I.
The Lotus Salon
The pale blue doors with the lotus-bud handles opened, and the young ladies of Frost-Crest limped through them into a dream.
The Lotus Salon was round.
That was the first thing.
A round room, not large, with a domed ceiling painted the soft blue of a summer sky and a ring of tall windows looking out over the lilac trees and the valley.
The walls were hung with silk the colour of new cream, painted all over with lotus flowers: white and pink and palest blue, floating on painted water that ran round the whole room at the height of a hand above the floor, so that sitting in the Lotus Salon felt like sitting in a boat in the middle of a pond.
The chairs were low and deep and covered in blue velvet.
The cushions were everywhere.
A fire burned in a small white marble hearth, though nobody needed it, and on the mantel above it stood a clock of silver and blue enamel with a tiny silver lotus that opened its petals every hour.
It smelled of jasmine and honey cakes, and of something warm and green and herbal that rose in soft clouds from the basins.
The basins stood in a ring on the floor in front of the chairs: one for every lady, of white porcelain painted inside with blue lotuses, full to the brim with steaming water clouded faintly pink.
Beside each one, a maid knelt with a towel.
Nobody said anything.
They did not need to.
Fifty-odd young ladies of the North sat down in the deep blue chairs, and pulled off their soft black boots, and put their scarlet, aching, heel-tortured feet into the warm pink water, all at once.
The sigh that went up was enough to lift the painted lotuses off the walls.
“Oh,” said Hilde Aarn, with her eyes closed.
“Oh, I’m never getting up.
I’m going to live here.
I’m going to live in this bowl.”
“Salts of the Archipelago, miss,” murmured her maid, sprinkling something from a little blue jar into the water.
“And rose, and Frost-Crest snow-ginseng, from Lord Kenneth’s own garden.
For the ache.”
“Lord Kenneth,” said Mira Halvard, from the next chair, in a faraway voice, with her own eyes shut, “is a great man.”
* * *
For a while, nobody said anything else.
The maids moved round the ring with jugs, topping up the warm water.
Others came with trays: little cups of something hot and pale gold that tasted of honey and lemon, and the honey cakes they had smelled from the entrance hall, small and round and sticky and dusted with powdered sugar.
Somebody had remembered, it seemed, that they had danced for two hours after breakfast, and that dancing for two hours made you hungry even if you had eaten a whole trout and a bowl of golden porridge first.
The little silver lotus on the clock opened, and chimed, and closed again.
Then Hilde Aarn opened one eye, and looked round the ring of chairs, and said: “So.”
Nobody answered.
“So,” said Hilde again, with great meaning.
“No,” said Senna Vaar, without opening her eyes.
“I haven’t said anything yet!”
“You’re going to say something about three dances,” said Senna.
“And I’m saying no.”
There was a silence.
A ripple went round the ring of chairs, very small: fifty-odd young ladies, every one of whom had been thinking about exactly that for the past hour, very carefully not looking at each other.
“Well, somebody has to,” said Hilde.
She sat up in her chair, with her feet still in the pink water and her ginger curls coming down out of their silver-starred crown.
“Two dances is enjoying each other’s company.
Three dances is getting married.
And every single one of us who was in a pillar of stars yesterday is seated next to the boy who was in the pillar of stars, at every meal, and is going to be dancing with him, every day, and Madame Odile is going to be watching…”
“Hilde,” said Mira.
“…and I’ve counted, and Arne and I danced the waltz four times this morning, four, and I didn’t even think about it, and does practice count?
Because if practice counts, then by the capital’s rules I am already engaged to Arne Stenvik and nobody told me…”
“Hilde.”
“…and he’s only said twenty-eight words in his life, Mira, I don’t even know what he sounds like when he talks, how am I supposed to marry someone when I don’t know what he sounds like…”
“Thirty,” said Senna.
“He said may I this morning.
That’s two.
Twenty-nine, thirty.”
Hilde stared at her.
Then she put her face in her hands, and said into her fingers, in a small, muffled voice: “He’s got a lovely voice.”
The Lotus Salon dissolved.
* * *
It went round the ring after that.
Not all at once.
Not in the way the boys would have done it, Lyra thought, watching from her own deep blue chair with her feet in the warm water and her cup of honey and lemon in her hands.
Not loudly.
In the way the girls of Room Nine had talked on the floor of their room, late, in the dark, in the first weeks at Frost-Crest, before any of them trusted each other: in pieces.
A word here.
A look there.
A laugh, and then a silence, and then somebody saying something true, very quietly, into the silence.
Tilda Marsh said that Bram Holloway had cried four times today, and that she thought it was the nicest thing she had ever seen a boy do.
Ylva Brenn said that Emrik kept turning his head to the left all through breakfast, just to look at things on that side, and that once, when he turned, the thing on that side had been her, and he had stopped turning.
A girl from the Second Lance, the sharp, practical leader who had once marched over to tell the Eighth everything it was doing wrong, said that the quiet boy from the First who had been in her pillar of stars had asked her, during the reel, whether she had ever seen the sea, and that she had said no, and that he had said neither have I, and that she had thought about it for the rest of the dance and could not work out why it had made her so happy.
Mira Halvard said nothing for a long time.
Then she said, very precisely, staring into her cup: “Sigurd Kell has trodden on my left foot eleven times today.
