17

I left my watery expression and my platitudes to do their work with Fritz and hurried to the studio.

“What have I missed?” I asked Cobie as I sat beside her. She was holding a needle in her hand like a dart. “Are they talking about the ball?” I assumed they would be, as I assumed the gowns in their laps were the ones they would wear that night.

“No, they’re talking about a wedding— Ow.” Cobie popped a bleeding finger into her mouth, glaring at the tear she was trying to patch. “Will’s so much better at this than I am.”

I glanced around at the freinnen, all of them immersed in their work. They reminded me of Imani, the brilliant designer and seamstress I’d commissioned my Arbor Day dress from in Potomac. As Imani had, the girls worked with an artist’s intention, their fingers moving as delicately as any sculptor’s, their eyes roving as keenly over color and texture as any painter’s would do. Old garments became new gowns in their hands.

Art was strictly regulated within the Imperiya. It seemed incalculable foolishness to count clothing out of that reckoning.

Suddenly, I straightened. “A wedding?” Certainly, it was a normal enough subject of gossip; but the freinnen didn’t seem excited. Their voices were quiet—almost grim. “What about it?”

Cobie frowned, concentrating on the torn black trousers in her lap. “Something, something, months to prepare, something, a year and a day . . .” She tugged a stitch through, needle high, wrapping the thread around her fingers so tightly it nearly snapped. “Oh. Their father’s wedding.” Something cold and slimy squirmed in my stomach.

Hertsoh Maximilian had warned us he was busy with marriage preparations, and indeed, I’d engaged little with him directly. He was a gray presence in my periphery at meals, the incarnation of the unseen tsarytsya, the living image of the castle decaying around me. I had furiously avoided his gaze; the few times I’d looked his way, he’d been laughing at a rat scampering, terrified, across the table, or cajoling Leirauh into letting him feed her off his plate. He was merely a shade of the tsarytsya, possessed only of a shadow of her power, but his presence sent me eagerly scrabbling back to the freinnen’s dungeon room. Even Fritz’s prickly company was far superior by comparison.

I wanted most of all to flee entirely. I had to remind myself constantly that we were here to help the Waldleute so they could be free of the tsarytsya and the duke and all his ilk.

“Do we know who his bride is?” I asked quietly, wincing as I stabbed my own finger, whipping my hand away so as not to bleed on the gown I was hemming. “I haven’t even heard whether she’s at court.”

“Maybe Perrault knows something,” Cobie said. I made a note to ask him after dinner. “Do you think—” But before Cobie could finish her thought, the door to the studio burst open.

As if we had summoned him, Hertsoh Maximilian himself stood in the doorway, clad in gray and flanked by two guards.

Hands in his pockets, he moved across the circle of his daughters, now risen from their threadbare brocaded chairs and faded velvet settees. Each of them curtsied, murmuring their greetings to him in Yotne.

Batyushka. Batyushka.

Ingrid and Hannelore. Johanna and Greta. Ursula and Margarethe and all the rest of them. Their light brown heads bobbed, their hands clasped. Leirauh shook her black hair in front of her face and stared at the floor.

Maximilian ignored Cobie and me. I could not say I took offense at the slight.

The duke turned instead to the dress forms scattered about the room, like dancers frozen in place. The sisters clustered a little closer together when their father’s back was turned.

He was a bizarre sight, loping amid the brightly clad gowns like a visitor to a menagerie. His brown eyes were fever-bright, the nostrils of his high-bridged nose flared as if scenting out a prize.

Maximilian was a handsome man, fit and lithe for his age. But the hunger in his gaze frightened me.

Suddenly, he paused before the gown Margarethe had been making over. It hung on a dress form, light fawn brown and fluffy as a cloud, its skirts grazing the floor, with extra tulle wreathing the shoulders. Gold embroidery around the hem and bodice winked in the light like turning autumn leaves, and though the fabric was worn from being worked over and over again, its thinness only added to its ethereal quality.

I recognized it at once: Ursula had worn it the night before.

The duke stood close to the dress, studying it, before putting his hands on its bodice. He skimmed his palms over the gown’s waist, tracing the embroidery.

Nausea roiled hot and vile in my stomach at the lechery on his face.

He shook his head. “Ni,” he said to Margarethe, waving at the full skirts and rubbing a bit of the soft brown fabric between his fingers. She clasped her thin hands tightly and nodded.

