THE FROST DUKE

Soren Aldridge woke at five o'clock every morning without the aid of a clock, a servant, or an alarm, because his body had long ago learned that any other arrangement would be punished. He lay for exactly one minute looking at the plaster rosette on the ceiling above his bed while the room slowly sorted itself out of the dark, and then he rose, washed in water cold enough to make his teeth ache, and dressed in the black wool coat that hung on the same hook it had hung on for eight years.

The kettle in his study had been set on its trivet by a footman the night before, and the lamp beneath it was lit by a tap of his gloved fingertip against the wick, which obediently blossomed into a small steady flame. He measured black tea into the pot with the care of a chemist. He let it steep for four minutes by the mantel clock, poured a cup, and carried it to the desk, where the morning's reports waited in four neat stacks beneath a brass paperweight shaped like a sunburst.

Then, as he did every day, he set the cup down at his elbow and did not touch it again until it had gone cold.

Dorian called it a ritual, and had once suggested it was the nearest thing the Grand Duke of Vandermere had to a prayer. Soren had never found an answer to that observation that did not sound like an admission, and so he had stopped responding to it. The truth, which he would not have shared with a living soul, was simpler and more embarrassing: his mother had always made him a cup of tea on the mornings of his lessons, and she had always forgotten it was there until it was cold. After she died, he had discovered that the only way he could stand to drink tea at all was to let it reach the temperature of her forgetting.

The reports were what he had come to expect. The Frost Coast fisheries had requested a further extension of their grain subsidy. The Prairie governors were complaining about the new rail tariffs, with the weary politeness of men who had decided to complain in writing before they decided to do something more drastic. A mine collapse in the Hollows had killed eleven, and the Colliery Board's inquiry, which ran to four pages, had managed to assign the blame to every party except the Board. He read each page twice, made notes in the margin in a small, upright hand, and felt, as he always felt at this hour, a vast and quiet weariness settle on him like snow on a roof.

It was a comfortable weariness. He had worn it for so long that he no longer felt it as a weight.

…

The Emperor's bedchamber smelled of camphor and boiled barley and the sweet rotten undertone of a body that was giving up on itself. Augustin Aldridge lay propped against a bank of pillows in the great carved bed, with a woolen shawl around his shoulders and a basin on the quilt beside his hand. Two doctors hovered at the foot of the bed with their hands folded, like undertakers waiting politely for the guest of honor to finish dying.

Soren dismissed them with a glance, and they went.

"Father," he said. "I didn't expect to find you awake at this hour."

"I am always awake at this hour." The Emperor's voice was a dry rustle, but his eyes, the same pale gold as his son's, held a flicker of their old sharpness. "It's the one advantage of having so little time left. One does not waste it on sleep."

A coughing fit seized him then, and Soren stood at the bedside with his hands clasped behind his back and watched his father's thin frame convulse beneath the quilt. He did not look away, because looking away would have been a kind of cowardice, but he kept his face smooth, as he had been taught. When the spasm passed, the old man spat into the basin and lay back gasping, and the napkin he pressed to his lips came away streaked with gray.

"The physicians say I have until spring," Augustin said, when he could speak. "I think they are being optimistic, since it makes the fees easier to collect. Come closer, my boy, and listen to me, because I haven't the breath to say this twice."

Soren came closer.

"You will marry Delphine Sterling before midwinter," said his father. "I want it done while I can still sit in the Cathedral and see it. The Council wants it, her father wants it, and the realm needs a settled succession, so I would take it as a kindness if you did not make me argue the point."

It was not a request, and they both knew it. Soren looked at the weak hand lying on the quilt, with its swollen knuckles and the signet ring hanging loose on the finger, and he understood that his father had already spent his strength on this sentence. He thought of a dozen answers, some of them bitter and one of them nearly honest, and he discarded each in turn.

"I understand," he said at last.