I counted.
And every single time, he said sorry as though it was the end of the world.
Nobody has ever been sorry to me like that.
About anything.” A pause.
“It’s very inconvenient.”
And Senna Vaar, when it came to her, did not say anything at all.
She simply looked down at her own hands in her lap, with their nails faintly shining, and then out of the window at the lilac trees, and went pink to the ears.
And everybody in the Lotus Salon understood her perfectly, and nobody said a word, which was, Lyra thought, the kindest thing she had ever seen fifty people do at once.
Isolde Frostmere was the last.
She was sitting very straight in her chair, with her white silk skirt drawn up an inch above the water and her silver hair falling down her back and her feet, which were as scarlet as anyone’s, in the pink water.
She had not said a single word since the doors closed.
She had been drinking her honey and lemon in small, perfect sips, looking at the fire, with the faint crescent on her brow quite calm.
The ring of chairs went quiet.
Fifty faces, very carefully not turning toward her.
Isolde set her cup down on its saucer.
The little click it made was very loud.
“He can’t use a fish knife,” she said, to the fire.
“He holds a dancing frame like a man holding a door shut in a gale.
He has no idea which fork is which.
He has cut his own hair with a belt knife for eleven years and it shows.”
Nobody said anything.
“He cut through a snow bridge without marking it,” said Isolde Frostmere.
“With his eyes shut.
Laughing.
To save someone he didn’t even know.” A pause.
“And when he dances the reel, he looks like the first day of summer.”
She picked up her cup again, and drank, and looked at the fire.
“That’s all,” she said.
“I’m only saying.”
The faint new moon on her brow had gone, very briefly, extremely bright.
Nobody in the Lotus Salon laughed.
Nobody teased.
Hilde Aarn, who had never in her life let a moment like that go by without saying something, opened her mouth, and looked at Isolde’s face, and closed it again.
And Mira, beside her, reached across without a word and squeezed her hand.
* * *
Then, of course, they all turned to Lyra.
She had known it was coming.
She had seen it coming since the moment Hilde said so, the way she had seen the lynx coming off the second ledge above Senna’s head.
And she had decided, as she had decided then, not to move.
“No,” she said, pleasantly, into her cup.
“Madame Odile said there’s a prince,” said Hilde.
“At the end of it.
She said.
We all heard…”
“Madame Odile,” said Lyra, “has taught three princesses and two sea-queens.
She says that sort of thing to everyone.
It’s a figure of speech.”
“It is not a figure of speech.
You went white.
You nearly dropped your fish knife…”
“I have never met a prince,” said Lyra Eisenhardt, entirely truthfully.
“I have never seen one.
I do not know a single thing about any prince in the Empire except his name, which everyone knows, and the colour of his eyes, which everyone knows too, because the ballad-singers in every market square in the Empire never stop singing about them.” She sipped her honey and lemon.
“And I am not the one who danced the waltz four times with Arne Stenvik.”
Hilde gasped, and went scarlet, and threw a cushion at her.
Lyra caught it without looking.
And the Lotus Salon dissolved into laughter again, and the moment passed, and they talked about the reel, and Lord Roderick and Mistress Agathe, and the Archduke smiling in the middle of the waltz, until the little silver lotus on the clock opened and chimed the quarter.
But Isolde Frostmere, two chairs away, had not laughed.
She was looking at Lyra over the rim of her cup with her pure silver eyes, very steadily, the way she looked at a target at two hundred paces.
Lyra looked back at her, and smiled, and said nothing.
She had told them the truth.
She had never met him.
She had never seen him.
She knew his name, and the colour of his eyes, from the ballads.
She did not tell them that, for one heartbeat yesterday, at the bottom of the Starwell, the water round her had turned gold, and pointed south.
* * *
The maids came round with towels, and dried fifty pairs of feet, and rubbed them with something cool that smelled of mint, and the scarlet faded to pink.
Then they brought out the satin dancing slippers with the silver stars on the toes.
Fifty-odd young ladies of the North looked at them with undisguised hatred.
“Luncheon,” said Mistress Agathe Rennick, from the doorway, with her keys, “is in the slippers.”
They put them on.
They stood up.
They wobbled, all of them, and found their balance, and stood straight, with their chins up, the way Madame Odile had told them, and their weight sitting back over the heel.
It was easier than it had been at ten o’clock.
Not much.
A little.
“But first,” said Mistress Agathe, looking round at fifty heads of hair that had been through the Northern reel, “hair.
Upstairs, to the dressing rooms on the gallery, all of you.
The gentlemen are waiting at the foot of the great stair, and you will come down it to them, as ladies do.” She rattled her keys.
“Slowly.”
II.
The Gentlemen Wait
In the entrance hall of Starfall Hall, on the silver stars of the northern sky inlaid in the white marble, fifty-odd young lords of Frost-Crest were waiting, and it was going very badly.
It was the cravats, mostly.
Two hours of the promenade, the waltz and the Northern reel had done to the cravats what two days on the Frozen Land had done to their boots.
Every one of them had gone into the Moon-Frost Ballroom with a neat, soft, silver-grey cravat tied at his throat by a valet who had been tying cravats for thirty years.
Every one of them had come out with something that looked like a bandage on a battlefield.
