, sir.
The ladies’ room.” Master Osric paused, very slightly.
“Gentlemen are admitted by invitation only.”
Finn looked at the closed blue doors with an expression of deep and instant longing, as though there were secrets behind them he would never be allowed to know.
“And this way,” said the Head Butler, “is breakfast.”
* * *
The fourth way was the dining hall: the Starlit Gallery.
They came through a pair of tall doors on the eastern side of the entrance hall, and stopped, all of them at once, the way they had stopped on the white path outside.
Rowan Thorne actually took a step backward and trod on Finn’s foot.
It was long.
That was the first thing.
It ran the whole length of the eastern side of Starfall Hall, a long, high, light-filled room with tall diamond-glass windows down the whole of one side, and through every one of them, as far as the eye could see, the valley of the Eisenhardts lay spread out in its eternal spring: the white orchards and the green fields and the shining blue mirror of the Winter-Lily Lake, three thousand feet below, with the willows round its edge like a fringe of silver-green lace and the far mountains standing up beyond it white and blue against the sky.
The ceiling was midnight.
Deep midnight-blue, the colour of the basalt, painted in silver leaf with stars: not a map this time, but a scatter of them, thousands upon thousands, all different sizes.
And as the young lords stood looking up at it, they realised that some of the stars were moving.
Very slowly.
Drifting across the painted night like the stars rising in the Starwell.
The Matriarch’s wards, Master Osric said.
A little of the Starwell’s light, carried up the mountain and set into the ceiling, so that the hall would always remember where it had come from.
Down the centre of the room ran a single table.
One table.
Long enough to seat a hundred and more, carved from the dark, close-grained wood of the nightoaks on the citadel terrace.
It was laid with white damask so fine and so white it looked like new snow.
On the damask, at every place, more silver than any of them had ever seen in their lives.
Three forks to the left.
Three knives and a spoon to the right.
Another spoon and a little fork above the plate, lying crosswise.
Plates of white porcelain rimmed in midnight blue and silver, one stacked on another, three high.
Four glasses at every place, of different sizes and different shapes, cut crystal, catching the light from the windows and throwing it across the white cloth in little shivering rainbows.
A napkin folded into the shape of a frost-lily on every plate.
And beside every napkin, a small card of white pasteboard, edged in silver, with a name written on it in the same fine, flowing silver hand that had been on the boxes.
The young lords of Frost-Crest stood in the doorway of the dining hall of Starfall Hall in their new midnight coats, with their hair combed and their boots shining, and looked down the length of that table at the silver and the crystal and the snow-white cloth, and every one of them was thinking exactly the same thing.
It was Bram Holloway who said it.
He said it in a voice of pure, quiet terror.
“All this,” said Bram Holloway, “for breakfast?”
“For breakfast, sir,” said Master Osric Vellane.
“Gentlemen, if you will wait by the windows.
Do not sit.
Do not touch the silver.
The ladies will be down directly.”
III.
The Ladies Come Down
They waited by the windows, as they had been told, in a long nervous line, with the whole spring valley blazing behind them and their hands clasped behind their backs because nobody knew what else to do with them.
Nobody touched the silver.
Sigurd Kell came close, once, reaching out one finger toward the nearest of the three forks as if it might bite him, and a footman standing against the wall said “Sir,” very quietly, and Sigurd snatched his hand back as though he had touched a stove.
They heard the ladies before they saw them.
Light steps on the marble of the entrance hall, a great many of them, and the soft whisper of silk.
A murmur of voices, low and nervous.
And then Hilde Aarn’s voice, quite clearly, from the other side of the tall doors: “I can’t.
I can’t, I can’t go in, what if I trip, what if I trip on the stars…” And Mistress Agathe’s, quite calm: “Then you will get up, miss.
In you go.”
The doors of the Starlit Gallery opened.
* * *
Afterward, none of the young lords of Frost-Crest could agree on who had come through those doors first.
It did not matter.
What mattered was that for nine weeks they had trained beside these girls on the Thousand Steps, and the Sword-Pond, and the Frozen Land.
