I feel a sickening mix of fear and excitement. Any time I think I know what I want from this evening it all slips away from me. Do I want Finn to court me? Am I agreeing to such by accepting his gifts and attending? Should I have returned them immediately? But I cannot deny the thrill that runs through me when I anticipate seeing him again.
It’s aggravating. And I will be certain to demand answers from him about his behavior. I reassure myself that this is the biggest reason I am going.
And through it all is an undercurrent of guilt. I worry that leaving Kelen behind while dressed in Alben finery is symbolic. He would certainly see it that way. Several times I open my mouth to ask the driver to take me back, but it’s too late to see Kelen anyway.
Before long—far too soon, in fact—the motor pulls to a stop in front of a building lit up like high noon on the warmest summer day. Light spills from the entire glass-encased structure, a palatial testament to engineering and science. I hadn’t understood what the conservatory was, but the glimpse of shrouded green I can see from here has me even more excited than I was before.
It’s a greenhouse! A tropical island in the midst of the great gray city.
My door opens and the driver stands to the side. I realize with a knife twist of embarrassment that I have no concept of whether or not I am to pay him. I have only a few coins on me, just enough tucked into the satin purse around my wrist for a cabbie. No doubt this was a far more expensive ride.
“I—”
“Everything is taken care of, milady.”
I nod, grateful that he anticipated my question. “That was the most I have ever enjoyed the streets of this city. In fact, I shall never again love them so much as I did this night.”
He finally looks up, the brim of his hat high enough to let him meet my eyes. “I’ll not be escorting you home, I’m afraid. But it’s all been arranged.” He sounds regretful and I smile, putting my hand on his arm. He seems surprised—both at the eye contact and at the touch. I know what it is to be ignored while providing service, and I refuse to do it to others.
“Well, nothing can compare to your exceptional motoring skills. Thank you.”
He nods, lips tight in a smile, and I release his arm. Pulling out the invitation, I walk down a path lit with hundreds of crystal-encased candles and try not to look like a wide-eyed girl incredibly out of her depth.
I am failing miserably, and I can’t find it in me to care.
At the doors, twelve feet tall with a blue-green patina of old copper, two liveried servants stand, their backs as straight as the spine of a book. One holds out a white-gloved hand and I place my invitation there. Without so much as looking at it, he bows and opens the door to me.
I’m hit by a rush of air. These doors are a portal to another world, one of green, growing things and warm, living air in the midst of this cold city. I have not been truly warm since I moved here. Blessed heat! Beaming, I step through and am greeted on one side by a woman in scarlet.
She is beautiful, I think with a pang of jealousy, before realizing that I am greeting my reflection. But it is a vision of myself I have never before seen. The dress makes me look more a woman than a girl, and I suddenly feel far too revealed. Not only my skin—though there is more of that on display than normal—but myself.
I am a girl playing at womanhood, bright lips and brighter dress. With the heady scent of plants so close to those I grew up with, I feel young, painfully young, and remember a time my mother walked in on me, wrapped up in her finest dress. She had laughed.
I dearly hope no one laughs at me tonight.
I hear the door opening behind me and hurry forward so as not to be caught holding court with my own reflection. The gravel path is lined with palms carefully coaxed to arch overhead, the space between filled with the fuzzy, soft fronds of smaller ferns. And then, just when I begin to wonder if the path ever ends, it opens into a massive room filled with riotous flowers and oddly shaped trees, the humidity-fogged glass ceilings at least twenty feet tall. There are islands of plants everywhere.
And people.
So many people.
Any hope I’d harbored of quietly finding Finn vanishes. There must be three hundred people in the room, and to my horror I am the only woman dressed in a shade other than charcoal gray, silver, or black. They congregate like austere and glittering chunks of volcanoes long since passed.
I look like the flame erupting from a living volcano, and my face is burning to match.
I walk into the room with my head held high as though I attend galas in wildly inappropriate colors every day. As if it weren’t enough to be alone in such a brilliant dress, I am also the only woman with a shade of skin darker than ivory. I would have been remarkable no matter what I wore.
