the week that followed our decision, I confess that I trailed Lord Temur like a lynx, lithe and hungry.
It had been so long since my last prey.
As luck would have it, my opportunity came just as I was nearly ready to give up altogether and ask Alcibiades’ aid in knocking Lord Temur over the head.
I was sitting at my vanity table, unhooking the clever wooden fastenings of the hair ornaments I’d borrowed from Josette without permission, when the door connecting mine to Alcibiades’ slid open, and the general himself appeared.
If I hadn’t already been sitting, I’d have fallen over with shock.
“My dear!” I said, rising at once and casting the little lacquered butterflies onto the desk. “If I’d known you were coming, I might have waited to undo myself. Come in, come in.”
I rushed over to take him by the arm, lest he change his mind before entering and duck out again straightaway. To my continuing shock, he allowed himself not only to be pulled into the room proper, but pressed into a nearby chair as well.
“You’ve got a bug in your hair,” he said, staring up at me.
“Oh!” I said foolishly, running a hand through my hair for the stray clasp. There it was, caught at the back. I fished it out, careful not to let it snag. “Well, fancy that. I completely missed it. Have you come to be helpful? Because there’s a knot in this sash that I can never seem to quite—”
“Josette says we’re doing it tomorrow,” he blurted out, interrupting me in the middle of turning around.
“Are we?” I asked, whirling around again at once to face him. I hadn’t meant to look so eager, but the fact remained that I had begun to think we’d never have an opportunity at all.
“You don’t have to look like it’s your birthday come early,” Alcibiades grunted, but there was a small, hard smile on his face that I hadn’t seen before.
“But you couldn’t have planned it better if it had been my birthday,” I told him earnestly, clasping my hands together.
“You’re an odd bird,” Alcibiades said, in a way that made me think that perhaps it was a compliment, coming from him.
“The very finest of peacocks, my dear,” I said. “Now I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave, I’ve a great deal of preparation to do for tomorrow.”
If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought the look on Alcibiades’ face was almost disappointed.
“All right,” he said, rising to his feet. “Just so long as we can get this over with.”
“I do hope it doesn’t bother you, my dear,” I said, softening considerably. “As I know how traditional you like to be about things.”
“If it were up to me,” Alcibiades began, then cut off, shaking his head. “Doesn’t matter, does it? Since it’s not.”
“That’s the most sensible you’ve ever been,” I replied, patting him on the shoulder.
It was only when I returned to the task at hand—the clips for my hair—that I noticed that my hands were shaking.
I was often asked what it meant to be a velikaia by the men and women who came to visit me during my “sojourns” in the countryside—all of them lonely, silly people desperate for gossip to get them through the country life. If it wasn’t chasing down poor, helpless little foxes during hunts—I liked to rescue them and keep them in my own private menagerie—then it was sitting about wondering what was happening in the capital, that distant, glowing, glorious zenith of social importance.
Some asked only for news of the Esar and the Esarina; this margrave or that; the latest news from Thremedon, and who was wearing what, and who had married whom—the usual trifling bits and bats we all longed for. Myself, I must necessarily admit, included.
But some, the poor creatures, had no idea about real manners at all. After a time, everyone found some way, tactful or not, to ask the questions they were so desperate to have answered.
What did it mean to be a velikaia? Were all the rumors they’d heard—bastion-only-knew from whom—true?
I always answered the question about the rumors first, because that really was the more interesting. Yes, I had been involved with the incident of Margrave Aulame; but no, his pretty young wife did not kill herself because of it. Yes, I had begun to assist the Esar when I was only seven years old; but no, I had assuredly not played a part in the untimely death of the Arlemagne duchess who married