the length of his sleeves as Marcelline pursed her lips next to him, looking relatively unimpressed with the whole affair.
“Hello, my dear,” I murmured as an aside.
“Greylace,” she said, looking wary but nonetheless unsurprised.
On our other side were Lieutenants Casimiro and Valery, their names coming to me in a fortuitous coincidence with Alcibiades’ grunted greetings. They looked very uncomfortable in their new uniforms, especially Casimiro, the larger of the two. He kept glancing to one side at Alcibiades, as though to somehow divine the mystery of how he’d managed to wear his own reds across the border unscathed.
Lastly, and quite alone, that fortunate creature, came Marius, a scholar at the ’Versity as well as a magician associated with the Basquiat. In fact, now that I counted our party, the numbers were overwhelmingly in the favor of magicians, myself included. This meant that the only men without Talent were Casimiro and Valery, though Alcibiades’ Talent was as good as nonexistent for all he used it.
What a curious group. We seemed more like a circus than Volstov’s best—the soldiers looking like clowns, and the magicians from the Basquiat even more so. For a man as uncomfortable around magicians as the Esar was, he’d certainly chosen a great number of them to represent his interests. Or perhaps he merely considered us expendable, should any trouble arise.
And amidst the chaos, there was Alcibiades, a bright red thumb in the noonday heat.
I drew up close to him, the silk of my blue jacket—cut especially after the Ke-Han style—rustling about me.
“One of these men is rather unlike the rest,” I murmured, taking his arm.
He stiffened, as if I had just produced a dead mouse from his pocket. His eyes were alert, and I decided then that he must be far more intelligent than the fashionably long-haired, golden dog that I too had once owned as a pet, to see what all the fuss was about; though her eyes had been very kind, they had never once been what any man might label “alert.”
“All the same to me,” he muttered in an undertone, which was more of a reply than I’d got to many of my observations during the long carriage ride. I felt especially heartened.
He was alert, but not particularly perceptive, then, for there were certainly differences in the men ranged before us, close together as though in defensive battle formation. Surely it wouldn’t be prudent to spend all my time among the Ke-Han thinking in terms of our warring past, though, and I dismissed the thought as swiftly as it had come. Our men and women of Volstov began to arrange themselves close as well, as though they’d been prodded into a showing of proper etiquette by the Ke-Han delegation arrayed before us.
We didn’t manage to stand nearly as straight or as still as they did, though.
We’d been counseled before coming over, by three separate professors from the ’Versity no less, that the culture of the Ke-Han was one deeply fixed in ceremony and that our most royal presence the Esar would be vastly disappointed if any of our number derailed the course of diplomacy simply by erring in decorum. Subsequently, our preparation for the journey had included an intensive course in ceremony, which I had thoroughly enjoyed. There was a certain grace and purpose of reason about all their cold and calm rules that I found quite fascinating. It was a shame I’d found no one to share my enthusiasm with, but that would soon change once I’d brought Alcibiades around. It would be more difficult, perhaps, than training a dog, but then I was accustomed to such challenges.
One of the Ke-Han diplomats stepped forward—not the one I’d singled out, but the one standing just over his shoulder. He wore his hair tied back in the thick-braided style of their generals, though I hadn’t had the proper time to study the significance of each plait. Indeed, it was a shame my own hair was not quite long enough yet to adopt a similar style, for I thought myself rather in need of such a change, and surely it would be a most flattering display of solidarity. The diplomat clasped his hands and bowed low to our arrival party. Unlike our own clothing in varying patterns of the same shade, the men of the Ke-Han were dressed in many different colors, with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Each, however, wore a sash of midnight blue that denoted their patriot status in what I felt was