"Do you truly?" The old man's gaze lingered on his face with something that might have been regret. "You have always been very good at understanding, Soren. It is the thing I admire most in you, and the thing I have most to answer for."

Before Soren could ask what he meant, the door opened, and the Emperor's face closed like a shutter.

…

Harlan Sterling had a way of entering a room that made it seem as though the room had been waiting for him. The Chancellor of the Dominion was a lean, silver-haired man of fifty-eight, with a patient smile and a voice as smooth and warm as buttered toast, and he carried a leather folio tucked under one arm as lightly as another man might carry a newspaper. Everyone at court agreed that he was the most courteous person in the Dominion. Soren had noticed years ago that no one had ever been able to say precisely when he had last been refused.

"Your Imperial Majesty, Your Grace, good morning to you both." The Chancellor bowed to each in turn, a degree deeper to the bed than to the son. "Forgive the intrusion at this hour. I wouldn't have troubled you, but the Council meets on Thursday, and I wished to place the Purity Bill in your hands before then."

He drew a bound document from the folio and laid it on the end of the bed. The cover was stamped with the Dominion's sunburst in gilt, and below it, in elegant script, the words An Act to Strengthen and Extend the Quarantine Provisions Respecting Persons of Blighted Descent. Soren recognized the shape of it before he had read a line, as one recognizes a trap by the way the grass has been combed over it.

"It tightens the existing Acts, in the interest of public health," Sterling said mildly. "Registration of all Blighted households, an extension of the Wards to cover the northern provinces, and a provision allowing the Crown to hold the property of Blighted persons in trust during any period of quarantine. It is a prudent measure, Your Grace. The Gray Cough spreads, and we cannot afford sentiment."

"The Gray Cough has been spreading in the Hollows for three hundred years," Soren said. "I wonder that it takes us so long to discover it."

"We discover it a little more each year." The Chancellor's smile did not alter. "Which brings me to the other matter I wished to mention. I understand the new tutor for Her Highness arrived last evening."

"She arrived last night, on the evening train from the Hollows."

"I am pleased. She was chosen with great care." Sterling gathered up his folio. "One does not trust a young princess to just anyone, particularly one with Her Highness's delicate constitution."

Soren turned his head slowly and looked at him. "Chosen by whom?"

"By people who care about Lila," said the Chancellor gently, and bowed himself out of the room.

…

The Observation Gallery was a long, glass-walled corridor above the east wing, built a century ago so that a fussy Empress might watch her children at their lessons without being seen. The floor of the schoolroom lay forty feet below, visible through a pane of one-way glass in the gallery floor, and the sound drifted up through brass speaking grilles with a faint metallic edge, as though the people below were talking inside a tin cup.

Soren had not come here in years. He told himself he was doing so now out of due diligence, which was true, and that he would stay for no longer than ten minutes, which was the first of several things he told himself that morning that turned out to be false.

The schoolroom had been arranged in the manner of every previous tutor's. A walnut desk stood at the front, a blackboard and a globe sat behind it, and the child's little table had been placed at precisely the correct distance. He had seen four tutors take their places there in the last two years, each of them a gentle, well-bred person with excellent references. Each of them had lasted a few weeks, and each had left with a pale face and a sudden family obligation in another city.

He expected the Blighted girl to be frightened. He had made a study of the way people behaved when they were afraid, and he knew that a girl from the Hollows, arriving alone in a house that despised her, would fall back on stiffness or sullenness or a brittle imitation of the manners of her betters. He was prepared to feel a certain pity, which he would suppress.

She did none of these things.

She came into the schoolroom with a small potted plant in her arms, a plain clay pot with a few green leaves just breaking the soil, and she walked straight past the desk without looking at it. She stopped in the middle of the floor, in front of Lila's chair, where the Princess sat as rigid as a candle, and then she did something that no tutor had ever done. She sat down on the bare floorboards in her patched brown skirt, tucking her legs to one side, so that her eyes were level with the child's.