They had seen them in Frostweave and furs and spirit-iron.
They had seen them sweating and swearing and bleeding and being sick in snowbanks.
They had seen them with their hair in wild clouds and their faces scrubbed raw by the wind and streaked with soot against the snow-glare and splashed with goblin blood.
They had seen them carried on their backs across two days of frozen hills.
They knew them.
They would have said, if anyone had asked, that they knew these girls as well as they knew their own lances.
They had never once seen them in a dress.
The ladies of Frost-Crest came into the Starlit Gallery in a slow, rustling, shining stream of blue and white and silver, with the light from the tall windows falling on them and the painted stars drifting overhead.
They came in their tailored bodices and their flaring A-line skirts with the silver stars scattered across them, and their soft puffed sleeves off the shoulder, and the white lace at their collarbones, and their sashes tied behind them in soft bows.
They came with their hair up and their hair down and their hair braided round their heads like crowns, with silver pins in it.
They came with their cheeks faintly flushed and their lashes faintly darkened and their nails faintly shining, walking carefully, very carefully, on the stars inlaid in the marble, as if they were afraid the floor might give way.
The young lords standing by the windows forgot how to breathe.
It went down the line like a wind through a wheat field.
One boy after another, as he saw the girl he had been looking for and did not, for a long, long moment, recognise her.
Bram Holloway, who had carried Tilda Marsh across half the Frozen Land screaming that she was full of flour, saw her come in, round and freckled and pink-cheeked in a dress of soft dove-white with a midnight sash, with her brown hair pinned up in a coil of little plaits like a loaf of festival bread and her bent ladle very definitely not in her belt.
He made a small sound, and put his hand over his heart, and left it there.
Emrik Stahl, who had seen nothing on his left side for five weeks and had grown used to turning his head, did not need to turn it now.
Ylva Brenn came in on his left, on two good legs, in glacier blue with her dark braids looped up and pinned with silver, and Emrik saw her, with both eyes, all at once, and simply stood there, looking, as though he were afraid that if he blinked she might go back to being half-dark.
Arne Stenvik saw Hilde Aarn.
She came in with her ginger curls pinned up in a soft crown with three silver stars among them and a few loose curls falling round her freckled face, in dusk-blue silk, and her eyes, made larger by whatever the maids had done to them, were suddenly, startlingly, unmistakably green.
She was not talking.
For the first time anyone could remember, Hilde Aarn was not talking.
She was walking very carefully on the stars with her lips pressed together, and her face was scarlet, and she was not looking at anyone.
Then she looked up.
And found Arne Stenvik standing by the window, looking at her.
Arne did not say anything.
Of course he did not.
But his large, square, sandy face went slowly and completely red, from his new starched collar to the roots of his combed hair, and stayed that way.
Beside him, Hakon Aarn, in his own midnight coat, looked at his sister, and then at Arne, and then up at the painted ceiling, and sighed the sigh of a man who has seen his fate and accepted it.
Sigurd Kell saw Mira Halvard and said, out loud, before he could stop himself: “Halvard?”
Mira stopped.
She was in glacier blue, with her hair, the hair that had looked like Lord Kenneth’s every morning for nine weeks, woven into a smooth, soft braid wound round the crown of her head like a circlet with a blue ribbon in it, and she had never looked less like Lord Kenneth in her life.
She looked at Sigurd.
Sigurd looked at her.
His big face was doing something it had never done before, and did not seem to know how to do.
“Yes, Kell,” said Mira, rather breathlessly.
“Who did you think it was?”
Sigurd opened his mouth, and shut it, and opened it again.
And then, for perhaps the first time in his life, Sigurd Kell, who had never once thought before he spoke, thought before he spoke, and closed his mouth, and simply bowed.
Badly.
But he bowed.
Mira’s face went the colour of a Dragon-Blood Orchid, and she looked away very fast.
Finn Brannoc saw Senna Vaar.