Sigurd Kell’s had come untied altogether and was hanging down his shirt-front like a dead fish.
Bram Holloway’s had worked round to the back of his neck.
Hakon Aarn had lost his entirely during the waltz and had no idea where.
And there was no valet.
There was only Master Osric Vellane, the Head Butler of Frost-Crest, standing at the foot of the great staircase in his black coat, long and narrow and silver-haired, with his hands folded behind his back, looking at them.
“Gentlemen,” said Master Osric.
“You have a quarter of an hour before the ladies come down.
You will not greet them looking like that.”
There was a pause.
“You will tie them yourselves.”
The pause got longer.
* * *
It took the full quarter of an hour.
Master Osric did not tie anybody’s cravat for him.
He stood in the middle of the entrance hall with a length of silver-grey silk of his own, and tied it round his own long neck, slowly, step by step, three times over, while fifty-odd young lords stood round him in a ring with their own cravats in their hands and copied him.
“Round the neck.
The left end longer than the right by the width of your hand.
Cross the long end over.
Up through the loop at the throat.
Down through the front.
Tighten.
Not strangle, Mr.
Kell.
Tighten.
Fold.
Tuck.
And then,” he lifted one long finger, “the most important part of all.
Look in the mirror, and smooth it once with the back of your hand, and leave it alone.
A gentleman who fiddles with his cravat is a gentleman who is nervous.
A gentleman who is nervous is a gentleman whom other gentlemen will try to frighten.”
The entrance hall of Starfall Hall had mirrors on every pillar.
Fifty-odd young lords crowded round them, elbowing, tying, re-tying, swearing under their breath.
Sigurd strangled himself twice.
Bram Holloway tied his so neatly at the first attempt that he stood staring at it in disbelief and refused to touch it again in case it came undone.
Finn tied his perfectly, without a mirror, because he had tied his father’s apron strings behind his back every morning since he was six, and then, when nobody was looking, quietly re-tied Emrik Stahl’s, who was still getting used to judging distances with two eyes.
Arne Stenvik tied his in silence, in one smooth movement, and smoothed it once with the back of his hand, and left it alone.
Master Osric looked at it.
Then at him.
“Mr.
Stenvik,” he said.
“You have done this before.”
Arne considered the question.
Then he said, slowly, in his deep voice: “My mother.” A pause.
“Ties knots.
Nets.
For the fish.
On the Kharn lakes.”
It was the longest thing any of them had ever heard him say about himself.
Twelve words.
Hakon Aarn, who had found a spare cravat from somewhere and was struggling with it in front of the next pillar, turned round and stared at him with his mouth open.
“Twelve,” said Hakon.
“That’s twelve words.
About your mother.
Hilde’s going to die she missed it…”
Arne looked at him.
Then he went slowly, deeply, completely red, and turned back to the mirror.
* * *
They were all tied by the time the clock struck the three-quarters.
More or less.
And with the cravats done, and nothing to do with their hands, and fifty of them standing about on the stars of the northern sky in their midnight frock coats waiting for the ladies to come down, the young lords of Frost-Crest began to talk.
Not the way the girls talked.
Cedric could have told anyone that.
When the boys of Room Four talked about something that mattered, they did it the way they did everything else: sideways, and loudly, and pretending they were talking about something else.
“Three,” said Sigurd Kell, to the ceiling, for perhaps the fifth time since they left the ballroom.
“Three dances.
Married.
Is that…
is that a real rule?
Or is that a Madame Odile rule?
Because she’s from the Archipelago, and they’re all mad in the Archipelago, everybody knows that…”
“It’s real,” said Cedric.
“My mother says the capital’s worse.”
“Then I’ve got to count,” said Sigurd.
“I’ve got to count, at every ball, for the rest of my life.
I can’t count and dance.
I can barely dance.
I trod on her foot eleven times…”
“Twelve,” said Finn.
“Eleven. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
The twelfth was the floor.”
Rowan Thorne was not saying anything.
He was standing at the foot of the great staircase, apart from the others, with his back to the nearest pillar and his eyes fixed on the top of the stairs, where the ladies would come down.
He had not said anything since the reel.
He had the look of a man who had been struck on the back of the head by something very large and very soft, and was still waiting to find out whether he was going to fall over.
Cedric looked at him for a while.
Then he wandered over and leaned on the pillar beside him.
“Rowan.”
“Mm.”
“You’ve been staring at those stairs for a quarter of an hour.”
“I’m looking at the…
the carving.
On the banister.”
“It’s plain marble, Rowan.
There isn’t any carving.”
Rowan did not say anything.
Cedric looked at him a moment longer.
Then, very quietly, so that nobody else could hear, the heir of the North said: “She laughed.
In the reel.”
“I know.”
“I’ve known Isolde Frostmere since I was six years old, at every Midwinter ball my mother ever gave.
I have never, once, in my whole life, heard her laugh like that.” A pause.
“Not once, Rowan.”
Rowan Thorne closed his eyes.
“I know,” he said again.
“I know.
That’s the problem.”
“Why is it a problem?”
“Because she’s the heir of the fourth-oldest house in the North,” said Rowan, very low, “and I’m a farmer’s son who cuts his own hair with a belt knife, and she knows exactly which fork to use, and I didn’t know what a fish knife was until three hours ago, and she showed me how to use it under the table so nobody would see I didn’t know, and I don’t…” He stopped.
