The Veil’s warriors approached in soundless unison, once more like enough in manner and dress but not in physical feature. One was taller, the other was leaner in shape—near rail-thin, and older. The topknot each sported was black, but I detected traces of gray in one that I had not seen among the men before.
Yet it was this older man whose movements I watched most closely. There was something much more serene about him, smoother in motion and delivery, that I did not trust.
In the corner of my eye, I watched the lion-prince incline his head. Respect, I think, but not obeisance. Not to the Veil’s servants, warriors or otherwise.
The muddled hierarchy of this place was mind-bogglingly complex.
I should not have been surprised, not after I’d seen the shared lingual capability between him and Hawke some months past, yet I confess to a moderate amount of wonder when Osoba spoke to the men in the same Chinese dialect Hawke knew.
Unlike Hawke, he shifted his voice into a somewhat more nasal range, which I would have found laughable if I weren’t so focused on the eyes of the older servant that watched me.
It was the other who conferred with Osoba. As was rapidly approaching the custom, I did not know of what they spoke. Not until the man I watched withdrew his hands from his bell-like sleeves and gold filigree winked in the light.
The breath vanished from my lungs.
Where I would have lunged for the palm-sized oval, Osoba’s grip on my shoulder did not allow me the opportunity. The Chinese man who held it raised it for all to see, and said in heavily accented and quite butchered English, “It left for you.”
The light caught on the gold rim, glinting in the delicate workmanship. An oval of burnt umber framed the black silhouette of a profile I knew only because I was familiar with my own.
My mother’s features, the curve of a cheek so like mine, the curl of her hair draped over her shoulder, decorated the cameo whose flat backing lacked any means to wear the piece.
It was not decoration. It was no bit of jewelry. One did not forget the object that was intended for one’s destruction.
Chapter Eight
My eyes narrowed. “Give it here.”
He did not.
Osoba’s voice returned to its normal resonance. “Apparently, this was left within the sweets’ chambers.”
Red tinted the outlying corners of my vision. What little bliss remained with me burned to nothing.
That murdering bastard. It suddenly came clear to me: the absence of my father’s material possessions when I’d gone back to the laboratory, the disappearance of this very cameo whose mechanism had contained the serum that was meant to subjugate me.
The sweet tooth, the rival collector who had murdered my father to save me, only to murder my husband for no particular demand, must have made off with the device.
Why? Why in all the hells of all the religious texts in the world had I not considered this?
And why leave it here, now?
Yet even as I worked my way through the manic rise of furious questioning, my skin turned cold. I turned, wrenching myself free of Osoba’s grip, and asked sharply, “Was anyone hurt?”
The gaze he levied upon me was considering. “Yes.”
I flattened a hand against my chest, where my heart jerked. “Who?”
“A sweet awoke with an aching head and no memory of her assailant.” Sensing my next question, he added, “She will mend.”
“So no one saw the man—” I caught myself, “—or woman who left it?”
Another burst of Chinese assailed me.
Osoba looked at the servants, then again to me. “The Veil demands recompense.”
Damn and blast and as many other invectives as I could reasonably imagine in a moment’s notice. I had no room with which to maneuver, no direction that was not blocked by the lion-prince or the two Chinese servants. I drew up my chin. “I had nothing to do with this.”
“Is that not your face?”
I couldn’t very well admit to it being my mother’s. That would open up a great deal of questioning that I did not want the Veil to have. Josephine St. Croix’s many accomplishments had been held over me for years. I would not allow the ghost of my mother to force my hand now.
I set my jaw in mulish determination. “The Veil may go soak his head.”
I had half-hoped to earn a gasp of shocked dismay. None of the men surrounding me delivered. All I could read in Osoba’s intent came in the subtle easing of weight, the firming of his shoulders. I knew without having to look that the men behind me had taken the stance I was learning to recognize as their way of preparing for a brawl.
Fine. They could have it their way. Exhaustion had ebbed to a simmering edge of anger and adrenaline, and it was this I drew upon as I lashed out a foot not at Osoba, but at the younger of the Veil’s servants.
To my utter delight, the ball of my foot connected with his knee. He grunted.
The rest fell upon me in a great snap of momentum.
Osoba was not a frontal assault brawler. I had expected him to come at me, and this he did, but not in any way that I predicted. Where he had begun in front of me, he came at me suddenly from the left, utilizing my distraction from the older servant as that one slipped beyond my guard and delivered an open-handed strike to my plated ribs.
It surprised him, I think, when his hand connected with slatted leather. The effort did push me back several steps, which allowed Osoba room to twine behind me and link my arms so tightly in his, I could not understand how he’d done it without dislocating his own.
Not impossible, given the nature of a circus’s performers.
However, he had not considered my own training—or perhaps was just unaware of it.
My corset provided support and shape, but it was not meant to keep my figure from collapsing in upon itself. I rolled my shoulders back so far that my shoulder blades touched, an act I hadn’t had to accomplish for some time. It hurt enough that would regret this decision, too, come tomorrow.
