“Most of your life will be made of a series of perceived crises,” he told her, after a pause in which Duster poured tea. “If you are lucky, they will seldom be so intense, and the outcome so uncertain. Do you understand that you could die?”
Jewel started to answer, and stopped. Because until he had said the bald words, she hadn’t. The nebulous fear of discovery had been enough to drive her; the fear that discovery would end in death? It hadn’t really occurred to her. And now that it had, it wouldn’t leave her. She knew it was possible.
“I have endeavored not to speak openly of it,” he continued, when she did not. “Because the nature of fear for some is paralyzing; because fear might make you clumsy and incapable, rather than more honed, and more wary.
“But I have spent the better part of a full week in your company, both of you, and I am better able to understand your fears and how they motivate you. You, Jewel Markess, I understand well. Your fear surprises me; it is seldom found in those in your circumstances. And Duster’s fear, as well, is uncommon because her life has been lived at the extreme edges of our society, for better or worse.
“In most your age, the fear of not being liked, the fear of disapproval, is enough motivation; it encourages people to wear outlandish styles and behave in even more outlandish ways; it causes them to group in packs, there to peck out a social order. This is not what drives you, either of you.”
Jewel was quiet, waiting for Haval to finish his thought; his thoughts were often long and meandering.
“It does not, however, matter. People will assume your fear—when exposed—means what they expect it to mean. But it is in the exposure, in the use of the fear, rather than the fear itself, that you will find some protection. And today, we will begin to teach you how to show that, how to let it seep through the cracks of your facade as naturally as if it were breath.” He turned and lifted his cup, and Duster was there by his side in an instant, filling it, her face a study in complacent neutrality.
“What does a servant fear?” he asked her, when she had set the hot tea aside, and was in no danger of spilling any of it in his lap.
Duster shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“Then think.”
Of the words he often used, these were perhaps Duster’s least favorite. She wasn’t stupid, but Haval’s manner of speech made her feel as if she were, and it also made her angry. He could see this clearly, and added, “We will discuss the nature of anger at a later date. At the moment, it is fear that you must understand. Think of it as a language, Duster, and one that you must master if you are to survive.”
“I’m not afraid of death,” she said coldly.
“No. But it is not of your fear that I speak. You are a servant; that is your role and your sole function. Your daily wages are earned by cleaning up after others, and by serving them when service is required. What, in that role, do you fear?”
She closed her eyes. Her lashes, dark and long, changed the look of her pale face. “I don’t want to lose my job?” she asked at last.
“Very good. Most don’t. You are more aware than Jewel that some people have power. You are now required to serve a man of power. How is that fear expressed?”
Duster swallowed. “I don’t know.”
“No. You don’t. It is why you are here. But time is not our friend in this place. Try again.”
“If he’s powerful, he’s more important. If he’s more important, any mistake I make can mean—”
“Yes. Instant dismissal. Possibly public, if your employer wishes to mollify an angry lord. You yourself do not fear this; it has never been your desire to serve. What you do fear—the loss of opportunity, the possibility of discovery—must express itself only in a way that a negligent man of power might interpret as fear of his rank, of the differences between his rank and yours.
“Men of station generally do not notice servants. There is a risk that Lord Waverly may, in fact, notice you, and not for the reason of servitude. How will you handle this?”
“By ignoring it,” Duster replied, with some effort.
“Yes. By ignoring it. But if Lord Waverly senses the fear, it would be better; he will—as I said—make his own translation. He expects to be feared; he expects to be waited on. He expects that the people who wait on him understand that their very livelihood is dependent upon his goodwill. If you are afraid for any reason in his presence—any reason, Duster, do you understand?—you must work to channel it, to express it in ways that will be expected, and can therefore be overlooked.”
“Jewel,” he added, “your fear is a different fear. It is upon you that Lord Waverly will—should this foolish and ill-advised plan be set in action—focus the brunt of his attention. What, then, will you fear?”
Jewel swallowed. But she did not answer immediately. She thought about it. “I’m the daughter of a merchant?” she asked at last, although she knew the answer by heart.
“Yes. A younger daughter, and not terribly lovely, but neither are you repulsive. You have been raised in a somewhat sheltered environment, but your mother has recently passed on, and your father is in a position to benefit from Waverly’s merchant interests, if Waverly is well-disposed toward him.”
Jewel nodded. Thinking not of herself, but of Finch. Of being sold by family, for that meanest and most necessary of things: money.
“Again, it is in Waverly’s nature to assume that all men seek advantage and position. If they seek it from him, and they are servile, they are almost servants. There is safety in that, for such a man. He does not seek a circle of friends; at best, he surrounds himself with like-minded rivals. An ambitious man of low birth will not be a surprise to Lord Waverly. But there are many ambitious men, and many of low birth, who would not seek to obliquely offer their daughter as the price of entry into his circle.
“What is offered, cannot of course be legally offered. Therefore, it will not be discussed openly. Ever. Waverly is aware of this, and aware of the risk involved in taking what is offered. He will assess you, when you meet, but he will feel relatively safe in the certain knowledge that he has the advantage of your father’s ambition.