“I don’t know what to do, Ced.
With any of it.
I’ve never not known what to do.
Not on the Frozen Land.
Not ever.”
Cedric was quiet for a moment.
Then he said: “Do you know what my father said, when my mother’s father asked him what he could possibly offer the only daughter of the richest man in the Western Archipelago?”
Rowan opened his eyes.
“He said, I can’t offer her anything she hasn’t already got.
I can only offer to stand next to her.” Cedric shrugged.
“My grandfather from the Archipelago said that was the stupidest answer he’d ever heard.
And then he gave my father his blessing on the spot.
Mother says it’s because nobody else had ever said anything to him that he couldn’t buy.”
Rowan Thorne looked at his friend for a long time.
“Is that true?”
“Ask my mother,” said Cedric.
“She tells it every Midwinter.
Badly.
With actions.” He pushed himself off the pillar.
“Also, she found your crown, Rowan.
In the Starwell.
Your crown of light.
She touched it.
She told you about it.” He grinned, suddenly, the old Cedric grin.
“Heirs of the fourth-oldest house in the North don’t touch the hair of farmers’ sons by accident.
Trust me.
I’ve been to a lot of balls.”
He wandered back to the others, leaving Rowan Thorne staring after him with his mouth open and his face slowly going the colour of a frost-boar roast.
* * *
Master Osric Vellane had heard all of it.
Master Osric heard everything that was said in any house he served in.
It was, he would have said, the whole of his profession.
He did not say anything.
But when the clock struck noon, and the doors of the dressing rooms on the gallery at the top of the stairs began to open, the Head Butler of Frost-Crest stepped forward on the stars of the northern sky, and spoke, just loudly enough for fifty-odd young lords to hear.
“Gentlemen.
One more thing, before they come down.
It is not in Madame’s lessons.
It is in mine.”
They turned to him.
“When she comes down that stair,” said Master Osric, “you will look at her as though she is the only person in the room.
And you will never, by a word or a look, ever let her feel that she owes you anything for it.” He folded his long hands behind his back.
“That is all a gentleman is.
Everything else is forks.”
And then the ladies came down the stairs.
The young lords of Frost-Crest stood on the stars at the foot of the great staircase with their cravats tied by their own hands, and watched them come: slowly, carefully, in their dancing slippers, with their chins up and their hands on the white marble banister, wobbling a very little and pretending they were not.
And when the ladies reached the foot of the stairs, every young lord who had been in a pillar of stars stepped forward, without being told, and bowed from the waist, not too deep and not too fast, and said, quietly, without his voice cracking at all: May I have the honour?
And every lady said yes.
Cedric and Hakon looked at each other across the entrance hall, as the couples formed round them, two men alone on the silver Dragon’s Spine with their arms crooked and nobody to put a hand on them.
Then Lyra came down the stairs, last, in her midnight dress.
And she held out both hands, without a word, one to each of them.
And the two of them bowed to her at precisely the same moment, as though they had been rehearsing it all morning, which, Lyra suspected, they had.
III.
Your Grace, Your Eminence, Your Highness
The Starlit Gallery had changed while they were dancing.
The long single table was gone.
In its place stood nine round tables, each laid for twelve, with white damask and silver and crystal and a low bowl of Moon-Frost Lotus in the middle, scattered down the length of the hall under the drifting painted stars.
And at each round table, in one of the twelve chairs, somebody was already sitting.
Somebody who had not been at breakfast.
The young soldiers of Frost-Crest stopped in the doorway, two by two, and stared.
At the first table, in the place of honour facing the windows, sat an enormous man in a coat of crimson velvet so stiff with gold embroidery that it could probably have stood up by itself, with a broad sash of purple silk across his chest and a ducal coronet of gilded paper perched on top of his head.
He had his chin in the air and an expression of the most profound and lofty boredom, and a quizzing glass on a gold chain, through which he was examining the ceiling.
It was Lord Roderick.
At the second table, all in white and gold, with a tall white mitre embroidered with a golden sunburst and a heavy gold sun-disc on a chain round his neck, sat a thin, stooped, bespectacled man with his hands folded piously on the tablecloth and an expression of deep, patient, ecclesiastical disapproval.
He smelled faintly, even from the door, of medicinal herbs and smoked star-wood.
It was Lord Kenneth.
At the third table, in lavender silk and a towering powdered wig with three ostrich plumes in it, with a fan of painted ivory and a lorgnette and a face of serene and terrible sweetness, sat a lady who was quite clearly the most dangerous person in the room.
It was Lady Seraphina.
And at the fourth table, at the very end of the gallery, under the tallest window, in a plain coat of dark grey cut so perfectly that it must have cost more than all the crimson velvet at the first table put together, with a single gold ring on one finger and nothing else to mark him at all, sat a lean man with wild black hair brushed flat for perhaps the first time in his life, and a face like a closed door.
It was Lord Lucian.
And he did not look up when they came in.
He did not look at anything at all.
Sigurd Kell, in the doorway, said “Uncle Rod…” before Mira stamped on his foot.
* * *
Madame Odile de Varenne stood at the head of the gallery with her cane.
“Ladies.
Gentlemen,” she said.