I think I surprised the so-confident whip. I was half from his floundering grasp—earning a brief and reverberating chuckle that surprised me—when the two servants rejoined the fray.
I stood no chance.
I started cursing when each grasped an arm, freeing me entirely from Osoba’s slacking hold, and only got louder as they dragged me back into the halls I’d only just left.
“What is this madness?” I demanded. “Take your hands from me!” My efforts earned no ire from my captors. They handled me with almost graceful synchronicity, maneuvering me in such a way that every attempt to impair or disengage fell victim of my own momentum.
Osoba followed, his occasional bout of laughter after a particularly crude threat only stabbing red-hot rage through the fear I refused to reveal. “Do not fight,” counseled the still-amused lion-prince. “This debt will be discharged for one night’s work.”
This time, the room I was forced into was not so elegant as Hawke’s, nor as empty. Two female servants, both Chinese and wearing the simple tunic and trousers I’d expected of the foreign women in the Veil’s employ, waited with well-mannered patience. Between them, a bathtub was filled with water, though it lacked soap bubbles or the slick of oils for scenting.
The implications were clear. I was to bathe.
Like hell I would.
I lashed out with my feet, my elbows, anything that would give me purchase, but the men who held me did not capitulate.
The women did not appear troubled by my exertions.
Words flew, orders or explanations or even warnings of care, and Osoba said from the door, “If you do not bathe willingly, the Veil will be forced to punish all who failed in their orders.”
“Does that include you?” I asked, panting from my efforts. I was not standing on my own, grasped between the men and held as if I were weightless between them, my legs sagging.
“Yes,” he replied, surprising me with his honesty. His gaze held mine, tawny gold and no longer laughi
ng. “As well as the men holding you, and the servants who are to tend you.”
The former I could well appreciate. The latter bit deeply. The Chinese girls had done nothing to me, and I had no doubt the Veil would have all of them whipped for a failure that would not be theirs.
I bared my teeth in a soundless snarl.
Osoba must have read capitulation in the act, for he said something in that blasted Chinese tongue and the men dropped me. I fell to the floor, barking my elbow painfully.
One of the girls gasped, and both hurried to my side.
The men bowed once, hands once more easing into their sleeves, and left the room.
I allowed one of the servants—the younger of the girls, with light brown eyes and almost no eyebrows to speak of—to pull me to my feet. “I despise you,” I said, glaring at Osoba.
He nodded, rather more readily than the observation warranted. “That is your right.” Saying nothing else, he closed the door, trapping me in the room with two efficient servants, a cooling bath, several pieces of polished wood furniture, and a vibrant blue and green folding screen.
What was it about the whips of this Menagerie that I could not provoke them into foolish action? Perhaps if he’d done something, anything at all but watch, I could have made my escape from this intolerable situation.
He had not. And would I have attempted escape knowing what I did of the Veil’s threat? That these innocent women would be punished for it?
Bloody bells.
In moments, I was stripped of my clothing and submerged to my neck in the tub, hissing when the temperature proved too cool for my liking. When one made a motion that I took to mean I was to get my hair wet, I jerked upright. Water, blackened and already turning gritty, cascaded from my shoulders. “No,” I said flatly.
I would not walk into the Veil’s machinations with my red hair bared. My identity was still my own. At least, I hoped so. I could not assume otherwise. The Veil had not once called me by name, and though Hawke knew, he had never given any indication of my identity after the disastrous ball where he had offered his bargain.
The servants exchanged a glance. Then, the younger girl said in heavily broken English, “Your hair.” Another sign that I was to wet it.
I shook my head. “I will not.”
“We fix it?”
“You will not fix it,” I told her, folding my arms over my bared chest and glaring. “You will leave it alone.”
Another exchanged glance. Then, the older woman made a circle, muttering a few terse syllables.
The girl nodded. “You will put it in...” She hesitated. “Like this.” She grasped her own long plait with her wet hands, then wrapped it about her head like a crown.
A simple effort. “That’s all?”
“Shì.”
That sound, I knew. I’d heard it from Hawke’s own lips. I frowned. “Does that mean yes?”
“Shì. Yes,” she repeated. “To say understand.”
At least I had come to recognize one word in the complex language.
I subsided, gritting my teeth when the servants scrubbed my skin clean, had me stand and poured cool water over me to wash the remnants of the grit away. They washed my face and my shoulders with cloths, gave me a brush and said nothing as the heavy lampblack in my hair turned my fingers gray. I washed them at their direction, pretended compliance, and all the while, I plotted.
The Veil had agreed that I would remain off the auction tables. He would not go back on his word easily, though I suppose he could have if he had no care for his word. Somehow, I did not suspect this was the case.
What else would the Veil have me do? Something that required bathing. Which indicated that I would be among other people.
The worst possible outcome coalesced so suddenly that pain blossomed behind my forehead. A mirrored hole opened within my belly. “What am I to wear?” I asked, striving for calm.
I prayed that I was wrong. That I leapt to a conclusion that was unfounded, impossible.
The girl glanced at the older woman, whose almond-shaped eyes wrinkled with distaste at the blackened bathwater I left behind. A short conversation ensued, so rapid that I could not separate one syllable from the next.
