WREN LOOKED around the great arched room and sighed straight from her toes. Another day of attempting to ingratiate herself with people who looked at her like something they’d scraped off their shoe. Joy.
I am a grown woman, she told herself. I am not sixteen and on the marriage mart to Father’s neighbors. I am an adult. I am on an assignment. I am playing a role.
Her eyes traveled across a coterie of younger women, all clad in elegant, figure-hugging gowns, with their hair styled into elaborate ringlets. Two of them were whispering to each other behind their fans, and although Wren knew that it was highly unlikely that they were talking about her, she still felt her stomach sink.
I am a grown woman. I do not care what these people think of me.
It didn’t help.
I could kill anyone in this room without breaking a sweat.
That helped a little. She glanced around to make sure that Shane was not actually in the room.
With the battle tide rendering all else equal, Shane’s superior strength would probably carry the day if the two of them fought. He was in one of the other rooms, though, keeping a watchful eye over Marguerite, so the statement stood. Yes. I could kill anyone in this room, unless one is secretly an assassin. And none of them know it.
…I just have no idea how to do my hair.
Wren wandered to a window and looked out. These ballrooms were halfway up the great fortress, so the view was an astonishing sweep of countryside, even if she couldn’t see the waterfall from here. With the glass pane between her and the open air, she did not feel the usual twinge that affected her in the presence of heights. It reminded her of being young and fearless, standing on the castle battlements able to see halfway to forever. If she stood on her toes, she could just make out the rooftops of the pottery works below, but for the most part, it was all fields and hedgerows, with long strips of woodland between them, stretching across gently rolling hillsides until they reached the mountains on the far side of the valley. Wren thought that it was amazing that the windows weren’t packed with people gaping at the view.
Still, they’ve probably seen it a hundred times. Probably admiring views is unfashionable.
Wren turned away from the window and ran her eye over the crowd, looking for anyone that she was even remotely acquainted with.
No one. Bah. Well, what about secret assassins? Surely there must be a couple in the Court of Smoke. I saw one fellow yesterday who was dressed as one of those chevaliers, but if he didn’t know his way around a garrote, I’ll eat my fan.
She tapped the fan in question on her wrist. It was made of vellum held between two carved wood sticks, meant to be folded and unfolded with an elegant flick of the wrist. Wren didn’t know if her flick qualified as elegant, but she could deploy the fan with enough precision to kill flies, which she was secretly rather pleased with.
There was supposedly a whole language to fan signals and where you carried it and how you fluttered it and where your gaze went while so fluttering. Wren had no idea how you learned that language. Her fan had bluntly pointed wooden handles and she was fairly certain that if she held it right, she could jam the closed fan into someone’s eye socket with enough force to break through to the brain.
She looked around for potential targets, but if there were any assassins in the room, they were hiding it well. Everyone here moved like…well, like fashionable women in uncomfortable shoes.
Small steps, constrained by the hems of the gowns. A sway in the walk carefully calculated to be attractive but not pronounced enough to be scandalous. Wren was doing her best to imitate that walk, and was pretty confident that she had the shoe part down, although the sway was probably a lost cause.
She ambled to the refreshment table. The bowl of wine had fruit floating in it to sweeten the taste, and had been watered down heavily enough that alcohol was a distant memory. Wren would have had to drink her own bodyweight in the insipid stuff to become inebriated. Lady Coregator carried a flask with her and liberally topped up her drinks. Lady Coregator was extremely intelligent. Wren hoped that she would finish her morning ride soon and come up to the court. Then she could talk to someone, or at least stand on the outskirts of the conversation, listening and smiling pleasantly, without anyone looking at her and wondering what she was doing there.
She had just filled a cup with watered wine when something struck her shoulder from behind.
Wren spun, started to drop into a crouch—when you were short, coming up from underneath was usually your best bet—saw a sea-green gown and the tall, giggling woman inside it, and had to devote most of her concentration to not slamming her elbow into the woman’s solar plexus and following up with a fist to the jaw.
Unfortunately, this left limited energy for holding things, like her fan and her wine cup. The cup fell, splashing across Wren’s bodice, and the fan hit the floor.
“Oh, I do beg your pardon,” said the woman in the sea-green gown, while her two companions murmured behind their hands. “I don’t know how I didn’t see you down there!”
Like hell you didn’t. Wren produced a grunt worthy of Shane. No, dammit, say something else.
Courtly manners. You have them, remember? “Please don’t trouble yourself,” she said, trying not to grit her teeth. “Accidents do happen in such close quarters.”
“And I’m certain no one will even notice the stain,” the woman said brightly.
Given that it had been red wine, however watered, and that Wren was wearing a blue dress, this was absolutely a lie. Wren simply met her eyes steadily. The woman smiled and flicked her fan, and her two companions tugged her away. Giggles erupted as soon as they were out of immediate earshot.
“I hate this,” Wren muttered to no one in particular.
“Understandably so,” said a man’s voice beside her, though not so close as to be alarming. Wren turned, resigned to the fact that her gown probably looked as if someone had put a knife in her ribs, and met the stranger’s eyes.
He was taller than she was, although that didn’t count for much, since almost everyone was. Not nearly as broad as Shane, and he looked unarmed. He had dark hair and amber skin, and his eyes were nearly black. She took a step back as he bent down, and for a confusing moment, she thought that he was kneeling at her feet, which made no sense at all.
Then he picked up her fan and offered it back to her. Ah. Yes. “Thank you.”
“It’s nothing.” He picked up the cup as well, which had broken into several pieces. Wren tried not to feel guilty. The tableware in these rooms was all unglazed bisque from the pottery at the base of the mountain, handsome enough but made to be used only once.
“May I?” he asked, taking a handkerchief from his surcoat.
“May you…?”
“Your dress,” he said gently. He had a pleasant tenor voice. Wren watched him dip the corner of the handkerchief in one of the carafes of water on the table. He turned toward her, making a dabbing motion, and she finally realized what he was doing.