She came in near the end, in pale silver-grey, the colour of frost on the Kharn passes at dawn, with her short dark hair brushed until it shone like a crow’s wing and swept back on one side with a silver comb shaped like a feather.
Her face was very still.
She was holding her shining hands clasped tight in front of her, as if she did not trust them.
She looked, Finn thought, like the first morning of winter: like the moment, on the passes, when the sun comes up over the snow and everything goes silver and clear and you stop walking because you cannot believe the world is allowed to be that beautiful.
He did not know he had stepped forward until he had done it.
One step, out of the line.
He stopped.
Senna looked up and saw him.
In his midnight coat, with his narrow dark face scrubbed and his hair brushed flat, looking at her.
She stopped too.
They stood there, the two of them, with ten paces of starry marble between them, and did not say anything at all.
They did not need to.
They had never needed to.
But Senna Vaar’s still, careful face slowly, slowly, against her will, broke into a smile.
And Finn Brannoc, the quietest boy in the Seventh Lance, smiled back, and it was the first time anyone in the Starlit Gallery had seen him do it with his whole face.
And Rowan Thorne saw Isolde Frostmere.
She came in alone, a little behind the others, the way she always did.
In white.
Frost-white silk, like the marble of the citadel polished to a mirror, with the stars on it in palest blue like ice, and a sash of deep midnight at her waist.
And her hair was down.
Nobody in the Seventh had ever seen Isolde Frostmere’s hair down.
Not on the Thousand Steps.
Not on the Frozen Land.
It had been a flawless crown of silver braids every day of her life, as fixed and unchanging as the walls of her family’s house.
Now it fell straight and shining past her shoulders like a waterfall of moonlight, with only two thin braids drawn back from her temples, so that nothing at all hid the faint new crescent glowing on her brow.
Her eyes were pure silver.
She walked in on the stars without looking down at them once, with her chin up, the way she always walked, like a queen on a parade horse.
And then she found Rowan Thorne at the window, in his midnight coat, with his hair cut and combed back from his face, looking at her as though he had been struck by lightning.
And the heir of the fourth-oldest house in the North faltered.
Only for half a step.
Nobody else would have noticed.
But Rowan noticed.
And the faint silver crescent on her brow, very briefly, brightened, the way a lamp flares when a door opens on it, before she could stop it.
She looked away.
He looked away.
Both of them were scarlet.
Both of them stood very straight and stared fixedly at completely different parts of the painted ceiling, and the stars drifted slowly across it, and neither of them noticed a single one.
Hilde Aarn, who had recovered the power of speech, whispered: “Did her moon just…”
“Yes,” whispered Senna.
“Don’t.”
* * *
Lyra came in last.
She had not meant to.
She had simply let the others go ahead of her, the way she let them go ahead of her on the Frozen Land, so that she could see them all.
And so she came through the tall doors of the Starlit Gallery by herself, after everyone else had stopped, into a room where every head was already turned toward the doors.
In midnight.
The deepest blue of the citadel’s stone, with the silver stars drifting across it from the hem to the shoulder like the Dragon’s Spine across the winter sky.
Silver lace.
Silver star-buttons at her back.
Her black hair, the black dandelion of Room Nine, brushed into a long, heavy, shining river past her waist, caught back at the sides with two fine braids and a silver frost-lily, and the faint violet sheen the Starwell had left in it catching the light from the windows.
Her violet-frost eyes, with their silver rings round the pupils, very clear.
She walked down the Dragon’s Spine of stars inlaid in the marble, and the stars on her dress matched the stars on the floor, and the stars on the ceiling drifted overhead, and for a moment it looked as though she had walked in out of the night sky itself.
The Starlit Gallery was completely silent.
Then her brother, standing at the window in his new midnight frock coat that made him look exactly like their father, took one look at her, and his face went through astonishment and pride and something like awe and arrived, at last, at deep and immediate suspicion.
He turned round and looked down the long table at the place cards.
“Right,” said Cedric Eisenhardt grimly.
“Who’s sitting next to her.”
