Echo in Onyx

by Sharon Shinn

  “What a beautiful place!” Marguerite cried.

  “Brianna has told me how much you love flowers,” Nico explained. “This is the best spot in the city to buy them. It’s a little farther from the palace than some of the other markets, but not so far that you can’t walk it easily when the weather is nice.”

  “I wasn’t even paying attention,” she said, stepping deeper into the plaza and looking around as if trying to decide which stall to visit first. “I’m not sure I could find it again.”

  “I’ll make sure to give Brianna directions,” he promised. “Or I can accompany you the next time you decide to come.”

  “Surely you have more important tasks than squiring me around the city,” Marguerite said.

  He bowed again. “None more important or more enjoyable.”

  “Careful,” she said. “Or I’ll tell Brianna you were flirting with me.”

  “She would probably tell you that I was just trying to make you like me enough to lower your guard.”

  “Would she be right?”

  He laughed. “Let’s look at flowers.”

  They shopped for the next thirty minutes, Nico showing remarkable patience for a task that most men would find tedious in the extreme. He mostly refrained from complaining about the prices—which were shockingly high—but he did talk her out of buying a very expensive bouquet of orchids. He was right. The colors were gorgeous, but the blooms were already starting to wilt. They would hardly last another day.

  The echoes and I were all laden down with bundles of paper-wrapped flowers when we finally left the market. By that time, I was practically exhausted with the effort of trying to copy Marguerite’s every motion while eavesdropping on every word of her conversation with Nico—without once drawing his attention. I did find the energy to very sneakily glance around the plaza to see how many vendors carried a certain variety of pink-veined rose. I didn’t see a single one on display.

  “I think I’m done now,” Marguerite said at last. “Brianna will believe I have gone mad.”

  “Nonsense. I’ve seen her buy twice this many flowers on your behalf,” Nico said gallantly. “Are you too tired to walk back? There are wagons for hire just over there.”

  Marguerite hesitated. “Large enough to accommodate us all?” she asked.

  I grew cold at the idea of sitting across from Nico in the close confines of a small vehicle, even for what was sure to be a relatively short ride. If he was staring straight at me for ten minutes, even through my veil, even as he had every reason to think I was someone else, I thought the chances were excellent that he would realize who I was.

  I would have to sit beside him, facing Marguerite and Patience and Purpose. Though that would be even worse.

  “I have errands of my own to run, and they’re not in the direction of the palace,” he said. “I would not be joining you.”

  “Then I think I would prefer to ride,” Marguerite said. “Thank you.”

  Five minutes later, he had hired a wagon, helped us all in—not even seeming to notice how familiar my hand felt in his—and waved goodbye. I waited until he was completely out of sight before I slumped against the wooden seat as if my spine could no longer support me.

  “Well, that was entertaining,” said Marguerite. “I can see why you like him.”

  “I don’t like him,” I muttered.

  “He certainly seems to like you.”

  I straightened up on the bench. I was on the backward-facing seat, next to Patience. “Or he’s very interested in you,” I said. “Trying to charm you into some kind of confession. I would think he’s very good at that.”

  “I have been playing court games since I was a child,” she said cynically. “Yes, and outmaneuvering my mother since I was born. I hardly think an inquisitor could trip me up.”

  “I hope not,” I said. But I couldn’t help but worry.

  No surprise, Lourdes was prowling the magnificent foyer when we returned, and she approached us as soon as we entered.

  “A coach has arrived with trunks intended for you,” she told Marguerite. “I had them taken to your room, but I supervised their delivery myself.” The implication being that she had made sure no impertinent maid or footman had had a chance to paw through Marguerite’s things when no one was there to see.

  “Thank you,” Marguerite said. “Brianna is probably already unpacking everything for me.”

  “I didn’t see her this morning, but I’m sure she’s there now,” answered Lourdes, sounding anything but sure.

  “Indeed,” was Marguerite’s cool reply. She nodded to the housekeeper and swept toward the stairwell, the three of us at her heels.

  Up in her suite, we found the additional trunks piled carefully in the main room. We unlocked them and began hanging up the clothes—all of which would need to be pressed before Marguerite could wear them—but I kept glancing with some distraction at the door. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until Marguerite asked me what was wrong.

  “Both Lourdes and Nico commented on my absence,” I said. “I feel like I need to show myself belowstairs or start all sorts of rumors circulating. And yet there is much to do here.”

  “I can finish putting everything away,” she said. “You go downstairs and do something to draw attention to yourself.”

  “It might involve casting you as a very persnickety and difficult mistress,” I warned.

  She smiled. “Describe me as if you were talking about my mother,” she answered. “That should make me seem wretched enough.”

  “My lady,” I said, but I had to muffle a laugh.

  “You go gossip. I will make myself useful.”

  “Well, if you really want to be useful, you could mend that tear in your lavender gown,” I said. “Although I don’t know if you have any skill with a needle.”

