at least until her part in the disastrous affair of the Tullan Empire mission had blown over.
It was a dismal prospect. This grey and smoky little backwater with its piddling river was hardly the broad, sunswept avenues of the Tullan capital, or even the flower-laced lanes of her sweet Binkiinha. Ixkaab set her jaw. All-knowing Chaacmul knew she’d seen uglier places—though not, so far, colder ones. As the Wasp had drawn nearer this side of the world, she had finally understood why everyone insisted she bring all her quilted clothing. “A damp cold,” Aunt Saabim used to write her mother, and now Kaab knew what she meant. Of course, there would be Local clothing to put on, better suited to the climate—she eyed the ship’s agent’s heavy wool jacket, which he wore unbuttoned in defiance of the chill. It looked scratchy. What kind of animal made wool like that? Would she be forced to wear it? Why hadn’t her people tried importing decent fabric to this place—something with some color in it . . . Spoken like a Trader, little bee, her mother’s voice said in her head. Now, think like an agent.
An agent whose wrists are bound by one mistake, Kaab argued with her mother in her head. What else is there to find out here? Two generations of Kinwiinik Traders had surely learned everything there was to know.
She feared that there was nothing for her to do here.
“. . . And that, milady, up there on the right, is our Hall of Justice.”
She carried the map of this new city already in her head. But she let the kindly ship’s agent explain it all to her anyway: “It was built in the days of the old kings, but is now the seat of our noble Council of Lords.”
It was hard to understand his accent. Had he really said all the kings were old? She shook her head. Of course not. These people had no kings. He meant “old” as in “previously had been there but now were not.”
Ixkaab badly needed to immerse herself in the daily speech of Xanaamdaam. She had tried on the voyage, but her relatives spoke only basic merchant Xanam, preferring to remain amongst their own kind in the strange city that so loved cacao. Her many shipboard conversations with the toothless old Xanamwiinik sailmaker had given her seven fistfuls of curse words, a profound knowledge of what a Riverside prostitute would and would not do for money, and many ways to defend herself with a canvas sail needle (including where to slip it in to kill and leave no trace, which Kaab was too polite to say she knew already). She had also spent hours in her cabin reacquainting herself with their clever system of alphabet letters to make words; and she and Cousin Chokan had practiced some dance steps that the sailmaker swore were just what decent Xanamwiinik ladies did in public—even though this involved holding hands with men who were not their relatives.
It would come to her, she was sure. She just needed to talk with more locals. Kaab was good at languages. As a child she had learned this one from a family servant who’d worked for Aunt Saabim here. Her mother had wanted her daughter’s tongue to be as swift as one of the little chameleons that flitted across the sunny courtyard—her mother, who, Ixkaab realized now, had also been one of the great movers of the chocolate trade across the North Sea passage to this land. But her mother was gone to the houses beneath the earth. Instead, it was Ixmoe’s younger sister Ixsaabim who dwelt here with her new husband, keeping the Balam family at the forefront of the Northern chocolate trade. And here Kaab would stay, in the Balam family compound, until her father called her home.
“The old kings were terribly corrupt,” the agent was saying.
“So now you are ruled by the Lords of Council.”
“The Council of Lords!” The agent laughed with the patronizing amusement of one not used to hearing his language imperfectly understood. What a hick! “But here I keep you chatting, when I’m sure you are tired and would like to go home to your family.”
“I am not in the least tired,” Kaab said. “Pray, continue your most delicious explaining.”
Because, in fact, Ixkaab Balam was not at all eager to arrive at Aunt Saabim and Uncle Chuleb’s before they had had time to read her father’s hastily written letter, the letter that had accompanied her on the Wasp, the letter explaining just what she was doing there, and why she had had to leave home in such a hurry.
• • •
“Your hair was perfect already,” the Duke Tremontaine said, standing awkwardly against the passementerie on his lady’s boudoir wall. It was one of the things she loved about him; the way he always seemed to feel out of place, no matter where he stood, everywhere except in his leather-filled library. When Diane had traveled here almost twenty years ago, a callow girl about to be married to the young heir to Tremontaine, she had been so afraid that he would turn out to be cold, or arrogant, or even dull. Duke William was none of those things. “I don’t know why you must spend so much time on it.”
The duchess’s maid knew better than to smile. It was her lady’s place to contradict her husband, when she chose.
Lucinda had had cosier employers: rich, titled ladies who wanted sympathy, gossip, or even mothering from the woman who tended to their looks, their clothes, and their personal comfort. But the lady’s maid preferred to work in silence, paying perfect attention to each curl, each ribbon, each fall of lace; to the placement of each jewel on the shining bodice or tight-laced sleeve. And the duchess repaid her efforts: Diane de Tremontaine was the shining star of every social gathering. She had a certain something no one could safely imitate: a simultaneous air of fragility and confidence, of grace and poise and hesitance, the desire to please and the fullness of being pleased . . .
The Duchess Tremontaine suited Lucinda very well. She made no demands other than to be turned out perfectly every time.
“Now, madam,” the duke said, “since you are sitting quite still for the foreseeable future, would you be so good as to listen to the notes for my speech at this afternoon’s Council meeting? You know I dread these things like a visit to the tooth surgeon’s.”
“I know you do.” Diane nodded her approval of the second set of enameled hairpins Lucinda set before her. “But you always perform splendidly. I wish I could come and see you in the Council of Lords. I could watch from the gallery. But I must get dressed up and attend that dreadful chocolate party at dear Lady Galing’s.” Diane frowned down at her lap. “I don’t know what I will wear; everyone’s seen all my afternoon gowns so many times already!”
“They won’t notice the gown; they’ll be looking at you.”
“You’re a darling. Clara Galing will notice. She has an eye for such things.” Diane turned a ruby ring on her finger, contemplative. “She isn’t well, you know. Who can say how many more times we will be called upon to listen to harp music in that blue salon, while balancing those tiny saucers on our knees?” She snapped her fingers in annoyance. “If only Honora had held out, she might very well have been contracted to Galing, and have been lady to the Crescent Chancellor before she was twenty!”
“With a husband twice her age?” The duke, less than ten years his wife’s senior, shook his head. “And anyway, Galing’s besotted with Asper Lindley, now.”
“Oh is he? With Lindley? I would have thought Asper a bit long in the tooth to attract Galing.”
“Well, that’s just it.” William leaned back against the armoire, comfortably sure of his facts. “When we were boys, new come to town—thinking ourselves fine young men, of course—Galing took quite a fancy to Asper. But Asper wasn’t having any ‘dry old politician’—his very words, as I recall—he was too busy chasing other men’s wives. Someone had told him they were easy, and he was . . . eager for experience.”