“And you will fear him,” he added. “Even if you do not fear him now. How your fear is expressed will define everything.
“How you dress, and how comfortable you are in that dress, will not matter; he will expect you to be both ignorant and nervous. I believe it will amuse him. Defiance,” he added, “will likewise amuse him, because he knows why you are there; he may well expect that you will not; that you will be naïve. I think that this approach is best; if you are confused and you lose your way, he will again interpret it in a fashion that fits his view of the situation.”
Haval rose, and set the cup aside. “At no time must your fear be for anything other than yourself. At no time must you pay heed to the presence of either servants or guards.”
“Guards?” she said sharply.
“He’ll have guards there,” Duster whispered. “He won’t send them away.”
Haval closed his eyes for a moment. “No,” he said at length. “For humiliation is important to men like Lord Waverly, and anything done in private will offer him less of what he craves.”
“If we’re to kill him,” Jewel began, “we’re going to have problems with guards.”
“Oh, indeed. And I assure you that some thought has been given to the matter of the guards. It is not clear how many—”
“Two,” Duster said quietly. Too quietly.
Haval did not pause. “Two guards, then. You will be attended by guards, and by Duster. But to Duster you will not look, do you understand? She will not be in the room, in any case, for the worst of it. You may look at the guards as chaperones, initially, and I consider this wise; you may treat their presence as safety.
“Do not make the mistake of believing it.”
Jewel swallowed, throat dry. “Where will Rath be?” she asked him, her voice almost too quiet to be her own.
Haval closed his eyes for a mom
ent, but his expression was thoughtful, not fearful. When he opened them, he said, “I don’t know. It is not for your Rath, as you call him, that I am concerned. He has survived worse than this.
“And in my opinion, it is better that you not know. Fear has an edge when it is genuine. Were I younger, Jewel, I would accompany you. You are—neither of you—the children I would have chosen for a ruse of this nature.”
“We’re not children,” Duster said.
“To me, you are,” he replied. “Experience alone does not change this fact.” He rose. “I will leave you both to think about what I have said today; I am weary, and I have not finished the work that will actually pay me.”
Fear was a constant companion from that moment on, but really, when in their lives had it been absent? They were aware of it, and Duster, aware that she had somehow been exposed. This vulnerability was worse for her than for Jewel; Jewel took a blunt pride in her ability to accept the truth. If she hadn’t developed that skill early on, she would never have survived a woman as sharp-tongued and clear-witted as her Oma.
But if Duster was ever to learn, it wasn’t now. Her silence was heavy, twitchy, a nervous and caged thing. What would spring from it—and Jewel felt certain something would—would not be pleasant.
“I’m using you,” Duster told her as they walked.
Jewel shrugged.
“Don’t you care?”
“Not much.”
Steam streamed from Duster’s slender nostrils as she snorted. “People use each other,” she said. “What are you using me for?”
Jewel shrugged again. “Don’t know,” she said quietly. “I don’t think about it much.”
“What do you want?”
“Impossible things.”
“Like what? Money? Power?”
“Safety,” was the curt reply.
“You don’t get safety without money or power,” Duster snapped back. She was spoiling for a fight. Would have to be; she’d been so damn attentive for Haval, it had to come out sometime.
“Money and power just get you attention,” Jewel snapped back. Better her than Lefty. “There are a lot of dead people who had money and power.”
“You get more safety with than without.”
“You never have safety,” Jewel answered. “It’s just something to want. Like happiness,” she added, squaring her shoulders. “Or peace.”
“Peace?” Duster stopped walking, her hands by her sides, bunched into incongruous fists around folds of loose skirting. “What kind of drivel is that?”
Jewel shrugged for a third time. “You don’t want the answer, don’t ask. You don’t like the answer? Tough.”
“Do you even understand what could happen to you? Do you have any idea what Waverly can do?”
“I can guess,” Jewel said bleakly. “I’d rather not talk about it, but I can guess.”
“I know.”
“If you didn’t, we wouldn’t be meeting him.”
Duster nearly shrieked, and Jewel felt slightly guilty; she was almost enjoying this. Almost. “I could die in the snow,” she told Duster, before Duster could let loose again. “I could freeze to death, the way Teller’s mother did. I could be Teller, finding her there. I could starve to death, the way Lefty almost did. I could have drowned on the riverbanks if the rains had come early and Rath had never found me.
“Dead is dead,” she added quietly, willing herself to believe it. “And everybody dies sometime.”
“That’s your Oma again, isn’t it?”
“What if it is?”
“Everybody dies sometime. I want to be old when I do it.”
“So do I. So did Teller’s mother. What we want doesn’t matter. Doesn’t always matter,” she added. Thought about it a bit, and said, “No, that’s not true. It does matter. It’s just not everything. You want to kill Waverly. We’re trying to. We wouldn’t be trying if it wasn’t what you wanted.
“But after that—have you thought about after?”
Duster shrugged. Which meant no. And almost meant she wasn’t about to start.
“Think about after,” Jewel told her, hoping to divert her anger.
“I’ll get there when I get there.”
