Deep down, Ophelia wondered where exactly her first home might be. Since she’d arrived in the Pole, she’d already visited Berenilde’s manor, the Clairdelune embassy, her fiancé’s Treasury, and she hadn’t felt at home in any of them.
The butler led them under a vast glass canopy just as there was a burst of applause, punctuated with, “Bravo!”, and, “Good show, my lord!”. Despite the white lace of her veil, Ophelia tried to work out what was going on between the palms of the indoor garden. A group of bewigged nobles was gathered on the lawn around what looked like a small maze. Ophelia was too short to glimpse anything over the shoulders of those in front of her, but Berenilde had no trouble clearing a path for them to the front row: the nobles, as soon as they recognized her, withdrew of their own accord, less for decorum’s sake than to be at a safe distance. They would await Farouk’s verdict before aligning their behavior to his.
Seeing Berenilde return with Ophelia, Aunt Rosaline hid her relief behind a look of annoyance. “You must explain to me some day,” she muttered, “how I’m supposed to chaperone a girl who’s forever giving me the slip.”
Ophelia’s view of the game was now unrestricted. The maze comprised a series of numbered tiles. On some of them, there were geese attached to pickets. Two servants stood at specific stages along the spiraling path and seemed to be waiting for instructions.
She turned to see what everyone was looking at right then: a small, round rostrum overlooking the maze. There, sitting at a dainty table painted the same white as the rostrum, a player was shaking his fist and taking obvious delight in annoying the spectators. Ophelia recognized him from his gaping top hat and cheeky, ear-to-ear grin—it was Archibald, Farouk’s ambassador. When he finally opened his fist, a rattling of dice rang out in the silence.
“Seven!” announced the master of ceremonies. Immediately, one of the servants moved forward seven tiles and, to Ophelia’s astonishment, disappeared down a hole. “Our ambassador’s really not lucky at this game,” said someone behind her, sarcastically. “It’s his third turn and he always lands on the pit.”
In one way, Archibald’s presence reassured Ophelia. He was a man not without faults, but in this place he was the closest she had to a friend, and he at least had the merit of belonging to the Web clan. With very few exceptions, there were only Mirages among the courtiers, and the whiff of hostility that hovered around them made the air unbreathable. If they were all as devious as the Knight, it meant some delightful days to come.
Like the rest of the spectators, Ophelia now concentrated on the table of the other player, further up the rostrum. At first, due to her veil, the only impression she got was of a constellation of diamonds. She finally realized that they were attached to the numerous favorites cradling Farouk in their entwined arms, with one combing his long, white hair, another pressed to his chest, yet another kneeling at his feet, and so on. Leaning his elbow on the table, which was far too small for his stature, Farouk seemed as indifferent to the caresses being lavished on him as to the game he was playing. That, at any rate, is what Ophelia inferred from the way he yawned noisily as he threw his dice. From where she was, she couldn’t see his face that clearly.
“Five!” sang out the master of ceremonies in the midst of applause and joyful cries. The second servant immediately started leaping from square to square. Each time he landed on a tile occupied by a goose, honking furiously and trying to snap at his calves, but he was straight off, going from five to five, until he finished bang on the final square, in the centre of the spiral, to be hailed like an Olympic champion by the nobles. Farouk had won the game. As for Ophelia, she found the spectacle unreal. She hoped someone would bother to get the other servant out of his hole soon.
Up on the rostrum, a small man in a white suit took advantage of the game ending to approach Farouk with what looked like a writing case. He smiled broadly as he had a word in his ear. Baffled, Ophelia saw Farouk casually stamping a paper that the man held out to him, without reading a single word on it.
“See Count Boris as a model,” Berenilde whispered to her. “He waited for the right moment to obtain a new estate. Prepare yourself, our turn’s coming up.”
Ophelia didn’t hear her. She’d just noticed the presence of another man on the rostrum who was absorbing all her attention. He stood in the background, so dark and still that he might almost have gone unnoticed had he not suddenly snapped his watch cover shut. At the sight of him, Ophelia felt a burning flash surge up from deep within her until even her ears were red-hot.
Thorn.
His black uniform, with its mandarin collar and heavy epaulettes, wasn’t suited to the stifling heat—an illusion, certainly, but a very realistic one—beneath the glass canopy. Stiff as a poker, starchy from head to toe, silent as a shadow, he seemed out of place in the flamboyant world of the court.
Ophelia would have given anything not to find him here. True to form, he would take control of the situation and dictate her role to her.
“Madam Berenilde and the ladies from Anima!” announced the master of ceremonies. As all heads turned towards Ophelia in a deadly silence, broken only by the honking of the geese, she took a deep breath. The time had finally come for her to join the game.
She would find her place, despite Thorn.
A Winter's Promise Page 41
