high on their foreheads, and angled to create an imperious effect. There might have been the slightest hint of mockery in their precise motions—after all, they were mimicking the imperial class, without belonging to it—but there was such delicacy in each step, each tilt of the chin or curl of the finger, that one was caught up in the beauty as if one might suddenly drown in it.
Without so much as the slightest cue, they all removed from their opulent sashes equally opulent paper fans and unfurled them all at once, obscuring their faces.
That was when the moon princess appeared.
There was no mistaking her—or him, I supposed, but it was impossible to remember that—though she was dressed in pale grays accented with lavender, the color of a fine morning mist hung low above the grass. She was not nearly so bright as her suitors were, but her poise was positively celestial. I found myself transfixed—I would have to order robes in the Ke-Han style of fabric in exactly that color at the very next opportunity—attempting, as best I could, to study the way she crossed the makeshift stage from right to left, then right again, as though she were floating bare inches above the floor.
“Beautiful,” Josette said. I could do no more than agree with her. The only one of us who looked skeptical was Alcibiades, no doubt because he couldn’t allow himself to forget her secret. It troubled him, I surmised, that anyone should appear as anything he was not.
She moved like a cloud crossing paths with the moon, her lips and nails the same deep, blushing red. The music, as played by the “narrator,” fanned the fire in our hearts by quickening pace, though the woman who played was no longer singing. The words, I supposed, would have to be found in the princess’s every movement, one hand lifting, then the other, changes so minuscule they should not have mattered.
What an artist the actor was. I never doubted for a moment that this was a woman before me, a princess fallen from grace with the stars, who would soon learn to live without them—only to be returned to the heavens once more, without a say in the matter.
“Wait,” Alcibiades said, and I could have throttled him for the disruption. “What’s that?”
I was just reaching over to quiet him by any means necessary, even if I had to go so far as to cover his mouth with my hand, when I, too, saw what he was talking about. How Alcibiades, still half-inebriated and hardly paying proper attention to the play itself, had managed to notice the knife hidden in the moon princess’s fan, I’ll never know. All I did know was that suddenly Alcibiades had leapt to his feet, knocking our dainty table over in the process, and was suddenly part of the play in progress. Or was it that the play had suddenly become all too real?
Another woman, one of our party, gasped. Josette, whose composure was magnificent, especially for a lady of true Volstovic heritage, did not. I did, however, feel Lord Temur tense beside me, reaching for a blade that unfortunately was not strapped to his side.
But Alcibiades, bless his heart, moved more quickly than all the rest, more quickly even than the Emperor’s guards themselves. I was more proud of him than I’d ever been of anyone, which was more proud than I had any right to be.
It was all over very quickly, though the moments etched themselves like scenes from a storybook, individual woodblock prints, across my vision. Alcibiades, breaking through the group of young actors portraying the suitors, who had, I saw then, cleverly formed a blockade against the majority of the diners to obscure the moon princess’s actions; Alcibiades, grasping the moon princess’s wrist, regardless of the dagger she held; Alcibiades, throwing himself between the Emperor and, it would seem, death itself, clad all in smoky, luxurious gray, while the music ended sharply on a jarring note; Alcibiades, acting as though that was what he had always been trained to do, and not, in fact, a terribly incautious whim.
The dagger fell to the floor, and the noise seemed to wake everyone from their slumber. Although I did not blame them, for I, too, felt as though I’d been caught in a spider’s web of dreams, the food and the incense and the music a deceptive spell thrown over us all to keep us sluggish and too slow.