"I thought we might begin with something other than the Dominion's exports," she said, and her voice rose clearly through the brass grilles, warm and dry and a little amused. "I've brought you a present, although I should warn you that it needs a good deal of work."

Lila stared at the pot. Tamsin set it on the floor between them, with the stern solemnity of a diplomat laying down a treaty.

"This is a pot of earth," she said. "Inside the earth is a seed, which I planted last night, and which has not yet decided whether it wants to be anything at all. I'd like to ask you a question, and you may take as long as you like to answer, because I've never heard of a wrong answer to this one. What do you think a seed needs most?"

The silence stretched. In the gallery above, Soren found that he had stopped breathing.

"Water," said Lila, so quietly that the speaking grille barely caught it.

"That's a very good answer, and I'd say it was nearly right." Tamsin tilted her head. "Is there anything else it needs?"

"It needs light as well."

"Also very good. Anything else at all?"

The child hesitated, and her small fingers crept toward the rim of the pot, then drew back as if burned. "Someone who will not mind," she said, in a voice so faint that Soren leaned forward until his forehead touched the glass. "Someone who doesn't mind if it grows."

The tutor did not speak for a moment. When she did, her voice was gentler than before, and it carried a note that Soren could not name.

"Yes," said Tamsin. "I believe that's what it needs most of all."

…

He stayed for forty minutes.

He told himself afterward that he had been observing, as any careful guardian would, and that he had been looking for evidence of improper influence. In reality he watched a Hollow girl in a mended skirt teach his sister to tell the difference between a seedling and a weed by feeling the stem between her fingertips, and he watched Lila's mouth twitch toward something that was almost a smile. At one point the child asked a question about the roots, and Tamsin took down a book from her satchel and opened it across her knees, and Soren saw the title stamped on its cracked cloth cover.

A Field Guide to the Botany of the Silverwater Valley.

He felt a quick, hot prickle of recognition, followed immediately by irritation. It was a banned book. Its author had been struck from the rolls of the Royal Botanical Society forty years ago, and every copy in the Dominion's libraries had been removed and pulped, but his mother had kept one in the drawer of her writing desk, wrapped in a silk scarf. She had read passages of it aloud to him when he was small, in a low voice, in the evenings when his father was away, and he had never in his life admitted to anyone that he knew it by heart.

That a Blighted girl from the Hollows should walk into his house carrying that particular book was a coincidence he did not like. It was as though she had reached into a locked drawer and taken out something warm.

"You've been watching the tutor for twenty minutes," said a voice behind him.

Soren did not turn. He knew the lazy baritone, the faint creak of leather boots, and the tone of suppressed delight that went with them. Captain Dorian Pike leaned against the gallery wall with his arms crossed and a cup of coffee in one hand, his uniform jacket unbuttoned at the collar in a way that would have caused a lesser officer to be reprimanded.

"I am evaluating a threat," Soren said.

"Of course you are." Dorian took a thoughtful sip of coffee and studied the scene below. "I've known you for fifteen years, and in my professional experience, a threat doesn't usually get that particular expression."

"Which expression do you mean?"

"The one you had when you were nine and found out the Cathedral library had a secret door." Dorian's grin was open and entirely unrepentant. "I'm just saying that if she's a danger to the realm, Your Grace, she's a remarkably well-read one."

Soren looked down through the glass at the crown of Tamsin Reed's head, with its coil of brown-red hair, and at the child beside her, who had just laid her small hand flat on the soil in the pot. A single green shoot, no taller than a fingernail, was lifting its curled head out of the earth between them. Tamsin stared at it for half a second with an expression of alarm, and then she picked up the pot and moved it casually behind her skirt.

Soren saw it all, and he understood nothing, and he found that he wanted very much to understand.

"Bring Miss Reed to my study tomorrow at nine o'clock," he said to Dorian, in the cool tone he used for orders that left no room for commentary. "I intend to examine her myself."