I.
May I?
The last plate was cleared at a quarter to ten.
A hundred and three young people sat back very slightly in their chairs, not touching the backs of them, with their napkins folded beside their plates exactly as their shadows had told them, and let out a breath they felt they had been holding for an hour and a half.
Breakfast was over.
They had survived it.
Sigurd Kell had used the correct fork for the last two courses entirely by himself, and was sitting with the quiet, dazed pride of a man who had killed his first frost-bear.
Madame Odile de Varenne rose at the head of the table.
Every chair scraped.
Every one of them half rose with her, the way they would have risen for the Archduke on the Sword-Pond.
Then a hundred and three shadows leaned forward at once and murmured, “Gentlemen rise.
Ladies remain seated,” and the young ladies of Frost-Crest sat down again, rather pink, and the young lords stood up the rest of the way, rather pinker.
“Thank you,” said Madame Odile, dryly.
“That will be enough of that.” She rested her hand on the silver head of her cane.
“Breakfast is finished.
The lesson is not.
The lesson did not begin when you sat down at this table, and it will not end when you leave it.
It began this morning, the moment you opened your door, and it will end, I am afraid, on the day you die.”
Somewhere in the Ninth Lance, Bram Holloway made a very quiet noise of despair.
“We will now go to the Moon-Frost Ballroom.
And you will not go to it as you have gone everywhere else for nine weeks: in a herd, at a run, shoving.” Her cane tapped the floor, once.
“Gentlemen.
You will escort the lady seated beside you.
Ladies, you will permit yourselves to be escorted.”
Nobody moved.
“Before you do,” said Madame Odile, “there is one thing you must do first.
One thing, without which nothing that follows is permitted.
Who can tell me what it is?”
Silence.
A hundred young lords stood behind their chairs and looked at each other in panic.
Then, from the middle of the table, a quiet voice said: “You ask her.”
It was Finn Brannoc.
He had gone red the instant he spoke, and looked as though he deeply regretted it.
But Madame Odile turned her head toward him, and the long, stern, iron-grey face did something very slight that might, in a warmer woman, have been approval.
“Mr.
Brannoc,” she said.
“Yes.
You ask her.” She looked down the length of the table.
“You never take a lady’s arm.
You never take her hand.
You never steer her by the elbow as if she were a cart-horse, or by the small of the back as if she were your property.
You offer.
And she may accept, or she may not.
A lady’s hand is never yours.
It is only ever lent.”
She lifted her cane and pointed it at Rowan Thorne, who flinched.
“Mr.
Thorne.
Turn to the lady.
Bow: from the waist, not the neck, you are not a pecking hen.
And say, May I have the honour of escorting you?”
* * *
Rowan Thorne had faced a Beast King’s pack, a rift angler, a frost-bear with his eyes shut, and a snow bridge over a hundred-foot drop with his best friend standing on it.
He turned to Isolde Frostmere, who was sitting perfectly still in her white silk with her silver hair down her back, looking straight ahead, and his mouth went completely dry.
He bowed.
From the waist.
It was not a good bow.
It was a little too deep and a little too fast, as though he were bowing to the Archduke on the parade ground.
“May I…” His voice cracked.
He started again.
“May I have the honour…
of escorting you.
Lady Isolde.”
Isolde turned her head and looked up at him.
Her face was perfectly composed.
The new moon on her brow was not.
“Yes,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Offer your arm, Mr.
Thorne,” said Madame Odile.
“Your left.
Bend it at the elbow.
Hold it a little away from your body, as if there were a book tucked under it.
The lady walks on your left.” A pause.
“In the North, I am told, this is so that the gentleman’s sword-hand is free.
In the Archipelago, it is so that his heart is nearest to her.
You may choose which reason you prefer.”
Rowan crooked his left arm.
It shook very slightly.
He held it out, and waited.
Isolde rose.
She rose the way she had been taught at six years old, smooth and straight, without touching the table.
And she laid her hand on his forearm.
That was all.
Her fingertips, resting lightly on the midnight wool of his sleeve, just above the wrist.
Not holding.
Not gripping.
Barely touching.
He could have shaken them off by breathing.
He could feel every one of them.
“Lightly, Lady Isolde,” said Madame Odile.
“Very good.
Never grip.
You are not climbing a cliff.
You are letting him know you are there.” She turned.
“Now.
Everyone else.”
* * *
It was a disaster, of course.
A soft, rustling, scarlet-faced disaster, all the way down the Starlit Gallery.
They had carried each other across the Frozen Land.
That was the absurd thing.
They had thrown each other over snow bridges and hauled each other out of drifts by the collar and slept on each other’s backs for nine miles.
Senna had twisted Finn’s ear.
Mira had shoved a whole sun-pepper root into Sigurd’s mouth with her thumb.
They had held hands across a pillar of stars in the Starwell, palm to palm, only yesterday.
None of it helped.
None of it was anything like this.
This was in front of everybody, in silk and wool, under painted stars, with a hundred servants watching and Madame Odile de Varenne’s cane ready to strike the floor.
And it was formal.
It meant something.
A boy bowing to a girl and asking for her hand, and the girl choosing to give it.
Sigurd Kell bowed to Mira Halvard so deeply that he nearly put his forehead on the tablecloth, and said “MAY I HAVE THE HONOUR” so loudly that a footman at the far end of the room dropped a spoon, and Mira said “Yes, Kell, quietly,” with her hands over her face.
Then he offered his arm, and it was the wrong one, and his shadow murmured “Left, sir,” and he switched it, and offered it again, and it was so stiff and so high and so far from his body that Mira had to reach up for it like a girl reaching for an apple on a branch.
She laid her hand on it.
He looked down at her hand on his sleeve, with its nails faintly shining, as though he had never seen a hand before.
Then he went the colour of a frost-boar roast and stared straight ahead and did not move again.
Bram Holloway bowed, and asked, and offered his arm, all correctly, and then burst into tears when Tilda took it, and Tilda patted his hand and said “There, there,” and gave him back his own handkerchief.
Arne Stenvik did not say anything at all.
He simply turned to Hilde Aarn, and bowed: a slow, grave, perfect bow, from the waist, exactly as deep as it ought to be.
