TERMS

By midnight, Tamsin had packed everything she owned into a single carpetbag, and the whole business had taken her less than eleven minutes.

It was not a long process. She had arrived with seven books, a rack of glass vials, a photograph in a tin frame, and a sprig of dried mugwort, and in the month since she had added only one volume and a handful of notes. The dark blue dress hung on the back of the door, and she folded it with particular care, because it had been lent to her in good faith and she did not intend to leave it creased. The moss-green velvet lay in a heap on the floor where she had dropped it, stiff with her own blood. Nurse Crowe would have to be told. She would write a note.

She sat down on the edge of the iron bed and put her hand to her neck.

The bandage was crude, a strip of linen from the infirmary, wound around her throat by Dorian Pike's steady hands while the Grand Duke stood by the window with his back to them, rigid as a column. Beneath the cloth the scar throbbed with a dull, steady, burning rhythm that felt like a second heartbeat. She had refused to heal it. She had not dared to, with half a dozen people in the room, and she was too tired now to reach for the green warmth that waited at the bottom of her chest. She would manage with willow bark and cold water. She had managed with worse.

Salt, she thought, for the hundredth time. There was salt in that wine. Not table salt, but something fine and bright, like powdered glass, that went through the lining of my mouth like a needle. She had read of it once, in a footnote in a medical journal that had been withdrawn within a month of publication. The Bloodroot in her blood had recoiled from it as a nettle recoils from fire.

Someone had known that. Someone had known precisely what it would do, and to whom, and in front of how many witnesses.

She stood up, took the carpetbag in one hand, and opened the door.

…

Captain Dorian Pike was leaning against the opposite wall of the passage with his arms folded, in a crumpled evening coat with the collar undone, and he looked as though he had been standing there for some time.

"I thought you might try the back stair," he said pleasantly. "It's a little steep for a person who has lost a pint of blood, so I took the liberty of waiting at the bottom of the front one. Then I thought, no, she's the sort who takes the hard way, and I came here."

"Captain," said Tamsin, "I'm leaving."

"Yes, I gathered that." He nodded to the bag. "Might I ask where?"

"I'm going home. The midnight train to Calder Junction runs until one, and if I walk quickly, I can reach the station before it goes." She kept her voice level. "I've had a most instructive month, and I'm grateful for the position. But I think it's clear to everyone that I have been used as a prop in a performance I wasn't allowed to read, and I don't intend to stay until the final act."

"That's an excellent analysis, and I won't insult it by arguing." Dorian pushed away from the wall. "But I have been asked to give you something before you go, and I'd be failing in my duty if I allowed you to walk out of the Hall without taking it."

He drew a long, heavy envelope from inside his coat. It was cream-colored and thick, sealed with a disc of plain black wax stamped with a single letter, and Tamsin took it with the cautious reluctance of a woman accepting a snake.

She slit it with her thumbnail. Inside were three documents. The first was a letter of appointment, signed and sealed, naming her Royal Tutor to Her Highness the Princess Lila Aldridge, with a salary of one hundred and twenty dollars a week, payable quarterly in advance. The second was a draft on the Imperial Bank for the sum of five hundred dollars, made out to her grandmother. The third was a single sheet of heavy cream paper in a small, upright hand that she recognized at once from the margins of a certain textbook.

By order of the Grand Duke of Vandermere, the person of Miss Tamsin Reed, her family, and her property are placed under the protection of the Household. Any act of violence or insult against her shall be regarded as an act against this House.

She read it a second time and felt her throat tighten.

"It's quite a handsome offer," Dorian said gently. "He wrote it himself, at two in the morning, and tore up four drafts before he was satisfied. I wasn't supposed to tell you that."

"He couldn't have thought a letter would be enough."

"He doesn't think it's enough. He thinks it's a start." Dorian lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "I'd never presume to guess at what's in His Grace's mind, but I'd say that he's trying very hard to behave like a man who has made a terrible mistake and means to put it right. It's a great deal for him, really, since he has no experience in the field."

Tamsin folded the three papers together and slid them back into the envelope. She held it out to him.

"Please tell the Grand Duke that I thank him for his generosity," she said, "but that I cannot be bought with a draft on the Imperial Bank, however large."

"He didn't think you could," Dorian said, taking it. "I'll give it back to him. And I'll say you went out for a walk."

She nodded, hefted her bag, and went past him down the passage.

…

She had no intention of taking the train. She told herself so firmly as she descended the back stair, with the hiss of the laundry boilers fading behind her and the cold air of the courtyard rising to meet her, and she told herself again when her feet carried her not toward the gates but along the flagged path that skirted the east wing. She had come out for air, that was all. She had spent two hours in a small room with a bleeding neck and a head full of unanswered questions, and she needed to stand under the open sky.

The Winter Garden lay dark and silent in the frost-white moonlight, its glass walls gleaming like the sides of a gigantic lantern. A thin mist hung over the lawn. The side door was unlocked, and she slipped through it and into the warm, close air, among the camellias, with the smell of wet earth and green leaves closing around her like a hand.

She set the carpetbag down on a bench and stood in the middle of the path with her eyes shut, breathing slowly. The tension went out of her shoulders by degrees. Somewhere in the dark the fountain whispered. A drop fell from a leaf. The hot, aching throb in her neck dulled, and for a moment the whole terrible evening seemed very far away.

"I thought you would come here," said a voice behind her.

She did not jump. It would have been more dignified, she thought afterward, if she had. Instead she turned slowly, with her back to the bench, and saw him standing at the end of the path where the orange trees stood in their tubs, tall and still against the moonlit glass. He had taken off his coat. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and his collar hung open at the throat, and his right hand, she saw, was bare.