The silence broke.
Somebody laughed.
Then everybody laughed, the boys by the windows and the girls on the stars, all at once, the nervous, helpless, relieved laughter of a hundred people who had been holding their breath for far too long.
And Lyra laughed too, with her hand over her mouth, and the moment passed, and they were themselves again: only dressed better, and looking at each other a great deal more carefully than they had looked yesterday.
Some of them were looking at each other very carefully indeed.
* * *
The far doors of the Starlit Gallery opened, and the room went quiet again.
Lady Seraphina came in first, in grey silk, with her veil thrown back.
Beside her, on her right, came the Archduchess Genevieve, in blue, glittering faintly with sapphires at her throat and her ears, with her fair Western hair piled high and her eyes going swiftly down the room over every one of them, missing nothing, the way she went down a column of figures in a treasury ledger.
And behind the two ladies came a third woman.
Tall, slender, very upright, perhaps sixty, with iron-grey hair drawn back so tightly that it seemed to lift her eyebrows, a gown of dove-grey cut so precisely that it might have been made with a ruler, and a long ebony cane with a silver head, which she did not lean on in the least.
“Ladies.
Gentlemen,” said the Archduchess Genevieve.
Her voice was not soft like the Matriarch’s.
It was clear and quick and very slightly amused, and it carried the faint lilt of the Western Archipelago.
“Good morning.
You look very well.
Some of you look a great deal better than I expected.” Her eyes rested on Sigurd for a moment, and something at the corner of her mouth quirked.
“Welcome to Starfall Hall.
I built it for you.
You may thank me by learning to use it.”
She turned her head.
“This is Madame Odile de Varenne.
She was the mistress of ceremonies at my father’s court in the Archipelago for thirty years.
She taught me.
She has taught three princesses, two sea-queens and the heir of the Southern Caldera, who was not grateful at the time and has since written to thank her.
She has come a very long way to teach you.
You will do exactly as she says.”
Madame Odile de Varenne inclined her head by perhaps a quarter of an inch.
Then she looked at them.
All of them.
A long, slow, assessing look down the whole length of the room, over every coat and every gown and every hand and every pair of feet.
Somewhere in the Ninth Lance, someone made a very small sound.
“In the spring,” said Lady Seraphina gently, “you will go south.
To the Academy at Aethelgard, and some of you, afterward, to the capital.
You have learned to fight beasts.
You have learned to fight goblins.
The people you will meet in the south fight with smiles, and with seating plans, and with which fork you pick up.” She folded her hands.
“Their knives are very sharp, and they are made of silver.
So you will learn to hold them.”
“Today’s schedule, Madame,” said the Archduchess.
Madame Odile struck the floor once with the silver head of her cane.
The sound rang down the long room like a bell.
“Breakfast,” she said.
Her voice was dry and precise, with a crisp Western edge, and every syllable of it landed exactly where she meant it to.
“Which is today your first lesson.
The table.
How to sit at it, how to eat at it, how to speak at it, and how not to disgrace your house at it.
It will take as long as it takes.
Then, the Moon-Frost Ballroom, until noon.
You will learn to stand, to walk, to bow and to curtsy, and to dance: the court promenade, the Archipelago waltz and the Northern reel.
Then luncheon, which will be another lesson.
Then, all afternoon, the art of conversation: how to address a duke, a bishop, a Saintess and a prince, and how to say no to all four of them so that they thank you for it.” She paused, briefly.
“And before dinner, I understand, you go down to the Starwell for the second time.
I am told it will be very painful.” Another pause, very slightly drier.
“You will then come up and dine with me in this room, in full dress, with perfect manners.
Pain is not an excuse for using the wrong fork.”
Somebody in the Tenth Lance laughed, and stopped at once.
“You will find your names on the cards,” said Madame Odile.
“Go to your places.
Do not sit.
Stand behind your chair, and wait.”
* * *
There was a commotion.
Of course there was.
A hundred and three young people, in clothes they did not know how to move in, all trying to find their own names on a hundred and three little silver-edged cards down the length of a single table, all at once, without touching the silver.
