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But there was a sting in my heart all the same, and I could not stop myself looking to the far end of the hall, to the place where Drystan had stood with his advisors, half expecting him to appear even now and end the charade in the space of a breath, so that I might cross the room and fall into his arms and let him tell them all himself who I really was.

He was not there. And still the triumph of it ran through me like warm wine, the sheer impossible fact of walking in through the front. The room was full now, a stark reversal of every hour I had spent in this palace alone or hunted or hidden, and the press of bodies and the noise and the hundred measuring glances set every instinct I had on edge. Selene had told me to read the room. I could not have stopped myself, but I read it the way the fox read a field for hawks, and I had to breathe and steady myself so the fox would not rise in me and pull me back into the raging water.

So I fixed on what I could see and smell and touch, the tangible things that kept me Lady Liora of House Marenne, and what Lady Liora saw was a sea of ornament. The court wore its wealth on its back, the men in heavy brocade stiff with gold thread, in deep dyed velvets no one could have moved freely in, layered and trimmed and crusted with stones at the cuff and the collar, every surface worked until the cloth was less a garment than a boast. Jewels at the throat, on every finger, sewn into the seams. It was beautiful and it was loud, and it told me, before a single one of them opened his mouth, what these people believed mattered.

They came to me soon enough, the men, because a new woman from a house no one remembered was the most interesting thing in the room, and they drifted over to take my measure. And they showed me what they were without meaning to, the way men do when they believe nothing they do will cost them, when they think you cannot feel their glances wandering down your spine.

I was passed through a flurry of them, name and rank and pretended interest. One, a Lord Hessen, attached himself early and kept circling back, throwing me looks that undressed me where I stood, and he held a cup a servant kept filling and never once looked at the boy who filled it, as though the wine arrived by the grace of his own importance. A young heir told me at length about his horses and his three sets of rooms in three cities, and when a serving woman passed too near he put a hand out to move her aside by the shoulder, the way you move a chair. An older man jewelled at every finger, his coat worth more than my village had seen in a generation, looked me over the way Hessen looked at the wine, as a thing arriving for his use, and smiled and said a temple girl must find the court a great deal more diverting than prayer, and let the word girl sit just long enough to be a slight.

I smiled at all of them. I held the still place under the storm and I gave them the right words in the right order, and not one of them saw the fox reading them for what they were, men whose wealth had taught them they need not trouble to be anything good, because their rank would supply the lack. Rank, I was learning, did not breed grace. They wore their worth the way the jewelled man wore his rings, as proof of the one thing they did not otherwise possess. I found myself wondering how Drystan had grown so unlike the men who surrounded him.

It was in the middle of all that shallowness that I first saw him, though his name came to me later.

There was a knot of men near the windows, set a little apart, and they spoke a different language entirely with their bodies and their dress.

No brocade. No gold. No stones. They wore close-tailored silver cut for a body that worked, with a trim of plain grey and a single small pendant at the throat, and I knew the make of it at once, because I had read of it. That spare unembellished silver was the dress of the emperor’s own vanguard, the oldest and most honoured fighting order in the annals, men whose plainness was not poverty but a discipline, a refusal of ornament as old as the empire itself. To wear no jewels in that company was the highest mark there was. And the court sneered at them. I stood in a hall of men weighed down with stones who held the empire’s finest in contempt for the crime of carrying nothing, and I understood, in that moment, exactly how decadent a place I had walked into.

In that sea of worked and crusted cloth the silver men stood like still water. The spareness of them called to mind the temple that raised me, where the holiest rooms held the least, where the beauty came from being stripped of everything that was not essential, down to the bare purpose of the place. To serve.

The court flowed around them and did not quite include them, and when the moneyed men’s eyes touched that group they curled. I could feel the lesser men’s unease, not only at the sheer physical presence of the group but at the fact that these men simply were what the others only performed.

“The emperor’s hounds,” the jewelled man said, following my glance, not troubling to lower his voice. “His Veilborn. Fine swords, if one needs a throat cut. Beyond that—” A small gesture, dismissing them, men who owned nothing, who lived on the emperor’s bread, who held no estate and no fortune and therefore, in the only arithmetic this hall respected, no standing at all. “One does not invite them, and yet one must tolerate them. The emperor is sentimental about his dogs.”

