The Glittering Court (The Glittering Court, #1)(21)

“How did you ever survive in your lady’s home?” she asked, regarding her butter and flour with satisfaction. It wasn’t the first time I’d been asked that question. Along with being the unofficial leader, I suspected I also served as regular entertainment for them, thanks to both my wit and my mishaps.

I shrugged. “I never had to cook. There were others to do that.” That wasn’t a lie. Ada might have had to cook growing up in her mother’s household, but she’d never had to in mine. “I sewed and mended. Dressed my lady. Styled her hair.”

Both Mira and Tamsin raised an eyebrow at that. They’d seen my hair efforts.

I successfully deflected from that when I saw Tamsin take out a ceramic platter for plating our pastry. “No, use glass,” I told her.

“Why the hell—I mean, why would we do that?” Tamsin had made a lot of progress in her word choice this last month but still often slipped.

“It’s how they’re serving it now. On glass, decorated with sugar and extra currants.”

I might struggle with commonplace activities, but I knew these small, luxurious details—things our instructors often hadn’t gotten around to yet in our education. It was like the chemises. I saw Tamsin’s eyes narrow, immediately filing this away. It was why she often looked past my other inadequacies—both real and contrived. These small things gave us an edge, and it was proven later when the cooking instructor came by to survey our work.

“This is lovely,” she said, studying the artful swirls of sugar on the glass platter that I’d made. “None of the other girls have focused much on aesthetics, but they’re just as important as the quality of the food. Visual appeal is part of taste appeal, you know.”

We didn’t see what she wrote down on her paper, but her pleased look spoke volumes. Tamsin could barely contain her smugness.

“There’ll be no living with her now,” Mira told me when we walked to our dance lesson afterward. She nodded to where Tamsin was animatedly telling another girl about our excellent marks. “She’s doing that for spite. She knows it’ll get back to Clara.”

“You’re saying Clara doesn’t deserve a little spite?” Clara had continued to make life difficult for Mira, though she’d backed off a bit when she realized taking on Mira meant also taking on Tamsin and me.

“I’m just saying that we don’t need to further petty rivalries when there’s already so much evil in the world we need to stop.”

She might not have Tamsin’s frenetic energy, but Mira was an ally—and a friend—I’d long come to appreciate. There was a calmness and strength to her that soothed me and even neurotic Tamsin. Mira was the rock we could both lean on. She gave the impression that the politics and drama in the house were of no concern to her after witnessing the ravages of war and subsequent hardships of the Sirminican ghetto in Osfrid. Her comment about the world’s evils was a rare allusion to her past, but I didn’t push her when she didn’t elaborate.

Instead, I linked my arm through hers as we entered the ballroom. “You should have been a nun with that kind of diplomatic attitude. Hide away in some cloister and meditate.”

“You can’t fight evil with meditation,” she replied. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she was quoting from one of her most prized possessions: an old book of heroic tales, smuggled out of Sirminica.

A dance mistress rotated among the different manors each week, and here was an area in which I had to consciously dumb down my abilities. I’d had formal dance lessons since childhood. The other girls had never had any, and most still struggled after only a month. It was one of those areas Cedric had warned I’d stand out in, so I was overly cautious about not attracting Miss Hayworth’s attention—to the point where I almost seemed hopelessly inept.

“Adelaide,” she said wearily. “Are you dancing the gentleman’s part?”

We were in the middle of a complicated line progression, in which it was common for us to alternate standing in for the opposite gender. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I thought we were supposed to take turns doing that?”

She threw up her hands. “Yes, but it’s your turn to dance the lady’s part—the part you’ll be doing in Adoria. You’re trampling all over poor Sylvia’s feet.”

“Oh. That explains it.” I gave her a sunny smile, and she moved on. Cedric might be able to sell salvation to a priest, but I could make my instructors find me endearing despite my frustrating progress.

We did a few more rounds and then paused for one of Miss Hayworth’s infamous pop quizzes. I promptly snapped to attention. These were not anything to slack on, as those who performed badly were often put on clean-up duty.

“Caroline, how many passes in a Lorandian two-step loop?”

Caroline—Clara’s chief sidekick—hesitated. “Three?”

“Correct.”

Miss Hayworth turned to the next girl, going down the line. When my turn came, I answered promptly and perfectly, earning a puzzled look from Miss Hayworth—seeing as the question had been about the dance I just botched. She walked past me.

“Mira, at what round is the twirl performed on the allegro circuit?”

I saw Mira’s face go blank. She had a natural instinct for the movements and did well in the actual steps—but these quizzes stumped her. Mira always worked so much harder than the rest of us, having to catch up on things many of us already knew as Osfridians—particularly with the language. She spent so much time working on her speech that technical dance facts just weren’t a priority.