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Pellus tossed aside the empty bottles. “Gods, are we out of wine? I don’t want to have to go to supper with the taste of you still in my mouth.”
Lily, who had been curled up in a blanket, humming to herself, sat up reluctantly as the warm glow faded. The odd thing was that Pellus was actually quite a skilled lover. But always afterward, she had to come crashing back into reality. She slipped out of bed, opened him a new bottle, and then poured two glasses. She sipped hers a bit more discreetly than he did, declining to mention that she had the taste of him in her mouth every bit as much as he had the taste of her.
He flopped naked into a chair and lit his pipe. “Apparently there’s some holiday coming up. Please tell me we’re not going to have to endure tedious exhibitions of local culture.”
“It’s May Day on Monday,” she said. “The first day of May, you see. Also known as Wonnermond or Brygidsnacht, apparently. So this whole weekend will be full of parties.”
She could have told him a great deal more about the holiday, but he interrupted her with a bitter laugh. “Really? Did they teach you all about the Myrcian social calendar at that whorehouse of yours?”
“Um...no.” She drew in a sharp breath. “I’ve been taking an interest in what’s going on here.”
“I really don’t care. Just tell me we’re going somewhere with good wine and a lot more idiots who don’t know how to gamble.”
“I’m sure we’ll find something for you, dear,” she said.
It was getting harder to find ways to distract him, though. On Saturday night they went to a supper party at the house of Baron Corbin, the Lord Mayor of Formacaster. After the meal, Lily had to spend twenty tedious, humiliating minutes running around before she found three other people who wanted to play cards with Pellus. No one liked him. He was rude, xenophobic, and a much luckier gambler than he had any right to be. Word got around, and so a lot of people who a week or two ago would have welcomed him gladly to their card tables, now claimed a sudden and pressing engagement whenever Pellus drew near.
Back in the Empire it had all seemed so simple. Moira needed someone at Wealdan Castle—someone with a pedigree so impeccable that his name and reputation could open any door. And of course his “private secretary” could tag along, chatting with people and sending back secret reports. But now Lily was starting to think there was something fundamentally wrong with the plan. Pellus wasn’t merely a caustic jerk. He was starting to become an actual impediment to the mission.
There had to be a better way of doing this.
Fortunately, everyone liked Lily. So eventually, after she’d wheedled and cajoled and smiled and simpered enough, she found him a table for the night, and she was free to go do her actual job.
She tried her best to promote Queen Rohesia’s interests, and to find clever ways to shut down the most egregious falsehoods about her. But it was hard. When the Countess of Kinnaird, sister-in-law of the Bishop of Leornian, pressed Lily for “evidence” that Legate Faustinus couldn’t have been Edwin Sigor’s father, she was forced to claim that Faustinus didn’t like women and had “Thessalian” tendencies. That won that particular argument on that particular night, but it wouldn’t take people long to figure out that she had been lying.
And indeed, the next morning, when Lily saw the countess again at a garden brunch party, the woman said, “Wait, Faustinus ran off with the sorceress Moira Darrow. Why would he do that if he didn’t like women?”
“Oh, you know Moira. She’s got a boyish figure,” said Lily, inwardly cringing at the stupidity of her own words.
“I don’t know what boys look like in the Empire,” said the countess archly, “but around here they certainly don’t look like her.” And Lily couldn’t really argue with that.
That afternoon, as it happened, when Lily and Pellus had returned to their inn, and Pellus had gone back to bed, a courier arrived from the diplomatic legate, bearing a reply from Moira to Lily’s latest report. It had been almost a week and a half, and considering that Moira was a day’s ride away in Hamstowe, Lily had started to worry something was wrong. But no, it turned out that the officious legate had deliberately delayed her letter, calling it “nonessential communication.”
“His excellency asked me to remind you that you are only to use the courier system in extreme emergencies,” said the messenger.
“Oh, trust me—I’m unlikely to forget,” sighed Lily.
The courier, apparently trying to be helpful, quietly suggested that in the future she sign Pellus’s name to her letters, which infuriated her. Yes, Pellus was a senator. But it sounded an awful lot like the courier was saying that her reports would be taken more seriously if they were written by a man. Which was probably true where most of the Imperial government was concerned. But not with Moira and Faustinus, thank the gods.
Lily sent the courier off with a penny for his trouble. Then she opened the message and started decoding. On the subject of a marriage between Princess Elwyn and Broderick the Younger, it turned out Lily had guessed wrong.
