confidence than I actually feel. I’ve no idea whether what I’m doing is right or not. What if it doesn’t work? Will she have me sent to the Waste on principle?
“It had better,” she says.
She flounces back to her own rooms without further comment, and the maids descend again upon my hair. I look into my own eyes and I don’t like the haunted look I see there.
Hours later, steamed, plucked, scented, coiffed, and trussed like some sort of high-class chicken, I critique myself in the mirror. The maids fuss here and there over a stray curl or a ribboned sleeve, but I’m as perfect as they can make me. I hardly recognize myself. My hair glitters with everpowder and is so tall I’ve no idea how I’ll get through the door. I feel guilty and repulsed to know that sylphid bones have been dusted all over my hair, but there’s not much to be done about it. I hope Piskel will forgive me.
Silver feathers swirl across my silk skirts. The Strix mask we saw in the shop is finished, festooned with onyxes and owl feathers. Part of me feels ridiculous, but another part cannot believe that this person I see is truly me. I hardly recognize myself in this deadly dangerous gown with its beguiling mask. Would anyone else? Would Hal? I lift my chin. He hasn’t seen fit to contact me. So much for his reassurance that he would come find me. Perhaps tonight I will meet my future husband.
I don’t like the hitch in my heart as I think of that possibility.
The maids leave me at the foot of the staircase, and I’m looking around bemusedly at the gold-framed portraits of Virulens gone by when I hear a flutter at the top of the stairs. Lucy comes down and her Phoenix-feather gown is so blue it nearly blinds me.
“I must say,” Lucy says, “you turned out even more handsomely than I hoped.”
Unsure what else to do, I curtsy deeply.
“Oh, stop that, you ninny. You do that to the other duchesses, not to me.”
“Yes, my lady.” I smile.
Lucy wags a gold-gloved finger at me. “Come along then, my dear Strix!”
Lucy takes my arm and draws me toward the waiting carriage.
“Lord Virulen . . .” I say, looking back over her shoulder as if the house will disgorge him at any moment. I’ve never actually seen him, though I’ve heard he’s quite hideous. He barely survived an attack from the Manticore while hunting in his youth. He killed the Manticore’s offspring, but lost his hand and his handsomeness in the process, if rumors are true.
“Is already at the Hall with the other Lords, drunk as a hoot owl, like as not,” Lucy says. That wicked smile plays about her lips, the one I both like and dread.
“Ah.”
The carriage pushes through the mad crowd. Lucy slides her fan case to the edge of the curtain so she can peer out. “Oh my,” she says, covering her mouth with her silk-gloved hand.
“Here, look.” She nods toward my end of the curtain, and I pull it away so I can peek out too.
A few Carnival revelers have gotten early into the wine, it seems. Or else they had only imagined putting on their party clothes. They dance down the streets naked, as unconcerned as if no one is watching.
Lucy laughs at my expression.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen the Uptown version of Carnival before, have you?” she asks. “It can get rather wild.”
“Can’t say as I have,” I say, dropping the curtain. “Nor that I want to, if that’s the way it’s going to be.”
Lucy laughs again and taps my knee with her fan case. “I can see we have much work to do with you.”
I’m afraid to know exactly what kind of work she’s talking about.
“Is this your first Ball? You almost looked too young to be out in Society that day we met.”
“Not quite my first.” I don’t want to recount last summer’s horrid Pre-Debutante Ball. I managed to rip my dress by catching it under a chair leg to my shame and Aunt Minta’s everlasting horror.
“This, I’m sure, will be the most interesting one you’ve attended yet. I’m not sure what Carnival will be like in the Tower; honestly the Imperial Balls tend to be terribly dull. And the clocks that woman has all over the palace! She’s insanely obsessed with them.”
“Clocks?”
“Yes, it’s quite bizarre. Clocks. Everywhere. Usually all telling the wrong time. And the ticking!” Lucy rolls her eyes. She snaps open her fan and her bergamot perfume fills my nose.
“I’ve never been.”
Lucy rolls her eyes again. “Believe me, it will be quite the education! Just pray to the saints that the Empress doesn’t decide to hold every function in the Tower from here on out!”
The wild Carnival revelers dance everywhere, making offerings to the saints where their effigies sit in state at the Uptown Square. An audience crowds around a group of performers as they act out the Pageant of Saint Newton and the Apple, but the carriage turns up Tower Hill before I can see the apple actually hit the saint on the head.
The way up is steep and so narrow that only one carriage can pass at a time. The city falls away behind us. Only the Imperial Refinery’s yellowish-green plumes of smoke are visible above the dense thorn hedge that chokes the Hill.
Finally, we top the Hill and come under the Tower’s great battlements. A contingent of Raven Guards lines the courtyard, watching silently as we disembark and are shown toward the Tower’s Grand Entrance. Their cousins, the tower ravens, perch all along the rooftops, watching them with eyes as eerily empty and yet dangerously alert as the Guards’. The stench of moldering guano almost overpowers me; the walls of the inner buildings are streaked white with it.
My lungs compress, as if filled with dark, damp feathers.
“Can you feel them?” Lucy says. “The nullwards?”
I nod and hurry her inside.
We join a long line of partygoers being searched by the Guard and security wights for weapons. Although the women aren’t searched as thoroughly as the men, even we don’t escape scrutiny. When one Guard attempts to lift Lucy’s skirts with a stick to see if she’s hidden anything under her voluminous blue layers, she fluffs them at him like an offended ostrich and takes my arm in hers.
“Really! Of all the nerve!” she says loudly enough for everyone to hear.
The Raven Guard steps back, expressionless as always. But his head swings to follow us, the white membrane shuttering his flat eyes in a way that makes me shiver.
Lucy is about to say more, but I drag her along past the cloakroom door. “Enough,” I murmur, even as I see my first clock.
Then I look down the corridor. She’s right. Clocks are
Lucy makes a little growling noise under her breath, but lets me lead her into a vast room of arched, marble gables and circular chandeliers that blaze like wheels of light. It looks more like an ancient chapel than a ballroom, and it’s filled to bursting with people in Carnival dress. And there are yet more clocks.
My mouth goes dry as the herald announces us, and the room falls momentarily into silence save for the time-ticking hum.
Lucy barely notices. She’s seen people she knows and saunters toward them. I follow, glimpsing the empty throne at the end of the hall, flanked by gilded candelabras fitted with antique black candles.
Lucy maneuvers through the crowd, while I keep a wary eye on everyone who meets her, half afraid the Guard will haul her away for her earlier impudence out in the hall. There are several young suitors, some more graceful about their intentions than others, but none of them are the Heir to Grimgorn. What if he isn’t here?
Apparently all the highest-ranking nobles are missing. After Lucy manages to get rid of the most recent
