THE BETROTHED

The Morning Room at Vandermere Hall faced east, so that the first light of the day came through its tall windows like a gift, and Soren had not eaten breakfast there since the spring his mother died.

He had no explanation for why he had chosen it now, other than a vague feeling that the long dining hall would have made the meeting into an audience and his study would have made it into an interrogation. The Morning Room was neither of those. It had pale yellow walls, a round table spread with a white cloth, and a hearth in which a small fire burned cheerfully, as if nothing in the world had ever gone wrong in it. A footman set down a pot of coffee, a dish of eggs, and a rack of toast, and retreated so quickly that he almost trod on his own heels.

She arrived five minutes early, which he took as a sign of either nerves or contempt, and which he discovered, on watching her cross the carpet, to be neither. She was simply the sort of person who preferred to be waiting for others than to have them waiting for her. She wore the same brown dress and the same gray ribbon, and she stopped just inside the doorway to look at the room with the unhurried attention of a naturalist entering a new habitat.

"You wished to see me, Your Grace," she said.

"I wished to give you breakfast, Miss Reed. It is possible to do both." He indicated the chair across from him. "Please sit down and make yourself comfortable."

She sat, and a small silence passed between them, in which the clock on the mantel ticked and a thrush on the windowsill began to sing. He had decided in the night what he would ask her, and he had rehearsed the question so many times that it had worn smooth, and yet now that she was here, with the morning light picking out the red in her hair and the pale branching scar at her throat, he found it hard to begin.

"The song you sang to my sister last night," he said at last. "I did not recognize it."

"It's a Hollows lullaby." She poured coffee into his cup, without being asked, and then into her own. "Every mother on Marrow Creek sings it, and I imagine that every mother in the Hollows has her own version. It doesn't have a title, as far as I know, and it isn't written down anywhere, since nobody there is encouraged to write things down."

"It seemed to calm her."

"It generally does." She added milk to her coffee and stirred it with great deliberation. "I hope that's not forbidden, Your Grace. I looked in the rules for Blighted staff and didn't find any provision on lullabies, but I admit I may have missed a schedule."

The corner of his mouth tugged against his will. "It is not forbidden," he said. "I only wished to know what it was."

"Then you know." She raised her eyes to his. "Is there anything else, or shall I eat my eggs before they cool?"

He found that he could not tell her what he actually wanted to ask, which was whether she had any idea that she had sung the song in a voice that was exactly the pitch and shade of one he had not heard in eight years. He looked at the cold toast on his plate instead, and said that she should eat, and she did. The conversation that followed was brief and almost entirely about the Princess's progress with the calendula. When she had gone, he sat for a long time looking at the empty chair.

…

The Council of the Dominion met in a chamber the color of old ivory, under a ceiling painted with the sun rising over a field of wheat. Eighteen lords sat around a horseshoe table of black walnut, with their secretaries behind them like rows of crows, and the air smelled of snuff and pomade and the faint metallic tang of too many Gilded in too small a room. A hundred years ago, so the story ran, the lords could be seen glowing faintly in the dimness of the winter afternoons. Soren had never seen it. Their eyes were gold and bright, but the soft aureole around their hands had faded generations ago, and no one remarked on it.

He took the chair at the head of the table in his father's absence and listened while the Chancellor presented the Purity Bill.

Harlan Sterling did it beautifully. He rose with a few notes in his hand and spoke without once looking at them, in the warm unhurried voice of a family physician explaining a regrettable but necessary operation. He cited the rising incidence of the Gray Cough in the northern towns. He lamented the strain on the Wards. He observed that the Dominion's generosity toward its Blighted subjects had been abused by those who would exploit it, and that the time had come for clear and compassionate firmness. When he sat down, a murmur of agreement ran around the horseshoe like wind through a field of barley.

"I move that the Bill be put to the vote at once," said Lord Ashcombe, a pink and white gentleman from the Prairie Provinces who had never in his life been known to read a document before signing it.

"I second it," said another.

Soren folded his gloved hands on the table and looked down the long polished surface at the Chancellor. Sterling returned the glance with an expression of benign inquiry, like a man waiting for a tardy child to remember his lines.

"Before we vote," Soren said, "I should like to remind the Council of Standing Order Fourteen, which requires that any measure affecting the property of the subject be circulated in full to the provincial governors for thirty days. I do not see that the Bill has been so circulated."

"It is a matter of urgency, Your Grace," the Chancellor said gently. "The governors have been consulted informally."

