SUPPER WITH THE EMPEROR

"I'm afraid I must decline," said Tamsin.

She had said it twice already, in different words, and she had the unhappy sense that the Grand Duke of Vandermere was not hearing either version. They stood in the long corridor outside the schoolroom, where the afternoon light fell through the tall windows in dusty gold bars, and he had delivered his invitation with the grave courtesy of a man reading out a treaty. She noticed that he wore his gloves, as always, and that he stood a little farther from her than manners required, as though keeping a careful distance from a lit fuse.

"I was not aware that it was a question, Miss Reed."

"It's a question the moment I'm able to answer it. A Blighted employee at the Emperor's private table? You'll get me killed, Your Grace, and I say that without exaggeration." She shifted the stack of copybooks in her arms. "There are at least five lords in this house who would be delighted to have me arrested for impertinence, and I can think of no more efficient way to give them what they want than to sit down beside His Majesty and pass the salt."

"No one will arrest you at my father's table."

"They'll arrest me on the way back from it."

He regarded her for a moment with his head slightly tilted. His eyes were very pale in the dim light, and they rested on her left hand, which lay curled around the copybooks, with a peculiar intentness that she did not understand. The burn was gone, and it had left not so much as a pink mark, and yet he looked at the hand as though he expected it to tell him something.

"I have never met a person," he said, "who negotiated so strenuously to avoid a free dinner."

"I have never met a person who was invited to one by the man who is supposed to enforce the rules that forbid it." Her voice came out sharper than she meant. She drew a breath and tried again. "I'm grateful, Your Grace, for what you did in the kitchen. I should have said so before now. I'm not certain why you did it, and I'm not certain I'd like the answer, but it was a kindness, and I'm in your debt."

Something shifted in his face, so quickly that she could not name it. "You owe me nothing," he said. "As for the supper, I am afraid that I did not ask you on my own behalf. Lila asked for you."

Tamsin opened her mouth to reply and found that she had nothing to say.

"She came to me this morning," Soren went on, in the same even tone. "She told me that she has never had anyone to sit beside at a meal, and that she should like it if her tutor would come, since she would not feel so frightened with a friend at the table. I told her that I would inquire. She informed me that inquiring was what people did when they intended to say no." A corner of his mouth moved. "I find that I cannot argue with a child who has formed such a precise view of my character."

Tamsin looked down at the copybooks. She counted the ink stains on the top one, five, six, seven, and she thought of the small white face at the window on the first night, and of the clover on the quilt, and of the laugh that had rung up into the glass roof like a bell.

"At what time should I come?" she said at last.

"The supper is at eight o'clock, and I will send a footman to bring you the dress."

"I have a dress."

"You have a patched brown dress that I have seen on six consecutive days." The corner of his mouth moved again, a little more. "I mean no offense by it. It is a very fine dress, and I understand that wool outlasts silk."

She stared at him, and then, to her own dismay, she laughed. It escaped her in a short surprised huff, and she pressed her lips together too late.

"You listen," she said, "far more carefully than you let on."

"It is my only talent," said the Grand Duke, and walked away down the corridor.

…

The footman brought a gown at seven.

It was a plain dark blue wool with a high collar and long sleeves, cut in the style of a governess's evening dress. It was not new, since there was a tiny mend at the cuff, but it was soft with careful washing, and it fit her better than any garment she had ever worn. She never learned whose it had been. She turned in front of the narrow mirror in her room and saw a stranger there, upright and slender, with her red-brown hair coiled neatly and her throat bare above the collar, and she tilted her chin and left the root-scar uncovered.

If I'm going to be stared at, she thought, I'll do it in a good dress.

The Emperor's private dining room lay in the oldest part of Vandermere, at the end of a corridor lined with faded tapestries. It was a long, narrow chamber with a coffered ceiling and a fire at either end, and a table of dark oak that could have seated thirty. Only four places were laid. The cloth was damask, the candlesticks were silver, and the plates were so thin and fine that she could see the shadow of her fingers through the rim. A footman in white gloves pulled out a chair near the foot. Lila, already seated on a high cushion, beamed at her across the width of the table and wriggled with excitement.

