chapter V

O NE DAY MY UNCLE SAID TO ME, “SABINA IS planning a Rogues’ Ball. I think you should come. It will be instructive.”

Wouldn’t you know it? My first real city ball, and it was something roguish. Still, “Shall I wear a ballgown?” I asked.

“Not for this.”

The last thing on earth I wanted was to make my city debut dressed like a boy. “Can I go masked?”

“You won’t need to go masked. No one you know will be there. No one, that is, that you could admit to knowing to the sort of people you would go masked against. It is, after all, a Rogues’ Ball.” He flicked the invitation’s stiff paper between his long fingers, then glanced at it again more closely: “Or, Rouges’ Ball, as she’s put it. If the woman can’t spell—and believe me, she can’t—she should get someone else to do her writing for her. She’s invited half of Riverside, and everyone on the Hill who still finds her amusing. I wouldn’t miss it for anything. We have a bet on how long it will take a fight to start. Dress for action, and don’t carry a purse with any money: I can guarantee those will be the first to go, with all the cutpurses in attendance.”

I knew who Sabina was by now: a professional mistress. She seemed to know my uncle well. She sent him chatty letters from her house in the Old City, which he sometimes read aloud to me and Marcus.

Sabina claimed always to be bored, bored, bored—bored by the lovers, bored by the duels, bored by the gold and the silk. But she kept at it nonetheless; the letters were full of her conquests and extravagances. I confess I was shocked by them: what she paid for a bracelet would have put a new roof on my mother’s house; what she paid for bed-hangings would have bought the woman a small farm. It seemed to me that if only Sabina could be bothered to put some aside, she could retire very nicely from the conquests and find something that did not bore her.

Now she was hiring a guildhall to have room for all her inviteds, along with the inevitable drop-ins. The duke said to me, “Come armed.”

There was no question in my mind but that I would take my master’s sword. For form’s sake I consulted with Phillip Drake, and to my surprise he was against it. “Old-fashioned,” he said. “Look at the hilt.”

“It’s perfectly balanced.”

“I’m not saying it’s not a good sword; nice, flexible steel and all, but plain, lady, plain.” He smiled. “I think we could persuade the duke to part with some funds to make a good showing at your first ball.”

I shook my head, though I was tempted for a moment. “There’s my New Year’s knife for pretty. Although…a new scabbard would be nice. I don’t think anyone would notice the hilt,” I wheedled, “if it were tucked in a green leather scabbard worked with gold and scarlet, do you?”

Phillip Drake said, “I’ll tell you what: you break my guard three times with the new double-pass I taught you, and I’ll see to it you get any scabbard you like.”

In any given fight, the weaker sword can prevail through sheer accident. But not in a drill, not three times in a row. I did it, though, and got my scabbard. So that was all right.

T HE NEXT TIME THEY MET, AT A CARD PARTY, LORD Ferris was determined to let Lady Artemisia feel her consequence.

“You will be pleased to know,” he said, “that half the young men of the town aren’t speaking to me, because I have carried off the jewel that might have been in one of their caps.”

Knowing her friends were looking, Artemisia could not resist tapping the Chancellor’s arm with her fan.

“Really, sir?” she said frostily. “Then how is it that you find yourself invited to so many fascinating parties without me?”

He said, “No party is fascinating without you, sweet. And, as you well know, no one would dare to invite me anywhere without my intended.”

Artemisia felt herself blushing. At first she was inclined to mind, but then she remembered that to see a blushing woman in a courting couple was expected. She raised her fan to her face to be sure that it was seen.

“I hear,” she murmured behind it, “there is a ball to which I have not been invited.”

“Really?” the Crescent Chancellor drawled. “Then I expect that I have not been, either.”

“Oh, but I think you have, sir. Or what is that letter in your pocket, which you were not eager to let me see?”

And, indeed, the Crescent Chancellor’s ringed hand flew to his inner pocket, but only for a moment. “Oh, that. Do you think it is from some woman?” he said loudly. “God love the puss, she’s jealous already.” He looked around the table for confirmation; the men guffawed, and Artemisia blushed in truth.

But she got it out of him in the end, when they were nearly alone, with her maid a discreet distance away. It was a ball, a ball comprised of rogues, the invitation said, but a ball nonetheless, and was she not an ornament at any ball? Her star shone too brightly for such low company—very well, then, she would cover it with a mask. She’d heard of married ladies who went to such places for a lark, suitably disguised, and were she and my lord not to be married so soon as made no never mind? As for rough company, well, it was soon to be his life’s job to protect her, and what better place to test it than at a roguish ball? Ferris laughed at that, and allowed that if he could not protect her, no one could. But this would require more discretion than he feared she was mistress of, to quit the house without even her maid’s knowledge. And what would her parents think of him if they found out?