“Today at luncheon you will not dine with each other.
You will dine with guests.” The corner of her mouth moved.
“Guests from the capital.
They have come a very long way, at great inconvenience to themselves, to see what the barbarians of the North look like at table, and they are going to tell everyone in Lumin-Valeria all about it.”
She lifted her cane toward the first table.
“His Grace the Duke of Brassmoor.
Very old family.
Very large estates.
Very easily offended.
He has never been north of the River Aure in his life, and he believes the people of the North eat their meat raw and their children with it.”
The Duke of Brassmoor lowered his quizzing glass, examined the young soldiers in the doorway through it, and sniffed.
Loudly.
“His Eminence the Archprelate Ignatius, of the Temple of the Radiant Dawn.
He has a great many questions.
About your health.
About your souls.
About the alchemy of the North, and where you got it, and whether the Temple has been told.”
The Archprelate Ignatius pushed his spectacles up his nose, and folded his hands, and gazed at them with an expression of infinite, patient, ecclesiastical suspicion.
“The Dowager Marchioness of Velle.
She knows everyone.
She knows everything.
She will know everything about you before the soup is cleared, and the whole capital will know it by tomorrow.”
The Dowager Marchioness of Velle raised her lorgnette, and smiled at them sweetly through it, and every young lady in the doorway felt her blood run cold.
“And His Highness,” said Madame Odile, “a Prince of the Blood.
A cousin of the throne.
He does not speak to strangers.
He has not spoken to a stranger at a luncheon in eleven years.
He is the most important guest in this room, and the most difficult, and one of you,” her eyes went down the doorway, and stopped, “will be seated on his right.”
Nobody needed to ask who.
* * *
“Before you sit,” said Madame Odile, “you will learn how to speak to them.
Because if you speak to them wrongly, they will never speak to you again, and nor will anyone they know.”
She struck her cane on the floor.
“Forms of address.
Listen.”
And she gave it to them, there in the doorway of the Starlit Gallery, in her dry, crisp, Western voice, as if she were reading out the order of battle.
“The Emperor.
You will very likely never speak to him.
If you do: the first time, Your Imperial Majesty.
Every time after that, Sire.
You do not speak until he speaks to you.
You do not turn your back on him.
You do not touch him, ever, for any reason, even if he is on fire.”
“The Crown Prince, and the princes and princesses of the blood.
The first time, Your Highness.
After that, sir, or ma’am.
The same rules.
You wait to be spoken to.”
“A duke.
An archduke, such as your own lord.
A duchess.
Your Grace.
Every time, the first time; after that, sir or ma’am will do, unless they are being difficult, in which case you go on saying Your Grace until they stop.”
“A marquess, an earl, a count, a baron.
My lord.
Their ladies, my lady.
Their sons and daughters, my lord and my lady if they have a title of their own, and sir and miss if they do not, and you will find out which before you speak to them, not after.”
“The Temple.” Something in her voice went, very slightly, drier.
“The High Hierophant, Your Radiance.
An archprelate, Your Eminence.
A priest of the Dawn, Father, or Mother.
The Saintess of the Radiant Dawn,” a pause, “Blessed Lady.
And a knight of the Holy Order, Sir, with his name, every time, because they are very particular about it.”
She lowered her cane.
“And three rules over all of them.
One: when you are introduced, the lesser is always presented to the greater, never the other way round.
Your Grace, may I present Mr.
Kell: not Mr.
Kell, this is the Duke.
Two: you never speak first to someone of higher rank than yourself, unless they have spoken to you.
Three: when you do not know someone’s rank, you call them sir or madam and you are very, very polite, because the person you are being rude to in a plain grey coat may turn out to be a prince.”
She looked, very briefly, at the fourth table.
“Places,” said Madame Odile de Varenne.
“Luncheon is served.”
* * *
It was carnage.
It was, more than one of them said afterward, worse than the Rimefang.
At least in the Rimefang the goblins had not been their own relations wearing paper coronets.
The Duke of Brassmoor was magnificent.
Lord Roderick had never been so happy in his life.
He sat at the head of the first table in his crimson velvet with his paper coronet over one eye, and examined every young soldier who came near him through his quizzing glass, and was offended by everything.
He was offended by the way they bowed.
He was offended by the way they sat.
He was offended when they spoke to him, and offended when they did not, and when Sigurd Kell, seated three places to his left, turned to him and said brightly, “Uncle…
I mean…
I mean, Your Grace, would you like the bread?” the Duke of Brassmoor lowered his quizzing glass, turned purple, and roared:
“UNCLE?
UNCLE?
Young man, I have never been so insulted in my life!
Brassmoor does not have nephews!
Brassmoor has heirs!”
“Sorry!
Sorry, Your Grace, I…”
“And you do not offer a duke bread!
You do not offer a duke anything!
You wait until the duke asks for the bread, and then you signal to the footman!
Do I look as though I pass my own bread?”
“No, Your Grace!”
“BRASSMOOR,” bellowed the Duke, enormously, to the whole Starlit Gallery, “DOES NOT ACCEPT YOUR APOLOGY!”
And then, under his breath, with his face still purple and his paper coronet trembling with outrage, he gave Sigurd the most tremendous, delighted wink.
At the second table, the Archprelate Ignatius was doing something much worse.