"Informal consultation does not satisfy a standing order, Chancellor. The Order was passed in the reign of my grandfather precisely to prevent measures of this kind from being rushed. If the Council wishes to suspend it, there will have to be a motion to that effect, and a second, and a debate on the motion, and I believe we shall find that a debate on whether to suspend the Order can be made to last until Thursday week."

A pause fell. Around the table, eighteen faces turned toward him with identical looks of mild alarm. One of the secretaries dropped a pen.

"The Frost Duke is stalling," murmured someone to his neighbor, quite audibly, in the tone of a man reporting a comet.

"I am applying procedure," said Soren, who had never in his life been accused of anything else. "The vote will be postponed until the governors have had an opportunity to respond."

He watched the Chancellor's face as the motion carried. Sterling smiled, inclined his head, and gathered his papers with perfect good grace. Only the faintest narrowing at the corners of his eyes showed that he had registered the move and would remember it, and Soren found that he was gripping the arm of his chair so hard that the leather creaked.

…

Delphine was waiting for him in the long gallery when the Council rose.

She stood by one of the tall windows with the winter light behind her, in a gown of emerald silk so exactly the color of her father's ledger binding that he suspected the coincidence was deliberate. Her platinum hair was dressed high in a coil of braids threaded with pearls, and she had a small, perfect, patient smile, the one she wore at the opera and at funerals. She was twenty-six and very beautiful, and she had been taught from the age of six that she was going to be an empress. She wore the knowledge like a diamond necklace, lightly and without apology.

"Soren," she said, extending a gloved hand. "You looked magnificent in there. I do so enjoy watching you humiliate my father in procedural terms. It is the only time I ever see him think."

"Delphine, this is a pleasant surprise." He took the hand and bowed over it, exactly as far as protocol required. "You are well, I hope."

"I am splendid. I have just come from the Ladies' League, where we have been planning the Founders' Gala." She slipped her arm through his, and he walked beside her without resistance, as one walks beside a river. "It will be held here at Vandermere in three weeks' time, and I intend that it shall be the finest in a generation. Your father is too ill to host, so I thought it would be a kindness if I did it for him. The entire court will be present, and half the Prairie delegation, and the Frost Coast lords. Think of it as a rehearsal for the wedding."

"You have been busy."

"I have been efficient. It's quite a different quality." She tilted her head up to study him, and her eyes, large and long-lashed and the color of heated honey, searched his face as if looking for a specific entry in a ledger. "You are not pleased."

"I am considering the expense."

"You are always considering the expense." She laughed lightly. "That is why I love you, you know, because you are the only man at court who thinks about the cost of things. The rest of them only think about the credit."

She said love in the same tone she used for efficient, and he noted it with the part of his mind that observed such things. As they passed beneath a gas bracket, she lifted a handkerchief to her eye and touched it quickly beneath the lashes, and he caught a glimpse of a small silver bottle in her other hand, slipped into her sleeve before he could be sure of it. When she lowered the handkerchief, her gaze was exactly as bright as before.

"A mote of dust," she said, catching his glance. "The gas is so drying in winter."

He said nothing. He had learned long ago that it was easier to remember than to challenge.

…

They turned the corner by the Rose Stair, and there she was.

Tamsin was coming down the staircase with a basket of calendula blossoms in the crook of her arm and a book tucked under the other, moving briskly in the manner of someone with an errand and no time for trouble. When she saw the Duke and his betrothed in the gallery below, she halted on the landing, then continued down at precisely the same pace. She stepped aside at the foot of the stairs to let them pass, lowering her eyes in the correct and customary manner.

Delphine stopped walking and turned her head slowly toward the stairs.

"Why, it's the little tutor," she said, in a voice like warm milk. She released Soren's arm and moved forward to inspect the girl, circling her with the pleasant interest of a woman choosing a ham. "Miss Reed, is it not? I have heard so much about you from dear Nurse Crowe. I hope you are finding Vandermere comfortable."

"Very comfortable, my lady, thank you," said Tamsin.

"What a brave little dress." Delphine fingered the patched elbow lightly between thumb and forefinger, as if checking the quality of a stuffed toy. "Did it come with the position, or did you bring it from home? I ask because I should hate to think the Crown was paying you so little that you had to make do with remnants. We pay our tutors nearly sixty dollars a week, you know. It would be a pity if you were wasting it on ribbon."

"The dress is my own, my lady, and I'm fond of it," Tamsin replied pleasantly. "I find that wool outlasts silk in the Hollows, and as for the ribbon, I was assured it was compulsory. I did not imagine that anyone at court would grudge me the chance to match."