Pooh, she said, her parents thought he’d hung the moon. If he wouldn’t take her, she’d find another who would. There’s Terence Monteith, quite mad for her, everyone knew he’d been drooping like a willow ever since she’d put on Ferris’s engagement jewel…or her cousin Lucius Perry, he’d do anything for her.

Well, said His Lordship, we can’t have you imposing on discarded lovers or worse yet, relatives. I see it is my duty to escort you safely there and back, for one last little girlish adventure…. If she could contrive to be at her own garden gate when the clock struck nine that night, he would be waiting, cloak in hand.

When he left, Artemisia was breathless with excitement. Such a victory, to bend such a man to her will! She would not mind being married to him at all, if this was a taste of things to come.

O N THE NIGHT OF THE ROGUES’ BALL, BETTY LAID out my nicest suit, the blue shot with crimson, and a new shirt with ruffles and a little gold edging, and low boots neatly cuffed. Just because I had no ballgown, I need not go looking like the dog’s offal! I was going to the ball, and I was going as the Mad Duke’s niece who studied the swordsman’s art and wore a swordsman’s clothes. What was the point of trying to hide it? Sooner or later it would all come out. It might as well be now. And if I found a mask to wear, he would only tear it off. I did have my new scabbard, though.

Marcus was delighted. He had retired to his room with a book of essays and a bowl of apples, with instructions to me to enjoy myself because he hated these things and not to let the duke do anything really stupid.

I waited in the front hall for some time, trying not to fidget with my sword. Nothing looks stupider than a swordsman who can’t keep his hand off his tool, the master had said, and although Phillip Drake had laughed uproariously when I repeated that to him, I planned to stand by it. Finally I gave up and went and knocked on the door of the duke’s chamber. Although the sun was nearly setting, the world bathed in its last colors, my uncle’s rooms were shadowy and candlelit, the heavy curtains drawn. He still sat before the glass, his long hair falling all about him, sleek and new-brushed. His eyes looked very large, their color bright, gazing into the glass in which he saw me behind him. There was something about him of the enchanted prince, in the pallor of his skin or the brightness of his eyes, the surprising fineness of his hair and the etched bones of his face. He wore only plain black linen, over a very white shirt whose edges reported crisply at neck and wrists.

“Nothing too gaudy,” he said to me in the mirror, “for a Rogues’ Ball.” But his right hand dazzled with rings. His valet combed the hair back from the duke’s face and bound it with a velvet ribbon.

My uncle rose, and looked down at my head, and further down to my toes. He nodded; I was all right. “Stay close to me,” he said. He wore not even a dagger. The gold rings, I supposed, were his weapon. And the plain black linen was exquisitely tailored; when he turned, I saw all the tiny folds and tucks stitched up and down the front.

He stumbled into a stool, and flung his hand out to the bedpost for support, and steadied himself there. “Stay close to me,” he said again. “Things aren’t quite where they should be.”

“My lord,” said his valet, “do you wish a draught of something steadying?”

“No,” said the duke; “what for?”

I followed him down the stairs, where he was wrapped in a heavy cloak. At the door, a palanquin was waiting. He got through the curtains and into his seat very slowly, and lay back with his eyes closed. “Is it summer?” he said. “It’s very warm.”

I didn’t answer; he wasn’t listening to me anyway. When we were over the old bridge, a carriage attended. It took us slowly along the river. Now I could see all the other people going our way, mostly on foot—Riversiders, all decked out in their tasteless best, like painted poles at a Spring fair. Some impudent rascal rapped at the side of our door, demanding a lift—our footman beat him off, but the duke put a restraining hand on my arm, although I hadn’t moved but to look. “Easy,” he said. “Not yet.”

The guildhall was so brightly lit inside that from the outside its tall windows shone like beaten gold. I was not the duke’s only guard; other of our men had ridden outside the carriage, and it took the entire escort to clear a path to the guildhall steps. But they left us at the door. The duke put a hand on my shoulder, balancing. A huge footman in a livery all of ribbons came forward. He looked at my uncle. My uncle looked at him. Clearly something was supposed to be happening but wasn’t. I wondered just how awful things would get if the footman tried to throw us out.

“We were invited,” I said nervously, but nobody even looked at me.

My uncle spoke, finally, to the footman. “What a getup. You look,” he said slowly but clearly, “like a booth at a fair.”

“Ah,” said the footman. “You’ve got that right. Shall I announce you, sir?”

“Why bother? Everyone knows who I am.”

And so we entered the Rogues’ Ball.

I recognized Sabina only because I didn’t think our hostess would allow any other woman at her ball to be reclining in a nest of red velvet at the heart of a huge golden shell. Anyone, I suppose, was free to wear pink gauze and a necklace of the biggest pearls I’d ever seen. The shell was on a platform at the center of the room; all the activity swirled around her. The duke was staring hard at it and blinking. She caught sight of us and called “Alec!” and waved a napkin in our direction. As we drew nearer she shrieked, “Black! You wore black to my party!”