They went up one side and down the other, peering, murmuring, bumping into each other, apologising, in a slow-moving rustle of silk and wool.
And then, one by one, they found them.
And stopped.
Because somebody had made the seating plan, and that somebody had very clearly been in the Starwell yesterday, watching the pillars of stars.
Rowan Thorne found his card.
And beside it, on the right, in the same fine silver hand: Lady Isolde Frostmere.
Finn Brannoc found his.
Miss Senna Vaar, on his left.
Sigurd Kell found his, and read the card beside it twice, and looked up.
Mira Halvard had just arrived behind the very next chair, and was reading her own card, very still.
Mr.
Sigurd Kell.
She looked up.
Their eyes met across the width of one chair-back.
She looked away first.
Arne Stenvik and Hilde Aarn.
Emrik Stahl and Ylva Brenn.
Bram Holloway and Tilda Marsh, who burst into tears of pure happiness and had to be given a handkerchief by the footman behind her chair.
Nobody argued.
That was the strange thing.
Not a single person.
A hundred young soldiers of the North, who had argued about everything for nine weeks, from who carried the cauldron to who had the better tally on the board, stood behind their chairs in the Starlit Gallery and looked at the names beside their own, and did not say a word.
There was only a glance, here and there.
A quick look along the table, and away.
And then, here and there, slowly, a smile.
Hakon Aarn found himself seated beside Cedric Eisenhardt, near the middle of the table, and the two of them looked at each other with deep mutual understanding: two men with sisters, and no stars.
And Lyra found her own card at the very end of the table, near the high end of the room, on the right hand of the place laid for Madame Odile de Varenne herself.
She read it.
She looked at the empty chair at the head of the table.
She looked at the ebony cane with the silver head, standing propped against it.
She understood, with a slow, cold, sinking feeling she had not had since the Beast King came out of the glass-birch forest, exactly what that meant.
Of everyone at that table, she was the one who would be going to court.
IV.
The Silver Knives
The Matriarch and the Archduchess took their places at the high end of the table.
Madame Odile de Varenne took the head of it, standing, with her hand on the silver head of her cane.
And behind every single chair down the whole long length of the Starlit Gallery, without anybody having seen them arrive, a servant was standing.
A footman behind every young lord.
A maid behind every young lady.
Not the ones who had dressed them: others, older, quieter, in the grey and the blue-and-white of Frost-Crest, standing with their hands folded and their eyes front, as still as the kata steles on the Sword-Pond.
“These,” said Madame Odile, “are your shadows.
They will stand behind you for every meal of this lesson, today and every day until I am satisfied.
They know everything I know about a table.
They will not speak to you.
They will not help you.
If you do something wrong, they will tell you so, once, very quietly, in your ear, and you will correct it, and nobody else at the table will ever know.” She paused.
“If you do it wrong twice, I will know.
And then everybody will know.”
Nobody moved.
“Gentlemen,” said Madame Odile.
“The lady on your right.
Her chair.”
There was a silence of pure incomprehension.
Then, behind Rowan Thorne, his footman leaned forward and murmured, so softly that nobody else could hear it: “Draw out the lady’s chair, sir.
Two hands, on the back.
Lift it, do not drag it.
When she sits, ease it in behind her.
Then sit yourself.”
Rowan went scarlet.
He turned to his right.
Isolde Frostmere was standing behind her chair in her white silk, with her silver hair falling down her back, not looking at him, with an expression of perfect serenity that he knew, by now, meant she was as nervous as he was.
He put both hands on the back of her chair.
He lifted it, so carefully that it might have been made of glass, and drew it out.
She stepped in front of it, gathered her skirt in one hand, and sat, in one smooth movement, as if she had done it a thousand times, which she had.
He eased the chair in behind her.
He did not drop it.
He did not hit her with it.
He did not pinch her skirt in it.
He let out a breath he did not know he had been holding.
“Thank you, Rowan,” said Isolde, very quietly, without turning her head.
