6

I THREW MY COMB DOWN, READY TO GIVE UP ON DRESSING MY hair for the formal dinner I had agreed to attend with Theodor. I knew how nobles managed elaborate hairstyles—they had their maids trained in hairdressing or hired professional hairdressers. I had no such luxury, but a formal dinner demanded a formal hairstyle nonetheless. Even more now, with the prince’s gold wrapped around my wrist, I had implicitly agreed to looking the part of royal consort. The rose scent from the powder wafted into my nose. I had liked it when I had selected it at the apothecary’s, but now it made me want to sneeze.

The bells from Fountain Square warned me that it was six o’clock already, and Theodor’s coach would be at my door in half an hour. I hadn’t dressed yet, wanting to spare my new gown an unhealthy dose of powder from my hair. I shook a little more powder into the front, took a breath, and rolled it onto the wool pad again. This time the modest pompadour was smooth and at least reasonably even. I quickly pinned it in place and gave up on the idea of more elaborate curls on the sides, settling instead for a simple chignon and loop of hair at the nape of my neck.

I hoped that the new gown, a brilliant turquoise silk with perfectly stitched pleats cascading down the back, courtesy of Alice, and trimmed with box-pleated strips of the same fabric, my own work, would distract anyone from the near travesty on my head. The prospect of accompanying Theodor to more public events had spurred me to remedy the severe lack of formal clothing in my own collection. I had made the turquoise gown, had begun another gown appropriate for a ball or dinner in a pale coral pink, and sitting in pieces in my bedroom were the beginnings of a court gown for the most formal occasions.

New gowns could only prepare me in part for accompanying Theodor anywhere, however. Any public appearance with an heir to the throne was complexly coded, read by the nobility as a message of intention and, often, political machinations. When the son of a minor noble appeared at his aunt’s birthday dinner with a duchess above his station as his guest, Viola’s salon had buzzed for a week over the alliance growing between the families.

Rumors had already circulated the city that the prince had bound hands with, depending on the source, a “heroic seamstress” or an “infernal doxy.” I had, of course, anticipated gossip. There had been intermarriages between commoners and minor nobility in my recollection. Accounts of the weddings made it into the better monthly magazines; salacious gossip filled the cheap rags. It had been clear that money, or a lack of it for the nobles, had motivated most of the marriages. Successful merchants, especially speculators who wagered well in the gamble of imports and shipping, could accrue more money than nobles whose estates were unlucky or mismanaged.

No one would assume that Theodor was courting me for my money. I laughed at the thought, but the laugh was spiked with nerves. It caught in my throat. There was no turning back, not now that I’d begun to uncouple myself from the shop, not now that I was about to appear on Theodor’s arm wearing paired wristlets.

I had a reason to be there, I told myself strictly, and that reason was the betterment of Galitha and her people. I repeated this little mantra to myself as I pinned my stomacher and then my gown into place, checking in the mirror that the robings covering the gown’s front edges were even and straight. The turquoise hue worked particularly well with my Pellian complexion—warm tones and dark hair that were unusual in the Galatine nobility. And that, I knew, meant that few other women would have a gown in this color. I consulted on enough gowns to have mastered the art of pairing silk hue to skin tone, complementing hair and eyes with the right touches of accent colors.

I plucked jewelry from my modest collection, deciding between paste peridot and real pearls from Theodor, knowing that the imitation peridot worked better with the gown but that the pearls wouldn’t be sniffed out as inexpensive costume jewelry. Ultimately, I chose the peridot.

I hovered by my door, watching anxiously for Theodor, not wanting to make him wait or come to my door. My neighbors were gossiping enough as it was, and I didn’t relish the attention. When the carriage maneuvered around the narrow corner, I was out the door in a flash.

“It’s not the hippodrome,” Theodor said as I rushed to close the door. “We aren’t in the midst of a race. Though, speaking of races, there is a horse race I thought you might—”

“One thing at a time,” I reminded him, though I couldn’t help but laugh. “Perhaps we’ll attend the dinner on your terms and the race on mine. Fancy a picnic on the general lawn?”

He smiled at my joke. I wished the suggestion hadn’t been made in jest.

