imagine how hard your brain would have to work to wring all the hidden meaning from every word and gesture. Even this tiny dose of it made her feel nervous about what she might be missing. She didn’t like it. “Are there really seditionists in Highfall, then?” she said, deliberately blunt.
“Leading an empire is difficult,” Firo said. “You can’t please everyone. Suffice to say that at the moment, every courtier in the House is particularly alert for—opportunities, shall we say. The firmest of rocks on which to step.”
“And I’m a firm rock?” She was bad at courtcraft, but she was excellent at derision, and she packed as much of it as possible into the words.
Firo didn’t appear to notice. “Lord Gavin certainly thinks so, which makes you useful. Also, I suspect you’re bored, which makes you vulnerable.”
“What makes you think I’m bored?”
“If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be spending quite so many of your afternoons shoveling filth in the stables.”
Involuntarily, Judah froze. Another one of those complex expressions rippled over his face: part pity, part amusement. It made Judah feel tiny. “Nothing escapes notice here,” he said. “You seem to think that because you choose not to notice the courtiers, they’ll choose not to notice you. Or maybe you think their notice is limited to snickering at your clothes and hair? I assure you, it’s not. Don’t think there’s a single courtier inside the Wall that hasn’t thoroughly considered your position, and how it may be leveraged to support theirs. And not everyone will approach you as forthrightly as I do. We speak beautifully, when we want to, and we dress beautifully as a matter of course. But inside the silk and perfume, we’re venomous.”
“That’s hardly news,” Judah said, but privately, she was discomfited. She knew the kind of gamesmanship the courtiers engaged in, but Firo was right: she’d never considered that she might be considered a playing piece. She’d assumed that nobody had noticed her trips to the stables because she assumed nobody noticed her. “I suppose you’re about to tell me there’s nobody I can trust but you.”
Firo shook his head. “Oh, no. I don’t think I flatter myself if I say that generally, I’m one of the nastier specimens you’ll find. But I find myself in an interesting position at the moment.”
“Which is?”
“Lovely Cerrington suddenly finds itself poor.” He waved a hand. On one of his fingers he wore a garnet ring, and in the shade the stone appeared almost black. “It’s mostly agricultural, you know. There are fields, and the farmers grow things in them. We’re particularly famous for our flowers. Beautiful, but useless. Our real value, for the last two decades or so, has been strategic.”
“Flowers are strategic?”
“We’ve had problematic neighbors. One in particular that I’m sure you’ve heard of—no? Not up on the latest news from the provinces? Well, Cerrington borders Tevala, and for the last two decades, Tevala has been under the control of a man named Pimm. Have you met him?”
Judah shook her head.
“Would you like to? I’m afraid you won’t find him much of a conversationalist. His head is on a spike in the kitchen yard. Third from left, I believe.”
There were always heads on the spikes in the kitchen yard. “Elban does love a good beheading.”
“And if you need any further indication of your power, my dear,” Firo said with a lift of his plucked eyebrows, “consider that the words that just left your lips would leave my own lips, along with the head they’re attached to, right next door to Pimm of Tevala. Who was an idiot, by the way. If you’re going to attempt a coup, don’t mumble about it for twenty years beforehand.” He shook his head. “Anyway, Cerrington has historically been a very willing partner in Elban’s efforts to keep Pimm under control. Now Pimm—and his sons, and his grandsons—are all dead, and Tevala is in the hands of his step-nephew-by-marriage-in-law or some such, whose name I can’t remember but who’s more than happy to stamp out dissent at home in exchange for a pretty room in the House and the pretty adventures that come with it. None of this is of any importance to anybody but me, of course—but it’s very important to me. Suddenly, my beloved Cerrington has no purpose. Fields and fields of flowers, but no reason to exist.”
“I don’t see how I fit into this,” Judah said.
“I don’t, either. Not yet, anyway. But it’s in my family’s best interest to make Cerrington useful