“Get me a drink,” my uncle muttered, but he wouldn’t let go of my shoulder.

By now, of course, everyone was staring at us. “Is this your new boyfriend?” Sabina demanded. We were now at the foot of the shell. It was raised above the throng, supported by carved horses with fishes’ tails rising from the waves. It reminded me a lot of a serving platter for a banquet table, and I’m not sure she didn’t mean it to.

“No, dear,” he replied; “this is one you’d find very hard to steal from me. Unless you like unnatural blondes?” he asked me; but, not waiting for an answer, told her, “This one guards my body, instead of trying to rob it of my vital fluids.”

Sabina threw back her head. She did have a glorious neck. “Brilliant. We all wondered when you were going to think of that. Well, then, I won’t worry about your getting snuffed at my party. You’re so considerate, you plan for everything.”

“Shove over,” he told her; “I want to sit down.”

The pink gauze shifted in our direction. “No. You’ll ruin my effect.”

“Shove over, I said; you’ve got the best view.”

“I will not.”

She was getting mad, and I wasn’t Marcus. But I tried. “My lord duke,” I said, “don’t you want to go see who’s here?”

“Oh, good god,” said Sabina. “This isn’t a boy at all. It’s the baby chick poor Ginnie was telling me about. Send her home, Alec, what’s wrong with you?”

“I can fight,” I said staunchly, to my surprise.

“Well,” she replied, “keep your uncle out of trouble, or you’re going to have to.”

“I am staying out of trouble.” He arranged himself on the steps to the shell. “How’s that? And don’t say you won’t get a huge bang out of having the Duke Tremontaine sitting tamely at your feet. People will talk for days.”

“No, no, no!” She smacked him with her fan. “Not only are you ruining the effect, but people always want things from you. I am not having my lovely seashell turned into a queuing for petitions for better drains on Tulliver Street.”

“I’ll stand guard,” I said. It seemed like the safest place to be.

“I’m sure you will, angel,” she purred, “but I want you to have a good time. Both of you. Alec, dearest darling, do go enjoy yourself and pick up some pretty man, and then you can tell me all about it tomorrow. I’ll let you be the very first one to call on me, I promise, and we’ll thrash the whole thing out together first thing. Will you do that for me? Please? Oh my goodness, who’s this dashing blade?” This last was addressed, not to us, but to a masked young man in very tight breeches and an open collar. He was awfully good-looking, and he was leaning over us to kiss her hand.

“Oh god,” my uncle groaned, “dinner is served. Get me out of here.”

I took his cold hand, and led him into the throng.

L ADY ARTEMISIA FITZ-LEVI WAS AFRAID THAT HER mask was slipping. Nervously she tugged at the ribbons that held it in back. If only she hadn’t had to sneak out without her maid’s help; Dorrie would have been able to pin it more tightly into her hair. Unlike every other party she’d ever been to, here there was no room to retire to with ladies’ maids standing by to mend tears and turn up stray locks of hair. She was on her own. “Don’t worry,” her escort breathed in her ear, “they’ll all think you are my ladybird, isn’t that the point? Put your head up, dearest, and laugh. Look like you’re having a good time, or they’ll know you’re not.”

“But I’m afraid it will come loose—”

“My dear.” Her intended ran his finger carefully along the place where the bottom of the mask ended and her cheek began. She felt a chill at the base of her spine: excitement, or fear, or that thing the older girls talked about? “If I see any sign of it coming loose, I will be the first to help you hide your face. Do you think I want the world to know my wife was at this affair? No, my little madcap puss,” and his arm was around her back now, holding her to him, his hand cradling her hip through the heavy layers of her skirt, “this will just be our little secret, our first adventure together. Isn’t that what you wanted?” and she had to say, “Yes, of course it is.”

The room was aswirl with people. It was like being in a pool of water, in a river that moved against her. Someone knocked into her and Artemisia gasped reflexively, “Oh! Excuse me!”

But her escort squeezed her waist and chuckled, “That’s no way to go about it. Not here, not with these types. The next time that happens, you jab out with your elbow and say, ‘Watch it, jackass!’”

She giggled nervously. “I can’t!”

“Yes you can…try it.” Without warning, he swung her around so she ran into a short man whose hands were full of pie. “Watch it, sister!” the man sputtered through a mouthful of pie, and she said, “Watch it, yourself,” and though she spoiled the effect by giggling, he told her she had done well.

