When had either arrived? Had they seen my forceful ejection from that room? I shot Osoba a glare designed to quell any mockery, but I saw none in the prince’s demeanor.
Zylphia’s expression did not reflect dismay to find her touch so rejected. In truth, she barely looked upon my face, her chin high and shoulders square in a frock that was more tea gown than true day-dress. Jealousy seized me, for no matter how often I begged Fanny to allow me to wear the unstructured fashion of the suffragettes, she had refused.
Now that I had seen a tea gown on Zylphia, I would never measure up.
She was lovely. The pale blue turned her skin to the hue of tea and rich cream, and her hair was loose in a long fall of heavy black. Her blue eyes, startlingly pretty in already exquisite features, were focused on the door behind me.
I stepped aside, because I did not like having no exit at my back. “Why is he in there?” I demanded.
Zylphia said nothing. Avoiding my gaze, she opened the doors, gathered her fine skirts—sheer in material but layered as if to provide a modest, cloudlike effect—and stepped inside.
For the second time, the doors closed on me.
Something ugly twisted my heart. Painfully, malice and poison conspired to turn my rage on Zylphia. To paint upon her the target of my reproach.
But it did not sit right, and I did not know what to do with it. I had no call to think of Zylphia so uncharitably. She had always done what was best for me, trained to act as my maid when the Veil forced her to accompany me above the drift. She had helped me when the sweet tooth had taken Betsy, my dear friend and childhood maid.
Zylphia had even brought me opium when the shock of Earl Compton’s death threatened to overwhelm me.
That I would not allow her to accompany me now was not her doing. It was mine. I feared for her safety—for all who befriended me. I suffered no argument, would broach no debate. It was temporary, I assured myself. Only as long as it took to bring the sweet tooth to justice. Surely she understood that.
Surely, she of all could read the fear that underscored my behavior.
I stared at that door and realized the cost of my independence. With nowhere else to go, Zylphia had obviously returned fully to her role as a sweet.
Like all the sweets, her duties included that of tending to the ringmaster’s every whim.
My fists clenched.
“It is time to go,” Osoba said, spreading one long arm to the side in gentlemanly mimicry.
I could not speak around the pained lump in my throat.
Instead of making any further attempt, I clasped my wounded hands to my chest and turned away from the polished door with its scenes of fantastical conflict. Dragons, tigers and ornate birds tangled together, as if caught in a dance, or a fight.
I would lay good coin on the latter. If I had a fight of my own to attend, I would have traded all I had to be there.
Perhaps it would have hurt less.
I did not attempt to ask Ikenna Osoba of what I’d seen in that room. I knew instinctively that he would not answer—perhaps in part to devil me, perhaps because he had nothing to answer me with.
I had not even made up my mind if what I’d seen was true, or if I’d only been taken in by the pressing heat and my own imagination. Hawke had thrown me for a terrible spin, and I did not like it. Not one little bit.
I expected Osoba to leave me once I’d been removed from Hawke’s presence, but he did not. He stayed near enough on my backside that I could bear my silence no longer. I spun in the foyer, glaring up at him with all the indignation I could muster. “What do you require of me, Your Highness?”
His teeth were rather white against his black skin, and I noted with some unease that his eyeteeth were slightly sharper than usually seen on a man. Not unheard of in the occasional person, but off-putting nevertheless. “Biddableness,” he informed me.
“Quite a few syllables for a savage prince,” I retorted, snide beyond measure.
His smile did not dim. “Your English disposition is laughably out of place.”
“So is yours,” I muttered, giving him my back in a huff. That I had not yet uncurled my fingers was an omission I chose to ignore. The feel of Hawke’s mouth on my sensitive flesh was something I had entirely too much trouble forgetting.
Damn him. Just when I felt as if I were gaining ground, he went and did something so...so...incongruous.
Osoba’s hand settled on my shoulder. It was not a friendly gesture. “Be still.”
My head jerked up, shaking loose a fine layer of black. “Take your hands off me.”
An order to no avail. The strong fingers gripping my shoulder did not ease, and as two men in red trousers and wide-sleeved tunics stepped soundlessly into the receiving room, I understood why.
I did not often deal with the Veil’s men direct, yet when I did, they were servants—or perhaps some version thereof. They wore black breeches in that funny foreign style and black slippers. The red trousers these men wore suggested they were of a different caste, though I knew little enough of the system to which they ascribed to call it that with any authority.
The Veil’s warriors approached in soundless unison, once more like enough in manner and dress but not in physical feature. One was taller, the other was leaner in shape—near rail-thin, and older. The topknot each sported was black, but I detected traces of gray in one that I had not seen among the men before.
Yet it was this older man whose movements I watched most closely. There was something much more serene about him, smoother in motion and delivery, that I did not trust.
In the corner of my eye, I watched the lion-prince incline his head. Respect, I think, but not obeisance. Not to the Veil’s servants, warriors or otherwise.
The muddled hierarchy of this place was mind-bogglingly complex.
I should not have been surprised, not after I’d seen the shared lingual capability between him and Hawke some months past, yet I confess to a moderate amount of wonder when Osoba spoke to the men in the same Chinese dialect Hawke knew.
Unlike Hawke, he shifted his voice into a somewhat more nasal range, which I would have found laughable if I weren’t so focused on the eyes of the older servant that watched me.
It was the other who conferred with Osoba. As was rapidly approaching the custom, I did not know of what they spoke. Not until the man I watched withdrew his hands from his bell-like sleeves and gold filigree winked in the light.
The breath vanished from my lungs.
Where I would have lunged for the palm-sized oval, Osoba’s grip on my shoulder did not allow me the opportunity. The Chinese man who held it raised it for all to see, and said in heavily accented and quite butchered English, “It left for you.”
The light caught on the gold rim, glinting in the delicate workmanship. An oval of burnt umber framed the black silhouette of a profile I knew only because I was familiar with my own.
My mother’s features, the curve of a cheek so like mine, the curl of her hair draped over her shoulder, decorated the cameo whose flat backing lacked any means to wear the piece.
It was not decoration. It was no bit of jewelry. One did not forget the object that was intended for one’s destruction.
Chapter Eight
My eyes narrowed. “Give it here.”
He did not.
Osoba’s voice returned to its normal resonance. “Apparently, this was left within the sweets’ chambers.”
Red tinted the outlying corners of my vision. What little bliss remained with me burned to nothing.
That murdering bastard. It suddenly came clear to me: the absence of my father’s material possessions when I’d gone back to the laboratory, the disappearance of this very cameo whose mechanism had contained the serum that was meant to subjugate me.