The foreign minister’s house was on the outskirts of the city, in a relatively new district full of limestone façades and grand brickwork overlooking the bluff where the river began to widen into the harbor. I had rarely been here, save an occasional consultation with a newly moneyed merchant’s wife or shipbuilder’s daughter. Viola and Theodor both lived in older, though no less wealthy, districts.

We were escorted down the long hall, wider and more full of echoes than either Viola’s or Theodor’s townhouse. Each footfall sounded louder than I intended, uncontrolled against the marble floor. I took in the dining room in one look—nothing intimate about this place, not like Viola’s salon. If I had thought myself at all prepared after spending afternoons and attending parties with Viola’s set, I was quickly disabused of that notion. This was a level of formality and presence I had not experienced since the Midwinter Ball—and my mission here was entirely different. I realized I was less prepared for it than I had been to remove the curse from the queen’s shawl.

I was relieved to be seated next to Viola. “I convinced Lady Juline to swap my seat for the Duchess of Pommerly,” she whispered, nodding toward a bird-slender woman with a pompadour of pure white hair, surrounded by other octogenarians at the far end of the table. “I think they’ll all be more comfortable if they’re allowed to nod off during the sorbet course, don’t you?”

“Thank you,” I replied. With Viola beside me, at least I had an ally.

She sat, smoothing her delicate lavender gown. Amethysts bobbed in her ears, catching the candlelight, and a brilliant scarlet cockade winked at the edge of her neckline. “Your gown is delicious,” she said as I took my seat next to her.

“Thank you,” I said. “I haven’t sewn for myself in ages.”

The woman across the table from us glanced at me. I wasn’t sure if she had heard me, but I flushed anyway. Sewing for myself—no other woman here did that, save embroidered trifles and beadwork that they gave one another as gifts. I felt my cheeks growing red, but after all, this was what gave me the clout to speak for the common people, wasn’t it? My calloused hands and long days of work?

“The color is superb,” Viola continued. “I suppose you went to the Silk Fair this year?”

I swallowed against a dry mouth. “Yes, it was well attended.”

“I hear that the Serafan silk production has suffered a bit from the droughts—the worms are overwarm or something,” she said. “But that their dyes are as brilliant as ever.”

I couldn’t help discussing fabric. “They’ve dealt with the quality issues by producing some silks with larger slubs in them—rougher texture—and thinner, so it won’t do for formal gowns, in my opinion. But it could make interesting wraps or dressing gowns. Dyed just so, the texture looks as though they even intended it.”

“So cheap silk becomes the new fashion.” Viola laughed.

“I think so,” I said.

The woman across the table didn’t seem interested in our conversation; no one did. Next to me, Theodor chatted amiably with a man with a graying mustache wearing full military uniform. Viola’s tactic was immediately clear—she had made me seem completely at ease, discussing any old topic, knowing full well no one else was listening to what I was actually talking about.

“Speaking of silk,” Viola said, digging into her pocket. “I nearly forgot. I know I should leave the sewing to you, but I made up a few of these.” She pressed a cockade of scarlet and gray silk into my palm. “To support the Reform Bill. Red for obvious reasons, gray for the granite most of Galitha City is built on. Like building on a good foundation. Clever, no?”

I turned the silk cockade over in my hand. The gray reminded me of ink, and of winter, too, of the Midwinter Revolt. “It’s perfect,” I said.

“I know it doesn’t exactly match your gown, but here,” she said, handing me a pin. I affixed the cockade like a breast knot at the center of my gown.

“And I was looking forward to sitting next to Lady Juline!” I looked up—the speaker was Theodor’s brother Ambrose. He grinned as he sat next to Viola.

“You can see if one of the prune and porridge set would like to trade.” Viola laughed.

“Then I couldn’t sit by Sophie,” he said with a half-serious seated bow. “Congratulations are in order, I understand. Welcome to the family, and my apologies.”

“Thank you,” I said with a nervous laugh. The woman across the table was staring now, at the gold bracelet, and abruptly caught herself and turned away.

Ambrose took a quick swig of wine. “Did you finagle a date for the wedding? Autumn, I suppose? But then again—Mother hasn’t been well lately, and she’ll certainly want to take the helm.” In truth, I hadn’t even begun to consider the multi-layered machinations of a noble wedding.