A BAND STRUCK UP IN ONE CORNER OF THE ROOM. It was the kind of music you could hear in any Riverside tavern, fiddles and ratchety pipes and drums, and everyone loved it. The Riversiders and University students knew the tunes and the steps that went with them and threw themselves into the dance, right at home. The nobles, some dressed in rags and some in ball regalia, but all easily distinguished by their cleanliness, started casting about for likely looking girls to dance with. I was glad my clothes ensured that no one could take me for one. I passed behind, the dark duke’s bright shadow, as he drifted looking for amusement.

His eye was caught by a group of men dressed in brightly fluttering tatters. They had braided ribbons into their hair, twined them through the careful rents in their shirts and sleeves and breeches. Some had tied in little bells; you couldn’t hear them above the noise, but they looked nice.

“What ho!” one of them cried, roguishly, I guess, to the crowd. “We are the Companions of the King! Come join us in our devilish revelry!” They seemed to be trying to arrange people into a pyramid against the wall behind them. A red-haired man had a food-stained tablecloth laid out on the floor and was drawing on it with a burnt stick.

The duke moved towards them as if their colors were flame on a cold night. One spotted us and shouted, “Oh, joy! It’s darkest Night—”

“Or Nightmare,” said the redhead, “allied with Temptation. Just what we need to complete the tableau. Do join us, please, and we’ll make you immortal.”

“I am already immortal,” the duke said, a little thickly. “Have you discovered a new method?”

“Art, sir, art is the medium! As it ever was. Art renders immortality through the medium of allegory. Twin art with morality, and there is nothing to offend anyone, yet something for all tastes.”

We looked up at the artists’ tableau. It was a complicated twist of people arranged reaching for fruit, for wine, or for each other. “It doesn’t look very moral to me,” my uncle said.

“Exactly.”

“What my friend means, severe and beautiful one, is that in the interest of revealing virtue, we mask it in vice.”

“Didn’t Placid say that?” asked the other.

“No, I said it,” snapped the red-haired artist. “It is a grand concept. A masked ball of virtue, the obverse of roguery, disguised as the very thing it seeks to cast down.”

The duke actually smiled. “Very apt.” He gestured to the pyramid. “And this represents…?”

“Man’s heedless quest for Pleasure, of appetites temporal and carnal. See how in their striving each man treads upon the other? And how the Pleasures reach out mindlessly to tempt us?”

I certainly did. One of the Pleasures, a man all tucked up behind another one, untwisted his arm, encased in peacock blue silk, to wave it languidly at the duke. I had seen his sleek head before, and this time I knew where.

It was Artemisia’s friend, and the Mad Duke’s as well. I was dying to say something clever to my uncle about that particular beauty being one of the pleasures he’d already enjoyed—but if I hoped to find out more about the mysterious young man who visited nice young girls on the Hill and also worked at Glinley’s, I would have to be chary. I would discover his name tonight; that would be my quest, and if I was very lucky, my uncle would not know of it.

“So in the interest of illuminating virtue,” the artist was saying, “it is possible, indeed necessary, to show vice in all its manifestations. It will be a tremendous crowd-pleaser.”

“Right,” said the duke. “Well then, get out your sketchbooks and get started, because I want to be at the top, and I probably won’t last long.”

As he handed me his empty glass, I recalled my duty. “Oh, no. I really don’t think you should—”

“You are my swordsman, not my governess,” the duke said sternly. “If someone attacks me with anything sharp and pointed, you kill them. Otherwise, leave me alone.”

There was no use arguing with him. If he broke his leg, someone could probably set it.

The duke set one finely shod foot on the thigh of a crouching earth spirit and began his ascent. I’d climbed some trees in my time, and clearly so had he. But the trees didn’t usually shudder and giggle underfoot. The red-haired artist wasn’t really helping, rushing in and patting people who were falling out of pose back into place. He nearly got kicked in the teeth by a ticklish Temperance. A couple of the others began sketching madly. It looked like roiling clouds of form all over their paper, not like people at all, but I saw they were drawing a sort of map of the scene. I’d never seen anything like it, and I was so fascinated that I missed the downfall of the allegory. I heard my uncle shout, “You! You—” and then the voices became indecipherable, and it was all a mess of arms and legs and skirts and hair and ribbons and shrieks and laughter.

The duke crawled out from underneath the heaving throng. He pointed into it. “Kill him,” he said. “He bit me.”

“I don’t think I—”

“My lord, I beg your pardon.” A bright head with rosy cheeks emerged from the sprawl. “I mistook you for a most delicious fruit.”

“An easy mistake for anyone to make,” the duke said smoothly. “Do I know you?”

I knew him. It was the horrible Alcuin.

