49. Chorda

chorda ~ae, f.

1. string of a musical instrument

2. intestine (as food)

For the first time in her life, Mirelle Ashadi-Hauteclare watches a tourney with dread.

The vis lights the sitting room blue. Heavenbreaker wins. The Lithrois win.

She looks to her grandmother seated on the chaise longue, her old spine straight and her lined face kept eerily neutral. Mirelle knows—the blanker Grandmother’s expression, the more worried she is, and she is nothing but empty canvas now. They both know, the knowledge echoing between the clinks of a tea tray being brought in by the maids and the bone-chill groan of the whitewood walls: someone in this House will now die.

Finally, Grandmother smiles at her. “What’s that worried look for? Come, have some tea with me.”

“But—”

“I have taken measures.” Grandmother pours a cup calmly. “We were perhaps unsteady in the beginning, but we are ready now, and the combined weight of the Hauteclare family is not something so easily breached.”

Mirelle glances to the hard-light chain mail of the guards lingering outside the sitting room, and she can’t help but sink back into the cushions. It’s true; Dawn Imperator is less a manse and more a fortress now. The garden windows blur with guards patrolling and relieving each other like clockwork, their robotic silver sentry hounds stalking heat signatures and electronic disturbances.

They are safe. Of course they are. Grandmother smiles softer and motions for her.

“Come. Drink, and let me braid your hair. It’s grown so long these days.”

Grandmother’s knotted fingers thread through her hair with grace and a rare tenderness. Grandmother loved her more when she was little, or so Mirelle thought, but the way her fingers move now reminds Mirelle that love does not go away, it merely takes on different faces throughout the years.

When she leaves the sitting room hours later, braids brushing against her shoulders and a bounce in her step, it is love that makes her stop at the maids’ voices coming from around the corner.

“—imagine it? A bastard, riding for a noble House! A commoner just like you or me. No academy, no riches, no title… It’s unthinkable.”

“But not unlikable.” Another maid giggles. “She’s amazing.”

Mirelle snorts softly—amazing? Passable at best. But even she has to admit the traitor is improving markedly with each match.

“They’re just allowing her to ride! No one’s stopping her—not even the king.”

A third maid speaks quieter. “I have a brother in Low Ward, and he says it means the court’s grip on things is getting weaker.”

“And more paranoid,” the first maid murmurs. “If all these atrociously mannered guards everywhere are any indication.”

“Paranoid? You saw what happened to Theta-7; those rebels could crash another freighter into the Wards at any time.”

“Be quiet, Yunice! Erabeth’s brother was on Theta-7.”

“Oh. Sorry, Erabeth.”

“It wasn’t Theta-7.”

The quiet stretches thin. And then:

“You mean…he was on the other one?”

It is love that makes Mirelle memorize each and every voice, and it is love that makes her turn each and every maid over to the king’s guard as traitors come morning.