  She made shooing motions to encourage me toward the door. “I can embroider very well, thank you, though I don’t much like doing it,” she answered. “I’ll try my hand at mending.”

  “I was joking.”

  “Well, that will teach you to jest with me, won’t it? Go on—downstairs with you.”

  I sighed and headed toward the bedroom, where my own clothes were laid out. “I have to change clothes, remember? I can’t go about dressed like you, or it defeats the purpose of showing myself as me.”

  Marguerite’s playfulness instantly disappeared. “Oh, Brianna, I’m so sorry. This whole thing is going to be just as hard on you as it is on me—”

  “It’s not,” I said, pulling off my fine dress and reaching for my plain one. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter if it’s hard. We just have to do it.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I suppose we do.”

  I spent the next two hours in the servants’ domain, learning where the laundry rooms were, borrowing shoe polish, and joining the others for lunch. The arrangements at this meal were almost as highly choreographed as the ones at the prince’s dinner, for we were all arrayed by our employers’ stations, and furthermore the visitors’ servants were somewhat segregated from the king’s staff. I found myself sitting with the maids for Lady Elyssa and the Banchura triplets. As I might have expected, Leonora and Lavinia and Letitia seemed to be amiable and openhanded mistresses, and their maids were cheerful and hardworking, with very few complaints to offer. That wasn’t the case with Lady Elyssa’s serving woman, who sighed and complained throughout the whole meal.

  “Why do you stay with her then?” asked Letitia’s maid.

  “The money! I’ll be able to retire in five years, if I can last that long. But I probably can’t. The rumor is that almost no one’s stayed with her longer than a year since she turned eleven years old.”

  Leonora’s maid turned to me. “What about Lady Marguerite? From everything I hear, she’s a likable sort.”

  I couldn’t bear to paint her as mean-spirited and underhanded, so instead I shook my head. “She’s kind enough, but she’s so fretful. ‘Should I wear this? No, I don’t like it, let m
e put this on instead.’ Pretty soon she’ll have tried on every gown in her closet and end up back in the very first one! She can be merry one minute, then dark and glum five minutes later, and she’s always coming down with some ailment. Her head hurts. Then her stomach is queasy. And then it’s, ‘Oh, Brianna, can you massage my back? It aches so much.’ She’ll send me off to buy powders from the apothecary, and then never use anything I bring back. When she’s gone, she wants me in the room so I can take care of things—though everything’s already washed and pressed and hung up—but when she’s back she sends me away so she can have privacy. And she doesn’t want any of the palace maids to make up the bed or straighten the room—I have to take care of all those chores, too, because she’s so particular about how everything is done.” I rolled my eyes. “So I don’t know how often you’ll see me down here over the next few weeks.”

  “That sounds dreadful,” said Leonora’s maid.

  “It sounds wonderful,” sighed Elyssa’s.

  I shrugged. “It’s like every other situation. It has its good points and its bad points. But I’m used to hard work and I love living in the city, so the job suits me for now.”

  Talk turned to other topics then, which was fine with me. I figured I had dropped just enough information to make my erratic behavior seem credible without complaining so much that people started wondering if I was telling the truth. I had to confess I found it difficult to believe Lady Elyssa could be as bad as her maid was saying, and by the way the Banchura women glanced at each other, I could tell they were thinking the same thing. Then again, Lord Jamison’s valet probably had equally terrible things to say about his employer, and I was sure all of them were true.

  Or, well. Used to be true.

  After the meal, I made up some reason to cross the foyer just so Lourdes could get a look at me. I stayed alert in case I unexpectedly ran into Nico on the stairs or in the hallways, but he must still have been on his own errands because I didn’t encounter him anywhere in the palace. I told myself I was relieved.

  I finally returned to Marguerite’s room to find that she not only had put away all the new clothes, but also had made good on her promise to mend the lavender gown. She’d done an excellent job of it, too, with stitches as small and fine as my own.

  “You can take a job as a seamstress if your parents ever turn you out of the house,” I told her.

  “If they turn me out because I’m a murderer, I’ll probably be in a dungeon somewhere,” she said lightly.

  “Maybe they’ll turn you out because of your inappropriate liaisons,” I said. I had been so flummoxed by Nico’s appearance that I hadn’t even had a chance to question her about our visit to the temple this morning.

  Her face showed a mulish expression, but she didn’t say I had no right to comment on her behavior. Neither did she say something patently untrue, like I haven’t done anything wrong! What she actually said was, “I am trying to be discreet.”

  “If you end up married to the prince,” I said, “I don’t think you can ever be discreet enough.”

  “I’m not married to Cormac yet,” she answered.

  “No,” I said, “but couldn’t you use your time away from Oberton to try to get over this other person? You said yourself that it was time to end the relationship. Take this opportunity to leave the past behind.”

  “And how long did it take you to get over Robbie?” she snapped.

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “I came to Oberton so I had something else to think about. So you’re in Camarria. Think about something else.”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  I shrugged. Maybe it was. In my experience, it was easy to make things more complicated than they had to be. Making a decision and sticking to it usually took care of the messy details. But maybe that wasn’t as true for someone in Marguerite’s position.

