Maybe she understood and maybe she didn’t, but Leilis could hardly stand behind her and coach her through the day. Besides, whatever happened in the deisa quarters was no concern of hers. Leilis gave a short little nod and turned to go.
“Wait!” said the girl, coming forward a half step. She was clenching her hands again, Leilis noted disapprovingly. “What is—Who are you?”
Leilis could feel her face set. “No one,” she said, and was gone on that word, leaving the beautiful girl behind with a hand half raised and a stricken look in her sapphire eyes.
The deisa were gone from the kitchens, leaving the cook and her girls in peace to prepare for the coming evening. Preparations were now well along. A dozen plucked, headless ducks lay on the cutting table. Three fat red fish, so fresh they looked all but ready to swim away, lay on trays of crushed ice behind the ducks. Loaves of fresh bread cooled on racks alongside the ovens, and a large pot of broth simmered gently on top of the nearest oven. The cook looked weary but satisfied.
The cook was using a soft brush to coat the petals of flowers with beaten egg whites, then dusting the flower petals with fine sugar and placing each one on a wire rack to dry. Trays of brightly glazed pastries occupied the rest of the cook’s huge stone table. Her newest girl, a solemn little creature with coarse black hair cropped short around her thin face, had come back from the market and now moved silently around the kitchens, putting butter and cream in the cold box and a sack of river mussels in the big stone sink.
Leilis leaned a hip on the edge of the cook’s big table and used a fine pair of tongs to lift candied flower petals from the rack, laying a single one just so on each glazed pastry.
The cook nodded thanks to Leilis and said over her shoulder to her girl, “Start whipping the egg whites for the meringues.” To Leilis, she said, “Do you think a red currant sauce for the ducks, or wild cherry? Did you go up and have a look at her, then?”
“Cherry,” advised Leilis. “Her name is Karah. She’s a lovely child.”
“Ah,” observed the cook wisely, “that won’t last.”
“Lily, you mean.”
“Who else? And Tiarella, and that little fool Sweetrose.”
The cook’s girl brought the bowl of egg whites to the table and began to whisk them into a froth, listening covertly to the gossip of her superiors. Most of the residents of Cloisonné House passed through the kitchens several times a day, filching tidbits, so the cook was usually an excellent source of gossip. Leilis concentrated on laying candied flower petals delicately on top of the pastries and made no comment about jealous deisa or the risks this new girl might run among them. She said instead, “The true amount Mother gave for her was eighteen hundred. Hard.”
“Ah. Mother won’t care to have her interfered with, then,” the cook commented, her eyes on the sugar she was dusting over flower petals. “Not paying as much as that. Especially this season, with expenses so tight. You wouldn’t believe the price of butter and cream in the market these days.” What the cook didn’t add was that Lily was unlikely to be held back by concern over Mother’s temper.
And, of course, Leilis, of all women, hardly needed to be reminded of the grim possibilities inherent in deisa jealousy. “I warned her to be careful,” Leilis said. Her tone had gone a little defensive, she found, and she shut her eyes for a second and hauled herself back toward the cool neutrality she’d thought she’d learned long since.
“Ah?” said the cook, meaning, What good do you imagine that will do?
Leilis had to nod. They both knew it would do nothing. But why Leilis should care… She was deliberately uninvolved in deisa quarrels and petty jealousies. For years she had held aloof from such concerns. Why should this new girl matter to her?
But, later, when most of the keiso and the deisa had gone out to entertain at Cloisonné’s banquet, Leilis filled a covered tray with plates of duck breast in cherry sauce, pureed parsnips with butter and slivers of sea-urchin roe, and cream-filled pastries. Then she slipped through the near-empty living quarters of the House, up the back stairs, and along to the House’s small dance studio.
The studio was, unsurprisingly, occupied.
Rue might have gone to the party, but large parties often took a raucous turn utterly unsuited to Rue’s own gift. Rue was a connoisseur’s keiso. Mother never asked her to attend the loud half-drunken parties that were the greatest pleasure of most of the younger keiso.
Instead, Rue was standing before the wide studio mirror, back straight and face blank, in an esienne stance, one foot on the polished floor and the other arched with just the toes placed delicately before the other foot. Leilis’s entrance did not elicit even a flicker of attention from the keiso. The woman shifted slowly from the esienne stance through a floating cloud exchange and then to a kind of elongated cat stance, and from that back to esienne.