Rowan sat down in his own chair, and found that his hands were shaking more than they had on the snow bridge over the rift angler.
All the way down the table it was happening, with varying success.
Finn drew out Senna’s chair with the grave, careful attention he gave to setting a spear-point, and Senna sat in it as though it might be a trap.
Arne Stenvik drew out Hilde’s chair, and then, overcome, simply went on holding it, until his footman murmured something, and he set it down.
Sigurd Kell lifted Mira’s chair clean off the floor, because he did not know his own strength since the Starwell, and held it in the air like a man holding up a trophy, and his footman said “Lower, sir.
Much lower,” with great patience, and Mira sat down in it with her eyes shut and her face scarlet and her shoulders shaking, which might have been mortification and was probably laughter.
Bram Holloway drew out Tilda Marsh’s chair, and seated her, and then seated himself, and sat on his own coat-tails, and could not move, and his footman leaned down and said, “Up, sir.
Flip the tails out behind you.
Then sit,” and Bram did it, and his footman said “Very good, sir,” and Bram looked as though he might weep with gratitude.
Then they were seated.
All of them.
A hundred and three young people in midnight and silver and blue and white, sitting very straight at a table of white damask under a painted sky with drifting stars, with a shadow standing behind every chair.
Madame Odile de Varenne surveyed them for a long moment.
“Napkins,” she said.
* * *
It went on for an hour and a half.
It was, more than one of them said afterward, worse than the Thousand Steps.
On the Thousand Steps, at least, you knew when you had failed: your legs gave out, and you fell over, and Lord Roderick shouted at you.
At Madame Odile’s table you could fail without moving a muscle, and the first you knew of it was a soft voice in your ear.
The napkin, miss.
On the lap.
Unfold it once, not fully.
The fold toward you.
Sit back, sir.
Your back does not touch the chair.
Neither does your front touch the table.
The bread plate is on your left, miss.
Your water glass is on your right.
Everything that is yours to eat is on your left.
Everything that is yours to drink is on your right.
Remember: left for bread, right for drink.
Do not pick up the knife yet, sir.
You do not pick up anything until the lady at the head of the table has picked up hers.
Nobody picked up anything.
A hundred and three people sat and stared at Madame Odile de Varenne’s hands, resting on the damask beside her silver, perfectly still.
She let them wait.
Then, unhurriedly, she picked up the smallest of her three forks.
The first course came in.
It was fruit: a small bowl of cloudberries and slices of winter pear, with a curl of cream.
And the shadows went to work.
The outermost fork, sir.
Always.
You work from the outside in, one course at a time.
The fork furthest from your plate is for the first thing that comes.
The next for the next.
When in doubt, sir, watch Madame.
Sigurd Kell, who had been about to stab a slice of pear with the largest fork he could see, stopped with it in mid-air.
His shadow’s voice in his ear was perfectly kind.
He put the large fork down, very slowly, as though it were a sleeping frost-bear, and picked up the small one.
It looked like a toy in his huge hand.
He ate one cloudberry with it with tremendous concentration, and beside him, Mira, without looking at him, without moving her lips, murmured: “Good.
Now the pear.
Small bites.
You are not at the Twelfth Tower.”
Sigurd looked at her sideways, astonished.
She did not look back.
But under the edge of the table, very briefly, the toe of her new shoe touched his boot.
Steady.
The porridge came next, and it was not porridge as any of them knew it.
It came in shallow porcelain bowls, smooth and golden, with honey and cream and a scatter of toasted nuts, and with it came the lesson of the spoon.
Away from you, miss.
You spoon it away from you, toward the far side of the bowl, never toward you.
Sip from the side of the spoon.
Do not blow on it.
Do not ever blow on it.
Hilde Aarn was very good at this.
She was very good at the spoon, and very good at the small bites, and very good at sitting straight.
What she was not good at was not talking.
She had remembered, around the third mouthful, that she was sitting next to Arne Stenvik, and that she was wearing a dress, and that he had gone red when he saw her, and the knowledge of all three of these things at once had built up inside her like steam in a kettle.