He wore the glove on the other hand only. In the silver light the bare hand looked strangely vulnerable, long-fingered and pale, with a faint stain on the knuckles that might have been dried blood.

"Your Grace," she said. "I wasn't aware that you kept hours here."

"I do not. I have not entered this room at night since I was a boy." He took a step toward her and stopped, as though he had thought better of it. "Pike will have told you what I sent."

"He did tell me. I returned it."

"I am aware of that, because he has just informed me." There was no anger in his voice, only a tired, dry amusement that she had never heard from him before. "He appears to have a bad habit of agreeing with you."

She laughed, a little breathlessly, and winced when the motion pulled at the bandage. He started forward at the sound, and she lifted a hand to stop him, and he halted with his fingers curled at his side.

…

For a moment neither of them spoke. The moonlight lay along the tiles in long pale bars. Tamsin watched his face, searching it for the cold, polished mask she had met on her first day, and found that it was not there. He looked exhausted. There were shadows beneath his eyes like bruises, and his hair, usually so rigidly in order, had fallen across his forehead.

"You examined me once on the subject of contagion," she said slowly, "but you never asked what I feared, and I'll tell you now. I fear being used, Your Grace, in the way that a very small and unimportant thing can be used by a large and unscrupulous one. I fear being the piece that is placed on the board to be sacrificed. And tonight, in front of three hundred people, you made me far more dangerous to myself than I have ever been."

"I understand the danger of it better than you might think."

"You knelt on a ballroom floor and held my hand. You told the entire court that I was under your personal protection." Her voice rose slightly, and she brought it down. "Do you understand what you did? Before tonight I was a servant with an inconvenient pedigree. Now I am the Duke's pet Blightborn, and every lady in Highmark is going to want to know what I did to deserve it. By morning there will be a dozen stories, and I will be a hag, a witch, and a harlot, and all of them will be wearing your name."

"I did not think," said Soren.

She stared at him.

"I did not stop to consider what the consequences would be." He had not moved, and his voice was low and quite steady, but she saw the muscle jump in his jaw. "I saw you fall, and I saw what was done, and I was across that floor before I had decided to be. I have never done such a thing in my life. I have never once, since I was a boy, acted on an impulse that I had not first examined from every side." He drew an unsteady breath. "I have never not thought before, Miss Reed. I am not at all sure how to proceed."

The honesty of it took her breath away. She had come ready for apologies, or for explanations, or for the cool dismissal of a man who thought himself above reproach. She had not come prepared for him to stand in the dark with his bare hand hanging at his side and tell her, in a voice almost without inflection, that he was lost.

"Well," she said at last, rather unsteadily. "That makes two of us."

…

They sat on the stone rim of the fountain, at a careful distance from each other, with the dark water murmuring behind them. She did not remember who had suggested it. The mist outside the glass had thickened, and the garden had become a small green island floating in a sea of silver. After a time, in the quiet, he began to speak.

He told her, in short, precise sentences, what he proposed. He wished to know the truth about the Gray Cough. He had read the passage in Dr. Hart's treatise four times, and he had since found two other volumes in his mother's cabinet that bore on the subject, and the evidence, such as it was, suggested that the Dominion's account of the Blight was at best incomplete. He wished to learn what the Rootkin knew. He wanted to know the real history of the Hollows and the real nature of the Bloodroot, the sort that did not appear in any textbook issued by the Board. And he wished her to teach him.

"I'll guarantee your safety," he said. "And your family's. You will have lodgings in the main wing, and you will have a guard, and you will be answerable to me alone. In return, you will continue to teach my sister, and in the evenings you will teach me what nobody has ever taught me about your people."

"And what do I get besides a roof and a bodyguard?"

"The right to be right," said Soren, "which I understand you value more than money."

She almost smiled. She turned her face to the glass, where a thread of mist had curled against a pane, and she thought of Jonah's coughing, and of the small white face of the Princess in the yellow bed, and of the Chancellor's stamp on a clerk's endorsement. She thought of the silver-white powder in the wine. Somewhere in this house was an answer, and she would not find it by running away.

"I have conditions," she said.

"Please name them."

"There will be no orders. You are my employer and a Duke, but you will not command me, and if you try, I'll resign and take the next train. There will be no hand-holding." She felt her cheeks heat, and pushed on. "That includes ballrooms, corridors, and anything else you might feel inclined to improvise. And you do not get to be sorry later."

"I do not understand."

"I mean that if this goes wrong, as I think it very probably will, you won't be permitted to tell me afterward that you regret it. I won't have it. If you say you'll do this, then you do it with your eyes open, and you accept what comes, and you don't turn around when it's hard and wish you'd never met me." She lifted her chin. "I've been somebody's regret before. It's an unpleasant thing to be."

The silence stretched. He looked at her, and the hardness went out of his face, leaving something gentler and far more difficult to bear.

"Agreed," he said. "To all three."

"Then we have terms."

"We do have terms."

She held out her hand, and he took it in his bare one. It was a brief clasp, warm and dry and as formal as a contract, and she told herself that it did not count. He released her at once. She slipped her hand into her skirt and curled it into a fist, as though she might hold the warmth there.

She was staying, of course. She had known it since the moment she walked into the garden. It was for Lila, who had laughed in this room, and for Jonah, who needed the money. It was also because the Chancellor had chosen her, and she meant to find out why, and because the man in front of her was the first Gilded she had ever met who had asked her to teach him something and sounded as though he meant it.

She picked up her carpetbag and turned toward the path.

"Tamsin," he said.

It was said very quietly, almost under his breath, as though the word had slipped loose before he could stop it. She had never heard her name in his voice. It was low and a little rough, and it dropped into the warm dark air like a stone into water, and her heart gave a single hard stumble against her ribs.

She stopped, with her back to him and the bag in her hand, and did not turn around.