He was being kind.
He sat with his hands folded and his mitre on his head and his spectacles on his nose, and he asked the young people round his table questions, in a soft, gentle, interested voice.
How did they find the North?
How had they been trained?
Where had they learned their healing?
Had any of them been wounded on the Frozen Land?
And how had they been healed, exactly?
So quickly.
So completely.
Not a scar among them.
It was quite remarkable.
The Temple would be so very interested to hear…
Bram Holloway, flustered, said “Your Radiance…” and the Archprelate gently corrected him: “Eminence, my son.
Only the High Hierophant is Radiance.
A small thing.
But you will find the Temple is very fond of small things.”
And Mira Halvard, seated on the Archprelate’s left, who had been asked, very gently, where a young lady of the North had learned to brew an alchemy that could close a wound overnight, opened her mouth to tell him about Lord Kenneth’s snow-ginseng, and the salve tin, and the Starwell…
And stopped.
She looked at the gentle, bespectacled, smiling face under the white mitre.
And she remembered the tenth law of the floor, and the Matriarch on the terrace yesterday morning, saying you will see things and hear things that are not spoken of outside this house.
“Your Eminence is very kind,” said Mira Halvard, sweetly, in a voice none of them had ever heard her use.
“But I’m afraid it’s terribly dull.
Northern country remedies.
Mostly onions.” She turned, with a perfect little smile, to the boy on her other side.
“Mr.
Holloway, have you tried the soup?
It’s delicious.”
The Archprelate Ignatius looked at her for a long moment over the tops of his spectacles. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Then, very slightly, under his mitre, Lord Kenneth Eisenhardt smiled, and inclined his head to her, the way a fencing master inclines his head to a pupil who has just landed her first clean hit.
* * *
At the third table, the Dowager Marchioness of Velle was eating young ladies alive.
She did it so sweetly.
That was the terrible part.
She sat in her lavender silk and her towering wig with its three ostrich plumes, and she smiled, and fanned herself, and peered at them through her lorgnette, and asked the most delightful questions.
Such a pretty dress, my dear.
Who made it?
And such lovely hair.
Is it your own?
And that charming young man at the next table, the big quiet one, the one who keeps looking over here: is he anything to you, my dear?
Are you promised?
No?
Not yet?
But the two of you danced, I hear.
How many times?
Hilde Aarn, who had been seated beside her, went scarlet from her collar to her ginger curls and opened her mouth to say four, but it was practice, so it doesn’t count, does it?
And then, at the last moment, she remembered Madame Odile’s voice in the Moon-Frost Ballroom.
A lady who shows her card to her friends, giggling, is a lady who will not be asked again.
She closed her mouth.
She took a slow breath.
And Hilde Aarn, who had never in her life been able to keep a single thought inside her head for longer than a heartbeat, smiled at the Dowager Marchioness of Velle, and said: “Oh, my lady, I could never keep count.
There was a reel, you know, and in a reel, one dances with everybody.” She lifted her glass of pear-juice.
“Have you ever danced a Northern reel, my lady?
You must.
It’s terribly rustic.”
The Dowager Marchioness of Velle lowered her lorgnette.
She looked at Hilde Aarn for a long, long moment, with her serene, sweet, terrible face.
Then Lady Seraphina Eisenhardt, behind her lavender silk and her powdered wig, laughed: a soft, delighted, genuine laugh, like water running over stones.
“Oh, very good,” said the Dowager Marchioness of Velle.
“Very good indeed, my dear.
You will do beautifully in the capital.” She tapped Hilde once on the wrist with her closed fan.
“Now tell me about the big quiet one.
Properly.
I promise not to tell a soul.”
“No, my lady,” said Hilde, very sweetly.
And the Dowager laughed again, and did not ask again, and Hilde Aarn sat back in her chair glowing like a lamp, and did not look at the next table once for the whole of the next course, which was, everyone agreed afterward, the single greatest act of self-control ever witnessed in the North.
IV.
The Finger Bowl
At the first table, the soup had been cleared, and the quail had been served, and eaten, with some difficulty, because a roast quail is a very small bird with a very great many bones in it and the young soldiers of the North had never in their lives eaten anything they could not pick up in their hands.
And now the footmen came round with the finger bowls.
They were small, shallow bowls of cut crystal, each one set on a little plate with a lace doily, and each one full of clear water, warmed, with a thin slice of lemon floating in it and a single white petal of Moon-Frost Lotus.
A footman set one down in front of every guest at the first table, at the head of the plate, with great ceremony, and stepped back.
Nobody had explained the finger bowl.
Madame Odile had not reached the finger bowl.
Sigurd Kell looked at it.
It was very pretty.
It was warm.
It had lemon in it.
He had just eaten a quail, which was salty, and he had been yelled at by the Duke of Brassmoor for a quarter of an hour, and his throat was dry.
He picked it up in both hands, and drank it.
All of it.
In one long, grateful swallow.
Lemon slice, lotus petal and all.
Then he set the bowl down on its little lace doily, and wiped his mouth with his napkin, correctly, and looked round the table, pleased with himself, and found that every single person at it was staring at him in frozen horror.
The footman behind his chair had closed his eyes.
The young lady on his left had put her hand over her mouth.