I might have thought no more of them. But just then a server came through with a tray too heavy for her, a girl younger than I had been at the temple, and the tray tipped, and the cups went over, and wine spread dark across the pale floor at the feet of the great men.

Lord Hessen stepped back from it with a sound of disgust and said something cutting about the quality of the staff, and the heir laughed, and the girl went down on her knees to gather the cups with her hands shaking, and the great men did nothing but step away from the mess as though it might dirty them.

And I knew that posture from the inside. A girl on her knees on a hard floor, small and terrified, ringed by powerful people who looked at her trouble and felt only annoyance, who would not stoop to help because she did not matter to them and the whole machinery of the place agreed that she did not. That had been me, days before, at a gate, begging a bored man to carry word to an emperor, made small in front of the powerful while not one soul among them moved to help. I felt it in my own knees, watching her, and the impulse to go to her rose in me before I could think, and I started forward.

One of the silver men reached her first.

He crossed the floor and crouched down beside her without ceremony, as though he had not noticed he was doing anything at all. I saw him fully, there in the bright fall of the high windows, fair-haired and golden and easy in his body where the jewelled men stood stiff in their cloth, the best-made man in the room. He smiled at the girl, a warm steadying smile that stopped her shaking, and helped her gather the cups, and when a steward came hurrying to scold her he turned the scolding aside with a few quiet words, took the fault onto the weight of the tray and the loading of it, so the girl rose with her tray and her place both intact and went on her way. Then he stood, and that was the end of it.

No one who mattered had been watching. The girl could do nothing for him. There was no advantage in that whole bright hall to a man of no fortune kneeling on a wet floor for a serving girl no one would miss. He had seen someone made small beneath him and gone down to her, and done the thing that not one person of rank in that room, and not one guard at a gate, had been willing to do.

In a hall full of men performing their worth, he had performed nothing. He had been good where being good cost him and gained him nothing. And the fox in me, that read every field for the thing that would hurt it, looked at this golden stranger in the full light of the windows and found the one word I had stopped believing in.

Safe.

I had felt it only once before. Not here, not from any face I could name, but in the dark, in a cut field, a wounded creature gathered up into arms I never saw, against a warmth with no shape and a low voice in the black and a scent of leather and clean soap. I had felt safe like that once, with a man I could not picture, in a night I could barely remember. And now, in a bright loud hall, a different man, seen clear and whole and golden in the daylight, a man I had never laid eyes on in my life, opened the same door in me and the same word came through it.

I did not understand it. The whole day had taught me that nothing here was safe, that Selene was right, that the smiles were graves. And yet something in me had gone quiet looking at him, the quiet of that remembered dark, and I had no idea why a stranger should call it up.

For a moment he glanced up, and across the crowded room his eyes found mine, mild and steady, and he inclined his head, the smallest courtesy, the same he would have given anyone, asking nothing, pressing nothing. Then he looked away.

The jewelled man made a small disgusted sound. “You see. No sense of his place at all.”

“No,” I said. “I see.”

I did not say what I saw. He could not have understood it, and I could not have put it into words, so I smiled politely and turned the talk back to his rings, and he took my smile for agreement with his contempt and was flattered, and forgot the man by the window. I let him, because Selene’s voice was in my head, curious not suspicious, trust no one, and because the last thing the new Marenne girl could afford was to be caught watching one of the emperor’s despised hounds as though he were the only untarnished thing in the room.

* * *

I held my composure for three hours, and it broke only once, nearly.

A woman did it. Selene had warned me that if anyone managed it, it would be a woman, though she had not guessed which. This one did not belong to the court at all. She stood at its centre like a blade left on a banquet table, a tall spare woman in the colours of a house I did not know, northern colours, a hard austere grey-and-white that owed nothing to the gold around her, and the court arranged itself around her the way a pack arranges itself around a wolf, everyone a little afraid. The minister’s wife gave me her name behind her fan, in the hushed voice people use for weather that might turn: The Envoy Vasstent. Sent down from the empress in the north to see a certain matter through, and not best pleased, by all accounts, at how slowly the certain matter was proving.

I did not understand the whole of it then. I understood only that she was powerful in a way that had nothing to do with this court’s gold, that her business here was the emperor’s business, and that when her pale northern eyes found me across the room they sharpened, the way a hawk sharpens on movement in the grass.