At the head, in a wheeled chair upholstered in dark red leather, sat the Emperor of the Meridian Dominion.

She had expected a grander figure. Augustin Aldridge looked like what he was, a sick old man wrapped in a shawl, with a rug over his knees and a tremor in one hand. His white hair was thin on his skull, and his skin hung loosely on the bones of his face. But his eyes were extraordinary. They were a deep, dark gold, almost amber, and they moved over her as she approached with a slow, patient intensity that made her feel that every secret she possessed had been laid out on the cloth in front of her.

"Miss Reed," he said. His voice was a rasp, but it carried. "You will forgive me if I do not rise. I am told that I am no longer permitted to do so without a physician's assistance."

"There is nothing to forgive, Your Majesty." She sank into a curtsy, careful of her borrowed hem. "I'm honored by your invitation."

"You are alarmed by it, which is more sensible. Sit down, child, and let us see if the soup is worth the fuss."

…

The meal progressed with the stately, awkward formality of a ritual that nobody had performed in years. A footman brought clear soup, then trout in butter, then a roast of lamb with a sauce of redcurrants. Tamsin ate carefully, using the forks in the order in which they had been laid, and watched the Emperor out of the corner of her eye. He ate almost nothing. He pushed the food around his plate with a trembling fork and sipped at a glass of barley water, and while he did so, he asked her questions.

They came at an unhurried pace, one at a time, each phrased so lightly that it might have been casual conversation. Where had she studied? What did she think of the botanical collection in the Conservatory? Was it true that the Hollows had a native willow that cured fevers, and how did the village women prepare it? She answered in plain, exact sentences, and noticed that his gaze never left her face. When she described the willow bark tea and the slow steeping of the inner bark, he nodded slowly, as though she were confirming something he had already known.

"And what," he asked, "would you say is the most dangerous plant in the Hollows?"

It was a trap, and it was also not a trap, and she took a moment to decide which was the greater risk.

"Whichever one is growing where someone has decided not to look," she said.

The old man's lips twitched. At the far end of the table, Soren, who had said nothing since the soup, set down his fork very precisely.

"That is a politician's answer," said the Emperor.

"It's a gardener's, Your Majesty. A weed in a hedgerow is only a weed, but the same plant in a pantry or a baby's cradle can be a poison. The danger is rarely in the plant itself. It's in the question of who put it there."

"Indeed, I think you are right." Augustin's amber gaze moved to his son, lingered for a moment, and returned to her. "I begin to see why the Chancellor was so insistent."

A cold feeling brushed the back of Tamsin's neck. Before she could ask what he meant, Lila, who had been fidgeting with her napkin throughout, burst out in a voice so excited that it cracked.

"Papa, we made a salve! We used lard and calendula petals, and Miss Reed let me do the pestle all by myself, and I made it lumpy, but it didn't matter because she said lumps are only evidence of enthusiasm!"

"Did she say that?" The Emperor's face softened astonishingly. "Then she is a wise woman."

"And we planted six seeds in the Winter Garden, and one of them has already come up, and Miss Reed says that in the spring we can put them in the beds by the south wall." The Princess was bouncing on her cushion. "And she says that the earth likes me, and I'm not to be afraid of it, and that there's a plant called horehound that tastes dreadful but cures coughs, and I'm going to make some, and..."

"Lila," murmured Soren, though without any real reproof.

"Let her talk, Soren." The Emperor lifted a trembling hand. "It has been a very long time since I heard a child chatter at this table. I had almost forgotten the sound."

Tamsin glanced down the table and found that the Grand Duke was looking at her. It was a brief, steady look, with nothing guarded in it, and it passed over her face as though he were trying to commit it to memory. Then his eyes dropped to his plate, and she was left with the strange impression that she had been watched all evening by someone who did not wish to be caught at it.

