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Tadek was at the writing desk, in the middle of scribbling something in the margin of some letter, and replied absently, “Give me two seconds, lov—Kadou. Er. Highness.” There was an awkward silence, and Tadek abruptly put down his pen, snapped the inkpot closed, and followed Kadou silently into his room.
Odd. Were they quarreling? A cold knot clenched in Evemer’s gut. Had His Highness told Tadek about what had happened in the alley behind the incense lounge?
His instinct was to trail after them, though he knew he wouldn’t be much help—it didn’t take more than one person to dress the prince. What would he do? Stand in the doorway and watch? He forced himself to stay at his post in the front room.
They left the bedroom door open. Evemer strained to listen, but he heard only an occasional murmur, the sound of the wardrobe’s doors opening and closing, rustles of cloth. At length, Tadek called out, “Evemer! The note from Her Majesty is on my desk—bring it in, would you?”
He did so. Kadou was seated in the chair by the window, dressed in a white-on-white embroidered cotton underlayer and an ultramarine blue silk kaftan, several shades richer than the blue of the kahyalar uniforms—the heraldic color of the Mahisti dynasty. Kadou was frowning at the bed, on which were draped three over-robes, all spectacularly beautiful. One was black imperial brocade with glittering silver figuring; the second was a damask precisely the blue-black color of Kadou’s eyes; the third was of dove-grey matelassé.
Evemer could spare these only the barest glance—Tadek had smudged kohl onto the corners of Kadou’s eyes.
“I’ve got my hands full here,” Tadek said—he did, he was dressing Kadou’s hair. “Tell us if there are any hints in there about how formal Her Majesty expects this dinner to be. We would have heard about it before today if it were going to be a full-formal affair.”
Evemer forced his eyes down to the paper in his hand. “Nothing, except that it is for the ambassador,” he said, after a moment of panic when his tongue seemed to have forgotten all language. “It won’t be lower formality than diplomatic standard.”
“Told you,” Tadek said, and Kadou made a face. “No damask for you. Evemer, could you put that one away?”
Evemer surreptitiously brushed his fingers against the other two robes next to it as he gathered up the damask—the matelassé was cotton. Not a thin fabric like some of Kadou’s finest underlayers, either, but as heavy as the damask and brocade, and twice as soft. Evemer’s mother was a weaver; she’d faint to hear about this. It was almost completely undecorated, but for the extravagantly intricate patterns of its weave, but the arduous process of producing such fabric would make it just as eye-wateringly expensive as the silk-and-silver brocade.
“An ambassador, but the ambassador ofOissos,” Evemer found himself saying.
Tadek hummed. “A good point.”
“She would have told me if I were supposed to show off for them,” Kadou grumbled. “The damask would have been fine.”
Tadek rapped him smartly on the shoulder. “None of that. Evemer is right. Diplomatic standard at the very least.”
Evemer folded the damask robe and put it away in the wardrobe, then drifted back to the bed. The black-and-silver robe was stunning, and all the candlelight would catch and glitter across it as Kadou moved, but the matelassé . . . It looked as soft as velvet, but infinitely more touchable, and Evemer’s fingers itched to brush against it again. The grey color was somehow warm rather than drab, and it would show Kadou’s hair better than the black and silver.
He studied the invisible chessboard laid out before him—either of the two options would be fine, diplomatically speaking. Both of them represented political strategy of a different sort: overt power and wealth versus the more subtle kind. But Kadou had little interest in leveraging politics like that, so the scales were so near to being balanced that it made no difference.
The matelassé really was beautiful. Evemer pondered a moment more and moved a pawn one space forward. “His Highness is right, too,” he said carefully. “Her Majesty would have sent word if she were planning to send a message.”
“You have an opinion?” Tadek asked, sounding mildly surprised.
“I only think understatement is usually preferable.”
“You would.” Tadek sighed heavily. “Yes, all right, I admit defeat. You both win. I concede the point that the brocade might seem vulgar.”
“Toldyou,” Kadou murmured, and Evemer found that he very much needed to leave the room and sit in the parlor by himself until they came out. When they did, Tadek was still fussing with the drape and the trailing hems of the dove-grey over-robe, and Kadou was doing the same with the positioning of his coronet, both of them bickering amicably. Evemer drew himself up to parade rest and fixed his eyes on the opposite wall.
“There,” Tadek said, hands on his hips and head to one side, studying Kadou. “You look nice. Careful of that over-robe, it’s going to show every single spot.” He turned to Evemer and pointed a warning finger at him. “Don’t let him sit on anything unless it’s immaculate, make sure nobody with poor table manners or messy eating is next to him at dinner, and if you let him get within three feet of a blade of grass that might stain his hems green, I swear to the gods I’ll fill your bed with itching powder.”
“It doesn’t matter if I ruin it, I can just buy another,” Kadou said reasonably, but Evemer felt faint with horror at the very idea of even a single corner of that beautiful soft fabric getting spoiled.
The rain was heavy enough that the kahyalar had sent for a covered sedan chair to haul Kadou in his finery out to the Silver Court, and Evemer spared a moment to be suspicious when Kadou didn’t try to protest in the slightest. He and the other kahyalar made do with umbrellas and only got slightly dampened by the time they made it to the hall.
“You needn’t stand attendance on me all evening,” Kadou whispered to him as they went in. “There’s plenty of kahyalar around. You can go eat in the antechamber, or play cards with the others, if you like.”
“Highness,” said Evemer, and might have done so, but Siranos accosted them a moment later.
“Kadou,” he exclaimed warmly, coming toward them. Evemer resisted the urge to throw himself between them. “What a pleasure to see you again, twice in two days.” He was wearing a fine kaftan that looked new, and embroidered slippers with the extravagantly long, curled-back toe that no one had worn for thirty years. The fashion now was for the point of the toe to tilt up sky-ward and no further. He still hadn’t hired an Arasti valet of his own, then, although Evemer saw that Siranos had, at some point since the last time he’d seen him, gotten his ears pierced. There was still a little scab of blood around each of the gold hoops.
“Hello,” Kadou said warily. “Do you want something?”
“Yes, I thought you might like to meet my sister,” he said. “She’s not with the ambassador’s delegation, of course, but everyone in Thorikou knows everyone else, and I convinced Zeliha that it would be nice to make it a sociable sort of evening rather than just business. Will you come?”
Kadou cast a single glance at Evemer. “Ah—”