“Arne,” she whispered.
“Arne, did you see the ceiling, the stars move, and the dome, did you see the dome, and the frost-chandeliers…”
Conversation, miss, breathed her shadow, is permitted.
It is conducted quietly, and turn by turn.
First to the gentleman on your right, through one course.
Then to the gentleman on your left, through the next.
Never across the table.
And never with your mouth full, miss.
Hilde closed her mouth.
She swallowed.
She went pink.
Then she turned to Arne, and folded her hands in her lap, and said, in a voice of tremendous and fragile dignity: “Did you see the ceiling, Arne?”
Arne Stenvik looked at her.
He had not said a word since she came through the doors.
He was not, it seemed, going to start now.
But he nodded.
Gravely.
Once.
And Madame Odile de Varenne, at the head of the table, who had been watching every single person at it at once without ever appearing to look at any of them, said, quite clearly and without inflection: “Mr.
Stenvik.
Excellent.”
Nobody had ever praised Arne Stenvik for not talking before.
He went a deep, astonished red, and Hilde beamed at him as if he had slain a Beast King.
* * *
Finn Brannoc surprised everybody.
He did not know about forks.
Nobody in the Roaring Drake ate with three forks; you were lucky in the Roaring Drake if you got one.
But he had grown up in his father’s tavern, carrying plates since he was six, and he knew things about a table that nobody else did.
He knew which side the food came from, and which side the plates were taken away from, and he leaned very slightly to the right when the footman came to serve him and very slightly to the left when the plate was cleared, without even thinking about it, the way he had done ten thousand times when he was the one carrying it.
His shadow, standing behind him, raised his eyebrows.
You’ve served, sir.
“My father’s tavern,” whispered Finn, scarlet.
“The Roaring Drake.”
There was a pause.
Then the footman behind him, who had been in service at Frost-Crest for thirty years, murmured: “Best drake brisket in three provinces, sir.
My compliments to your father.”
Beside him, Senna Vaar was eating her porridge with absolute precision, every movement neat and small and exact, the way she probed the ice with the butt of her spear: as though the table were a rift field, and every fork a snow bridge that might give way.
She had not made a single mistake.
Her shadow had not had to say a single word to her.
But her knuckles were white.
Finn saw it.
He did not say anything.
He could not, under Madame Odile’s eye.
But he set down his spoon very quietly, and turned, as he was allowed to turn, to the lady on his left, and said, in a perfectly proper low voice, the way his shadow had told him a gentleman spoke at table:
“Do you remember the goat that ate your father’s boots?”
Senna looked at him.
Her mouth twitched.
“Both boots,” she said, very properly.
“And one of the laces.”
And her knuckles, on her silver spoon, slowly went pink again.
* * *
At the far end of the table, Rowan Thorne was dying.
He was a farmer’s son.
He had eaten with a knife and his fingers and a heel of bread for the first seven years of his life, and with a wooden spoon in the citadel barracks for the eleven after that.
He had never in his life seen a fish knife.
He did not know what a fish knife was.
And the third course was fish.
It came in on white plates: a fillet of silver lake-trout from the Winter-Lily Lake, in a pool of pale butter sauce, with a sprig of dill on it, and beside his plate, as the footman set it down, there appeared out of nowhere yet another piece of silver.
A flat, broad, strangely shaped knife with no edge on it at all, and a notch in the blade like a bite out of an apple.
Rowan looked at it.
He looked at the three forks.
He looked at the two remaining knives.
He looked at the little spoon and the little fork lying crosswise above his plate, which nobody had explained yet.
And for the first time since the snow bridge, he felt his mind go perfectly, completely blank.
His shadow leaned forward.
But before his shadow could speak, something touched the back of Rowan’s left hand where it lay on the damask.
Very lightly.
A single fingertip, cool, the nail faintly shining.
It touched the flat, broad, notched knife, once, and withdrew.
Then it touched the fork beside it.