And held out his left arm, crooked at exactly the right angle, a little away from his body, as if there were a book under it.
He had not asked.
He had not said a word.
Madame Odile’s cane rose.
Then Arne Stenvik opened his mouth, and said, in his deep, slow, rarely used voice, so quietly that only Hilde could hear it: “May I.”
Two words.
Hilde looked at his arm.
Then up at his large, square, scarlet face.
And Hilde Aarn, who had not stopped talking for nine weeks, laid her hand on his arm and said nothing at all, and the cane came slowly down again.
And Finn Brannoc and Senna Vaar did it as if they had been doing it all their lives.
He bowed, not too deep, not too fast.
He said the words, quietly, looking at her.
She rose, and laid her shining fingers on his sleeve without looking down to find it, as if her hand already knew where his arm would be.
Neither of them was red.
Neither of them was shaking.
They simply stood together, waiting, the quietest pair in the room.
It was, Madame Odile said afterward, the one pair she did not have to correct at all.
“Some people,” she said, “are born knowing how to stand beside each other.
It cannot be taught.
It can only be noticed.”
* * *
And in the middle of the table, there was a problem.
Two chairs stood side by side, with two cards on them.
Lord Cedric Eisenhardt.
Mr.
Hakon Aarn.
Two young men in midnight frock coats, standing behind them.
No lady seated beside either one.
They had both realised it at the same moment, when Madame Odile said the lady seated beside you.
They had both looked to their right.
They had both looked to their left.
They had both found, in each direction, only the other.
They looked at each other.
Hakon Aarn was a head shorter than Cedric and half as broad, with the face of a prince in a painting and his newly mended left arm.
Cedric Eisenhardt was the heir of the North, a Grand Sword Master since yesterday, with frost still faintly glittering on his forearms under his sleeves.
They had known each other for nine weeks.
They had fought side by side in the Rimefang.
They had sat together at breakfast, two men with sisters and no stars, and understood each other perfectly.
They understood each other perfectly now.
“No,” said Cedric.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.
You were going to say one of us will have to be the lady.
And it’s not going to be me.”
“Why not you?” demanded Hakon.
“You’ve got the hair for it.
You’ve got lovely hair.”
“I’ve got a Domain of the Blade,” said Cedric, with enormous dignity.
“Grand Sword Masters are not escorted to ballrooms.
Grand Sword Masters escort.”
“Oh, in your dreams,” said Hakon.
“I’ve got a mended arm.
I’m an invalid.
Invalids should be escorted.
It’s only proper.”
“You were healed yesterday.
In the Starwell.
You’ve been waving it about all morning.”
“It aches.”
“It does not ache, the Starwell made it not ache, that’s the whole…”
They had both forgotten to whisper.
All down the long table, heads were turning.
A footman’s face was doing something very complicated.
At the head of the table, Madame Odile de Varenne’s cane had stopped halfway to the floor.
Cedric glared at Hakon.
Hakon frowned back.
Then, all at once, the frown collapsed, and Hakon Aarn’s face did something tragic.
“Why?” he said.
His voice rose to a wail.
“Why?
Why are we the only ones?
Why are we the only gentlemen without a lady?
I came home through a hole in the air, Cedric!
The Sword Emperor brought me!
I went in the Starwell!
And everyone else came out with a pillar of stars, and I came out with…
with…” He gestured at Cedric.
“Him!”
“Him?” said Cedric, wounded.
“My sister got a pillar of stars!
Arne Stenvik got a pillar of stars!
He’s said about thirty words in his entire life!”
“Twenty-eight,” murmured Hilde, from Arne’s arm.
“Where is my beloved?” demanded Hakon, of the painted ceiling.
“Where is my partner?
Did the Starwell forget me?”
Cedric opened his mouth to say something cutting.
And then he did not.
Because it was true.
Rowan had a pillar of stars.
Sigurd had one.
Even Finn.
And he, Cedric Eisenhardt, heir of the North, had floated in the second terrace turning slowly round in circles while all his friends were drawn away from him one by one across the glowing water, and he had said that’s insulting, and laughed, and it had been funny, and now, standing in his midnight coat at a table full of couples, it was suddenly, deeply, profoundly not.
His face crumpled.
“It did forget us,” said Cedric.
“It did.”
“It did!”
And the two of them turned to each other, the heir of the North and the archer of the Twelfth Tower, and flung their arms round each other’s shoulders, and clutched each other, and buried their faces in each other’s very expensive midnight-blue wool, and sobbed.
Loudly.
Theatrically.
With great heaving shoulders and terrible gulping noises and absolutely no tears at all.
“Nobody loves us,” wailed Hakon, into Cedric’s lapel.
“We’ll die alone,” agreed Cedric, into Hakon’s hair.
“Alone, Hakon, in the Drake’s Rest, drinking cider…”
“With the drake skull…”
“Talking to the drake skull…”
The Starlit Gallery broke.
It started with Sigurd, who made a noise like a burst bellows and had to let go of Mira’s arm and hold on to the back of his chair.
Then Rowan, bent double, with Isolde’s hand still on his sleeve and Isolde herself turned away with her free hand pressed over her mouth and her shoulders shaking.
Then everyone.
All down the table, the stiff, scarlet, terrified couples dissolved one after another into helpless laughter, the young lords with their carefully combed hair falling into their eyes, the young ladies with their hands over their painted mouths, Hilde Aarn laughing so hard she had to lean on Arne Stenvik to stay upright and Arne letting her.
Even the footmen were looking at the ceiling, with their lips pressed very tight.
And the tension that had been sitting on the Starlit Gallery since the ladies came through the door, the stiffness and the redness and the terror of the silver forks, simply went.
Blown out like a candle.
Everyone breathed again.
At the high end of the table, the Archduchess Genevieve had put down her glass and was laughing openly, the bright, quick, unguarded laugh of the Western Archipelago, and beside her Lady Seraphina had lifted one hand to hide her mouth, and her eyes over it were full of light.
Madame Odile de Varenne lowered her cane to the floor without a sound.
She did not laugh.
Madame Odile did not laugh.
But anyone who had been watching her very closely, which only one person in the room was, would have seen the corner of her stern mouth move, very slightly, and stay moved for rather longer than she might have wished.