A RTEMISIA HAD A STITCH IN HER SIDE. SHE REACHED across the dancers for Lord Ferris, but his hand seemed to slip away from hers as if pulled by the awful music, the straining strings. A stranger with garlic breath had his arm around her waist, and she was close to tears. The dance was not one she knew. There were no steps, it was just leaping back and forth in time to the music, with your partner swinging you this way and that and handing you off to someone else at a signal, but she did not know what it was. All sorts of men had had their hands all over her, and it was too much, really too much, but every time Lord Ferris came in view he smiled brightly at her and said, “Enjoying yourself, sweetheart?” It was all that kept her from tearing herself out of the crowds and running for home…. The garlic went away and she smelt a familiar scent, looked up and realized it was Lord Ferris with his arms around her, and she leaned into his chest and whimpered up at him, “I’m thirsty.”

“Poor kitten,” he said. “Of course you are. What a treat you were there, a jewel ornamenting the arms of some of the roughest men in town.” He was holding her as close as some of them had, closer than he had ever held her before. But at least they were off the dance floor, headed for a quiet corner away from the worst of the brawl. “What shall I feed you now, my sweet pet, wine? Or maybe beer, in the spirit of the evening.”

“Water,” she said, “or a fruit coolant.”

But he went on as if she had not spoken, “I’m not sure she’s serving wine tonight; they’d guzzle it like rough ale, these types, and there would be chaos. But don’t worry; I’ve brought this.” He drew a flask from his jacket, and raised it to his lips. When he lowered it, a little moisture clung to them. “Taste?” he whispered.

“What?” Artemisia was baffled.

He leaned his face down to hers, so that his wet lips were nearly touching hers. “Put out your tongue,” he said, “and taste.”

No one knew where she was. No one here would care what he asked her to do. They were in a corner where no one could see them. Closing her eyes, she slowly put out her tongue and tasted burning brandy and the skin of his lips.

“Ah!” His sudden hot breath shot right into her lungs; she gasped and tried to pull back, but his arms were tight around her.

“Ah,” he said again, and his mouth was all over her, her lips, her chin, her ears, her neck, her chest where the gown was cut as low as she had dared.

“My wicked girl,” he said, “how I adore you.” Artemisia knew she should be pleased, but she was frightened. His hands were everywhere, too, rumpling her skirts, pushing at her bodice, pinning back her hands while he kissed her.

“Please,” she breathed, “I—”

“Oh, do you?” he growled. “Do you? Of course you do, of course you do, so do I—”

“No!”

She said it, she heard herself say it, but he did not seem to. He did not seem to hear anything except his own hot breath, which was terribly loud in her ear while he did things to her skirts until there was nothing at all between him and her, really nothing whatsoever, and although she wailed in distress it only seemed to make him hotter and he forced her up against the wall and rammed himself into her over and over and she had to stop thinking because there was nothing else to do until he let out a revolting noise and draped himself over her all sweaty and said, “Couldn’t wait, could you?”

She was shivering as if her whole body would shake to pieces.

“My dearest love,” he said, and pulled a lock of hair back from her cheek, “are you cold?”

“Please,” she said, “I want to go home.”

“Come home with me,” he murmured. “We’ve the whole night ahead of us.”

He wrapped his arms tight round her, and she tasted sick in the back of her throat. She swallowed hard and tried to match his tone, but her voice came out all squeaky. “How can you say that? How can you say that to me?”

“But why not, sweetheart?” Lord Ferris murmured in her hair.

“How dare you suggest that I—that I—”

“That you are the sort of young lady who would go off unchaperoned with a man to a strange place with no protection? That you’d allow him liberties with you there?” Something caught in her throat and she made a kind of barking noise. “Now, now,” he said, “don’t cry. Can’t you see I love you all the better for it, you wanton little sweet sweet slut?”

She was sobbing so hard she could scarcely breathe, and she heard herself making awful retching noises. She reached out blindly for someone, for something, but only his hands were there to catch hers, and “Oh, come on,” he said; “it’s not that bad. Stop howling like a kitchen maid. Maybe I was a little quick for your first time, but can you blame me? Overcome as I was by the rapture of your beauty—I’ve been overcome for weeks, now, and you damn well know it, you hot little piece. You lead me on, and then expect me to control myself? There, there, stop crying; I promise I’ll be good and slow and patient when we’re married. You’ll like it fine, you’ll see.”

“Married?” she gasped. “Married? To you?”

As she spoke the words, she realized what it meant. Married to Lord Ferris. There would be all the gowns and the jewels, the wedding ceremony and the guests and the banquet, and then she would go home with him to his house, and she would belong to him forever and he could do this to her whenever he liked, without asking. That was what it meant.

“Well, yes, married to me,” he said reasonably, and chuckled. “Were you thinking of doing this, and then marrying someone else? That’s not how it works, you sweet little slut, and you know it.”

Artemisia tried to catch her breath—once, twice, and she found the air she needed to say, “Never. I will never marry you.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” he said comfortably. “Think of it this way: at least we know now we’ll suit between the sheets. Not bad, that. Now pull yourself together; you’re a bit of a mess. I’ll find you something nice to drink, and when I come back we’ll have a little dance, shall we?” She shook her head in protest. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I won’t make you dance with any of those buffoons. I admit I enjoyed seeing them holding you there—but you’re mine now, and I won’t let you out of my hands ever again.”