The door closed heavily behind the duke as he left.

Margarethe and Ursula instantly hurried to each other, pale foreheads bent close together, long brown locks shielding their expressions from us.

I sat heavily on my chaise, feeling boneless. “Have you ever seen him here before? Did he come when I was with Fritz yesterday?” I asked Cobie.

“No,” she said vehemently, then glanced up, distracted as the girls switched again to Deutsch.

“What?” I glanced around. “What are they saying?”

“Apparently the duke has rejected another wedding dress,” she said under her breath. I started to ask another question, but Cobie put a hand on my arm, listening hard for another moment.

“That’s why they’re here,” she finally said. “They’re sewing gowns for the duke’s bride. Ostensibly.”

“What do you mean?”

“The duke is a difficult man to satisfy.” Cobie met my eyes. “They’re taking their time over the clothes, it seems, and putting them to other uses when their father rejects them.”

Johanna and Greta began taking the beautiful dress off its form, poking pins into their aprons as they went. One of Greta’s curls fell into her eyes as she bent at the dress’s waist, but she blew it out of her face and kept working.

It was like the story Homer had told me so many months ago, before I’d become angry with him. Penelope wove her shroud all day and pulled it apart at night as she put off her aggressive suitors, buying herself one day at a time with her sparse resources and her own ingenuity.

I didn’t trust the freinnen. But it didn’t hurt anyone to admit, in the privacy of my own mind, that this ruse impressed me.

Margarethe curled up onto her settee, gathered the gown that had served its purpose onto her lap, and began to unpick some of the embroidery around its hem. The smug little smile that curved her lips appeared and disappeared so quickly I might have imagined it.

“Try to eat through your teeth, instead of over your tongue,” Fritz said, nodding at my bowl. Dinner was millet again, mixed this time with potatoes. Unsalted, unpeppered, utterly flavorless, and room temperature. It wasn’t spoiled, but that was the most that could be said for it.

I grinned. “Is that how you do it?” He nodded, wincing as he worked down a bite. “Innovative.”

Fritz laughed softly, but the sound filled the dining room, silent but for the scrape of spoons on porcelain. A few courtiers looked up from their plates; from the high table, Perrault gave me an encouraging nod.

Well done! I could almost hear him say, as if this were a tennis match and I’d scored a point.

Fritz and I had barely established a rapport, compared to my easy relationship with Torden. Perrault’s reaction would have been offensively patronizing if it hadn’t been so obviously sincere.

Beside him, Lang’s long fingers were clenched tight around his fork, candlelight in his eyes and shadows in his lashes as he glanced back and forth quickly between Fritz and me. Margarethe sat at his side, still talking, unaware Lang was distracted.

I am pursuing our goal, I wanted to snarl at him. I am trying to find the Waldleute, and I am keeping all of us safe, should the tsarytsya be watching this courtship. But my satisfaction ran deeper and less selfless than that, and I knew it.

Lang’s jealousy was forbidden and indulgent, and I reveled in it, just a little.

I needed to focus. Furrowing my brow, I faced Fritz again. “Why bother enduring meals like this when you can get things like sugar?” I whispered.

There had been food at the party the night before—meat, cheese, fresh fruit, fresh bread. And here we sat, a whole court eating cold starch in a rotting hall.

It was an empire away from dinners at Winchester, with children playing beneath the table—from nights in Asgard, with Ragnvald telling stories over the crackle of the fire.

“Because I can’t,” Fritz hissed, glancing at his father. “Not usually.”

But he could sometimes. I wondered if Fritz knew his sisters were sneaking out at night. I wondered if they shared the same sources.

I had to press him a little further. “Where did you get it last time?” I made a face at my meal. But Fritz’s mood didn’t lighten with my attempt at levity.

“I can’t talk about this.” His whisper grew sharper. “Do not ask me again.”

He set down his spoon with a loud clank and sat back from the table, arms crossed, expression closed off as it had been the first night I met him.

Unbidden, my gaze strayed back to Lang. He cocked a brow, eyeing Fritz and me. I could read his challenge from all the way across the room.

Do they really all come around, Seneschal-elect?

And when he smiled at Margarethe, and she smiled back, it stoked the fire under my resolve.

Cobie and I would track the freinnen into the woods once more. Like the foxes I’d watched the court hunt in England, I would run their secrets to ground.