* * *
The one person who had been watching her closely rose from her chair at the head of the table.
Lyra Eisenhardt walked down the length of the Starlit Gallery in her midnight dress, with the silver stars drifting across it, past the laughing couples, until she came to the place in the middle of the table where her brother and Hakon Aarn were still clutching each other and wailing.
She stopped beside them, and waited.
They did not notice.
Cedric was explaining to Hakon, in a voice of tragic grandeur, that when they were old men in the Drake’s Rest they would name the drake skull Beloved.
Lyra cleared her throat.
They looked up.
Both of them.
Their faces were red, their hair was in their eyes, their very expensive cravats were askew, and they looked at her like two puppies that had been caught in the larder.
“Escort me,” said Lyra Eisenhardt.
“Both of you.”
There was a pause.
Then Cedric Eisenhardt let go of Hakon Aarn, and straightened his cravat, and pushed his black hair back off his forehead.
And Hakon straightened his, and pushed his back.
And the two of them turned to her, side by side, and bowed: both at once, from the waist, perfectly, in unison, as though they had been rehearsing it for a week.
“May we have the honour,” said Cedric gravely, “of escorting you, my lady?”
“You may,” said Lyra.
Cedric crooked his left arm.
Hakon, on her other side, after a fractional hesitation, crooked his right, and held it out, and looked at Madame Odile with a face of pure innocence, as if to say there is no rule for this, and you know it.
Madame Odile looked back at him for a long, cool moment.
Then she inclined her head, by perhaps an eighth of an inch.
Lyra laid her left hand lightly on her brother’s arm, and her right on Hakon’s.
And between them, in her midnight dress, with a young lord on either side of her and a hundred people still laughing all round them, she turned toward the tall doors of the Starlit Gallery.
“After you, my lady,” said Hakon Aarn.
“No,” said Madame Odile de Varenne, crisply, from the head of the table.
“With you, Mr.
Aarn.
A gentleman never walks before the lady he escorts.
Nor behind her.
Beside.” Her cane struck the floor once.
“That was your first mistake of the morning.
It will not be your last.”
“No, Madame,” said Hakon meekly.
And so they went: the whole Starlit Gallery, two by two, and in the middle of them all one lady with two gentlemen, out through the tall doors and across the stars of the entrance hall, toward the great round room under the dome, where the frost chandeliers were turning slowly in the sunlight and the music was already beginning to play.
II.
The Laws of the Floor
The Moon-Frost Ballroom was even larger from the inside.
They came in two by two through the tall white doors and spread out round the edge of it, under the mirrors, because nobody dared to walk out onto the middle of the floor.
It lay in front of them like a frozen lake: pale ash-wood polished to a soft, sleek gleam, so smooth that the light from the dome lay on it in pools, and inlaid at its heart, in silver, the great frost-lily, its petals spreading almost to their feet.
High above, under the glass of the dome, the frost chandeliers turned slowly in the sunlight and broke it into rainbows that drifted across the floor like coloured leaves on water.
The tall mirrors round the walls caught all of it and threw it back and forth, so that the room went on forever in every direction, and a hundred and three young people in midnight and white and silver stood at the edges of it, reflected a thousand times over, looking very small.
In the musicians’ gallery under the dome, half hidden behind a balustrade of white marble, a little orchestra was tuning: four strings, a flute, a harp, and a pianoforte of pale wood that had come, the footmen whispered, all the way from the Archipelago by ley-ship with the masons.
The thin, sweet sounds of the tuning floated down and hung under the dome like the rainbows.
Maids went among the young ladies with trays.
On each tray, a pair of gloves: white kid, soft as a petal, long enough to come up over the elbow and meet the puffed silk of the sleeve.
Footmen went among the young lords with gloves too, shorter, white, with a single pearl button at the wrist.
And then the maids came back with a second tray, and on this one, laid in tissue, were shoes.
They were dancing slippers, in midnight satin, with a single silver star stitched on each toe.
And they had heels.
Not high heels.
Two fingers’ breadth, perhaps.
A small, elegant, slender heel, curved like the neck of a swan.
Exactly the kind of heel, Mistress Agathe Rennick remarked to nobody in particular, that the ladies of the capital would be wearing to the Academy’s Midwinter Ball.
Senna Vaar, who had walked the Kharn passes in boots since she was nine, looked at the slippers in her maid’s hands the way she would have looked at a snow bridge with a rift angler under it. Read the latest chapters at novelping.com.
“I can’t walk in those,” she said.
“No, miss,” said her maid kindly, kneeling to unbuckle her flat shoes.
“Not yet.”
* * *
Madame Odile de Varenne took up her place in the very centre of the ballroom, on the heart of the silver frost-lily, and struck the floor once with her cane.
The sound rang up into the dome, and the orchestra fell silent.
“A ballroom,” she said, “is a battlefield.”
Nobody had expected that.
A hundred young soldiers of the North, who knew a great deal about battlefields, looked at her with sudden and complete attention.
“Yes.
It is.
It is the most dangerous battlefield in the Empire.
More wars have been begun in ballrooms than on any field you will ever stand on.
More alliances made and broken.
More fortunes.
More reputations.
More hearts.” She let that settle.
“On a battlefield, you know who your enemy is.
He is the one trying to kill you.
In a ballroom, everybody is smiling.
And so you must know the rules better than anyone else in the room.
Because the people who break them are not punished by the rules.
They are punished by everybody watching.”
She began to walk, slowly, round the edge of the silver lily, with her cane tapping the floor at every second step.
“Listen to me.
I shall say these once.
Your shadows will say them again tonight, and tomorrow, and every day until you could say them in your sleep.”
* * *
“First.
When you arrive at a ball, you do not run for the refreshments, or for your friends, or for the prettiest girl in the room.
You go first to your hosts, and you greet them, and you thank them for the invitation, and only then are you permitted to exist.
Whoever has invited you, they have opened their house to you.
Remember it.”
“Second.
Gloves.” She lifted one hand in its grey kid glove.
“On the floor, a gentleman’s hand and a lady’s hand do not touch bare.
Never.
Not in the waltz, not in the reel, not in the promenade.
If you have lost your gloves, you do not dance.