I scan the crowd, walking with as measured a pace as I can manage, though I’m feeling more and more frantic. I crave Finn’s face, desperate for someone familiar, even someone as confusing as him. Shocked and appraising glances follow me, and I try to pay them no mind.
Weak, stringed music drifts on the air, barely able to fill so large a space. Some couples dance, their movements formal and perfectly scripted.
After traversing nearly the length of the room, I’m close to despair. Why wasn’t he by the front, waiting for me? Why isn’t he looking for me? Surely he’s not indifferent, not after the lengths he went to get me here.
I let out a sigh of relief. There, in a brightly lit corner, Finn stands surrounded by three women who glitter like obsidian peacocks. My heart picks up, and I raise a hand.
“Finn!” I call. His suit sets off his dark eyes and fine shoulders, and how his hair catches the light! He looks up from his conversation and his eyes widen. Instead of greeting me, he lifts a gloved hand to his heart and his chest retracts inward as though in pain. Then he looks back at the woman who is speaking, dismissing me without a word.
Six
I STAND GAPING AT HIM, HIS REFUSAL TO acknowledge my existence like a sharp stone in my throat.
I know this pain, this raw ache—it’s what always precedes crying. I glance to either side, desperate for an exit. I’ll run out, flee, pretend tonight never happened, and then . . .
I clench my jaw and narrow my eyes. I am no wilting Alben, I am a fierce and strong Melenese woman. And I am not the victim of any cruel jokes. Spirits below, I will make certain he knows I am not to be toyed with.
I march directly over and take the small space left between two of his admirers. He tries to avoid my gaze, suddenly intent on whatever the tallest peacock has to say.
“Good evening, Finn.” I smile brightly. “What a marvelous building this is.”
He finally looks at me, dragging his eyes as though it takes physical effort. “I’m sorry, have we met?”
I will not be embarrassed. I will not. I grasp hold of the anger flaring ever higher in my chest as a lifeline. “I believe we have.”
“You’re mistaken,” says the shortest peacock, her brown hair adorned with a massively jeweled headband. “This is Lord Ackerly of North Aston.”
I raise my eyebrows, not looking away from Finn. “A lord? How nice for you.”
“Yes, quite. Good evening.” He turns back to the tallest peacock, but the last peacock, in a clinging slip of charcoal gray, cannot resist.
“How pretty you are,” she says with a cloying smile. “You must feel so at home here in this horrid, muggy heat with all of these wild plants. You look like one yourself!”
The worst part is, she’s right. I did feel at home when I walked in, but I know how far I am from it now. Lifting my chin, I return her smile with a pointed one of my own. “Why thank you, I do feel comfortable here, just as you must feel perfectly suited to this city of cold, gray rocks.”
Her eyes grow bigger than I’d have imagined possible. I look triumphantly at Finn, who is trying his hardest not to see me. Fine then. “So nice to meet you all. I think I should prefer a dance. Lord Ackerly, ladies.” I bob my head at them and turn on my heel.
A shadow looms behind mine and I turn, expecting Finn to have followed me, a sharp word already on the tip of my tongue. I frown, confused. He hasn’t moved, but in some trick of the light from so many electric torches, his shadow stretches farther than the women’s, mingling with my own. He looks down as though he notices it, too, and his face is as white as a ghost.
Ghost-faced spirit cursers. It’s a nasty phrase in Melenese, filled with hissing noises. Mama spanked me the one time I used it in front of her. That’s what Kelen always called them. Kelen, whom I should be laughing with right now instead of pretending at finery I despise.
Ghost-faced spirit cursers. I hold the words on my tongue, relishing their feel as I march into the crowd, determined to stay the entire evening so that Finn sees me dancing and enjoying myself and knows he hasn’t won. Whatever his game is with the strangeness in the hotel, then the dress and the invitation, I have not gotten this far to be beaten by simple humiliation.
Sweeping my filmy shawl over one shoulder, I smile as though I am the queen Ma’ati said I looked like. And, to my surprise, it works.