A small silence settled over the gallery. Soren, standing with his back to a column, saw the corner of Delphine's smile freeze and then thaw again, and he watched something move behind her golden eyes, something quick and shrewd and slightly frightened. He could not tell which of the two women was the more dangerous. He knew only that he had never before seen anyone fail to be crushed by Delphine Sterling's sweetness, and that the sight gave him a warm and wholly inappropriate sense of satisfaction.

"How very amusing you are," said Delphine, at last. "I do hope you will stay amusing. It would be such a shame if the winter proved too long for you."

"I'm told the winters are very bracing in Highmark, my lady," said Tamsin. "I expect I shall manage."

She curtsied, a precise and polite dip, and went on up the corridor, with her back straight and her basket of marigolds glowing like a handful of small suns in the gloom. Delphine watched her go with her head tilted and a small smile on her lips, but the hand that rested on Soren's arm was trembling, very slightly, and her breath came fast.

…

That evening he stood alone in the portrait gallery with a candle in his hand.

His mother's likeness hung at the far end, between a window and a marble bust of the first Emperor. It was a large oil painting, done in the year of her coronation, and showed a slender dark-haired woman in a pale gold gown, seated on a stone bench in a garden. She was not smiling. She had the faintly wary expression of a woman who has been told to hold still and who intends to wait until the painter is not looking before she moves. Her eyes were gold like his own, but the painter had given them a depth of warmth that Soren had never seen in any other portrait of a Gilded queen, as though he had been unable to prevent himself from painting what he saw.

She had died in the autumn of his twentieth year.

He remembered the last evening perfectly, because he had played it over so many times. Her bedchamber, with the shutters closed and the doctor's black bag on the dresser. A little brown bottle on the table by her pillow. Dr. Pell's soft voice, saying something about the gradual weakening of her constitution. His mother's hand, thin and cool, taking the glass from the nurse, and her face turning toward him as she drank, with an expression he had never been able to read. She had looked at him as though she were memorizing him, and then she had smiled, and said in a low voice that the cup was bitter.

You are so like your father, Soren, she said. You must try not to be.

She had not spoken again. By morning the bell was tolling from the Cathedral.

He stood in front of the portrait for a long time, with the candle guttering in his gloved fist, and he did not ask himself what she had meant, because he had been refusing to ask for eight years.

"Resigned, frightened, or paid to," said Dorian, behind him, in a tone so quiet that Soren might have imagined it. "That's what I found out about the four tutors, in case you were going to ask. I went through the files and spoke to a few of the footmen. Take your pick, Your Grace, because it looks as though every one of them might have been all three."

"Paid to what?"

"To leave, I think. One of them had a new house in Marlowe Square within the month, which seems a remarkable coincidence on a tutor's salary." Dorian stepped into the candlelight, his boots silent on the parquet, and his usual levity had dropped away. "Someone does not want that child to have a teacher. And now someone has sent her one who does not scare easily. I would very much like to know why."

"So would I," said Soren.

…

It was past midnight when he found himself outside his sister's room.

He had not decided to go there. His feet had simply carried him along the corridor, as they sometimes did in the small hours, and the door stood slightly ajar, with a thread of lamplight lying across the floorboards. He pushed it open without sound. Nurse Crowe was asleep in the armchair by the fire, with her chin on her chest and her cap askew. The great canopy bed stood in the shadows beyond.

Lila slept on her side with the quilt pulled up to her chin, her black hair spread over the pillow and her breathing slow and even. She looked smaller than she ever did in daylight. One hand lay outside the covers, loosely curled, and he saw that it held something: a little bag of pale cloth, no bigger than a walnut, tied with a bit of gray ribbon, which she gripped with the fierce absent tenacity of a child holding on to a dream.

He crossed the room on silent feet and bent over the bed. Very gently, so as not to wake her, he lifted the sachet from her fingers and held it to his face.

It smelled of chamomile and wild mint.

For a moment the room went away. He was nine years old again, lying in the window seat of the morning room with his head in his mother's lap, and the afternoon sun was warm on his hair. She was telling him a story about a girl who had followed a stream to its source, and the smell of the pressed flowers in her sleeve was all around him, sweet and green and faintly bitter, like summer in a cup. Nobody had worn that scent in Vandermere Hall since the day she died. He had searched for it once, as a young man, in the perfumers' shops of Highmark, and had found nothing.

He stood in the dark of his sister's bedroom with a scrap of cloth held to his face, and for the first time in eight years, Soren Aldridge could not remember how to breathe.