Each time she spoke, she felt it again, the swift gold glance across the candles, the immediate retreat. By the time the pudding came, she had stopped trying to pretend that she did not notice.

…

The dinner ended a little before ten. The footmen cleared the cloth, the fire burned down to a bed of coals, and the Emperor was wheeled by an attendant toward the door. Lila had fallen asleep with her head on her arms, and Soren was bending to lift her, with an unaffected gentleness that Tamsin watched in secret.

She rose when the old man's chair stopped beside her. She had thought that he would dismiss her with a nod, but instead he put out a thin hand and touched her sleeve, and when she bent, his voice dropped to a rasp so low that no one else in the room could have heard it.

"That song you sing to Lila at night," said the Emperor. "The one about the creek, and the green things."

Her blood turned to ice. "Your Majesty, I..."

"My late wife used to hum it."

The room went very quiet. A coal settled in the grate with a small crack. Tamsin stared into the old man's dark amber eyes and saw that they were wet, and that there was no accusation in them at all, only a vast and weary tenderness, as if he were looking at something very far away.

"She hummed it when she thought no one was listening," he went on. "In the garden, when she watered the lilies. In the nursery, when the children were small. She would never tell me where she learned it. I asked her once, and she laughed and said it was something her nurse had sung, and I let the matter drop, because I was a very great fool." His hand tightened on her sleeve. "I have not heard it in eight years, Miss Reed. I would have gone to my grave without hearing it again."

"Your Majesty," she whispered, "it's a Hollows song. There is no one in Highmark who has ever heard it."

"No," said Augustin Aldridge. "I should think not."

He let go. His attendant wheeled him out of the room, and the door closed behind him with a soft thud. She stood there in the lamplight with her heart hammering, and she did not see the Grand Duke, who stood motionless with his sleeping sister in his arms, looking from the door to her and back again with an expression of dawning, frightened understanding.

…

She did not sleep that night.

She lay on her narrow bed in the dark, with the dark blue dress folded on the chair and the hiss of the laundry boilers rising through the floor, and she turned the question over and over in her mind. The song was not written down. It had never been printed in any book, for the simple reason that nobody in Highmark would have wanted to print the songs of the Blighted. It had passed from mother to daughter along the banks of the creek for generations, and Granny had learned it from her own mother, and she from hers. Tamsin had sung it to Jonah on a thousand sleepless nights.

How could the Empress of the Meridian Dominion, a Gilded queen born to a great house, have hummed it in a garden?

She learned it from a nurse, Tamsin told herself. A Hollows nurse, perhaps, hired in her childhood, as plenty of families did before the Acts. It was a perfectly reasonable explanation. It accounted for everything. It did not account for the Emperor's eyes, or for the way Soren had stopped moving at the sound of her singing, or for the clover, or the sachet in a child's fist, or the laughing orange tree.

She stared at the ceiling until the window turned gray.

…

At seven she opened her door and nearly stepped on a card.

It lay on the threshold, propped against the sill, a stiff oblong of gilt-edged cream paper with an embossed border of wheat sheaves and a small perfumed ribbon. The scent was jasmine, heavy and sweet and faintly suffocating. She picked it up between two fingers, held it to the light from the passage window, and read the delicate copperplate inscription.

Lady Delphine Sterling requests the pleasure of the company of Miss Tamsin Reed at the Founders' Gala at Vandermere Hall, in the capacity of escort to Her Royal Highness Princess Lila.

Below the formal words, in a different hand, was a single handwritten line. I do hope you will come, since I should so like to see you in something besides brown. Yours affectionately, Delphine.

She read it once. She read it again. Her mind, which was a tidy and well-disciplined organ, set about its usual task of sorting the card into categories: an invitation, an obligation, a threat, a courtesy. It declined to decide between them. In her imagination, she saw a pair of honey-colored eyes under a coil of platinum braids, and a smile that rested lightly on the lips like a silk glove, and for a heartbeat she could feel the slim gloved fingers on her sleeve.

The smile glittered like the edge of a gilded knife.