“Her migraines?” Viola asked. “Is she leaving for Rock’s Ford for the summer soon, then?”

“Mother’s trying to hold out until the council recesses, but Polly’s working on her to go now. She even started flirting with that entirely reprehensible rake of a man Duke Tye of Underhill, just to convince her to leave the city earlier rather than later. Or too late, when she’s late.” He laughed.

“You’re terrible,” Viola said, “and your jokes are worse. Ah, the salad—tomatoes? Who plates a tomato and calls it a salad?” She prodded the runny crimson and gold disks on her plate with some disdain, but I enjoyed them, enhanced with salt and a dash of vinegar.

As we finished the salad course and moved on to the fish, conversations percolated from observations about the weather, the meal, conspicuous or absent guests. It was almost as though any topic of potential contentiousness was neatly avoided, the woman across the table from me even steering discourse nimbly away from summer weddings with a pointed glance at my wrist. This continued until the meal was nearly finished. Viola had been correct—the clutch of older guests at the end of the table had grown very quiet. I nudged her and we both laughed behind our hands.

“I don’t think there’s anything going for it,” the man next to Theodor said, too loudly for the room, breaking the quiet hum of conversation. “Enough with reforms already. There’s been enough concession as it is.” Ambrose glanced at me and rolled his eyes with a subtle shake of his head. A keen student of law, he had supported Theodor’s bill from the first, helping him draft and revise the nuanced codes and regulations that would provide legal structure to a new system.

“So I suppose you’d favor a return to last fall’s riots and last winter’s coup, then?” The woman across the table from me had a high, piercing voice. “General Whiteacre, perhaps you have the benefit of having missed this particular engagement, but I assure you, none of us wishes to repeat it.”

“I didn’t miss anything,” General Whiteacre bellowed. I assumed she had touched a sore point. “I’m not afraid of rabble with pitchforks, but you lot can’t see what you should be afraid of, and that’s their grand ideas—not only stuff and nonsense, but dangerous poppycock. Impossible for a government to put into practice.”

“How so?” Ambrose asked, the careful control in his tone making even more plain Whiteacre’s histrionics. “Are there particular legal theories or comparable government frameworks one could reference?”

Whiteacre avoided the request for a scholar’s specifics. “The common man can never be expected to govern himself. That’s what they want, at the end of it—you’ll concede yourselves right out of governance. And when you’re gone, what will the country have? Anarchy.”

“Not a government of elected men?” Theodor said. “Hypothetically. That is what most of their writings aim at—elected representation.”

“Commoners electing each other—yes, let’s allow the pigs to rule the sty.”

Viola glanced at me, her wide brown eyes taking in the entire scene at once, scanning the players and the setting as though arranging a painting. I could see it laid out on canvas, in a classic style, the quarreling statesmen-nobles arrayed on either side, the opulent setting, the remnants of the meal laid out like a still life, and me at the center, turquoise gown drawing the eyes to an unwilling focal point.

“I thought I was coming to dinner, not the hall at the council,” Viola said. “I’ve avoided sitting in the gallery there long enough and now you’re bringing it to me!”

There was some polite laughter, but General Whiteacre would not be quieted. “The common people don’t have the gumption to sustain a revolution,” he said.

I took a hesitant breath. “I believe, sir, that you would find yourself on the losing end if you laid stakes on that bet.”

Viola’s eyes widened, surprised that I’d spoken, and Theodor pressed his lips together until they turned white, clearly nervous on my behalf. Ambrose gave me an encouraging lopsided smile. I straightened my shoulders. “They were quite capable of fomenting one insurrection and will be all the more motivated if their patience is rewarded with inaction.”

Whiteacre’s bulbous nose turned a shade of crimson that the best dyes would have difficulty reproducing. Before he could reply, the woman across the table who had dealt him a swift retort turned her shrewd eyes on me. “Is this to be read, I wonder, as a threat from the insatiable masses?”

If I had thought her an ally in the cause of the reform, I had been mistaken. “I hardly think so,” I stammered. “Merely a comment on their dedication.”