Once.
And withdrew.
Rowan did not look at Isolde Frostmere.
He did not dare.
She was sitting perfectly straight beside him, eating her own trout with her own fish knife in tiny, exquisite, flawless movements, looking at nothing but her plate.
Nobody at the table could have said she had moved at all.
He picked up the fish knife and the fork.
He did not know how to use them.
She showed him that too.
Not with words.
She simply turned her own wrist, very slightly, toward him, as she ate, so that he could see the way she held the broad blade, flat, and slid it under the flesh of the fish and lifted it off the bone, without cutting, the way you lift a page.
And he watched her hands, and did it.
Badly, the first time.
Better, the second.
By the fourth mouthful his shadow, standing behind him, had quietly folded his hands again and was looking at the ceiling.
At the head of the table, Madame Odile de Varenne said nothing.
But the silver head of her ebony cane, very gently, tapped the floor once.
Isolde Frostmere went pink to the tips of her ears.
So did Rowan.
Neither of them looked up.
* * *
And at the very head of the table, on Madame Odile’s right hand, in her midnight dress, Lyra Eisenhardt was being taken apart.
Not unkindly.
Madame Odile was never unkind.
She simply sat beside her, and ate her own breakfast in small, perfect, unhurried movements, and watched.
And every so often, in her dry, precise, Western voice, pitched so low that only Lyra could hear it, she spoke.
“Your posture is correct, Lady Lyra.
It is too correct.
You sit like a sentry on a wall.
At court, a lady who never moves is a lady who is hiding something.
Lean, a little.
Toward the person who is speaking.
As though you are interested.”
Lyra leaned.
A little.
“Better.
Your use of the silver is faultless.
Your mother taught you well.
But you eat as though you expect someone to take the plate away from you before you have finished.
Slower.
A lady of your house is never in a hurry.
Everyone else at the table waits for her.”
Lyra slowed.
“You are watching every person at this table,” said Madame Odile, quite pleasantly, lifting a morsel of trout.
“You have been watching them since you sat down.
You know where every footman is standing.
You know who has made a mistake and who has not, and which of them are frightened.
You have looked twice at the doors.” She ate the trout.
“That is very good.
You will need it.
In the capital, it will keep you alive.
But you must not let them see that you are doing it.
Your eyes give you away.
Look at your plate when you think.
Look at your companion when you listen.
Look at the room only when you laugh.”
Lyra looked at her plate.
She was not used to this.
Nobody had ever taken her apart like this before.
Not her father, not Uncle Lucian, not the Beast King.
And she found, to her own considerable surprise, sitting there in her midnight dress with her heart beating rather fast, that she did not dislike it at all.
“Madame,” she said, quietly, to her plate.
“How long did it take the princesses?”
Madame Odile de Varenne considered this.
“The three princesses,” she said, “a year each.
The two sea-queens, two years, and one of them never learned to stop drumming her fingers on the cloth.
The heir of the Southern Caldera, four years, and he threw a soup tureen at me in the second.” She set down her fork, precisely.
“You, Lady Lyra, I believe will take a month.
Possibly less.” A pause.
“Your difficulty is not that you do not know how to behave.
Your difficulty is that you know far too well how to be seen to behave.
That is a much rarer fault.
And a much more dangerous one.”
Lyra looked up from her plate, and met the old woman’s eyes, and for one moment neither of them said anything at all.
Then Madame Odile de Varenne smiled.
Very slightly.
The first smile anyone in the Starlit Gallery had seen on her face.
“Eat your trout, my lady,” she said.
“Slowly.
We have a long way to go, you and I, and I am told there is a prince at the end of it.”
Lyra Eisenhardt, who had faced a Beast King and a Goblin King and the whole weight of the Sundering in her own blood without once losing her composure, nearly dropped her fish knife.
Across the table, in the Archduchess’s chair, her mother lifted her glass of pear-juice to her lips, and hid behind it a smile that could have lit the whole Starlit Gallery without any help from the stars.
End of Chapter 19.