M Y UNCLE LOOKED ALCUIN UP AND DOWN. “OH. You. I thought I got rid of you ages ago. What were you doing lurking in allegories biting me?”

“Old habits die hard?” suggested the beautiful Alcuin.

“It is a habit,” the duke said, “that I would endeavor to correct if I were you.”

“Oh, really?” Alcuin lowered his eyelids and looked up through long lashes. “And are you going to help correct me?”

As if entranced, the duke slowly moved one hand toward the handsome man’s face—but at the last moment, Alcuin turned his face away. “Leave me alone,” he said sharply. “You had your chance.”

I didn’t like this. Other people were getting interested. I looked around for the sleek man from Glinley’s, but he had slipped away from the crowd. The artists may not have known who my uncle was, but various Riversiders did, and I heard the whispering behind us: Tremontaine

My uncle looked his former lover in the eye. “You shoe-scraping,” he said. “You worthless piece of trash.”

Alcuin’s face turned pale, and then dark. “Not so worthless,” he said. “I’ve got something you don’t have. Something I happen to know you want.”

He raised his chin and made a little moue with his rosy lips. A well-built dark-haired man came to his side, a sword slung low at his hips.

“Is someone,” the swordsman said to his friend, “offering you trouble?”

The duke’s face stiffened with distaste. Ignoring the swordsman, he said to Alcuin, “You can’t challenge me, you monkey’s turd. Only a noble can do that, and you’re not exactly noble; the Court of Honor would never hear your case. A civil court would sentence you to death, even if you won.”

“No one would dream of challenging you, sir.” Alcuin did not budge. “But my swordsman has every right to challenge your…your thing.”

My hand was on my sword. I heard the duke say, “It appears, Lady Katherine, that my old sweetheart here would like some of our blood.”

I didn’t care. I was more than ready for him.

And I did not like being called a thing.

Alcuin’s swordsman was much bigger than I was, and much stronger, too. He looked me up and down. “Do you really think this is even worth it?”

“Just do it,” Alcuin told him through gritted teeth.

“But—no offense, dear—but it’s a girl, right?” Like Alcuin, he wasn’t very bright.

“I don’t care if it’s a spotted baboon! She’s got a sword, and she offends me. So if you want to get any tonight, or ever again for that matter, you’ll draw your steel right now and teach her some respect!”

“She is a noble,” the duke drawled, “and you are not. The privilege of the sword extends only to—”

“I accept the challenge,” I said quickly. “On my own behalf, sword to sword, I accept.”

“Well, then,” my uncle said.

I looked around at the considerable crowd. “Where do we—”

“Fall back.” The duke and some others started clearing people back to form a circle. I had the sudden fierce wish that Marcus could be there, not to help me, but to see me doing it for real at last.

“Five on the girl.” The betting had begun. “Twenty on Rippington.” So that was his name. What a stupid name. Rippington.

Rippington and I faced each other across the circle. “Oh, lord,” he said, and sighed. As the challenger, he had the right to begin the match, but as the challenged, I could call the terms.

“First blood,” I said. My hand was closed around the pommel of the master’s sword. I was glad I had not let Phillip Drake talk me out of bringing it tonight. I thought, Well, at least you’ve done this before. I breathed deep, felt the balance in my feet. Balance is everything.

“Ready?” he asked formally.

I nodded. He drew, and I drew, and we stood at guard. Then Rippington advanced and tapped my blade gently. I didn’t move. Don’t waste your moves, and don’t show your strengths until you have to. Make them wait, and make them guess, and make them show you theirs.

Rippington fought like a training lesson. He pulled back and executed a perfect lunge, hoping to get it over with quickly, I guess, but I saw it coming a mile away and stepped gently aside to let him pass, which he did, nearly falling on his face.

“Dammit!” he said, and I heard, “Twenty on the girl.”

I turned around and attacked him in a high line to see if he’d go for it, and of course he did, opening his entire front for just long enough for me to have killed him if I had wanted to. He parried this time, and I replied a bit show-offishly with a fancy riposte, just to see if he’d follow the move. God, he was slow! I realized later he must have been drinking to be so slow and precise; he fenced as if he was doing lessons, as if he was always trying to be sure his feet were in exactly the right position. Wine is enemy to sword. But at the time, I thought that he was making fun of me, refusing to take me seriously, so I got a little flashy and began speeding things up.

