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“I did manage to marry a prince,” Melody countered, and had to order herself to release the tension in her body, because this was no time to be wound like a spring, ready to attack. It would get her nowhere.
No matter how satisfying it might have been.
Madame Constantinople Dupree sniffed with pointed disdain. “A prince is but a man, Your Royal Highness. And it is not the men of society you need concern yourself with on your first day of social calls. You should be so lucky! Alas, it is the aristocratic women who will be coming to vet you today, I am afraid.”
“Are you?” Melody shrugged before she thought better of it, and tried to pull off a bit of a cringe at the end of it. “I am not afraid of a collection of silly women who speak of nothing but last night’s parties.”
“You should be,” Madame retorted with another sniff. “Believe me when I tell you that even if they have not sampled Prince Griffin’s legendary charm personally, there will be no reason whatsoever for them to go easy on you.”
“Save that I outrank them.”
In return to what she’d thought was a winning argument by any measure, Melody heard a light, brittle sort of laugh. It reminded her so much of the sort of sound she’d been letting out herself since her wedding that she was forced to take more notice than she might have otherwise.
“My dear child.” And she could hear things she didn’t want in the other woman’s voice, then. A seriousness. And an underlying bedrock of certainty. “Society’s most fearsome women are coming to pay their respects to a new member of the royal family. Which you should be aware means they would love nothing more than to pick clean your bones, slay you alive, and destroy your reputation. Preferably over a lovely cream tea, with a charming smile attached. Never, ever underestimate the ruthlessness of a woman who seemingly speaks of nothing. She is almost certainly deliberately hiding her power, and a hidden power is nearly always far more dangerous.”
Melody sat a bit straighter at that, for she knew it to be true of herself. Why not the great many aristocratic ladies she had never bothered to study, thinking them anything but worthy opponents? She should have known better after witnessing her sister’s struggles over the years. Not all fights used the weapons she’d been training with for a lifetime.
But that didn’t mean Melody intended to lose.
“It can’t be that bad, can it?” she asked. “A bit of palace intrigue, perhaps? A few salacious rumors?”
“Whatever you are imagining, Your Royal Highness,” replied Madame Constantinople Dupree, severely, “it will be worse. Much worse. And yet here you are, still abed in your nightgown, when we ought to be preparing you for war.”
“War?” That sounded a lot more fun than the day Melody had imagined, but she reminded herself to shrivel a bit, like a frightened creature might. “I don’t know...”
The other woman sighed. “They told me you were a frail, fragile little thing. Rest assured, that can only work in your favor. But we must act now.”
“Very well, then,” Melody said, with exaggerated bravery. And was certain she could hear Fen’s snort of laughter from the hall. “War it is.”
Accordingly, she surrendered herself to the brisk morning schedule outlined by Madame, who did not pretend to be anything less than a humorless drill sergeant. She allowed herself to be marched off to the shower, then whisked into the chair that she’d discovered during her explorations last night, sat before a vanity table. Inaptly named for a blind woman, perhaps, who could be vain in all manner of ways that did not involve mirrors, but she doubted that Madame Constantinople Dupree would find such commentary amusing.
As she sat there, letting servants buzz around her, breakfast was brought to her. And Melody was deeply unimpressed to discover it was little more than a hard roll to go along with her coffee.
“I prefer my breakfasts not to suggest that I might have woken up to find myself incarcerated,” Melody muttered. To Fen, who had brought her the tray and who was currently pretending she didn’t speak the local language—one of her preferred places to hide herself in the presence of others. None of whom, apparently, ever bothered to discover that she was, in fact, an Idyllian native. “Though I think they serve better food in jail.”
“You may have as luxurious a breakfast as you wish, Your Royal Highness,” Madame said in a forbidding tone from somewhere behind Melody. Once again wielding Melody’s new title like a sword. “But I should warn you that you will be eating all day.”
“That’s the first thing you’ve said about the day ahead of me that sounds the least bit enjoyable,” Melody retorted, because she hadn’t yet had enough coffee to think better of it.
“Nothing about today will be enjoyable,” came the swift, brisk reply. “You will be judged on what you eat along with everything else. How you sit. How you respond. How you laugh. How you hold your hands. You must view today as a comprehensive exam, Your Royal Highness. One from which it is extremely likely that you will emerge with dire marks from all involved.”
“Will all these ladies pelt me with their tea sandwiches?” Melody asked dryly. Too dryly, she understood, when Fen refilled her coffee without her having to ask. “Sling pots of clotted cream at my head?”
It was difficult to pay attention to things like the expression she ought to have had on her face, or the tremulous tone she ought to have been using, when her staff was careening all around her. They were troweling on cosmetics she had no way of knowing if she liked or not and doing acrobatic things with her hair, all while Madame stood behind her, radiating disapproval.
It was only Fen’s cough, in fact, that reminded her to shift her body language into something that made sense for the character she was meant to be playing here. To round her shoulders and make herself small instead of entertaining little fantasies of what it might be like to bat away clotted cream weapons, and expose her real self to any soft, pampered, vicious society ladies who imagined they could bully her in some way.
That would be satisfying, but foolish. And not at all the strategy that she was supposed to be employing. By decree of the monarch himself, in case she’d forgotten.
“I understand that this seems silly to you,” Madame was saying in a tone that made it clear she did not, in fact, understand. Or wish to understand. “You’ve led a very sheltered life, after all. Protected from the intricacies of life at court.”
That was not how Melody would have described her life, but she told herself to let that go. If anything, she should have been amused that after being considered the great, humiliating scandal of the Skyros family—something that couldn’t be true, by definition, if she was now a member of the royal family and sister to the new Queen—there was already a new, usable fiction to explain why it was that she had been so seldom seen or heard from her whole life.
“Yes,” she murmured, striving to sound overwhelmed rather than entertained. “Very sheltered.”
“In a perfect world, I would have had months to prepare you,” Madame said, reprovingly. “Years. Instead, I have but hours.” She sighed. Heavily. “We will do the best we can.”
“It is just...” Melody paused, because the woman tugging on her hair did something that made her eyes water. She blew out a breath as if that was emotion, not a sting. “The Prince did not say anything about this. He didn’t even tell me there was anything for me to do today.”
