Only then did she begin to scream.
Ten years later Belinda came awake with a start, the lurch more emotional than physical: stillness was inscribed so deeply in her soul now that she sometimes had to remind herself to react in ordinary company. At times she even thought she might have to tell herself to breathe, the silence in her so complete. But not now: her heartbeat was too fast, breath shallow from sleep. Dreaming of du Roz was never a good sign.
Nor was waking to the scratchy beard and bad breath of a Khazarian lover. Belinda exhaled, and carefully slid her shoulder out from under his head. He grunted, burrowing further into blankets in lieu of the pillow she’d made. She sat up, rubbing away stinging prickles left by his beard, and drew a discarded sleeping gown around her shoulders. Linen, silk-soft from age, hissed as she slid it from beneath the Khazarian’s weight.
Belinda frowned at him, trying to remember his name. Vlad? Vasilly? Valentine? No, it had been shorter than Valentine. Sharper. She had spent weeks in his bed. She ought to know his name with some certainty. But then, there were reasons not to. It was Viktor, she thought. It hadn’t been he, attentive but unimaginative in bed, who had inspired dreams of du Roz. No, there was more. Something coming awake in the belly of the little palace, its stirrings pressing into Belinda’s mind and making her sleep restless. That was unusual; she often slept lightly, but the prickling awareness of things arriving harkened back to her childhood and the night her father had ridden so hard to his estates to make his daughter an assassin. Something had driven her out of bed that night; something now did the same. She could not recall that itch coming over her once in the intervening decade.
She slipped out the door without bothering to fasten her sleeping gown with more than a ribbon. The sky, pale with summer twilight, told her it was still early, perhaps three in the morning. Without winter’s chill to ward off, no other servants were likely to be up, not within the house itself: no fires needed building, no breads to set baking, not for another hour or two. Belinda had the narrow servants’ halls to herself.
They ran as shortcuts from one part of the little palace to another. The count, a stark man with grey at his temples and an eye for beauty that led to tales of sexual prowess, would not stand for delay. Not with his women, not with his wine, certainly not with the wealth of which he enjoyed showing unsubtle flashes. The ancient buildings that had stood his family for generations had been torn down, stone by stone, and rebuilt again to his pleasure. He was master and architect here, and now, with the back halls well-laid and well-lit, it took a maid, running at full bore, no more than two minutes to fetch any hot tea or cold drink from the kitchen back to her master in his study. Belinda had made the deliveries herself, all too aware that downcast eyes and a heaving breast were as much a part of what Gregori delighted in showing off to guests as the astonishingly rapid service. Her gowns were cut accordingly, square necklines a nearly imperceptible fraction lower than decorum permitted, breasts shelved high and mounded against the stiff bodice fabric. The line of propriety was so narrowly skirted that it was a rare man indeed who noticed Belinda’s face. Gazes locked on the sharp line of fabric pressing into pale flesh instead, searching for a blush of pink. Other women used rouge to suggest that colour, but Belinda left nature alone, trusting men’s imaginations over cosmetics.
The deliberate heavy bindings of daily wear made traversing the halls in little more than a shift against her skin all the more delicious. From kitchen to bedroom, library to dining hall, it was the same. Delicate bells with half a dozen tones strung the upper walls of the servants’ halls: the deepest tone signaled a runner from the kitchen, and the highest, purest of them bespoke the bedrooms. Belinda had learned within a day which halls ran where, and to stand well back from the crossroads when a bell rang. Causing a wreck in the servants’ halls earned even the most beloved servitors a beating. Rumour had it that more than one maid had left the count’s service after such a beating, bellies rounded with disgrace. Many men blurred the line between violence and passion, and there was no one to press Gregori Kapnist to a gentler hand.
Belinda had made neither the error of clumsiness nor wanton sensuality; her position in Gregori’s household was one of unobtrusiveness. When she was gone, no one should remember her face, only generous breasts and dark hair tucked away under a tidy white cap that emulated the rich snoods of the wealthy.
It was unfortunate for Viktor, snoring away in Belinda’s bed, that her need for him had passed once she was ensconced in Gregori’s household. The nights she’d spent with him since were necessary payment to keep a lustful man happy; most of all, to keep him from naming her a whore to his lord and master. No one believed the legendary chastity of the serving classes, but neither would anyone employ a maid denounced as a slut. A rough man like Viktor, in his lord’s employ as an armsman, could and would destroy her, unless she turned him away by means of finding a lover of more power within the household hierarchy. To do so was beyond Belinda’s needs, and meant a sad end to Viktor’s days.