You stand by the wall, and you are ashamed of yourself.”
Sigurd Kell, who had already split the pearl button on one of his, put that hand behind his back.
“Third.
The card.”
The maids went round again.
And now each young lady was given a little thing of white card and silver, no bigger than the palm of a hand, hung from a loop of midnight ribbon, with a tiny silver pencil on a chain.
The maids slipped the ribbons over their gloved wrists.
Inside, on a single folded sheet, a list was printed in silver: the dances of the morning, one under another, with a blank line beside each.
“A dance card,” said Madame Odile.
“The lady wears it.
The gentleman asks to write his name in it.
One name to each dance.
He never writes it there without her leave, and she never lets the same name fill her whole card.
And the card is the lady’s own business.
A gentleman does not read the card of a lady he is not dancing with.
A lady who shows her card to her friends, giggling, is a lady who will not be asked again.”
Hilde Aarn, who had been about to hold hers up and show it to Senna, lowered it very slowly.
“Fourth.
The asking.” Madame Odile turned toward the young lords.
“You go to her.
You do not wave across the room.
You do not send your friend.
You do not shout.” Her eyes rested on Sigurd.
“You go to her, and you bow, and you say: May I have the honour of the next dance?
Or of a particular dance, by name: May I have the waltz?
And you wait.”
“Fifth.” She turned to the young ladies.
“She may say yes.
She may say no.
If she says no, she says it kindly: Thank you, but I am engaged for that dance.
Or: Thank you, but I am resting this one.
And here is the rule that has started more duels than any insult ever spoken.” The cane struck the floor.
“If a lady declines a dance because she is resting, she does not then dance that same dance with anybody else.
Not with anyone.
If she refuses you, and then you see her in the arms of another man before the music has ended, she has told you, and told the whole room, that it was not her feet that were tired.
It was you.”
There was a long, slow, collective intake of breath round the edge of the ballroom.
“Gentlemen, if you are refused, you bow, and say another time, perhaps, and go.
You do not sulk.
You do not ask again in the same hour.
And you never, ever, ask why.”
“Sixth.
And attend to this one, because it is the most important of all.” Madame Odile stopped walking.
“Two dances.
You may dance two dances with the same partner in one evening.
Two.
Not three.”
She let them wait.
“One dance means nothing.
A courtesy.
Two dances means you enjoy each other’s company.
Three dances, in a single evening, with the same person, means that you are going to be married.
Or that one of you intends it.
Everyone in the room will know it by the end of the third.
Your mothers will know it by morning.
And the capital will know it by the end of the week.”
The silence round the edge of the Moon-Frost Ballroom was absolute.
Then, very slowly, all the way round the room, every single pair who had been drawn together in the Starwell turned their heads and looked at each other.
And then looked very quickly away again.
Rowan Thorne stared at the ceiling.
Isolde Frostmere stared at the floor.
The new moon on her brow went, briefly, rather bright.
Finn and Senna looked at each other, and did not look away, and Senna went pink.
Sigurd said “Three?” out loud, in a strangled voice, and Mira stamped on his foot.
“I see that one has landed,” said Madame Odile dryly.
“Good.”
“Seventh.
The floor.” She swept her cane out round the great silver lily.
“The dancers move round the room in a circle.
Always the same way round: against the turning of a clock’s hands.
Against the sun, the old courts call it.
In the North, I am told, you call it with the wind.” A pause.
“You never cut across the middle.
You never stop dead on the floor to talk.
The faster couples go round the outside.
The slower, and the beginners, which this morning is all of you, keep to the inside.
And if you collide with another couple, which this morning you will, the gentleman apologises first to the other gentleman’s lady.
Not to his own.
Not to the man.
To her.”
“Eighth.
The frame.” She lifted her arms, holding the cane in one hand like a partner’s hand.
“In the waltz, the gentleman’s right hand rests flat on the lady’s left shoulder blade.
On the shoulder blade.
Not lower.
Never lower.
If I see a hand lower than the shoulder blade, its owner will spend the afternoon dancing with me.” A very slight pause.
“And I lead.”
Nobody’s hand moved anywhere.
“The lady’s left hand rests on his right shoulder, lightly.
Their other hands are joined, out to the side, at the height of her eyes.
And between them, there is a space.
Exactly one hand’s breadth.” She held up her own gloved hand, flat.
“Not less.
Not more.
Close enough to move as one.
Far enough that the Saintess of the Radiant Dawn could walk between you and not touch either of you.” The corner of her mouth moved, very slightly.
“Though I should not let her try.”
“Ninth.
Your eyes.
While you dance, you look over your partner’s right shoulder, at the room, so that neither of you walks into a pillar.
When the music ends, you look at her.
Only then.
And you thank her.”
“Tenth.
Conversation.
You may speak on the floor.
Lightly.
About the music, the room, the weather, a book.
You never speak of business.
You never speak of the Temple, or the throne, or the price of grain.
You never, ever, speak of another lady in the room.”
“Eleventh.
When the music ends, the gentleman returns the lady to the place where he found her.
To her chair, or her mother, or her friends.
He bows.
He thanks her.
And he goes.
He never leaves a lady standing alone in the middle of the floor.
A gentleman who leaves a lady alone on a ballroom floor,” said Madame Odile, “may as well leave her on the Frozen Land.”
She came to a halt, back on the heart of the silver lily, facing them.
“And twelfth.
The last.” Her voice changed, very slightly.
Not softer.
Madame Odile was never softer.
But lower.
“There will be, in every ballroom you ever enter, someone standing alone against the wall.
Someone whom nobody has asked.
Someone in an old dress, or too plain, or too shy, or from the wrong family.
Do not pretend you have not seen them.
You have.
A gentleman of a great house dances with every lady in the room who has not been asked, before he dances twice with anyone he likes.
A lady of a great house brings her into her own circle, and introduces her, and makes room.
That is not etiquette.
That is what etiquette is for.”
She struck the floor once, and the sound rang up into the dome.
“Those are the laws.
Every court in the Empire keeps them.
The capital keeps them more strictly than any.
Break one and someone will notice.
Break three, and nobody will ever invite you anywhere again.”
There was a pause.
