With the clarity of disappointment, Geder saw that he’d expected a parallel between the writer of the essay and Basrahip, high priest of the spider goddess. Both, after all, prom ised to tell of a secret history otherwise unknown to mankind. But where Basrahip had the power of the Sinir Kushku, Righteous Servant, the goddess of spiders, this other person had self-aggrandizing stories. If only Basrahip could judge the truth of written words as clearly as living voices…
“Baron Ebbingbaugh?”
Geder looked up, half annoyed by the interruption and half pleased by it. His house master was a Firstblood man with a long white beard and bushy white eyebrows that reminded Geder of drawings of Uncle Snow from a children’s book he’d had as a youth.
“Yes?”
“You have a caller, my lord.”
Geder stood up from his desk. His personal study was a disaster of papers, scrolls, notebooks, and wax tablets. He looked around with dismay. He couldn’t have anyone see this.
“All right,” Geder said. “Put him… put him in the garden?”
“I have put her in the north drawing room.”
Geder nodded, more than half to himself.
“North drawing room,” he said. “Which one’s that?”
“I’ll take you there, my lord.”
The mansion and grounds of his estate were still new to him. A year before, he’d been the heir to the Viscount of Rivenhalm. Now, after Basrahip had helped him expose the treason of Feldin Maas, he was not only Baron Ebbingbaugh but Protector of Prince Aster. The boy who would one day be king of Antea was his ward. It was an honor he’d never dreamed of in a life now full of things that had once seemed beyond his grasp.
He’d wintered in Ebbingbaugh when he wasn’t chasing around after the wandering feast of the King’s Hunt. Returning to the mansion in Camnipol had been strange as a dream. Here was the storage room where he’d watched Feldin Maas, the previous Baron Ebbingbaugh, slaughter his own wife. Here were the garden paths he’d fled through in the night, the letters proving Maas’s guilt pressed to his chest. Everything about the place screamed danger. But it was his by right now.
The north drawing room was the one he’d mentally labeled “the sitting room by the courtyard.” And the guest he’d expected wasn’t the one waiting for him.
He’d seen the girl in court the year before, but he’d seen more or less everyone in court. Her skin was the soft brown of coffee and milk, her hair spilling softly around her long, high-cheeked face. She wore a dress of startling green under a black leather cloak cut slightly too large, a fashion Geder himself had unintentionally begun. Her chaperone was a looming Tralgu woman in an almost comically frilly dress who stood in the corner.
“Ah, oh,” Geder said.
“Lord Protector Geder Palliako,” his house master intoned. “Her Ladyship Sanna Daskellin, third daughter of Lord Canl Daskellin.”
“I hope I haven’t come at a bad time,” the girl said, gliding across the room toward him, her hand out for him to accept. He accepted it.
“No,” he said, nodding. “No, this is fine.”
Her smile was fast and bright.
“My father is hosting the opening of the season, and I wanted to bring the invitation to you especially. You don’t think I’m too forward, do you?”
“No,” Geder said. “No, not at all. No. I’m delighted you could stop by.”
She squeezed his fingers gently and he realized he was still holding her hand. He let it drop.
“We’ve only just returned to Camnipol,” she said. “How did you find your new holdings?”
Geder crossed his arms, trying to affect an ease he didn’t feel.
“With a map and a guide for the most part,” he said. “Maas never invited me out. We didn’t travel in the same circles. I spent most of the winter just trying to find out where he’d put everything.”
She laughed and sat on a red silk divan. It occurred to Geder that she wasn’t leaving. The combination of unease and excitement was slightly nauseating. He was talking to a woman in his own house with her chaperone present. There was no transgression against etiquette or propriety, but his blood raced through his veins a little faster all the same. Geder licked his lips nervously.
“So what are his plans for the season’s opening. The usual feast, I assume.”
“A fireshow,” Sanna Daskellin said. “He’s found this marvelous cunning man from Borja who can build structures to channel flame and make it burn in all different sorts of colors. I’ve seen him practicing.” She leaned toward him, a small shift of weight that indicated a shared secret. “It’s beautiful, but it smells of sulfur.”