undertone of the dragon's blood still overwhelming her senses. She realized then that her eyes were leaking tears of pain, and that she was as damp as if she had stood in front of a furnace. She wiped her streaming eyes, finished the glass of whatever-it-was, and as she tried to clear the fog of tears by blinking furiously, Lily put a third cup into her hand. This was hot water mixed half-and-half with honey and some sort of fragrant herb cordial, and it succeeded in clearing the taste from her mouth, her nose and her throat.
Strangely enough, her stomach was not in revolt. This was possibly because every other part of her body that had come into contact with the awful stuff was. Possibly because her poor stomach still didn't realize what had been dumped into it. Or possibly because the blood had never actually gotten there, and instead had coated her throat and mouth.
She was very glad she had been sitting when she drank it. She was not entirely certain her knees wouldn't have buckled under the onslaught. She sincerely hoped that Lily would not ask her to drink or eat anything like that, ever again. The experience was enough to make her rethink wanting to be trained as a Godmother.
But Lily must have guessed her thoughts from the expression on her face. 'I promise you, that is probably the worst thing that will ever happen to you in your training,' Lily said in sympathy, patting her hand. 'Eventually something will happen that you will need the gift of animal speech for, and you will be very, very glad that you have it. As for the rest, there is a great deal that you won't have to learn, because you already know it. The very existence of The Tradition comes as a shock to most new Godmothers-in-training, and they have to study for a good deal of time before they have the depth of lore that is already at your command. I can tell you already, because I am of Fae blood, that the Fae will accept you as a Godmother, should we decide you actually need to be one. And unlike Champions, Godmothers don't have to keep undergoing ridiculous ordeals every time one turns around. Our idea of besting a dragon is not to chop it into bits, but to get it to sit down to tea.'
Rosa laughed weakly, and finished the honey drink. As her senses cleared of the noxious stuff, she was able to relax as she had not expected to since her mother's death.
The Queen's Chambers had always been the most welcoming in the Palace. Only the outermost room had the air of formality one would expect from a Queen. The rest — the bedroom, sitting room, and tiny supper room where she and her mother had often played silly card games long into the night — were decorated in a very curious but comfortable fashion. They looked exactly like what they were — the rooms of a country shepherdess with impeccable taste and an unlimited amount of money to spend. All the furniture was solidly built, and solidly comfortable; whitewashed oak and woven willow for the most part, with bleached muslin cushions stuffed with goose down. The white marble fireplace always had a nice fire in it. Wood-paneled walls had been whitewashed, then tinted pink, with a touch of gilding. There were sensible lamps instead of ostentatious candelabra.
Rosa had feared that Queen Sable had turned these rooms, once a haven, into a nightmare, despoiling them with expensive, spindly furniture and things too fragile to even look at lest they break, or worse, into a gloomy cave furnished in black velvet and plum satin. To discover that it was really Lily here, and that the rooms had been untouched, was a little like getting part of her mother back.
'Well.' Rosa coughed a little. 'What is there for me besides a near poisoning?'
'First, what we are doing, which will certainly set some tongues wagging.' Lily smiled. 'Simply being closeted together without anyone seeing what we are up to.'
Rosa had kept to her rooms for two days after returning, mostly because she discovered she was a great deal more worn-out than she had thought. She had bathed until she finally had the last of the filth out of her hair, from under her fingernails, scrubbed off her skin. She'd slept an amazing amount. And she had eaten far more than she would have thought, too; mostly fresh fruits and lovely, lovely salads, but when Lily had suggested a nice bit of roast beef she had eaten such a great slab of it that the ladies of the Court would have been scandalized had they seen it.
'I put about the truth — that you were recovering from your ordeal,' Lily added. 'Of course, since I was the one who said this, most people didn't believe it, and thought I had locked you up. I suspect that only the fact that your servants could come and go freely stopped the rumors that I'd had you murdered in your bed.'
Rosa nodded. This morning for the first time ever she had turned up for Morning Court, and had defiantly taken her place beside Queen Sable, something she had not done since the Queen had arrived.
The Queen had given her a cold stare, but then, the Queen gave everyone cold stares, and there wasn't a particle of difference between this one and the one she bestowed on someone she really did not want to hear petitioning her. They sat side by side on matching smaller thrones — the larger one for the King had been removed to the back of the dais — listening to petitions. Breaking fast, of course, was done in the private apartments, so this was, officially, the first time the two of them had been together since Rosa's return. The Lesser Audience Chamber had been so full of frozen politeness that it was amazing icicles weren't hanging from the noses of the courtiers before it was all over.
'It was all I could do to keep from laughing during Court,' she said with a grin. 'You do know I was deliberately imitating you, don't you?'
Lily chuckled. 'We believe,' she said, a deep chill in her voice, 'that the petitioner should reconsider his position. But we would like to hear the opinion of the Princess Royal.'
'The Princess Royal has no opinion,' Rosa replied, with the same distant manner and chill. 'Except that the Royal Consort is a stranger here, and thus, may have the analytical distance required to asses this situation.' They both laughed.
After Morning Court was the large meal of the day, dinner. This was the meal at which everyone who was anyone had to turn up, unless he or she was ill. When Rosa entered at the same time as the Queen, and the two sat side by side at the high table, it caused an immediate stir, because again, Rosa had not sat at dinner since the Queen had been installed. Dinner was a piece of balletic extravagance that only a country as wealthy as Eltaria could afford. There were seven courses, and each course had several dishes. One was not expected to eat everything, or even to taste most of the dishes — though Siegfried had made good inroads on many of them. Rosa wished she could have been there to see the reaction of the two men the first time they had been presented with such bounty.
'What happened at the first dinner — with our tagalongs, I mean?' she asked.
'Siegfried's eyes nearly jumped out of his head. I had put them on either side of me and he muttered something about not expecting the feast day in Vallahalia. Leopold was...impressed. But he spent most of the feast trying to impress me by pretending to be casual about it all.'
'At least Leopold didn't try to pocket the knives and forks,' Rosa said dryly.
After dinner — which took place in absolutely uncanny and unnatural silence, since virtually everyone was
