flourish of one hand, and the orchestra took up the first dignified movement of a waltz they all knew.
‘I have no partner!’ Alice wailed. All around them, gentlemen were asking ladies for the honour of this dance, but there were far more women than men and Emily knew that she and her sister were destined to be left behind by the dancers like driftwood by the tide.
‘I do not feel like dancing just now,’ she declared, putting a brave face on it as she retired to one side of the room, where some of the Deerlings servants had been setting out chairs.
She looked round for Alice as she reached there, but her sister, who had been at her very shoulder, was now gone. A moment later, to her astonishment, she saw the girl partnered with a uniformed man twice her age, who was marching her gravely through the steps of the waltz as though it was a military manoeuvre. Alice noticed her staring and stuck her tongue out as she and her stiff major sailed past.
‘That girl . . .’ Emily muttered to herself, wanting to conjure up a remark particularly scathing, but the fact that she was genuinely envious took the moral wind out of her sails. Alice danced well, she noted, and she looked well too. If the cut of her cloth was inferior, then her energy and her smile more than made up the difference. She belonged here, Emily realized. Alice belonged in a way that she herself did not.
I am no socialite, after all, and I will be glad to get home again. But it was not true, and she felt utterly helplessly jealous.
The waltz drew to a dignified close, and their hostess, Lady Deerling, retired from partnering the King with a low and delighted curtsey. His Majesty extended one arm to a lady, swan-like in white, and the musicians took up the first few notes of a livelier tune. Alice was swooped upon by a debonair aristocrat whom Emily did not recognize. The dance began again, with the ladies and the men weaving in and out between one another, constantly slipping between partners in a complex, shifting knot.
‘My lady?’
Emily glanced up, and then rose to her feet more suddenly than she had intended, for it was one of the young wizards who now stood before her, watching her with amber-coloured eyes. He was a lean, neat-looking man with a narrow, clever face and hair like new-cut copper.
‘I am sorry, sir, you startled me.’
‘Miss Marshwic,’ he went on.
She opened her mouth a few times, utterly thrown from her train of thought.
‘Am I right?’ he asked anxiously. ‘I had thought . . .’
‘You are correct, sir, but how . . . ?’
‘No magic, Miss Marshwic. In truth, I can see your mother’s likeness in your face. Your father’s too. I heard that you would be here.’
‘You have me at a disadvantage, sir.’
He smiled, looking unintentionally vulpine. He might have been a few years her junior, but that face would still look young in a decade’s time. ‘I apologize. My name is Giles Scavian, a humble apprentice. My training was at the hands of—’
‘Of Patrick Scavian, my father’s friend.’
‘My uncle,’ he agreed, and she had placed him now. The same Warlock who helped her father oust the Ghyer had kept a boy in training. They all did so, as their duty to provide the King with fresh champions. ‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr Scavian.’
Giles Scavian gave her a little uncertain bow, and she wondered if a wizard’s training left him much time for learning the social graces.
‘That is not your uncle you entered with, I think?’ Emily enquired.
Scavian glanced at the elderly wizard, currently tripping the steps of the dance along with the nimblest of them. ‘Alas, no. My uncle has passed away.’
‘The war?’
‘Some years before, in truth. It always comes too soon, does it not? You can attest to that as much as I.’
She let her society facade drop at that, just a little; her father’s death had been so much on her mind.
‘It still seems so recent,’ he continued softly, and she felt a brief welling of misery within her that she fought down.
Scavian’s expression must have mirrored her own. ‘I am sorry to trouble you. I know nobody here,’ he confessed. ‘In truth, when I spotted your face from across the room, I felt that I knew you already. It was your parents that I read there, but still . . .’