House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(28)

“You’re not answering the question.” He stalks the room, pacing back and forth, stalling every now and again to squint at the details on some new piece.

“You were invited.”

“How very unlikely,” he snaps back.

I will not let him make me feel guilty. “House Eline are extending the hand of friendship. It would be churlish to refuse.”

“And this has nothing to do with your-” He waves one hand vaguely.

I raise a brow. “My what?”

“Your thing, your whatever.”

“I have a great many things and whatevers,” I tell him, one corner of my mouth twitching. “Which one would this be?”

He pauses in his pacing to shoot me a particularly glaring scowl. “It’s very convenient that we receive an invitation now from one of the Houses on your little list. Stop scheming.”

“Me.” I widen my eyes. “Scheme? You wound me.”

“Or is this about the wife?” Jannik says.

“Perhaps,” I say, though I keep my tone guarded. Jannik is more perceptive than I would like. And he’s right. This is as much about her as it is about him. Carien is difficult for me to understand. There are moments when it feels like I could tell her everything; she is wild and unHouse-like, she is filled with a seething mockery of everyone’s status, including her own. And I don’t quite trust her. In that, I suppose, she is also like Dash.

“Ah,” says a man from the arched entranceway. Eline Garret. “I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.”

It’s more probable that he kept us waiting on purpose, in order that we understood our place in this affair. After all, it seems to be Garret’s preferred tactic. He uses the same weapons and therein is his flaw.

I smile serenely. “We hardly waited a moment,” I say. “And with such a fine collection to peruse, even a moment was too short a time.” I take the smallest sip from my glass and watch Garret carefully.

He’s wearing Ives Blue and turquoise, and against them his pale hair looks almost silver and his eyes all the bluer.

Behind him Carien is standing like a scarlet shadow, her dress deeper than wine, her dark brown hair swept up. “Ignore him,” she says. “It’s all part of the game.” With that, she marches past her husband and takes my arm in hers. “You look beautiful,” she says. Before I can stutter a reply, she turns to Jannik, and smiles. “And you, oh there has been so much talk of you.”

Jannik takes a small step back. In his drab blacks and dark green neck tie, in his Pelimburg dullness, with his chalk skin and cave-black hair, he is a rumpled crow in a gathering of peacocks.

“Did Felicita put my proposal to you?” Her voice is light, bantering, but there’s a tightness around her eyes. They’re puffy, as if she has been crying. The powder she has used to cover her imperfections sits chalkily in the slight creases at the corners of her eyes.

“Proposal?” Jannik looks to me. “Not that I’m aware of.”

“Really, Carien, allow our guests some reprieve from your idiotic hobbies.” Garret smiles as he says this and Carien snaps back to heel.

We are offered more drinks and led to an intimate dining room. The food is excellent, and Jannik even does more than merely push his thin shavings of egret around his plate. Red egrets from the eastern parts of Oreyn – they must have been shipped here at great expense. People have tried to cultivate them here, but they stay sickly and die soon after, far from their tropical jungles.

There are other courses, each finer and more expensive than the last. No one mentions business or politics. Instead we stay on the safer ground of art and extravagance. There is a new opera that Garret wants to see, an artist he recommends for fine portraiture, an auction of glass-work from some minor House fallen on ill times, a play that has received glowing reviews. I might as well be reading the Courant, the talk is so banal.

And then Iynast. Garret dismisses his work with a sneer. “Barbaric. The man can barely hold a brush,” he says and stabs at his dessert. “No better than the trite nonsense you manage to slap onto a canvas,” he says, nodding at his wife.

She places her fork neatly down. “You’ve been to the exhibition, then?”

“Hardly. I heard enough about it.”

“Ah.” Carien glances at me. We’ve finished our meal. In a normal House this would be our cue to retire and leave the men to talk. I fumble with my napkin. Carien stands and walks away from the table.

I sit with Jannik and Garret, and the three of us stare uncertainly at one another.

“Your wife needed your signature for some papers I had drawn up,” Garret says.



A servant stealthily clears away the dishes, while another brings in a bottle of vai, and another of distilled wine. My cue to leave has long since passed. Am I supposed to now stay and watch over Jannik’s interaction with Garret as if he were a boy-child? If I stay, I humiliate him; if I leave, Gris knows what could happen.

“The papers, yes.” Jannik allows a serving Hob to pour him a snifter of the distilled wine. “There are certain points we should discuss further.”

I make my decision and exit as surreptitiously as I can. Jannik gives me a parting glance then continues talking to Garret. Their voices buzz into silence and I look for Carien.

She’s not in the ladies’ drawing room. A serving girl shows me the way to a glass balcony on the second level of the house. Carien is standing against the rails, her face to the night wind. Her hair has been pulled ragged by the breeze and flies about her head in a snaky confusion. “You left them,” she says. “For a while there I thought you were going to hold his hand while Garret spoke with him.” She laughs. “Do you see him as a child? Or a trained beast?”