And at the head of the table, the Duke of Brassmoor had lowered his quizzing glass, and his face, under the paper coronet, was going slowly and gloriously purple, and he was drawing in a breath so enormous that the gold embroidery on his crimson coat creaked.
Sigurd looked at the empty finger bowl.
And somewhere, very slowly, behind his eyes, he understood.
“It’s for your fingers,” he said, faintly.
“Isn’t it.
It’s for…
washing your…”
The Duke of Brassmoor opened his mouth.
And from the third table, quite clearly, in the sudden silence of the Starlit Gallery, came the soft, sweet, delicate clink of crystal being lifted from a plate.
Every head in the room turned.
The Dowager Marchioness of Velle had picked up her own finger bowl.
She held it in both hands, in her lavender silk, under her towering wig, with her three ostrich plumes nodding, and she looked across the Starlit Gallery at Sigurd Kell, and smiled at him: a warm, gentle, perfectly serene smile.
And she raised the finger bowl to her lips, and drank.
All of it.
Lemon and lotus and all.
Slowly, gracefully, as though it were the finest wine of the Archipelago.
She set the bowl down on its doily, and dabbed her lips with her napkin, and said, in her soft, carrying voice, to the whole room: “How very refreshing.
One does get so thirsty, with quail.”
There was a silence.
Then, at the high table, the Archduchess Genevieve, without a flicker of expression, lifted her own finger bowl, and drank.
And beside her, Madame Odile de Varenne set down her cane, and lifted hers, in both gloved hands, and drank it, lemon and all, with the precise, unhurried dignity of a woman who had been doing exactly this at every luncheon of her life.
And then, at the first table, the Duke of Brassmoor, purple, enormous, magnificent in his crimson velvet, with his breath still held and his mouth still open to roar, looked at the three ladies.
And looked at Sigurd.
And slowly, very slowly, let out his breath.
And picked up his finger bowl, and drank it.
All down the Starlit Gallery, one after another, without a word being spoken, the guests from the capital lifted their finger bowls and drank them.
The Archprelate Ignatius drank his.
The footmen at the walls, who had no finger bowls, stood very straight and looked at the ceiling.
And within half a minute, there was not a single drop of lemon water left on any table in Starfall Hall, and Sigurd Kell was sitting at the first table with his face the colour of a sunset and his eyes, for some reason he could not have explained, stinging.
Madame Odile de Varenne set her empty bowl down, and lifted her cane, and struck the floor once.
“That,” she said, “is the last lesson of the luncheon.
And the only one that matters.”
She looked down the long gallery, at all of them.
“Every rule I have taught you today, every fork and every bow and every Your Grace, exists for one reason.
Not to make you better than other people.
Not to catch them out.
To make the people round you comfortable.
To make sure that nobody at your table is ever ashamed.” Her cane tapped the floor, once.
“A lady or a gentleman who sees a guest drink from the finger bowl, and laughs, has learned all my rules and understood none of them.
A lady or a gentleman who picks up their own bowl, and drinks it, and says how refreshing: that is somebody I would be proud to have taught.”
A long pause.
“Mr.
Kell.
The finger bowl is for your fingers.
You dip the tips of them in it, one hand at a time, and dry them on your napkin.” The corner of her mouth moved.
“You will not forget it now.”
“No, Madame,” said Sigurd Kell, hoarsely.
“Never.”
And at the third table, the Dowager Marchioness of Velle caught his eye across the room, and lifted her empty bowl, very slightly, in a toast.
And the big, loud tower captain’s boy from the Ninth Tower lifted his empty bowl back to her, and found that he could not, for a moment, say anything at all.
* * *
At the fourth table, under the tallest window, the Prince of the Blood had not said a word.
He had not said a word through the soup.
He had not said a word through the quail.
He had drunk his finger bowl when the others did, without expression, and set it down, and gone back to looking out of the window at the valley with his face like a closed door.
And on his right hand, in her midnight dress, Lyra Eisenhardt had been trying, for the better part of an hour, to make her uncle talk.
She had tried everything.
She had tried the weather.
A fine day, Your Highness.
The valley is very beautiful in spring.
Nothing.
She had tried the food.
The quail is excellent, sir.
Do you care for game?
Nothing.
She had tried the room, the music, the view, the Archipelago masons, the dome, the drifting stars on the ceiling.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Not a word.
Not a glance.
He sat there, lean and grey and silent, and ate, very precisely, and looked out of the window, and she might as well have been talking to the Wall.
She had even tried, in desperation, the one subject she knew would work: I understand Your Highness is a great swordsman.
And Lord Lucian, who would talk about the sword to a fencepost, who had once talked about the sword to a frost-bear, who had laughed out loud at the leaf behind the leaf, had looked at her for one long, cool, expressionless moment, and gone back to his quail.
At the head of the table, Madame Odile de Varenne was watching her.
Not unkindly.
Watching.
“May I offer an observation, Lady Lyra?” she said quietly, when the plates had been cleared and Lyra was sitting very straight, very still, staring at the tablecloth with the cold beginning of real despair.
“Please, Madame.”
“You have spent an hour,” said Madame Odile, “talking about things that are interesting to you.
Or things you believe should be interesting to a prince.
The weather.
The food.
His sword.” She folded her gloved hands on the head of her cane.
