THE GALA

On the night of the Founders' Gala, Vandermere Hall burned like a lantern on its cliff, and Soren, standing on the raised dais at the end of the great ballroom with a glass of champagne he had no intention of drinking, thought that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever hated.

Three hundred candles floated in the crystal chandeliers overhead, doubled in the tall mirrors that lined the walls, so that the whole long room seemed to be suspended in a haze of molten gold. Garlands of white hothouse roses hung from the galleries. A string orchestra played on a platform beneath the windows, weaving a slow waltz through the roar of conversation, and the floor, a field of polished parquet laid in the pattern of a sunburst, shone like a frozen lake under the dancers' feet. Everywhere he looked, women in silk and diamonds swept past in the arms of men in black and silver, laughing, fanning themselves, gleaming. The air was thick with the smell of beeswax and perfume and hot champagne.

It was a performance, as everything in his life was a performance. The Gilded of the Dominion had gathered under his roof to celebrate the founding of the empire, and they believed, every one of them, that they were seeing the very summit of civilization. He had spent a week watching the footmen unroll the carpets and polish the silver, and he had come to feel that the whole house was a gilt picture frame constructed around an empty space.

"You are frowning," said Delphine, at his side.

She stood on the dais in a gown of white satin so heavily embroidered with gold thread that it seemed to be made of light. A necklace of diamonds blazed at her throat, and her platinum hair was piled in an elaborate crown that must have taken her maids three hours. She looked magnificent. She had also taken, he noticed, a very great deal of trouble with her eyes, which were lined with kohl and shimmered with a faint gold powder that could not quite disguise how pale they had become beneath the chandeliers.

"I am looking," he said, "at the room."

"You are looking at it as though you intended to sentence it." She laid her gloved hand on his arm, smiling for the benefit of the guests below. "Do smile, darling, or the Prairie delegation will think you are unwell. They are already whispering that you have been seen in odd company."

"I am sure they have a great deal to occupy them."

"They have you. It's the most delightful topic in the Dominion." Her fingers tightened slightly. "My father says that if you do not stop disappearing into the Archive and the Winter Garden and goodness knows where else, there will be talk. I told him that it was merely the strain of your father's illness. I hope that was accurate."

He did not answer. He had caught sight of a flicker of movement near the foot of the great staircase, and his attention had snapped to it like a compass needle.

…

She stood at the edge of the crowd, just beyond the pillars, holding his sister's hand.

He had been looking for her for twenty minutes without admitting it. She wore a gown of deep moss-green velvet that he had never seen before, simply cut, with a square neckline and long fitted sleeves, and it hung a little loose at the waist, as though it had been taken in at the last moment by someone with more goodwill than time. Her hair was pinned up in a plain knot, with a few tendrils escaping, and in the candlelight it glowed the color of copper and old wine. She had left her throat bare. The root-scar showed there like a drop of watercolor, delicate and branching, from beneath her left ear to the base of her collarbone, and every woman who passed her turned her head and then turned it away.

Beside her, Lila was almost unrecognizable. The Princess wore a pale gold dress with a sash of green ribbon, and her hair had been brushed until it shone. She stood very straight, with her chin lifted, in an imitation of her tutor's posture so exact that something twisted painfully in his chest. Behind them hovered Nurse Crowe, wringing a handkerchief, in a gray silk gown that was clearly her best.

The dress, he thought. She borrowed it from the nurse.

He realized he was smiling again. It was becoming a habit, and he disliked it enormously.

"Is that the tutor?" said Delphine, following his gaze, in a tone of very faint, very pleasant surprise. "How well she has done with such limited materials. Do forgive me, darling, but I shall have to go and say hello. One must be gracious to the staff on an occasion like this."

She glided down the steps with her train rustling behind her. He watched her go, felt every muscle in his body draw tight, and told himself that the feeling was only apprehension. Then, because he could not help it, he went down the steps after her.

…

By the time he reached the edge of the floor, it had already started.