“Madame,” said Hilde Aarn, in a very small voice, from beside Arne.
“How many did we break at breakfast?”
Madame Odile looked at her.
“Collectively, Miss Aarn?” she said.
“Forty-one.” And then, before the horror on Hilde’s face could finish arriving: “That is a great deal fewer than the heir of the Southern Caldera broke in his first week.
Up straight.
We begin.”
III.
One, Two, Three
They began with the court promenade, because it was the easiest.
Madame Odile said so.
Madame Odile was wrong.
“The promenade,” she said, “opens every ball in the Empire.
At the Imperial Palace, the Emperor himself leads it, with the highest lady in the room on his arm, and every other couple falls in behind in order of rank.
It is not a dance.
It is a walk.
A walk in which the whole court looks at you, and decides who you are.” Her cane tapped.
“It has four figures.
The Honour, the Arch, the Turn and the Cross.
In couples, please.
A column of two.
Ladies on the left.”
They made a column.
It went round the edge of the ballroom like a long blue-and-white ribbon, with Lyra and Cedric at its head, because Madame Odile put them there, and Hakon Aarn hovering forlornly beside them until she pointed her cane at him and then at the space directly behind them, and said, “You will take the next figure with Lady Lyra.
Until then, watch.”
The orchestra began.
Slow, stately, in a measured four, like the tread of a procession up a cathedral aisle.
“Walk,” said Madame Odile.
They walked.
That was all it was.
Walking.
In time to the music, round the great silver lily, two by two, the lady’s hand resting lightly on the gentleman’s arm.
Every one of them had walked ten thousand miles in the last nine weeks.
They had walked the Thousand Steps three times before lunch.
They had walked the Kharn passes and the sastrugi and the back of a glacier warden.
They had never walked like this.
It turned out that walking slowly was a great deal harder than walking fast.
And that walking slowly, in time, with a straight back, with your chin level, with somebody’s hand on your arm, in front of a hundred people and a thousand mirrors, was the hardest thing of all.
Sigurd Kell marched.
He could not help it.
Nine weeks of the Legion’s drill had gone into his legs and would not come out, and he went round the ballroom stamping in perfect time like a sergeant on a parade ground, with Mira Halvard on his arm taking two quick steps to every one of his and hissing “Glide, Kell!
Glide!” Bram Holloway counted out loud.
One, two, three, four.
One, two.
Rowan Thorne walked so carefully, so slowly, so afraid of stepping on the hem of Isolde’s white dress, that he very nearly stopped altogether, and the couple behind walked into his back.
And the ladies were walking in heels.
They had not thought, any of them, that two fingers’ breadth of satin heel would make such a difference.
It made all the difference.
It tipped them forward.
It made the polished floor suddenly as treacherous as blue ice.
Senna Vaar, who could read a rift field in the dark, wobbled on her third step and caught Finn’s arm with her whole hand instead of her fingertips, and went scarlet, and he simply turned his arm under her hand, without a word, so that she could hold it more firmly, and walked a little more slowly, and did not look at her, until she found her balance again.
“The Honour,” called Madame Odile.
The couples turned to face each other.
The gentlemen bowed.
The ladies curtsied: and here there was a short, sharp, savage lesson, because a curtsy, it turned out, was not a bob.
Left foot behind.
Bend both knees.
Back straight.
Head inclined, not dropped.
Hold.
Rise.
Do not wobble.
In heels.
Hilde Aarn curtsied, and wobbled, and rose, and wobbled, and grabbed Arne’s sleeve, and said “Sorry,” and Arne caught her elbow without looking and held her steady and said nothing, which she was beginning to understand was the most reassuring thing anyone had ever done for her.
“The Arch.”
The first couple raised their joined hands high, and the column passed beneath them, one couple after another, and each couple as it came through raised its hands in turn, so that the arch grew down the length of the ballroom like a tunnel of hands.
It was beautiful.
For about four couples.
Then Sigurd Kell raised his arm so high, so enthusiastically, that Mira was lifted onto her toes and her heels came clean off the floor, and the couple behind, trying to pass under, walked straight into his elbow.
“Mr.
Kell.”
“Sorry!
Sorry, Madame…”
“It is an arch, Mr.
Kell.
Not a drawbridge.”
“The Turn.
The Cross.”
Round they went, and round again, and by the third time round the great silver lily something had begun, very slightly, to change.
The column was straighter.
The steps were slower and smoother.
Sigurd had stopped marching, mostly.
The arch went all the way down the room without anyone being struck in the face.
And the ladies, wobbling less, had begun to discover that if they held their heads up and let their weight sit back over the heel instead of forward over the toe, the slippers were not blue ice after all.
Madame Odile struck her cane, once, and the music stopped.
“That,” she said, “was the worst court promenade I have seen since the second week of the heir of the Southern Caldera.” A pause.
“The third time round was very nearly acceptable.”
It was, they all agreed afterward, the nicest thing anyone had ever said to them.
* * *
“And now,” said Madame Odile de Varenne, “the waltz.”
A ripple went round the ballroom.
They had all heard of the waltz.
Even in the North.
The Archipelago waltz, the dance that had come to the Empire from the Western sea-courts a hundred years ago and scandalised every bishop in the capital, because it was the only dance in which a gentleman held a lady in his arms.
Not by the fingertips, in a line.
In his arms.
“You will not understand it by being told,” said Madame Odile.
“So you will be shown.”
She turned toward the tall white doors.
And every head in the ballroom turned with her, because standing in them, in his plain grey coat, with his hands behind his back, was the Archduke of the North.
Nobody had seen him come.
He might have been there for some time.
He walked out onto the floor, into the middle of the silver frost-lily, at his long, steady, unhurried stride.
And the Archduchess Genevieve rose from her chair beside the Matriarch at the edge of the room, and walked out to meet him.
They met on the heart of the lily.
The Archduke bowed.
It was a short bow, a soldier’s bow.
The Archduchess curtsied, low and slow and perfect, in her sapphire blue, the curtsy of the Pearl of the Western Seas.
The orchestra began to play.
And the Iron Regent of the North, Sword Monarch, the man who had run at the head of a hundred children through a blizzard on the Frozen Land and stood with his hand over his eyes on a rock above the Sleepers, took his wife in his arms, and waltzed. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
They had never seen anything like it.