They wrapped me in a simple robe of shapeless design, too plain and ill-fitting to be the answer I sought, and the girl stepped behind the screen.
As the older woman cleaned the water spatters around the tub, the other returned carrying items that did not offer much clarification until she lay them out, one by one, upon the single chair.
The little voice urging its warning turned to a choking scream. I bit it back before my panic could give it words.
There are some who believe that the loss of one’s memory, the muddling of reality until it becomes little more than an absent dream, is enough to bury a fear forever. They are wrong. Opium had stolen the memories, the details, of my time in Monsieur Marceaux’s Traveling Curiosity Show, but no smoke or bitter tar could ease the lash of instinct and ingrained habit.
The things that occurred to me were this: there is an appearance, a fashion, that is uniquely ascribed to a circus. No sweet determined to seduce or entice would wear such a thing as laid out before me, because the whole was not meant to seduce. It was not overly exotic, nor was it scandalous—or, at least, scandalous in terms of the usual performing fare, though Society might consider otherwise outside the rings.
What the girl laid out began with a corset in a blue so rich as to put a peacock’s feathers to shame. Following, a cream-colored skirt whose blue-trimmed front ruffles would not reach my knees, stockings in a striped violet and green, and various accouterments designed to draw attention to—without hiding or masking—long limbs. My arms would be bare of all but cream ruffles just under the shoulder, and matching at the wrist. My throat, shoulders and décolletage bare.
The ensemble spoke for itself.
One could not bend in a full corset like that, which is why I’d made mine special and without the low hips. This indicated that one wearing such a fancy piece would not be among those required to fly upon the trapeze or silks, or bend for the admiration of a crowd. I was not convinced that the Veil even knew that I could do any of these things; a secret I intended to keep to myself.
The colors were bright enough to assure an audience’s attention, yet the material not so heavy as to hide anything from the eye.
This suggested a role that would demand awareness. Applause.
A bend to the left, a tip-toe across a narrow rope, and the whispered warning of a knife’s edge just by my left ear.
My hands shook so badly, I buried them in the too-large robe. “I see,” I said, and could not hide the tremble in my voice with equal success.
“Very beautiful,” the girl offered, her smile obscenely delighted as she fingered the blue taffeta trimming the skirt.
“Very.” It rasped.
Pretty as a colored cobra rearing to strike, more like.
The Veil would put me in its shows tonight, trapped beneath the red circus tent? I would not. I would not.
But I could not fight the Veil’s men.
I took a slow, measured breath; panic raged inside my skin, twisted and writhed as if it would tear through my constraining flesh. Everything I looked at seemed as if it came from far away. Fresh sweat erupted over my forehead, my shoulders.
The women looked at me expectantly.
I had no choice. And only one real option.
Feeling sick, I gestured to the door. “I can dress myself.” A worthless bit of modesty, for all they’d washed my body already.
The women once more looked at each other, and I wanted to scream at them to get out, to leave me alone.
“I will dress myself,” I insisted. “Thank you. Now, please.” If there was rather more emphasis on the please than I liked, I would not fault myself. I quaked beneath the robe, fear and nausea rapidly taking what control I barely maintained.
When neither woman moved—and in fact, the older began t
o roll up her long, wide sleeves with intent—I raised my voice. “Osoba!”
As I suspected, it only took one summons. The door opened, and if the man maintained a decent bone in his body, he did not show it, looking in with untoward interest. “Yes, Miss Black.” The tone was not one of subservience.
I did not expect it, but at least he opened the door. It was a crucial step. “I wish to dress myself,” I told him, folding my arms tightly over the front of the robe. I must have looked a sight, with my hair long, frizzed in brushed out curls and unevenly black, my robe too big, my bare toes peeping from beneath the hem.
He studied me for a long moment. “Why?”
“Because I am used to dressing myself,” I explained, pretending far more patience that I truly had. Please, please. “I know how tight to make the corset so that I do not faint in the heated atmosphere of the rings, and I prefer to maintain my own appearance.”
Such snobbery. Such fabrications.
Yet if he had any interest to argue with me, it was put to rest abruptly as Zylphia’s voice, dearly familiar and one more ragged hole punctured in my composure, interrupted the negotiations. “Ikenna,” she said, with a degree of familiarity that did not seem to sit well with the man. “Cage demands your appearance.”
That she was the one to bear the message only indicated that she had not left Hawke’s side this whole time. The panic clawing at my throat tightened.
The man turned away, the door closing partially. “Is it Cage doing the asking?” I heard, low menace. That each was so familiar with Micajah Hawke as to use the intimate shortening of his first name was a telling reveal.
Zylphia’s tone did not change. “Does it matter?”
“It matters,” he said darkly. Apparently not one for farewells, the man said nothing else. He was simply gone, no trace of footsteps or sound.
The door moved. Zylphia beckoned, shaping a few halting words with care. The servants bowed to me, collected my discarded clothes—damn and blast, not at all what I’d wanted—and left the room.
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