“And I think it important,” Theodor rushed to add, “that they are being very patient, given the circumstances. Why, half of the broadsides circulated are celebrations of the legal process and exhortations to patience, patience, more patience.” His laugh was nervous, but I noted that several nobles, silent in this debate, were nodding.

“Speaking of wagers, I understand we’re to be given quite a treat with the series of horse races this summer,” Viola said, prompting several voices to fill the silence with chatter centering on the summer social events in the city. Even this topic, however, was tinged with conflict—the only reason so many nobles were staying in the city this summer was the Reform Bill. Most of them, in a peaceable kingdom, would be spending the summer away from the city, on their estates.

“I’m sorry for that outburst,” Theodor said as we drove away. “I shouldn’t have pressed Whiteacre—he’s a blowhard. Knows the military but couldn’t maneuver through passing a new law for his life.”

“He’s certainly not the only one with those particular opinions,” I replied. If Theodor’s goal for the evening had been to encourage an elite nobility to consider and begin to accept a commoner as a consort, I wasn’t sure that we had been even remotely successful. “And it isn’t only reform he’s rejecting,” I said, staring out the window. It was the idea that he was equal to someone like me at all. I was glad my side of the carriage overlooked the bluff and the river rather than the oversize houses on the other side of the road.

Theodor edged closer to me and laced his fingers through mine. “Men like him can bluster all they like, but they can’t unmake this alliance. They can’t go against legal reform. We’ll outlast him.”

“What if—what if we don’t?” I recalled something from one of Kristos’s books, one of the thick tomes I now suspected he had borrowed from Pyord Venko. Despite the dubious source of the material, the line stuck with me. “Stasis is easier than change, and it has its own momentum, entrenching itself,” I paraphrased. “What if they won’t change?”

“If reform passes, they have to change. Whether they like it or not.”

“Do they?” My voice was small, barely a whisper. It challenged everything we had built our hopes on, but I had to voice the creeping doubts that Whiteacre had stirred in me.

“For them to go against the law would be treason. Just as much as assassination or secession or any other unthinkable act.” He edged closer to me as we jounced over a particularly deep rut. “Reform won’t be theirs to give or withhold any longer.”

“But they still have the money, and control so much of the provincial regions—how will you make them?”

“They’ll follow the law,” Theodor repeated.

I hesitated. “Theodor, I—I don’t mean to mistrust you, but these nobles—they’ve been working within a system of governance that gives them all of the authority for generations. Isn’t it—perhaps—just a bit too optimistic to assume they’ll bend to new laws?”

“Are you suggesting that the nobility would—what? All turn criminal overnight?”

“No,” I answered, frustrated. “But when you see them, you see them as equals. I see them as people who have been at the top of a very unfair game of king of the mountain for a very long time. They don’t know what the view looks like from anywhere but the top.”

“Are you saying I’m… stepping on you? Keeping you below me?”

“No!” My hands clenched into fists around my silk petticoats. “That is, not on purpose. You can’t help that you were born on the top of the mountain and I’m farther toward the bottom, but can’t you see how you’re allowed power that we’re not?” I breathed out, quick and relieved to have finally said it out loud.

“But I’m trying to help! I’m trying to do right by you and everyone else in Galitha without the whole damn country falling apart!”

“I know! But—damn it all, Theodor, can’t you see how you doing it is part and parcel of the problem? How it feels like something is being given?” I sucked in a breath. “How it feels like it could be taken away?”

He stared at me, at the crumpled silk in my hands and my stalwart confidence. He took a measured breath. “I can try to understand that better.”

“Thank you.”

“In the meantime, I think we can proceed with some assurance that even if they don’t truly want to change, they’re not interested in fighting a long-scale rebellion, so they’ll pass the bill.”

I accepted his confidence with a tentative smile. “I don’t suppose they fancy fomenting civil war, disobeying the reform once it’s law.”

“Indeed not,” he blustered with mock indignation. “Leave that to the upstart common rabble who think they can govern themselves! Poppycock!” I laughed—his imitation of Whiteacre was on the nose. “For now, there’s piles of work to be done, and plenty of long evenings like that ahead of us.” He took my hand. “I’m glad I’m facing it with you beside me.”