The music was in three.
One, two, three.
One, two, three.
Sweeping, lilting, turning, like a wave rolling in and drawing back and rolling in again.
And the Archduke and the Archduchess turned on it, round and round, sweeping out across the silver lily in long, smooth, wide curves, his hand flat on her shoulder blade, her hand light on his shoulder, their other hands joined, high, out to the side.
Exactly one hand’s breadth between them.
On every one, they came down, soft and deep, and on the two and three they rose up onto their toes, so that they seemed to float, rising and falling like a boat on a long swell.
And every three steps they turned, and every three steps the room turned round them, and the frost chandeliers turned overhead, and the rainbows swept across the floor, and the Archduchess’s sapphire skirt flared out round her like the petals of a flower opening.
He did not look at her.
That was the rule: over her right shoulder, at the room.
But she looked at him.
And halfway round the floor, she said something, low, that nobody else could hear.
And the Archduke of the North, mid-turn, in front of a hundred young soldiers of his own Legion, smiled.
At the edge of the room, Cedric Eisenhardt made a strange sound, and put his hand over his mouth.
Lyra, beside him, had stopped breathing altogether.
They had never seen their parents dance.
Not once in their lives.
The music ended.
The Archduke and the Archduchess came to a stop on the heart of the lily, exactly where they had begun.
He let go of her waist.
He did not let go of her hand.
He bowed over it, very slightly, and she curtsied, and for one moment longer they simply stood there, looking at each other, as though there was nobody else in the Moon-Frost Ballroom at all.
Then the Archduke turned, and walked back to the tall white doors, and was gone, without a word.
The Archduchess walked back to her chair, and sat down, and opened a fan of white lace, and fanned herself, and looked extremely pleased with herself.
“That,” said Madame Odile de Varenne, into the silence, “is the waltz.” A pause.
“Now you will do it.
And it will look nothing at all like that, for a very long time.”
* * *
It looked nothing at all like that.
“Down, up, up,” called Madame Odile, over the music, walking slowly between the couples with her cane.
“One, two, three.
Gentlemen, forward on your left.
Ladies, back on your right.
Side.
Close.
Down, up, up.
Do not look at your feet.
Your feet know where they are.
Look over her shoulder.
Mr.
Holloway, stop counting aloud.”
The sound of a hundred feet stepping on a hundred other feet went round the Moon-Frost Ballroom like rain on a roof.
“Ow.”
“Sorry…”
“Ow!”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry…”
Sigurd Kell trod on Mira Halvard’s foot on the first one.
Then again on the next one.
Then, with tremendous consistency, on every one thereafter, so that Mira’s whole waltz became a little hop on the downbeat to get her foot out of the way.
“That’s three, Kell,” she hissed, on the third.
Sigurd went white.
“Three?” he said.
“Three dances?
But Madame said three means…”
“Three feet, you idiot!
You’ve trodden on my foot three times!”
“Oh,” said Sigurd, enormously relieved.
And then, a moment later, rather less relieved, as he realised what he had just said in front of everyone.
Mira looked at him.
He looked at her.
Both of them went the colour of the Dragon-Blood Orchids at the same moment, and he trod on her foot again.
Bram Holloway, who could not stop counting aloud, found halfway round the room that Tilda Marsh was leading.
He did not know when it had happened.
She simply had her hand on his shoulder and was steering him, firmly, the way she steered a loaded tray through a crowded kitchen, murmuring “One, two, three, turn,” and he was going where she put him.
He decided, wisely, not to mention it.
Hakon Aarn, who had finally been given his figure with Lady Lyra, trod on her foot on the very first one.
Hard.
With his whole weight.
Lyra did not feel it at all.
She was a Sword Monarch, and had been to the Starwell, and her foot was very nearly as hard as the floor.
Hakon felt it a great deal.
“Ow,” he said, in a small, astonished voice, and stopped dead, and looked down at his own toe, as though it had betrayed him.
“What…
what are your feet made of?”
“Breakfast,” said Lyra serenely, and steered him back into the line of dance.
Arne Stenvik could waltz.
Nobody had expected it.
Nobody, least of all Hilde Aarn, who had put her hand on his shoulder with the expression of a woman bracing for an avalanche.
But Arne Stenvik, it turned out, had been counting in his head all his life.
He counted everything.
He counted words, his own and everyone else’s.
He counted steps on the Thousand Steps and strides on the Frozen Land.
And one, two, three was simply a count, like any other.
He took Hilde in his arms with grave, enormous care, as though she might break, and moved off into the waltz, down, up, up, round and round, steady as a mill-wheel, never once looking at his feet, never once missing the one.
Hilde was so astonished that she did not say a single word for the whole of the first dance.
By the second she had stopped thinking about her feet.
By the third she was not thinking about anything.
She was simply being turned, round and round under the frost chandeliers, by the largest and quietest boy in the North, and the rainbows were sliding past, and the music was going one, two, three, and she found that she had put her head back and was laughing out loud, and did not care who saw.
Arne did not say anything.
But on the last turn, very slightly, he smiled.
* * *
And Rowan Thorne could not waltz at all.
He tried.
He had never tried so hard at anything.
He stood in the frame with his right hand flat on Isolde’s shoulder blade, exactly where Madame Odile had said, not one finger lower, and his left hand holding hers out at the height of her eyes, and exactly one hand’s breadth between them, and he stepped forward on his left on the one.
And he went rigid.
Every muscle in his body locked.
He moved like a man made of planks, stiff and square and careful, counting under his breath, terrified of her toes, terrified of her dress, terrified of the hand’s breadth, terrified of the whole room watching.
Isolde Frostmere let him do it for one full turn of the room.
Then she said, very quietly, without looking at him, over his right shoulder at the room:
“Rowan.
Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop trying.” Her silver eyes were fixed on the far mirror.
“You’re doing it the way you did the log.
Trying to cut through it.
You’re forcing it.” A pause.
“How did you cut the rift angler?
Through the bridge?”
Rowan stared at her.
“You stopped trying,” said Isolde.
“You laughed, and you shut your eyes, and you let it go.
And it went where it was meant to go.” Her hand moved, very slightly, on his shoulder.
