had to like this arrangement, though. It was uncomfortable days of riding in a carriage to come to a place I didn’t want to set foot in, to put on a smile I didn’t want to wear on my face, and to bow to men who’d just as soon have cut me down if everything had worked out a little differently.
It was too short a period of time to go forgiving an entire country for fighting so underhanded that they almost won. There were some tactics you never forgave.
I didn’t like their blank expressions, or the way their women hopped-to quick as soldiers might’ve, just to serve the enemy. That was the sort of behavior that made a man wonder what the women he knew back home would’ve done if the coin had fallen to the other side. Everyone in the Ke-Han palace was too fucking polite.
At least I hadn’t slapped on enemy colors just to keep them happy. I could feel every last one of them staring at me, but I wasn’t playing any games or crawling into bed with an enemy I’d only just got the better of. This was Volstov’s victory. It was bad enough being sent there to hammer out the terms of a more lasting treaty; I didn’t have to make it worse by dressing like them and pretending I didn’t hate it just as much as they did.
Their whole palace was a tricky affair designed to be treacherous, its narrow hallways winding around each other like the individual threads of a spider’s web and its walls made of paper so thin you could see shadows passing before them, in the rooms hidden just on the other side. Whispers chased us when we got too close, and now and then the sound of a woman’s ghostly laughter followed close behind. On top of that, with all of us feeling like exhibits at the zoo, there were mirrors slanted against the ceiling, fitted into every corner where simple lamps should have been. Any sort of light you wanted came from your own personal tight-mouthed Ke-Han groveling bastard, who followed you around like he’d stab you in the back as soon as light the way for you.
We were esteemed guests, all right—so esteemed we wouldn’t be able to go anywhere or do anything without having someone watching us. Well, I told myself, if they wanted to assign some poor fool the job of listening to me snore and being privy to when and where and how much I shat, that was fine by me. Chances were it’d be worse for him than it would be for me. It was a waste of everyone’s time, and I wasn’t bothering myself any by thinking about it.
“Do you know,” said Caius Greylace, coming up on me unannounced like some kind of winter ailment, “that the mirrors show you everything happening all along the halls? How clever!”
I wasn’t in the mood to praise Ke-Han ingenuity like some fat country noble might praise his favorite spaniel. Chances were, this Caius creature would get bored soon enough and find someone else to bother; it didn’t matter who, so long as it wasn’t me. I didn’t like spaniels.
“Looks like,” I said.
“I suppose they must have an awful lot of trouble with assassination,” Caius went on. He was dressed half like a woman and half like a lunatic, breezing through the halls behind our lamp-bearer, the fabric of whatever it was he was wearing swishing all the way. “Or perhaps they’re simply inbred. I hear it causes paranoia in noble bloodlines as old and as carefully guarded as theirs.”
I didn’t say anything to that at all.
We were all split up by where we slept—a fact I didn’t enjoy for a second. And I would have made it clear at the time I realized it, too, if Caius hadn’t exclaimed over a peacock wandering across the courtyard, effectively ending all conversation on the matter of lodgings.
What really set all the warning bells off in my head was the way we were put here and there, and most of us halfway across the palace from one another, with real careful regard paid to status and nothing else. Josette, Fiacre, and Wildgrave Ozanne were all quartered together in the West Wing of the palace, for example, whereas Casi and Val were somewhere in the south nearer to the stables and the menagerie. I hadn’t even seen Marcy and Marius since we’d arrived, which tickled me the wrong way.