“Or take one of the priests,” Lady Kemmin said.
“Or that,” Clara agreed, sourly.
A dozen women or more had arranged themselves around the garden, each according to their own dignity and position. Depending upon who spoke to whom and where the apparently casual traffic of social exchange went, their status would be ratified by the women around them or else denied. Clara watched it with a practiced eye for the occult significance of it alclass="underline" Lady Emming had taken the chair with its back to the house, and so commanded the best view of the gardens; Canl Daskellin’s youngest daughter had arrived slightly before her older sister; the ladies whose houses extended to Asterilhold weren’t deferring to the purely Antean houses the way they had been when Clara had left to follow Jorey. All of it had meaning.
Including—especially—Nickayla Essian’s dress.
It was simply cut, and flattered her figure. The cloth was a gentle green set off by more vibrant ribbons at the spine and woven into the skirt. During King Simeon’s reign, it would have been an acceptable if unremarkable choice. Among the black leather jackets and unsettling ossuary cloaks of the present fashion, she stood out like a single live blossom on a burned field. The context made it bold, even brash. And more, it announced an allegiance to Clara. The borrowed green dress she’d worn to Lady Emming’s previous, smaller garden party had begun a new fashion. Nickayla Essian’s statement was the boldest, but once Clara knew to look, there were others. Dannie Sennian had a pale-green ribbon woven in her braids. Lauria Caot, while still sporting a fringe of bones along the cuffs of her sleeves, had a choker with a single new leaf as its pendant.
None of them knew or could know the depth of the conspiracy in which she’d involved herself. She felt tired because she’d spent a fair portion of the previous night with the Lord Regent and the banker who was his mortal enemy and unhealthy obsession. Most of them would have been horrified to find out that she had camped at the edges of Jorey’s army with the whores and merchant carters, much less that she’d helped to engineer a fundamental realignment in the forces of the war. For them, the struggle was still very much the Severed Throne and the spider goddess standing against the draconic and inhuman Timzinae. But Nickayla had seen something in the accident of Clara’s appearance, and she’d grabbed on to it.
It wasn’t hope, but it might be the desire that there be hope. A shoot of new growth in the decadence of black jackets and bone robes. That the potential existed at all meant something, and Clara suspected it would be something good. Unless the two armies in the field against Jorey did their work and everyone here faced the blades and arrows of Elassae.
It seemed impossible that Camnipol could fall. Even with the men of court scattered for the most part to the army, everything was too familiar, too regular. Catastrophe would surely announce itself more clearly. Simply by having garden parties and dances, feasts and performances of poetry, they affirmed the normalcy of the world. Surely if the end were really coming, they wouldn’t have sweet buns and tea, and so sweet buns and tea were a kind of armor against what they all feared. The laughter that covered the shriek.
She imagined Suddapal had felt much the same before their own army had come to it.
Her mind turned to Hoban, the cunning man who’d saved Vincen Coe’s life once. She wondered whether he still worked out of the little house in the low quarter of the city. Alston, who had been her servant when she’d been Baroness of Osterling Fells and kept a compound of her own, and was now… she didn’t know. She’d been so careful to keep track of all her old servants. Now that she’d come back from her tour with the army, she needed to find them all again. Tomorrow. She would do that tomorrow, unless the enemy came. Unless Geder decided to execute them all as traitors. Unless Lady Skestinin discovered that Clara had… how had Lord Skestinin put it? Betrayed the kingdom? Well, if the world didn’t find some way to collapse before the next morning, she would put in the effort to find her old servants and go to the Prisoners’ Span and renew her old acquaintances there.
Oddly, the idea cheered her. It would be good to see them all. And, now that she thought of it, there might be other connections within the court that it would be wise to renew. The problem of the Timzinae children in the prison and their parents working as slaves on the farms, for instance, might be something that—
“Don’t you think, Clara?” Rielle Castannan said, and Clara realized she’d utterly lost the thread of the conversation.
“I am making a concerted effort not to think at all,” she said, and the others chuckled politely.
The commotion in the house was small at first: a raised voice, and movement in the doorway. Clara hardly noticed it. It was only when the others began to rise from their seats that she turned back to look. Geder Palliako stood on the stone-paved walk with a too-cheerful smile and cast his gaze across the gardens. Lord Emming trotted out from the house, his shirt and hair in disarray. He looked like a man half wakened from a nap, which he likely was. Clara stood, either in respect for the Lord Regent or through the animal impulse to run. Discerning between the two was not straightforward. If Cithrin bel Sarcour had failed, this would be Clara’s last moment as a free woman. She tried to savor it.
Her mouth set in a tight smile, Lady Emming came to where the two men were speaking. Neither priests nor guards accompanied the Lord Regent, so that was something. Clara chanced a look around the garden. Not all the guests were standing, but most were. Not all looked frightened, but more than didn’t. So at least she wouldn’t stand out.
Lady Emming nodded to the Lord Regent and gestured toward Clara’s table. Geder’s gaze shifted to her and grew brighter. He trotted toward her, waving to the other women as he came, like the parody of a carefree man. “Please don’t let me interrupt,” he said as he reached her. “I only need to borrow Lady Kalliam for a moment. You don’t mind, do you?”
“No,” Lady Skestinin said, but too late. Geder had taken Clara’s arm in his and was already leading her off to a corner of the garden where rosebushes formed a little grotto of thorns and buds not yet in bloom. Geder looked back at the party, playing his grin over the ladies of the court like a searchlight in the darkness. When he spoke to her, his voice was low and conspiratorial.
“We’re meeting tomorrow night,” he said. “The Ebbingbaugh compound, just before sundown. Can you be there?”
“Of course I can,” she said.
“Good, good, good. I’m putting a plan together, and I want you all to be part of it. You’re the only people I can trust anymore.”
I have betrayed you as deeply as I could manage, Clara thought. I stood by and watched you slaughter a man I love with your own hand. And yes, I see that you trust me. Her heart was complicated by pity and hatred and a hope of her own.
“I will make my way there,” she said. “Discreetly.”
“Yes. Important that we be discreet,” he said, with the eyes of the garden party on him. He appeared unaware of the irony. “There are going to be a lot of things we need to manage if we’re going to fix all this. A lot of things to be done.”
“That’s true.”
“And I wanted… I wanted to thank you. For what you’ve done. For bringing her back to me.” He nodded, his gaze on the roses, as if by nodding he could convince her to agree that Cithrin bel Sarcour had been brought back as a gift for him.