A tall girl in rose-colored silk had separated from a cluster of young women near the champagne fountain and approached Tamsin with a glass in her hand. Soren knew her slightly, since she was the daughter of a Frost Coast shipping magnate and a prominent member of the Gilded Ladies' League. She was smiling with great warmth, in the manner of someone who has been told to be agreeable and who has decided to do it thoroughly. Behind her, four or five other girls had drifted nearer and were pretending to examine the flowers.

"Miss Reed, isn't it? We haven't been introduced, but I've heard so much about you." She held out the glass. It was a flute of pale gold wine, and a fine thread of bubbles rose through it to the surface. "It's a tradition of the League that all newcomers to the Hall are given a welcome toast. Won't you take it? It would make us all so happy."

"That's very kind of you," Tamsin said. "But I don't drink wine when I'm working, and tonight I'm escorting the Princess."

"Oh, a sip couldn't possibly matter." The girl's smile widened. "It's only a ceremonial thing. We'd be dreadfully hurt if you refused."

Lila, at Tamsin's side, had tilted her head and was looking at the glass with an odd, unblinking intensity. Her small nostrils flared. She tugged on Tamsin's sleeve, but before she could speak, a soft, silvery voice floated over the group.

"Is there some difficulty?"

Delphine had arrived. She stood with her hand lightly poised on the shoulder of the girl in rose, looking from one face to another with an expression of gentle concern. The whole cluster seemed to bend toward her like a field of flowers. Soren, three paces behind, felt the hair rise on the nape of his neck.

"Miss Reed is being modest," said the rose-colored girl. "I only offered her a toast."

"How charming of you to be so considerate." Delphine's eyes drifted to Tamsin, and she smiled, a small and gracious smile that managed to carry no warmth at all. "But of course she will accept. It would be rude to refuse the future Duchess."

The words fell into a sudden hush. Tamsin did not move. The firelight of three hundred candles shone on her face, and Soren saw her eyes go from the glass to Delphine's face and back, quick and clear and calculating. He saw her understand. He saw her weigh the danger of refusal against the danger of what the glass contained, in the space of a single breath, and he saw her conclude that she had no choice.

"Tamsin, do not drink that," he said, aloud, in a voice that did not carry above the music.

She heard him. He knew she did, because her eyes flickered toward him, wide and startled, and then her gaze dropped. She took the glass.

She lifted it to her lips and drank one small sip.

…

It was almost nothing at first. A tightening of her mouth. A faint wince. She lowered the glass, and he had time to think that perhaps he had been mistaken, that it was merely wine after all, and that the cold dread in his stomach had been an absurd overreaction.

Then her hand flew to her neck.

The root-scar was changing color. Where it had been a delicate rose pink, it flushed to scarlet in a heartbeat, then to a deep angry crimson that seemed to burn beneath her skin. Fine lines of fire raced along its branches, up toward her ear and down toward her shoulder, as though the mark were a lit fuse. She gasped for air as her fingers clawed at her throat, and the glass slipped from the other hand and burst on the parquet in a shower of gold. Lila cried out. A thin red thread appeared at the edge of the scar, and then another, and a thick drop of blood welled up and rolled slowly down her collarbone and soaked into the green velvet. It was darker than ordinary blood, and its edges, he saw, shimmered faintly blue.

She sank to her knees on the polished floor, with one hand pressed to her bleeding neck and the other braced against the boards, breathing in short, shuddering gasps.

"Oh, God, she is bleeding!" Delphine's voice rang out across the ballroom, high and shocked, and he noticed, with a sort of numb clarity, that it was a very good performance. "Look at her neck, the Blight is on her! Somebody make everyone stand back!"

The circle around them broke apart like a dropped string of pearls. Women shrieked and snatched up their skirts. Men fumbled in their pockets for handkerchiefs and clapped them to their mouths. The music faltered, then stopped, and an eerie hush rolled through the vast golden room, broken by the scuff of dozens of shoes backing away. A man at the edge of the crowd said, in a clear carrying voice, "Get her out of here. Send for the Wardens." Another called, "Quarantine! Quarantine the house!"