A breeze caught her gown, cool and unexpected. Belinda curled her fingers into the fabric at her throat, feeling her body react to the brief chill. She stepped back against the wall, lowering her head while shifting her gaze left and right. She’d come from the servants’ quarters behind the kitchen, small and uncomfortable but private. The halls opened to the outside in two places: the east wall, the servants’ entrance around the corner from the main southern entrance, and the north wall, where the stables lay. The breeze lifted her hem again, and she turned her head to the right.
To the north, the stables. Someone’s assignation, likely, no more legal than her own. Belinda loosened her hand from the throat of her gown, pushing the fabric open to bare her collarbones. She folded one arm beneath her breasts, lifting them, and judged the effect from above before twisting her hair over her shoulder in dark, artless curls. She clutched the skirt of her gown in one hand, letting her stance and body language claim she was afraid of being caught.
But stillness washed over her as she lowered her head and gaze. Sometimes it seemed that the childhood memory came real again, and that men and women looked through her as if shadow had swallowed her whole, even when no shadows were to be seen. The sense of certainty that had accompanied that one frozen moment had never reasserted itself, and so each time now she was made to wait, and to see if she would be seen.
A man’s footsteps, taking long, sure strides. Belinda watched the floor through her eyelashes, marking the swiftness of steps. Her breath barely stirred her bosom as she inhaled, and with the exhalation, the man strode by. Expensive boots, black and well-made, the stitching impossible to see at a glance; well-shaped legs. A scent of the outdoors, of horses, of perfume made with an exotic spice: a rich man’s scent. Perhaps Gregori, returning from a visit with Akilina Pankejeff, whose grand duchy put her out of line for the throne, but far above what a count might call his own. There were a few who whispered that Gregori eyed the widowed imperatrix, and laughed in their sleeves at the idea. She was born too high, and he too low, though no one could fault him for his taste in women, and some admired the long reach of his ambition.
A hand closed in Belinda’s hair, knotting in the curls she’d pulled over her shoulder. Her coquettish downward gaze had lost her the chance to watch, and there had been no change in his pace to warn her the man had turned back. She forbore to flinch or squeal as he pulled her head back, forcing her chin up to make her meet his eyes. Hazel eyes, dark with patchy light from well-spaced torches, and a well-shaped mouth thinned with anger. “Better, I suppose, to have it here than wake whatever cock you’ve got roosting in your nest.”
Dmitri! Belinda knew this man, the expressive mouth and low voice a match to the one she’d heard as a little girl, in her father’s own home. Surprise dilated her pupils, one of the few reactions she couldn’t control. For a few seconds the halls seemed brighter, as if early-morning sunshine had somehow spilled through stone and around corners to light the place where they stood. Her pulse betrayed her by bumping higher in her throat, just one beat before she swallowed it down. “My lord?” A soft voice, properly cultivated as benefited a servant of a wealthy house, but with country vowels. Her Khazarian could be high- or low-born, less learned than absorbed in infancy, as had been her native Aulunian tongue. Gallic she spoke like an Aulunian, but that was artifice; she could swallow her accent and make herself sound a native if she had to.
But a country-born serving girl in a Khazarian palace would have no speech but her own, and Dmitri had spoken Aulunian. “My lord?” she asked again, eyes wide with uncertainty that was only partly feigned.
“Do not play me for a fool,” he growled, fist tightening in her hair. “I’ve travelled long and late to meet you, and morning comes on harder than I’d hoped. Time is running out.” Belinda’s chin came up with the weight of his hand, exposing her throat. His gaze flickered to her pulse, and pleasure she couldn’t allow on her face warmed her belly. She had him: the tiniest signs of vulnerability were the ones men could resist the least. The slightest signs of a man noticing weakness were the ones she could exploit the most.
“My lord,” she whispered a third time. “I don’t understand.” He couldn’t recognize her; he’d only seen her sleeping, and that more than ten years ago. He’d changed very little, only the style of his hair, cut shorter now than Belinda remembered. His beard was still thin and trimmed to the line of his jaw, his cheekbones and figure as