Mistake. Drunk or not, his sword was still perfectly long and deathly sharp, and when we closed at close quarters I realized that he could wrench the blade from my hand simply by applying enough force. Spooked, I backed off, nearly crashing into the ring of onlookers. There were jeers; I tried not to hear them, but I knew what they meant. I looked like a fool, and I felt like one. This was not a lesson. Rippington’s blade was not tipped, and he would not pull back if he came too close. When he lunged, I felt the steel sweep past my face, and knew it was steel. He hadn’t been making an effort because he thought I wasn’t worth it. Now he wasn’t so nice. Now he was working harder, testing me, trying to draw me out. I kept my moves small, trying to give little away, but it was hard not to bring out my fiercest defensive moves. Save them, a voice inside me said. Save them for when you need them. Watch him and see what he does.

I watched, and I responded. The crowd was quieter now. This was the way it was supposed to be, a conversation between equals, an argument of steel. I wasn’t going to die. The worst that I could do was lose the bout, but I wasn’t going to lose if I could help it. Because at last I found the move that my opponent loved best: a nice, flashy double-riposte. I found it, and I found that I could make him do it every time. High parry, low parry, wherever I came in didn’t matter, I could count on him coming back with that double-riposte. Like making a cat jump to a piece of string. It probably worked better with a taller opponent; with me he didn’t have to reach quite so far as he was used to. He kept doing it out of habit, and because he looked good in the pose, but the difference between us made it just a little off-balance for him. That’s the problem with having one favorite move. I enticed him into it one more time, and then I came in right where I was supposed to, in a clean line straight to the—

Straight to the heart, it would have been, and I don’t know whether he could have defended himself in time, but at the last minute I realized what I was doing, and turned my wrist just a fraction so that instead the point slashed messily across his arm, tearing his shirt and the skin under it.

“Blood!” The cry went up. I fell back, gasping; I hadn’t realized I was working so hard. “First blood to—what’s your name, dearie?”

“Uh, Katherine,” I said. “Katherine Talbert.”

My uncle was gazing delightedly at me. “This,” he began, “is my—”

“Shut up!” I told him. “Just shut up, don’t say it, all right? Just for once.”

So then he was laughing so hard the red-haired artist had to hold him up. I had a feeling the red-haired artist who loved allegory was in for an interesting night.

“Alec!” Sabina had arrived; I guess it took her a long time to get down from the seashell. “Alec, when did I tell you there would be fighting at my party?”

I looked for Rippington. Alcuin was binding up his wounds surrounded by a coterie of friends. They shot me some truly dirty looks. It had never occurred to me that not everyone loved you after you’d won a fight. It wasn’t in the books. Even Richard St Vier hadn’t mentioned it.

Not that people weren’t all around me saying some very nice things, trying to get my attention. But I had no stomach for answering questions just then. I was thirsty, and I just wanted to be alone for a bit.

“Here, you.” Someone put a cup in my hands. It was the woman I’d met my first day out in Riverside, the colorful Ginnie Vandall. I drank. Water had never tasted so good. She put her arm around my waist, and I let her lead me out of the crowd. But she wanted something from me, too. “Where is he?” she murmured low and urgent in my ear. “I know those moves. Where is he?”

I broke away from her, and ran.

I ran to the furthest corner I could find, but it was already occupied, by a dark-haired woman in a truly beautiful lavender gown, a color I cannot wear. Her back was to me, but then she turned around and I recognized Artemisia Fitz-Levi, of all people.

“Oh!” she said brightly. “It’s you! Are you here, too? Are you having a good time?”

It was perfectly obvious that she’d been crying her eyes out. And her hair was a mess.

“What happened?” I asked because clearly something had, and it was not good, whatever it was.

“Oh, nothing. I’m just fine. How are you?”

Her hands were shaking. I took them in mine. They were icy cold. I said, “I’m fine. I just almost killed someone. I’m here as the duke’s bodyguard, but I think you need one more.”

She looked at me with terror. “Is my hair really awful?”

“A rat’s nest.”

Her face melted and crumpled, and she started to cry. She put her hands up over her face, as if she could hide it, and she shook her head when I tried to touch her, but I did for her what I sometimes did for my mother, and just put my arms around her until she naturally laid her head on my shoulder and clung to me, and she sobbed there for a good long while. When she got a little quieter, I disengaged enough to dig out my handkerchief and offer it to her.

“Look,” I said, “can you tell me what happened? Maybe I can do something.”

“You can’t do anything,” she sniffled. “No one can. It’s all my fault and there’s nothing I can do, but I’ll never marry him, never!”

“Marry who?”

“Lord F-Ferris. My intended. I made him bring me here, and then he—he—”

I stepped back a pace. “A nobleman brought you here? To this? What is he, an idiot?”

“He’s the Crescent Chancellor, you dolt!” Well, she was upset. “I’m supposed to marry him, but I can’t, now. I can’t marry anyone, never, ever. I’m ruined!” she wailed.

“Ruined how?”