“We should do everything possible to discourage this,” Prefect Moira wrote. “The marriage would bolster Baron Broderick’s claim to the throne.”
“Good thing I didn’t go out of my way to promote the marriage,” thought Lily. And after she pondered the question for a few minutes, she saw that Moira was almost certainly right. When Elwyn and Young Broderick were married, the elder Broderick would have a massively outsized influence on the Myrcian government, even if Edwin remained king.
She read on to the next, and last, paragraph, which so startled her that she had to sit down. “Faustinus and I have consulted with the Proconsul of Terminium,” Moira wrote, “and you are now authorized to use any means necessary, up to and including assassination. Good luck.”
“Assassination?” Lily thought. “Me? An assassin?”
She wasn’t a killer. She was a courtesan who had been lucky enough to stumble into a job as a Scriptora, or correspondent, for Moira. Lily paced up and down the parlor for a few minutes, wringing her hands and wondering if she could ever bring herself to kill someone.
There was a false bottom in her trunk, back by the bed where Pellus was napping, and she had a pair of daggers and some powdered arsenic in there. But that was just a precaution, wasn’t it? That’s what Moira had called it when Lily had left Presidium. Just a precaution. Moira and Faustinus had taught her a little about how to fight, back in the garden of the house that Pellus paid for. But that wasn’t the same as being a real killer.
“Oh, dear, this isn’t going to end well,” she thought. But if Moira wanted her to do something, she had to try. Hopefully it wouldn’t turn out to be necessary, and her weapons could stay in the bottom of her trunk where they belonged.
Monday evening arrived, and Lily almost had to get a knife out to force Pellus to go to the Brygidsnacht parties they had been invited to. Especially once she had explained to him the odd little Myrcian custom that allowed girls to pick their own dance partners on this one night of the year.
“You mean that if some woman asks, I have to dance with her?” asked Pellus.
“Well, you can say ‘no,’ but it would probably cause offense.”
“And there’s something wrong with that?”
But of course when they got to the parties, women weren’t exactly lining up to dance with Pellus, so Lily was able to steer him over to the card tables, like she always did. After that, she did her best to enter into the spirit of the holiday, and she solicited dances with quite a number of important noblemen.
She learned a great deal about how the voting would proceed once the Gemot convened, and she got a sense of how many votes Rohesia could count on—distressingly few, as it happened. Of all the noblemen she danced with that night, only the Duke of Leornian and the Earl of Stansted would say openly that they would vote to confirm the queen as regent and to keep her son as king. The others were noncommittal.
Much later in the evening, in a smoking room among faded tapestries, she ended up sharing a low-slung leather couch with Lady Emily Cuthing, daughter of the Duke of Keelshire, and Lady Gwenevir Dryhten, who was the daughter of the Duke of Leornian. They were both ladies-in-waiting to Queen Rohesia, though her majesty’s recent confinement had left them with little to do. Lady Gwenevir was 16, in her first “season” at court, and she had gotten herself excessively drunk, so Lady Emily, age 20, was wisely looking after her, even though Emily was none too sober, either.
The subject of the royal engagement came up, as it often did at parties now, and Gwenevir declared, in a slurring, sing-song voice, that she knew “the real reason” why Elwyn didn’t want to marry Young Broderick.
“You mean other than the fact that she’s being forced into it against her will?” asked Emily.
“That’s not it,” said Gwenevir. “I was there when it happened. This was down in Severn. I was there with my parents before I went to school, you see. And I saw it happen.”
“Saw what happen?” asked Lily eagerly.
“Elwyn was trying to teach him the Mt. Nellis Reel—that’s the one where your feet are like so, and your hands do this.” She nearly knocked over her wineglass. “It’s very tricky, Miss Serrana. Anyway, she was teaching him, and she did a turn like this, and he was supposed to catch her, but instead of getting her by the arms, he got her by the chest. It was an accident, or at least I think it was. But she really yelled at him. And she kneed him in the balls. That’s why she doesn’t want to marry him—because he grabbed her breasts.”
“I think it might be a little more complicated than that,” said Emily.
“Do you think there’s any chance the wedding could be stopped?” asked Lily.
“There’s not going to be a wedding,” scoffed Gwenevir. “No girl is going to marry a boy who grabbed her chest in front of a room full of people.”
“Oh, there will be a wedding, alright,” said Emily. “The only thing that can stop it at this point is if Young Broderick happens to drop dead.”