“Do that.”
“I can’t shut my eyes,” said Rowan.
“I’ll walk into a pillar.”
“I’ll tell you if there’s a pillar,” said Isolde Frostmere.
“Now.”
And she said it exactly the way he had said it on the snowfield, on the second day of the run home, with the wolves coming and her bow drawn on his back.
Now.
On the beat.
On the one.
Rowan Thorne heard it.
And something in him, some tight, careful, frightened thing, simply let go.
He did not shut his eyes.
He did not need to.
He stopped counting.
He stopped thinking about his feet and her feet and the hand’s breadth and the hundred people watching.
He listened to the music, the way he listened for the heart of a thing through armour, and he let it carry him.
And he stepped into the one, soft and deep, and rose on the two and three, and turned.
And Isolde turned with him, as if she had been waiting for him to do exactly that all along.
They went round the floor once.
Then again.
Not the way the Archduke and Archduchess had: nothing like that.
But smoothly, now.
Lightly.
Rising and falling.
His hand flat and steady on her shoulder blade, her hand light on his shoulder, their joined hands out to the side, one hand’s breadth between them, turning and turning under the frost chandeliers.
And very faintly, as they turned, the new moon on her brow and something round his hair, the faintest ghost of a green-gold circlet that nobody else in the ballroom could quite see, began to glow.
At the edge of the room, Lady Seraphina saw it, and lowered her eyes, and smiled.
When the music stopped, Rowan Thorne stood on the edge of the silver lily, still holding Isolde Frostmere’s hand, out to the side, at the height of her eyes, and could not for a moment remember how to let go of it.
“Rowan,” said Isolde.
“Mm?”
“That’s one.” A pause.
“You have one more.”
Then she took her hand back, and curtsied to him, low and perfect, in her white silk, and turned and walked away to the edge of the floor with her chin up and her silver hair swinging.
And he did not see her face.
But he saw her ears.
* * *
By the end of the hour, the ladies’ feet were red.
Not a little red.
Scarlet.
Every one of them.
Two fingers’ breadth of satin heel and an hour of down, up, up on a polished floor, after nine weeks in boots, had done what goblins and frost-bears and two days and nights of running had failed to do.
Senna Vaar was standing on one foot like a heron, holding the other in her hand.
Mira had taken off one slipper and was examining her toes with her clinical expression, saying “Fascinating,” in a tone that meant the opposite.
Hilde was leaning on Arne.
Tilda Marsh had simply sat down on the floor.
Even Isolde Frostmere, the heir of the fourth-oldest house in the North, who had danced in heels since she was six, was standing very straight and very still, the way a person stands when moving would be a mistake.
The boys were not much better.
Their feet had been trodden on, too, and not always by accident.
Sigurd was limping on both legs.
Hakon Aarn was still nursing the toe he had broken on Lyra’s foot.
Madame Odile de Varenne surveyed the wreckage of the Moon-Frost Ballroom with an expression of perfect, unsurprised satisfaction.
“Good,” she said.
“Now the Northern reel.”
IV.
The Northern Reel
There was a groan.
It started somewhere among the scarlet-footed ladies and went all the way round the Moon-Frost Ballroom.
Madame Odile de Varenne let it finish.
“The Northern reel,” she said, “is not a court dance.
It was not invented in a palace.
It was invented in the long halls of the North, in the winter, by people who had been snowed in for six weeks and needed to stamp their feet to stay warm and to stop themselves from killing each other.” The corner of her mouth moved.
“It is danced at every great house north of the Kharn, from the Archduke’s table to the meanest tower on the Wall.
And it is now danced, I regret to tell you, in the capital.
The young ladies of Lumin-Valeria consider it rustic and charming, and dance it very badly, in silk, at the end of every ball.”
She turned her head toward the young ladies, standing on their red feet.
“In the capital, it is danced in slippers.
In the North, it is danced in boots.” A pause.
“This morning, ladies, you may dance it as the North does.”
There was a silence of one heartbeat.
Then fifty-odd young ladies of Frost-Crest bent down as one and pulled off their satin dancing slippers with the silver stars on the toes, and the sound of fifty sighs of pure relief went up into the dome like a flock of birds taking off.
The maids swept in with trays, and on the trays were boots: soft, low, black, laced at the ankle, flat as a Wall soldier’s.
The young ladies put them on with expressions of quiet, religious joy.
Senna Vaar laced hers up, stood up, stamped once on the polished floor, and for the first time all morning, smiled like herself.
* * *
“Two lines,” said Madame Odile.
“Gentlemen on one side, ladies on the other.
Facing.
Partners opposite.
The head couple at the top, by the musicians.”
They made two long lines down the length of the ballroom, across the silver lily, facing each other.
And they did not need to be told how.
Because every one of them, in a hall or a barracks or a tavern somewhere in the North, on some long winter night, had seen this done.
The orchestra in the gallery changed.
The pianoforte fell silent.
The harp fell silent.
And the first fiddle, a lean grey man with a face like a winter apple, put down his bow, and picked up another fiddle, older and darker, from under his chair.
He tucked it under his chin.
And he struck up a tune that every young soldier in the room knew in their bones: fast and bright and stamping, a tune you could hear from the Thousand Steps on Midwinter Night, a tune they played in the Roaring Drake on market days until the tables shook.
Finn Brannoc’s face lit up like a lamp.
“That’s Kharn Wind,” he said.
“That’s…
that’s the one Da plays…”
“Head couple,” called Madame Odile, over the music.
“Down the middle!”
* * *
And for the first time that whole long morning, the young soldiers of the North knew exactly what to do.
It was not graceful.
It was not meant to be.
It was fast and loud and joyful and slightly dangerous.
The head couple, Lyra and Cedric, took hands and went skipping down the long corridor between the two lines, sideways, at a gallop, and back again, and the two lines clapped them down and clapped them back, in time, on the beat, a great sharp crack of a hundred pairs of gloved hands.
Then they spun, the two of them, hand in hand, round and round at the top of the set, so fast that Lyra’s midnight skirt and her long black hair flew out round her like a banner in a gale.
Then they let go, and Cedric went down the line of ladies, swinging each one round by the arm in turn, and Lyra went down the line of gentlemen, swinging each one.
