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“Which is the only reason I am attending,” said my aunt. “You know there will be trolls.”
“Trolls are clever creatures in their own way, Tilly. This unreasoning prejudice serves you ill.”
Bee grabbed my sleeve and tweaked it to get my attention. With a lift of her chin, she indicated the twilit streets beyond the ice-rimed panes. An unmarked black coach rumbled down the west side of the square, pulled by four horses as pale as cream. As it passed down the street, each lamp it passed flickered and faded and, once the conveyance had rolled on, flared back into life. The coach turned the corner left onto our street, its journey traced by the dying and rising of light.
The lamp standing beside the park gate dimmed to a sullen shell of orange-red. The coach halted in front of our house. The coachman swung down to hold the reins of the two lead horses. Their breath rose out of their nostrils like smoke. A footman, dressed in a heavy black flared coat, climbed down from the brace between the back wheels, bumped out a pair of steps from the undercarriage, and opened the coach’s door.
Bee squeezed my fingers so hard I actually grunted in pain. In a swirl of flared fashionable jacket so saturated a red you could faintly discern its color against the dusk, a personage descended from the coach, leaning on a gilded cane, and walked up the front steps. From this angle, we could not see him arrive at the front door, located under cover of the stoop and concealed by the entry pillars. Three sharp knocks rapped the heavy door, delivered by a blunt instrument. The entire house, all four stories and set back, shuddered like a cornered animal.
“I don’t like this,” Bee muttered in her serious voice, nothing like the blabbering light-minded aether-head she often pretended to be. “It reminds me of a dream I had last month. Twilight brings bad tidings….” She released my hand.
I shook out the ache in my fingers. “Ah! That really hurt!”
“We’ve got to hide,” she said in an altered tone. She shoved away the blanket and pushed out from behind the curtain. “Hurry, Cat!”
The way she looked, with her entire body tense and a scared heat pouring off her, flooded me with cold fear. I slid off the window seat. My feet touched the chilly floor just as the front door below was opened, as though the opening door caused the floor’s exhalation of cold.
Evved could talk down his nose at anyone. “I’m sorry, maester, the family is out for the evening.”
The personage pushed past our steward without a word. Of course, I couldn’t see him, but I felt that presence enter the house in the same way your hair rises and your neck tingles before a storm. I felt it in the joints and eaves of the house, straining to protect us against a presence powerful enough to enter without an invitation.
“If we move fast…” Bee made a little humming noise, a buzzing through her teeth, and hurried to the open door, past the open journals. Shiffa had taken the Roman lies book.
From below rose voices.
“What manner of intrusion disturbs our evening?” demanded Uncle in the voice he used to dismiss the pretensions of social-climbing trolls. “We have not given you leave to enter. We are not at home.”
A male voice, reeking of mage House privilege, replied, “That is an odd sort of lie, because here you are.”
“As you can certainly see by our dress, we are in the act of departing the house for an evening engagement. Please be so good as to call tomorrow.”
We slithered out the open door into the passage that ran back from the wide first-floor landing. The door to Uncle’s office was closed, but the latch clicked down, pushed from inside. I shoved Bee behind me and dug deep for a concealing glamor as Shiffa emerged from the office. She walked right past us, past the full-length mirror in which our reflections clearly showed, to me, and halted at the railing beside the potted dwarf orange tree at the top of the grand staircase. She bent forward to observe what was going on in the entryway below.
The voice continued. “I hope I need not remind you to what manner of person you are speaking. I am here now, so you will attend me now. I will be done with my business and gone within the hour.”
“Fiery Shemesh!” cursed Uncle, his voice tingling with suppressed fury—and fear. “You’re from Four Moons House. A magister from the Diarisso lineage.”
A cold mage in our house! Behind Shiffa’s back, we skated soundlessly across to the foot of the upper stairs.
“Did you not get the message I was meant to arrive today?” His words and accent were cultured and elegant, yet his indignation soured them. It was almost enough to make my straight hair curl.
“We received no message, no warning.” The tight way Aunt Tilly choked out the words really frightened me. The house vibrated with sympathetic anger. “You can’t possibly still maintain you have a claim.”
“Indeed, we can and we do. The contract clearly states that Diarisso ownership extends until the twentieth birthday. Ownership reverts to the Hassi Barahal family only at sunset on the evening that begins the natal day, when the subject attains her legal majority.”
Bee tugged on my wrist, having more self-possession than I did. We set foot on the stairs, creeping toward the next floor.
“I believe the proper legal term is rei vindicatio,” he went on. “I am here to reclaim ownership of what you have been generously allowed to keep possession of.”
There was a man whose pretensions wanted slapping down! How he could make those words come out with such condescension was beyond my understanding. We kept climbing, working around the boards that creaked.
“You’ll have to come back tomorrow,” said Aunt even more briskly, “because she’s not here.”
We stopped, Bee and I. We just stopped, as though an unseen hand with fingers of ice had fastened itself on our shoulders and pulled us to a halt.
“I understand you may not be in charity with the terms of the settlement that were forced upon you thirteen years ago, but please do not attempt another bald-faced lie. I know she is in the house. In fact—”
I heard an even tread mounting the grand staircase. A chill mist exhaled from the surface of the mirror. Bee was ahead of me, farther up the stairs, so I braced myself, hoping my body would hide hers. For on the very first day I had come to live with Aunt and Uncle, Aunt had solemnly told me that I was to look out for my little cousin Beatrice, even though Bee was only two months younger than I was and already, at six, a complete hellhound with a temper just as bad as Uncle’s and a mean sting that she hid behind her honey face.
