dinners and parties. I thought the first one was a mistake. But even after I realized they couldn’t all have gone astray, I still had no idea what to do with them, or why they were coming.
“I see you’re already in demand,” Solya said, stepping out of a shadow and through my doorway before I could close it after yet another maid, delivering yet another card.
“Is this something we’re supposed to do?” I asked warily. I had begun to wonder if perhaps this was a duty of the king’s wizards. “Do these people need some kind of magic done?”
“Oh, it might come to that eventually,” he said. “But at the moment, all they want is the privilege of displaying the youngest royal witch ever named. There are already a dozen rumors flying about your appointment.” He plucked the cards out of my hands, shuffled through them, and handed one out to me. “Countess Boguslava is by far the most useful: the count has the king’s ear, and he’s sure to be consulted about the queen. I’ll take you to her soirée.”
“No, you won’t!” I said. “You mean they just want me to come and visit? But they don’t even know me.”
“They know enough,” he said, in patient tones. “They know you’re a witch. My dear, I really think you would be better off accepting my escort for your first outing. The court can be—difficult to navigate, if you’re unfamiliar with its ways. You know that we want the same thing: we want the queen and Kasia acquitted.”
“You wouldn’t give a crust of bread to save Kasia,” I said, “and I don’t like the way you go about getting the things you want.”
He didn’t let me chase away his manners. He only politely bowed himself backwards into the shadows in the corner of my room. “I hope you’ll learn to think better of me, by and by.” His voice floated distantly out of the dark, even as he vanished. “Do keep in mind that I am ready to be your friend, if you find yourself at sea.” I threw the card from Countess Boguslava after him. It fluttered to the ground in the empty corner.
I didn’t trust him at all, though I couldn’t help but worry he was telling me part of the truth. I was beginning to understand how little I understood about the life of the court. To listen to Solya, if I showed my face at a party given by a woman who didn’t know me, she would be pleased, and tell her husband so, and he’d—tell the king that the queen shouldn’t be put to death? And the king would listen? None of that made sense to me, but neither did strangers sending me a pile of invitations, all because a man had written my name down in a book. But here were the invitations, so plainly I was missing steps along the way.
I wished I could speak to Sarkan: half for advice, half to complain at him. I even opened up Jaga’s book and hunted through it for a spell that would let me reach him, but I didn’t find anything that seemed as though it could work. The closest was one called kialmas, with the note, to be heard in the next village, but I didn’t think anyone would appreciate me shouting so loudly that my voice would go a week’s distance across the country, and I didn’t think the mountains would let the noise through anyway, even if I deafened everyone in Kralia.
In the end, I picked out the earliest dinner invitation, and went. I was hungry, anyway. The last of the bread I’d saved in my skirt pocket was so stale by now that even magic couldn’t make it go down easily, or really fill my belly. There had to be kitchens somewhere in the castle, but the servants eyed me oddly when I went too far down the wrong hallway; I didn’t want to imagine their faces if I went sailing into the kitchens. But I couldn’t bring myself to stop one of those maids, a girl just like me, and ask her to serve me—as though I really thought myself a fine lady, instead of just dressed up pretending to be one.
I roamed up and down stairs and through hallways until I found my way back out to the courtyard, and there I girded myself and went to one of the guards on the door, and asked him the way, showing