  “Then let’s do something simple,” I said. “Let’s get you ready for dinner.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Our second dinner at the royal palace was even grander than the first because it took place in a very large, very formal dining hall and included the king, the queen, the young princess, and a handful of other high-ranking visitors, in addition to Prince Cormac and all his guests. I was unsophisticated enough to be thrilled by the notion of seeing the king in person, though the arrangement of the dining hall worked to my disadvantage. The room held six long tables for the nobles, and twelve for their echoes, and it was difficult to see through all the clusters of people that separated me from the royal family. I did get enough glimpses to note that King Harold looked a good deal like Cormac, though his handsome face was wearier and sterner, and his smiles less frequent; Queen Tabitha looked clever and cold. Princess Annery, who might have been twelve years old, rarely looked up from her plate and never spoke to anyone except her mother. Her two echoes, seated behind her, seemed equally listless.

  By contrast, the echoes belonging to the king and queen had more color and substance than most others I’d encountered, as if the responsibilities of ruling the realm weighed almost as heavily on them as on their originals. I wondered if their hands would be warmer to the touch, their gazes more direct. I remembered Nico’s story about King Edwin, whose spirit was able to flow from his own body to that of his echoes. I wondered if that was a trick mastered by everyone who wore the crown. I would never want to witness a regicide, of course, but that magical transference was certainly something I would like to see.

  After the meal, which seemed endless, the whole mass of diners adjourned to another huge hall—again, more formal than the salon where the prince had entertained his guests the night before. The ceiling was high and covered with glinting gold leaf; the walls were panels of dark wood interspersed with panels of maroon wallpaper decorated with the royal crest limned in gold paint. Two gilded thrones had been set up on a velvet-covered dais; behind them were less ornate chairs clearly designed for echoes. There was nowhere else in the room to sit.

  It was quickly clear that the visiting nobles had been brought there to pay their respects to the king and queen, and that no other entertainment was to be had. Footmen moved through the room, issuing soft-voiced instructions, and slowly everyone drifted to one of two camps—diners who were familiar visitors to the palace, who had no need to seek an audience with the royal couple, and newcomers who would be expected to make their obeisance to the throne.

  Obviously, Marguerite was in the second group, along with about half of Cormac’s guests. I wasn’t surprised to see the Banchura triplets in the first group because that province lay closest to Sammerly. Nigel and a few of the other men also turned out to be familiar to the king. Now that I knew Elyssa was expected to marry Prince Jordan, I understood why she, too, was able to stand with the visitors who had been to court before. She must have traveled here many times in the past—or at least often enough to allow Jordan to realize how much he disliked her. But perhaps she had only visited Camarria once or twice; I didn’t think it would take too much contact with her for anyone to reach that conclusion.

  Lady Darrily and her brother, Dezmen, were standing with the people who were already acquainted with the king. She looked just as stunning tonight, in a dress of burnt orange accented with falls of lace; again, she wore an opal pendant against her forehead, held in place by a golden chain. Even in the muted light of the high-ceilinged room, it glowed with a wicked light.

  “Her affectation is so much better than mine,” Marguerite breathed. I was standing right next to her, Patience and Purpose on my other side.

  I risked a reply, trying not to move my lips. “Yes, but her affectation isn’t calculated to save her life.”

  “As far as you know,” Marguerite retorted. “Everybody has secrets.”

  Unfortunately, I knew this to be true.

  If there was any particular order to how people were being invited to approach the throne, I couldn’t discern it. My guess was royal whim. King Harold would whisper to a footman, who
would approach someone in the crowd and lead that person back to the dais. After a short conversation with the king and queen, the individual would bow or curtsey, then join the group on the other side of the room. Given the number of people still awaiting an introduction, I figured this whole process could take close to two hours.

  It seemed like an exceedingly tedious way to spend an evening.

  We had been standing there for about fifteen minutes when the young woman standing closest to Marguerite looked over with a friendly smile. She was short and a little plump, with curly brown hair and a pink complexion. She was attended by two echoes, and all three of them wore necklaces of sculpted amethyst. Probably from Alberta, then.

  “We haven’t had a chance to talk yet, but I’m Cali,” she introduced herself. “You’re Marguerite, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was very excited to be invited to Camarria, but I wish this part of it was over,” Cali confessed. “I’m a little nervous about meeting the king.”

  “So am I,” Marguerite replied. “What are we supposed to say?”

  “Elyssa told me that he will just ask a couple of simple questions,” Cali said. “He does not expect deep conversation. He is merely showing kindness by taking the time to meet us all. Though I’d rather he was kind from a distance, frankly.”

  “I think I agree with you.”

  Cali gave her a quick appraisal. “He’ll want to talk longer to you, I expect. I mean, if you’re really going to marry Cormac—”

  “Oh, that has not been decided yet,” Marguerite said easily. “I’m just in Camarria visiting, like everyone else.”