She’s imagined me in a lot of black jackets with high collars, the skirts slashed up the sides for easy movement. The shoulders look as though they’re armored, and, in a few cases, she has drawn what appears to be a single shiny sleeve of metal.
“They can measure me,” she says. “You won’t even have to go to the fittings.”
I give her a long look. Taryn doesn’t like conflict. Her manner of dealing with all the terror and confusion in our lives has been to become immensely adaptable, like one of those lizards that changes color to match its surroundings. She’s the person who knows what to wear and how to behave, because she studies people carefully and mimics them.
She’s good at picking out clothes to send a certain message—even if the message of her drawings appears to be “stay away from me or I will chop off your head”—and it’s not like I don’t think she wants to help me, but the effort she’s put into this, especially as her own marriage is imminent, seems extraordinary.
“Okay,” I say. “What do you want?”
“What do you mean?” she asks, all innocence.
“You want us to be friends again,” I say, sliding into more modern diction with her. “I appreciate that. You want me to come to your wedding, which is great, because I want to be there. But this—this is too much.”
“I can be nice,” she says, but does not meet my eyes.
I wait. For a long moment, neither of us speaks. I know she saw Cardan’s clothes tossed on the floor. Her not immediately asking about that should have been my first clue that she wanted something.
“Fine.” She sighs. “It’s not a big deal, but there is a thing I want to talk to you about.”
“No kidding,” I say, but I can’t help smiling.
She shoots me a look of vast annoyance. “I don’t want Locke to be Master of Revels.”
“You and me both.”
“But you could do something about it!” Taryn winds her hands in her skirts. “Locke craves dramatic experiences. And as Master of Revels, he can create these—I don’t even know what to call them—stories. He doesn’t so much think of a party as food and drinks and music, but rather a dynamic that might create conflict.”
“Okay…” I say, trying to imagine what that means for politics. Nothing good.
“He wants to see how I’ll react to the things he does,” she says.
That’s true. He wanted to know, for instance, if Taryn loved him enough to let him court me while she stood by, silent and suffering. I think he’d have been interested in finding out the same about me, but I turned out to be very prickly.
She goes on. “And Cardan. And the Circles of the Court. He’s already been talking to the Larks and the Grackles, finding their weaknesses, figuring out which squabbles he can inflame and how.”
“Locke might do the Larks some good,” I say. “Give them a ballad to write.” As for the Grackles, if he can compete with their debauches, I guess he ought to have at it, although I am clever enough not to say that out loud.
“The way he talks, for a moment, it all seems like it’s fun, even if it’s a terrible idea,” Taryn says. “His being Master of Revels is going to be awful. He will take lovers and be away from me. And I will hate it. Jude, please. Do something. I know you want to say you told me so, but I don’t care.”