And then they met at the bottom, and swung each other, and went back up the middle, and the next couple was off.
And the next.
And the next.
Faster and faster, as the fiddle went faster, and the clapping went faster, and the stamping started.
It was in their feet.
It always had been.
Nine weeks on the Thousand Steps and the Sword-Pond, five weeks on the Frozen Land: and every one of those steps had been leading, somehow, without their knowing it, to this.
To a long room full of light, with a fiddle sawing and a hundred people clapping and boots stamping on a wooden floor so hard that the frost chandeliers shivered overhead and sent their rainbows dancing in every direction at once.
Sigurd Kell, who could not waltz to save his life, could reel.
He went down the middle with Mira Halvard like a frost-boar down a slope, and swung her round so hard at the bottom that her feet left the floor entirely and she shrieked, and he put her down exactly on the beat, laughing, and she hit him on the arm, and was laughing too.
Hilde Aarn went down the middle with Arne Stenvik and talked the entire way and did not miss a single step.
Bram and Tilda went down the middle with Tilda very much leading and Bram not minding at all.
Senna and Finn went down it the way they did everything, side by side, perfectly matched, and when they spun at the bottom they were both laughing, which none of them had ever seen Finn do.
And Rowan and Isolde went down the middle, and Rowan was a farm boy from the barley fields, and every harvest of his life had ended with this tune played on a fiddle by the barn door.
He did not need to stop trying.
He had never needed to try at this.
He took the heir of the fourth-oldest house in the North by both hands and spun her down the middle of the Moon-Frost Ballroom at a gallop, laughing out loud, and Isolde Frostmere, who had danced the reel exactly once in her life, at a Midwinter ball, very badly, in silk, threw back her head with her silver hair flying and laughed too: really laughed, wild and unguarded and astonished, the way nobody in Frost-Crest had ever heard her laugh.
The whole ballroom heard it.
Several people stopped clapping to stare.
Rowan did not hear it at all.
He was too busy watching her face.
* * *
At the top of the set, at the very end of the reel, when the last couple had gone down and come up and the fiddle was sawing faster and faster toward its final wild flourish, the tall white doors of the Moon-Frost Ballroom burst open.
Lord Roderick Eisenhardt stood in them.
He had heard the fiddle.
Of course he had.
He had heard Kharn Wind from the other side of the citadel, and he had come at a run, and he was standing in the doorway of the ballroom in his sleeveless tunic, in a room full of silk and midnight wool, with his enormous arms flung wide and his face alight with joy.
“KHARN WIND!” he roared.
“NOBODY TOLD ME THERE WAS A REEL!”
And before Madame Odile de Varenne could lift her cane, before anyone could stop him, the Cultivation Maniac of House Eisenhardt strode across the floor, straight past the two lines of astonished young soldiers, straight past the Archduchess and the Matriarch in their chairs, to the place by the wall where Mistress Agathe Rennick was standing with her great ring of keys, and bowed to her: a vast, sweeping, magnificent bow, from the waist, exactly as deep as it ought to be.
“Mistress Agathe,” said Lord Roderick.
“May I have the honour?”
The Head Maid of Frost-Crest, small and round and terrifying, looked up at him for a long, long moment.
Then she unhooked her ring of keys from her belt, and handed it to the nearest footman without looking at him, and put her small hand on Lord Roderick’s enormous arm.
“You may, my lord,” said Mistress Agathe Rennick.
“Once.”
And they went down the middle.
Nobody who was in the Moon-Frost Ballroom that morning ever forgot it.
Lord Roderick Eisenhardt, seven feet of bellowing muscle, galloping down between the lines with the Head Maid of Frost-Crest on his arm, and Mistress Agathe Rennick keeping up with him step for step, her skirts held up in one hand, her neat grey head held high, her feet flying, while a hundred young soldiers of the North clapped them down the room so hard that their hands stung, and the fiddler in the gallery played Kharn Wind faster than it had ever been played in the history of the North, and at the bottom of the set Lord Roderick swung her round, and round, and round, and set her down on the last note exactly on the beat, and she curtsied to him, perfectly, without a single grey hair out of place.
Then she walked back to the wall, took her keys from the footman, and hooked them back onto her belt.
The Moon-Frost Ballroom erupted.
The cheering went on for a very long time.
Somebody was stamping.
Everybody was stamping.
Lord Roderick was bowing to all four walls at once.
The Archduchess had her fan over her face and her shoulders were shaking.
And Lady Seraphina had leaned very slightly toward Madame Odile de Varenne, and said something in her soft, carrying voice, and Madame Odile, for the first and last time in the memory of anyone at Frost-Crest, had laughed.
Out loud.
Briefly, and very dryly, like a door creaking open after many years.
But out loud.
* * *
Then it was over.
The fiddler put down the old dark fiddle.
The young soldiers of the North stood in their two lines on the polished floor, breathing hard, flushed and dishevelled and shining, their careful hair coming down, their cravats askew, their gloves split, their feet throbbing, and every one of them, without exception, grinning like a fool.
Madame Odile de Varenne struck the floor once with her cane.
“That,” she said, “will do for the morning.”
She looked down the two long lines, at the red faces and the wild hair and the ladies in their soft black boots.
“The promenade was very poor,” she said.
“The waltz was dreadful.
The reel,” and her stern mouth moved again, very slightly, “was the best I have seen danced outside the North in thirty years.
Remember how it felt.
In the capital, they will be watching to see whether you are barbarians.
Let them see you waltz like courtiers.
And then, at the end of the night,” a pause, “let them see you reel like this.”
She turned to go.
Then she stopped, and looked back over her shoulder.
“Ladies.
Your slippers.
Your maids will bring basins of warm water and salts to the Lotus Salon.
You have a quarter of an hour.” Her eyes went down the line of boys.
“Gentlemen.
The Drake’s Rest is not open.
You will wait in the entrance hall, and you will escort your ladies to luncheon, correctly, at noon.”
A pause.
“Luncheon,” said Madame Odile de Varenne, “is also a lesson.
In the slippers.”
The groan that followed her out of the Moon-Frost Ballroom was the loudest one yet.
End of Chapter 20.