“Every lady in the capital who is seated beside a prince does exactly the same.
Every one of them talks to him about his sword, and his horse, and his famous victories, and how handsome he looks in his uniform.
He has heard all of it a thousand times.
He is bored to the bone.” A pause.
“Do not talk to a man about the thing he is best at, my lady.
Everybody does that.
Find out what he loves.
They are very rarely the same thing.”
Lyra looked at her for a long moment.
Then she looked at her uncle.
Really looked, the way Madame Odile had told her at breakfast she looked at everything: the way she read a room, a rift field, an enemy.
Lean.
Silent.
Black hair brushed flat.
Plain grey coat.
Looking out of the window.
Not at the valley.
Not at the lake, or the orchards, or the mountains.
At the colonnade.
At the long, white, soaring columns of Starfall Hall outside the window, fluted from top to bottom in perfect, delicate, identical grooves, each one cut by a hair-thin blade of arcane force, in a single stroke, by a man from the Archipelago who had never held a sword in his life.
He had been looking at them all through luncheon.
Lyra set down her napkin.
“Your Highness,” she said, quietly, “I’m told the columns were each cut in a single stroke.
By a craftsman.
With a blade of pure force, no thicker than a hair.” She looked out of the window with him, at the nearest column, catching the light.
“I’ve been wondering all through luncheon.
How do you suppose he held it straight?
For that length.
Without a single waver.
All the way down.”
There was a pause.
And the Prince of the Blood turned his head from the window, slowly, and looked at her.
“He didn’t,” said Lord Lucian.
Lyra waited.
“It wavers,” said Lucian.
“Look.” He lifted one lean finger and pointed, through the glass, at the column.
“Two-thirds of the way down.
On the third flute from the left.
A hair’s breadth.
Less.
He breathed.” A pause.
“He told the Head Butler he did each one without stopping to breathe.
He did not.
He breathed on that one.
He corrected it.
It is very good.
It is almost perfect.” Another pause.
“I have been trying all through luncheon to work out whether I could do it without the breath.”
“Could you?”
Lord Lucian considered this.
His eyes had gone back to the column, but they were not closed any more.
They were alight.
“No,” he said.
“Not yet.” And then, slowly, with something in his voice that Lyra had heard only once before, on the Hollowmere, when Rowan cut the angler through the bridge: “I should like to meet him.”
Lyra smiled.
And for the rest of the luncheon, through the fruit and the cheese and the little cups of black Archipelago coffee, the Prince of the Blood who had not spoken to a stranger at a luncheon in eleven years talked to the young lady on his right about stone, and blades, and breath, and the difference between cutting a thing and letting it fall apart along the line where it had always meant to break.
He talked more than anyone at Frost-Crest had ever heard him talk at one sitting.
The whole fourth table stopped eating to listen.
At the head of it, Madame Odile de Varenne picked up her little cup of black coffee, and sipped it, and said nothing at all.
But she looked at Lyra over the rim of the cup.
One month, she had said, at breakfast.
Possibly less.
She was beginning to think it would be less.
* * *
The afternoon went by in a long, bright, exhausting blur of conversation.
Madame Odile kept them at the round tables, and the guests from the capital kept their costumes on, and for four hours the young soldiers of the North practised talking.
To a duke who was offended by everything.
To an archprelate who asked the most gentle and dangerous questions.
To a dowager who wanted to know everything about everyone.
To a silent prince, who, it turned out, would talk for an hour to anyone who asked him the right question, and not one word to anyone who did not.
They learned how to begin a conversation, and how to end one.
How to change the subject without anyone noticing.
How to say no to a duke so that he thanked you for it, which Sigurd managed, on his ninth attempt, so successfully that the Duke of Brassmoor burst into tears of pride and had to be led away by a footman.
And then, at last, the light in the tall windows of the Starlit Gallery began to turn gold.
The shadows of the white columns began to stretch out long across the lilac trees.
And the doors at the end of the gallery opened, and Mistress Agathe Rennick came in with her ring of keys.
Behind her came the maids.
And over the arm of every maid, folded, white, heavy, woven with a thread of frost-mithril so that it would not float, was a bathing robe.
The Starlit Gallery went quiet.
A hundred and three young people sat at their round tables in their silks and their midnight coats, with their forks laid correctly across their plates and their napkins folded correctly beside them, and looked at the white robes over the maids’ arms.
And every one of them remembered, at the same moment, what the Matriarch had said on the terrace yesterday morning.
Each time it goes deeper.
Each time it goes deeper, it will hurt more.
At the third table, the Dowager Marchioness of Velle took off her towering powdered wig, with its three ostrich plumes, and set it down on the tablecloth beside her empty finger bowl.
And Lady Seraphina Eisenhardt sat there in her lavender silk, with her own fine black hair beneath it, and looked at them all with her gentle, serene, unreadable face.
“The second time,” she said softly.
“Before dinner.
As I promised.” She rose.
“Come.
The Starwell is waiting.”
Nobody moved.
Then, at the fourth table, Lyra Eisenhardt laid her napkin beside her plate, correctly, and stood up.
And beside her, without a word, the Prince of the Blood stood up too, and offered her his arm.
One by one, all down the Starlit Gallery, the young soldiers of the North stood up after them.
End of Chapter 21.