House of Shadows(17)
Narienneh lifted the goblet, sipped, sighed, and set the goblet back on the table again. She closed her eyes, leaning back in her chair.
“A pretty girl. A pretty naïveté,” Leilis observed. “Doubtless she will ally the House with a most noble kisonne in her first keiso month, if she still owns such sweetness when she turns nineteen.” Leilis did not stress the if by even so much as a direct glance up at Mother. Leilis, of all women of the House, did not need to.
“The deisa will help her. Lily will keep them in order,” said Narienneh, with a peculiar and specific naïveté all her own. That she did not check Leilis for her impudence in offering an unsolicited opinion indicated clearly enough that she was worried, however. Possibly she even suspected her own blindness, around the edges of her conscious awareness.
Leilis modestly glanced downward and bowed her head, deliberately using a keiso trick to draw attention to herself, trying not to feel the irony of using keiso mannerisms to influence Narienneh when she would never in her life become a keiso.
Mother’s eye was drawn by that movement, despite her own deep knowledge of all the keiso tricks. She shook her head. “I am quite certain that will not happen again.”
Leilis bowed her head a little lower, to point up the irretrievable damage that deisa jealousy could do. If such damage could happen once, was Narienneh truly so confident that it could not happen twice?
Her own loss still bit deep; Leilis felt the teeth of it now more keenly than she had for years. Maybe she really should have left Cloisonné House and memory behind. But truly, even if she was forever barred from the keiso life, where else was there a place for her but in the flower world? She told herself, as she had a thousand times, and she knew it was true, that she was lucky Narienneh had made a place for her in Cloisonné House.
But the Mother of the House would not want to risk having to make such a place twice. Especially when her newest deisa had cost the House so dearly and showed such fine promise to win back her price doubled and redoubled. Leilis waited a moment, then murmured, “What a pity the girl is not already nineteen. A keiso is an asset to her House; a deisa merely an expense. If this girl must be too old for deisa, as well she were old enough to be made keiso at once.”
Mother tilted her head, her fine-boned face going thoughtful. “Even if she were nineteen, I fear her elder sisters would resent such swift advancement.”
Leilis did not let herself glance up, lest Mother should see the satisfaction hidden in her eyes. She could not have made a better opening if she had worked till dawn for it. She murmured, “Rue wouldn’t,” and rose, bowing gently to excuse herself, leaving that thought to mingle with the taste of the wine on the back of Narienneh’s tongue.
CHAPTER 3
Taudde thought there was a fair possibility that he was going to find himself under arrest and on his way to some grim, silent dungeon within the hour. They had good dungeons in the Laodd, or so he’d heard. Prisons where a man could be locked away from light and music for a long, long lifetime… This situation must be due to some unrecognized carelessness. The wages of rampant stupidity, his grandfather would say. Bad enough to come to Lirionne at all, especially with the peace imposed by the Treaty of Brenedde so nearly at an end; worse still to dare Lonne itself; beyond foolish to be caught breaking the Seriantes ban. But worst of all and proof of blazing stupidity for a fool to completely miss whatever mistake had given him away!
Taudde could all but hear the old man’s acerbic tone in his mind’s ear, and at the moment he would have been hard put to refute a word of it. But—a poor saving grace—neither did he have leisure just now to indulge in recriminations. Taudde glanced warily from Lord Miennes to Mage Ankennes. If he’d merely had a lord of Lonne to contend with, he would have had more options. Lord Miennes knew that, of course. The mage’s presence was hardly a coincidence.
Mage Ankennes, a big man with powerful hands and opaque gray eyes, looked deliberately into Taudde’s face and smiled. That smile was not exactly a challenge, because a challenge would have invited opposition. There was no such invitation here. The mage truly believed that Taudde was going to yield. That he wouldn’t even try to fight. Nor flee. That very confidence was intimidating. Taudde was afraid to reach for his flute, or even use perfectly ordinary tricks of tone and intonation.
Sometimes, aside from questions of intimidation and nerve, discretion was indeed the wisest course. Taudde put down the surging anger trying to rise into his eyes, his throat, and—dangerously—his voice. Instead, he smiled, lifted his cup, sipped, paused consideringly, and said casually, “Enescene, of course. A Tamissen gold, I think. From, oh, perhaps, the middle of the Niace regency? I don’t think I can come closer. I did warn you I am not a connoisseur.”