She hiccupped and looked me in the eye. “Ruined. Exactly like in the books. That kind of ruined.”

“And your Lord Ferris stood by and let someone—”

“No. He did it himself.” I seized her sticky hand, and she gripped mine, hard. “He says I’ll learn to enjoy it. But I won’t. I won’t. I won’t marry him. I’ll never let him touch me again.”

I said, “Certainly not. Look, you’d better go home.”

“Will you take me?” she asked piteously.

“I—I’ll have to ask my uncle.”

“No! You mustn’t tell anyone! Above all, not him!”

“I won’t tell him, I’ll just…” Just what? Then I thought of something. “Look,” I said, “do you remember that day I came to see you? And you were visiting with that pretty young man?”

“Pretty enough, I suppose,” she sniffed. “That’s my cousin Lucius. Lucius Perry.”

“Your cousin! Perfect. Because he’s here, Artemisia, I saw him not long ago. I’m going to go find him, and he will take you home.”

She clutched my sleeve. “Oh, no! Don’t leave me! Lord Ferris might come back at any moment.”

“Then you must hide. Hurry, the time is short.” We found her a niche outside the main hall and she huddled into it, pale in the moonlight and the shadows from the hall.

“Be strong,” I said to her; “be brave, Artemisia. I’ll find this Lucius, and all may yet be well.”

Her eyes got a little wide, and then I watched her face change subtly. Some of the pain went out of it, to be replaced by a soft determination. “All will be well,” she said, and I knew she was thinking of the same chapter I was, “with you at my side.”

I turned back to the ballroom then, which was good because I was blushing. Although I’d thought about it a lot on my own, no one had ever compared me to Fabian before.

The place was a madhouse, with people dancing and kissing and who knows what. I was never going to find her cousin Lucius without some kind of a plan. Lucius Perry, Lucius Perry… He was a nobleman, and a Perry at that. Even I had heard of the Perrys, a large and prosperous family. No wonder the duke didn’t want us to know who his visitor really was. The duke was encouraging Artemisia’s cousin Lucius in a life of vice, and taking his share out of the profits, too. Maybe the duke was blackmailing young Perry. Did Tremontaine blackmail people, or did he draw the line at that? He had some strange notions about honor, did my uncle the Mad Duke.

“Out of my way, boy!” A big man in red brocade bumped into me, and I jumped about a foot. Was this Artemisia’s betrothed, that evil man? I didn’t know what the Crescent Chancellor looked like, but I wanted to be sure he didn’t find her again tonight. Now I really wished Marcus were here. But he wasn’t. That might be for the best, though. I would definitely tell him about Lucius Perry; Perry was ours. But what had happened to Artemisia Fitz-Levi, that was something I must keep to myself.

If you were a nobleman leading a double life who had decided to attend a Rogues’ Ball where half the people knew you as one sort of person, and the other as another, where would you be? Masked, I thought, if you had any sense. But had he? He had been in the allegory bare-faced. My master said that there were swordsmen who courted the dangerous opponent and the sudden move. He must be like that, her cousin Lucius.

“I’m writing a song.” The voice was so close I thought it was directed at me, but the speakers were off to one side, above my head. “‘The Maid with the Blade.’ It will sell like mad on the street.”

“Dirty or clean?”

“Oh, romantic, I think. With lots of verses; maybe I’ll even run to two sides….”

It was about me, and it wasn’t, but I couldn’t worry about that now. I moved slowly onwards, looking.

Lucius Perry was masked, so it’s a good thing I recognized his smooth dark hair, that and his sleeve, which was of an unusual cut in that glorious peacock blue. When you’ve mended as many clothes as I have, you sort of memorize fabrics without realizing it. He stood off to one side, leaning against the wall with a drink in his hand, watching everyone.

“Come quickly!” I said, without wasting time. “Artemisia is here, and she needs you!”

He lifted the soft velvet mask off his eyes. “Who—oh, you’re the—Wait a minute. What’s happened?”

I grabbed his wrist. “Just come!”

I had thought she would fall into his arms weeping, but when she saw her cousin, Artemisia simply held out her trembling hands. “Lucius,” she whispered, “take me home.”

“I will.” But first he took off his mask, and tied it securely over her face. “Come,” he said; “come with me, and don’t speak a word.”

He put an arm around her waist, and she leaned on him, very shaky. “Don’t worry,” I said encouragingly, and tried to think of something better to say. “Tonight’s deed will not go unpunished.”

She turned and smiled at me, and then she and Lucius Perry disappeared into the crowd.

Pinking Alcuin’s bullyblade Rippington had been nothing, just swordplay and acrobatics. But at least now I knew that I could win a fight against a full-grown man. What Lord Ferris had done to my friend was unspeakable, disgusting. When she told her family, they would probably kill him. But if they didn’t, I would.