Lila screamed and ran forward, and Nurse Crowe, with a sob, caught the child about the waist and dragged her back, kicking and weeping. "You mustn't touch her, Your Highness," she gasped. "You mustn't, you mustn't, it isn't safe..."

"Let go of me!" the Princess shrieked, in a voice he had never heard from her. "She is hurt, and you must let me go to her!"

Soren was already moving.

…

He did not hurry. That was the thing he remembered afterward. He walked across the open floor with a steady, measured stride, through a ring of faces that fell back before him as if he were carrying a torch, and he looked at nothing but the girl on her knees in the green dress. He felt the eyes of three hundred people on his back. He felt the hum of the orchestra's silence and the heat of the candles and the sick cold weight of every lesson he had been taught since boyhood.

At the edge of the circle, he stopped, reached up, and took hold of the fingertips of his right glove.

He drew it off slowly, finger by finger, and let it fall to the floor.

There was a collective gasp. It was a small gesture, but every person in that room understood it, since the Grand Duke of Vandermere had not been seen without gloves in public since the day of his mother's funeral. It was a matter of common talk. It was said that he found the touch of other people distasteful, and that his frost-magic was so sharp that he dared not risk contact. Tamsin lifted her head and stared at him through a fog of pain, her gray-blue eyes enormous and dazed, and her lips parted in a protest he did not let her make.

He knelt on one knee on the polished floor beside her.

Her right hand was covered in blood. He took it in his bare one, and her fingers closed around his, hot and slippery and trembling, and the contact went through him like a current. Her skin was feverish. The pulse in her wrist drummed against his palm, and the blue-shimmering blood ran warm over his knuckles and dripped onto the parquet between their knees. It did not burn him. It did not do anything but make him aware, with a terrible and total clarity, that he was holding her hand in front of the entire court.

Then he lifted his head and looked across the width of the ballroom, straight at Delphine Sterling, who stood in her white and gold with her mouth slightly open.

"Miss Reed," said Soren, and his voice rang out into the stillness, cold and clear as a struck bell, "is my sister's tutor and my guest. Anyone who insults her insults the Crown of Vandermere, and I will answer for it personally."

…

The silence was so complete that he could hear the candles fluttering in their sconces.

Nobody in the whole room dared to move. The orchestra sat frozen over their instruments. The girl in rose had gone the color of paper, and the other members of the League were clustered behind her like startled birds. At the far edge of the circle, Dorian Pike had abandoned his post by the wall and stood with one hand on his sword hilt and an expression of dawning, delighted horror. Delphine's face had blanched beneath its powder. For a heartbeat he saw her eyes, wide and shocked and a little desperate, and they were not gold at all, but a muddy amber, like water in a stagnant pool.

Then a sharp tap rang out on the floor, once, twice, three times.

The Emperor sat at the head of the room in his wheeled chair, with his stick in his hand. He had been watching from the shadows by the north doors, so still that no one had remarked him, and now his tremulous old voice rose over the room in a thin, clear command.

"Sit down, Soren."

It was said quietly, but everyone heard it, and everyone understood that it was neither a request nor a rebuke. It was something stranger. It was the voice of a man in the last weeks of his life, asking his son to be careful.

Soren did not sit down. He did not let go of the hand in his.

Tamsin's fingers shook against his palm. Her eyes were fixed on his face, and in them he saw astonishment, and confusion, and under both of those, something so raw and unguarded that the breath stopped in his throat. Blood pulsed between their joined hands. Around them the court of the Meridian Dominion stood in a stricken ring, staring, and he could feel their thoughts, quick and glittering as sparks. He could feel what they were seeing, which was no longer a Grand Duke displaying an impeccable sense of honor toward a servant.

They saw what he had not yet admitted to himself.

At the far side of the circle, half hidden behind a column, the Chancellor of the Dominion had set down his glass. Harlan Sterling's face was perfectly calm. His eyes were fixed on his future son-in-law with a look of pleasant, attentive, measuring interest, exactly the look of a chess player who has watched a favorite piece move to a square that was not on the board.