We’ll get there, Jewel thought grimly. She said nothing else. Let Duster fume. Let the cold of the walk bleed off some of the heat of her anger. Jewel shortened her stride, drawing her shoulders down her back and lifting her chin as Haval had taught her.
“What the hells are you doing now?”
“Practicing,” Jewel told her. “Rath hasn’t given us a day. He hasn’t given us a place. But when he does, we have to be ready.”
Rath was seldom home, and when he was, he was not in a mood for company or discussion. Jewel was, but she wanted Rath’s. In his absence, however, she arranged the early outings to market, she stocked the cupboards, and she fetched the boots that had finally been finished from the rather truculent cobbler. In bits and pieces, the children in her care became less gaunt and less cold; Fisher even ventured a few words here and there, although he would never be much for talk.
Only Lander’s silence was persistent, a reminder of the things that lay both in the past and the future.
At the end of the ninth day, Haval told them he thought they had come as far as they could under his tutelage.
“So we come to the last and the least of things,” he told them, and he headed toward an armoire against the west wall, one that had never been touched or opened in their presence. “Appearance. It is easy to alter appearance,” he added, “but harder to live in it. What I have taught you will carry you through much; you can suggest training and birth by carriage and speech, and if you must spend any time under scrutiny, that subtle suggestion is more powerful than all of the dyes and superficial artifice in the world.
“But the world is superficial, and now that we have come as far as we can in the time we have, I will teach you how to alter your appearance.”
“Your appearance,” he said, turning to Jewel, “is unfortunately distinctive. Especially your hair.”
She said nothing. Distinctive was not the word that was usually used to describe it, but mess was nothing she wanted to offer as an alternative when Haval had that particular expression on his face.
Everyone gaped in their own special way when Jewel finally opened the door, took a breath, and walked in. Duster was almost skulking behind her. There was a loud moment of silence that was broken by Finch.
Unfortunately, Finch didn’t exactly say anything.
Rath, watching in silence from the door to his room, which had remained slightly ajar for the better part of the two hours they were late, was surprised to find that he was jarred, as unsettled for a moment as the rest of the children here, although he’d been witness to far more spectacular transformations.
If there was one thing that defined these two—besides their ability to curse in Torra—it was the fact that they were who they were. Duster, capable of lying when it suited her, also loudly proclaimed the fact, whittling away at any possible gain subterfuge might lend her. And Jewel? Practical in the extreme, she barely paid attention to what she was wearing as long as it was either warm enough or cool enough to suit the weather. Her hair, which had always been a tangle of curls, was like a visual punctuation to the statement of who she was.
And neither of them looked precisely like themselves.
He recognized them, of course; would have recognized them anywhere and under any circumstances. But Duster’s sleek hair had been both cut and dyed; it was a pale, almost platinum blonde. Her faced had been powdered, and were it not for the color of her eyes, she would have been able to pass for a cold Northern servant. Were it not for her eyes and the way she was uncomfortably crowding behind Jewel, her shoulders hunched inward as if expecting a blow.
Jewel herself? Her hair had been ironed. Rath was aware of the custom; had seen it several times in his youth. But Jewel’s hair was actually quite long when it was straightened. Haval had not chosen
to change its color; it was the same auburn that it had always been. But it reached for her back, and in the dress she now wore, it was striking. Her eyes, Haval had also left alone; he had powdered her skin, paling her natural complexion, but he had done little else.
Yet what he had done was enough; she looked only slightly less wary than Duster as she confronted her group.
But she was still Jewel; something caused her to look past her den down the hall; to see Rath as he stood in his open door. To say, “Sorry we’re late. Haval insisted.”
“Given what he’s done, I’m surprised you arrived before dawn,” Rath replied. “You look . . . different. Both of you.” He took a breath, like a pause, and held it. “The timing is not, perhaps, poor. I have some business that will keep me away this eve, and some part of tomorrow, but I believe that tomorrow night, or the day after, we will be ready.”
Jewel nodded. Her nod was entirely her own; it was all business. Duster, behind her, said nothing. And Teller, watching as Rath watched, offered no words, but he turned and met Rath’s gaze with something akin to disapproval. It was not a bold glare, such as Duster would have offered; it was not—quite—an invitation to argument. In fact, it invited no response at all, and Rath was almost at a loss for words. Which, considering how often he spoke with Jewel’s den, was just as well. He retreated, leaving them, and returned to his room, where the letters he had written lay unfinished. They were in various stages, and no single one of them had been left untouched or unmarked; he had sifted each word for tone and weight, choosing first one and then another. Tonight, however, at least one must be finished and sent, and before it was posted, he had one more visit to make.
The Den—the bar—was dark and noisy when he arrived; this was not his preferred time of day, but he was not there to enjoy the rather unfortunate atmosphere. He was there to speak with the men of The White Lady. Northerners all, they sometimes referred to themselves as sea wolves, an incongruous term that nevertheless suited them.
Here, with snow in the air and on the ground, they were beached and stranded; the port itself was nothing short of hazard, for it was not the job of the port authority to maintain passages in and out of the shipyards when the ships themselves were in harbor for the season.
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