First one man, then another, then another, asks me to dance. I am twirled and curtsied around the length and width of the room. Mama would be so proud to see the lessons I threw fits about attending paying off so well. I laugh and make charming remarks. Why yes, I do love tropical flowers, why no, not everyone from Melei is as fair of skin as I am and in fact I envy them their darker shade, why yes, I am here to further my studies.
My partners are all charmed by my “exotic beauty.” I do not feel exotic. I feel strange and small and false, but I smile and smile and smile.
This building is a wonder. Not even the cold night can get through the glass, fogged with steam. Everything glows in a bright haze of progress, and I think I understand why Albion assumes it does the rest of the world a favor by installing itself and its standards wherever it lands. If they can bring the hot, green glory of Melei here, why can they not bring the rigid structure and social “progress” of Albion there?
One man, in his late teens with ginger hair and clever eyes, asks me to dance several times. I can tell he is pleased with his own deviance, happy to be the focal point of the room when I am on his arm. I don’t like being used that way, but he is pleasant and a good conversationalist.
“And how do you find the school?” he asks.
“Well, seeing as it’s always in the same location, it’s never very difficult to find.”
He laughs, delighted, and I can’t help but really smile. “Are all women from your island this charming?”
“Far more so, sir. That’s why they sent me here. I was a blight on the whole village.”
“I cannot imagine you being a blight on anything.”
Another man, this one older but indistinguishable from the last three with his well-trimmed mustache and slick-combed hair, taps my shoulder to cut in. I would rather turn them both down—I am out of breath and near dizzy from the heat and the spinning.
“If I may?” the older gentleman asks. My ginger-haired suitor looks disappointed and oddly worried. But he nods.
The new man smiles at me and I have the briefest impression of sharp teeth and sharper eyes, though when I shake my head to clear it his teeth are perfectly normal and there’s nothing remarkable about his face.
“I’m afraid I have to steal her away now,” a soft voice says next to me. I turn to find a woman I’ve never met, young and fair with reddish curls, her dress shimmering silver. “My brother, Ernest, has been monopolizing her. He can be quite selfish that way. If you’ll excuse us, gentlemen, I’ve promised to show her the outer rooms and at this rate the sun will rise before she makes it off the dance floor.”
My foiled new dance partner bows to us, and my savior takes my gloved hand and puts it through her arm. Ernest gives his sister a glare softened with a smile.
She leads me away from the press of bodies in the center of the room. I try not to scan for Finn. I do not need to see him; I know he’s seen me. Everyone has seen me.
“Now then,” the girl says, “I’ve been watching you for some time and, seeing as how this gala is the first I’ve planned, I’d feel simply awful if someone were to pass out from overexertion. They’d never let me be in charge again. My brother, bless him, would dance you into the floor.”
I laugh, my throat raw. “I cannot thank you enough. Nor can my feet in these wretched heels.”
“I admire your courage, coming to the gala knowing how you would stand out.” She must feel me stiffen, because she hurries on. “I don’t mean to offend. Unlike many of my lovely associates.” She smiles at two women who hold fans over their faces and lean in to whisper as we pass. “I mean, I cannot imagine what it must be like to enter a room and know beyond a doubt that everyone will notice you. The very thought sets me to the edge of panic. But here you come to a new land and allow no one to tell you that you cannot stand out. Well done.”
“And if I admit tonight is among the worst of my life?”
“Is my brother really that terrible a dancer?” She laughs as I stammer to correct her, and shakes her head. “I know he’s awful. But I will proudly inform you that no one here would ever have guessed you were unhappy, so you have played your part to perfection.” Her face is narrow, the features too pinched to be traditionally pretty, but her eyes are clever and a beautiful pale color. I can certainly see the resemblance between her and Ernest.
“That is a relief. Now I would like to find somewhere quiet and hidden to sit and be unnoticed by anyone.”
“I can do that, as well. I’m Eleanor. I should have mentioned that sooner. My uncle is the Earl of South Deacon. He granted me the favor of being the planner for this event.”