rose in volume as she entered the parlor. 'Girls! It's time to leave for the lecture.'
We did not move. In the square outside, a trio of men barged out of Ranwise Close at a strong clip. I recognized Banker Pisilco's stoop. He reached the park gate opposite our window, waved a farewell to his companions, and opened the gate into the park. The other two forged on with heads bent together, deep in conversation, but the banker struck out across the lit path past the monument and through the park toward the houses on the far side of Falle Square. It was odd to watch his shadowy form pass from shadow into the aura of gaslight and back into shadow, from light into shadow, light into shadow, and all the while, whether in light or in shadow, his hat glimmered as though dusted with tiny stars.
'Girls?' Shiffa stumbled among the couches and rattled the journals I'd left lying open on the table. 'Oh, dear,' she muttered in a grating tone of fond exasperation. 'What are these doing out again? That child!'
Abruptly, her breathing shifted. Her fingers fluttered pages, and she sucked in a hard breath and whispered to herself in a tone so steely it was as if a different person were speaking, 'Melqart's Curse! We were assured every copy of the codebook had been burned.'
Bee lowered her hand to grasp my wrist, her fingers tightening until I thought she would crush my bones. We had left Lies the Romans Told on the table. The codebook?
'Have you found the girls, Shiffa?' My aunt's voice rose from
the direction of the stairs. She sounded as if she were trying not to laugh.
'No, they're not in here, maestra,' called Shiffa in her fussy, happy voice, which now sounded utterly false to my ears. 'They weren't in the nursery or in their bedchamber, those mischievous creatures!' She moved out the door, and Bee let go of my wrist as I grimaced.
'I told you, Tilly!' My uncle's voice rumbled from farther below. 'They're hiding in the attic.'
Aunt moved down the staircase to the ground-floor foyer, still speaking. 'It's you? own fault for trying to force them to attend a lecture that they assured me they already heard once today.'
'We are not attending to hear the lecture, but to be seen. The girls have made excellent connections at the college. Tonight's lecture is more about politics than aerostatics. It's a bold step for the Prince of Tarrant and his court to agree to tether an airship in the Rail Yard, much less hold a public exhibition of it for all to see. He and his clan are declaring through this act that they do not support the mage Houses' opposition to the new technological innovations.'
'As I am well aware, dear. Yet we must be careful never to show an inclination to any side. You know we must not draw the attention of the mage Houses.'
'Yes, yes,' he said impatiently. 'They've forgotten about us. That was a long time ago. Camjiata has been safely locked away in his island prison for over thirteen years. Anyway, those rich Fula bankers will be at the lecture.'
Bee stiffened, but not because she had heard this mention of Maester Amadou's family. She was looking outside.
'Which is the only reason I am attending,' said my aunt. 'You know there will be trolls.'
'Trolls are clever creatures in their own way, Tilly. This unreasoning prejudice serves you ill.'
Bee grabbed my sleeve and tweaked it to get my attention. With a lift of her chin, she indicated the twilit streets beyond the ice-rimed panes. An unmarked black coach rumbled down the west side of the square, pulled by four horses as pale as cream. As it passed down the street, each lamp it passed flickered and faded and, once the conveyance had rolled on, flared back into life. The coach turned the corner left onto our street, its journey traced by the dying and rising of light.
The lamp standing beside the park gate dimmed to a sullen shell of orange-red. The coach halted in front of our house. The coachman swung down to hold the reins of the two lead horses. Their breath rose out of their nostrils like smoke. A footman, dressed in a heavy black flared coat, climbed down from the brace between the back wheels, bumped out a pair of steps from the undercarriage, and opened the coach's door.
Bee squeezed my fingers so hard I actually grunted in pain. In a swirl of flared fashionable jacket so saturated a red you could faintly discern its color against the dusk, a personage descended from the coach, leaning on a gilded cane, and walked up the front steps. From this angle, we could not see him arrive at the front door, located under cover of the stoop and concealed by the entry pillars. Three sharp knocks rapped the heavy door, delivered by a blunt instrument. The entire house, all four stories and set back, shuddered like a cornered animal.
'I don't like this,' Bee muttered in her serious voice, nothing like the blabbering light-minded aether-head she often pretended to be. 'It reminds me of a dream I had last month. Twilight brings bad tidings…'
She released my hand.
1 shook out the ache in my fingers. 'Ah! That really hurt!'
'We've got to hide,' she said in an altered tone. She shoved
away the blanket and pushed out from behind the curtain. 'Hurry, Cat!'
The way she looked, with her entire body tense and a scared heat pouring off her, flooded me with cold fear. I slid off the window seat. My feet touched the chilly floor just as the front door below was opened, as though the opening door caused the floor's exhalation of cold.
Evved could talk down his nose at anyone. 'I'm sorry, mae-ster, the family is out for the evening.'
The personage pushed past our steward without a word. Of course, I couldn't see him, but I felt that presence enter the house in the same way your hair rises and your neck tingles before a storm. I felt it in the joints and eaves of the house, straining to protect us against a presence powerful enough to enter without an invitation.
'If we move fast…' Bee made a little humming noise, a buzzing through her teeth, and hurried to the open door, past the open journals. Shiffa had taken the Roman lies book.
From below rose voices.
'What manner of intrusion disturbs our evening?' demanded Uncle in the voice he used to dismiss the pretensions of social-climbing trolls. 'We have not given you leave to enter. We are not at home.'
A male voice, reeking of mage House privilege, replied, 'That is an odd sort of lie, because here you are.'
'As you can certainly see by our dress, we are in the act of departing the house for an evening engagement. Please be so good as to call tomorrow.'
We slithered out the open door into the passage that ran back from the wide first-floor landing. The door to Uncle's office was closed, but the latch clicked down, pushed from inside. I shoved Bee behind me and dug deep for a concealing glamor as Shiffa
emerged from the office. She walked right past us, past the full-length mirror in which our reflections clearly showed, to me, and halted at the railing beside the potted dwarf orange tree at the top of the grand staircase. She bent forward to observe what was going on in the entryway below.
The voice continued. 'I hope I need not remind you to what manner of person you are speaking. I am here now, so you will attend me now. I will be done with my business and gone within the hour.'
'Fiery Shemesh!' cursed Uncle, his voice tingling with suppressed fury-and fear. 'You're from Four Moons House. A magister from the Diarisso lineage.'
A cold mage in our house! Behind Shiffa's back, we skated soundlessly across to the foot of the upper stairs.
'Did you not get the message I was meant to arrive today?' His words and accent were cultured and elegant, yet his indignation soured them. It was almost enough to make my straight hair curl.
'We received no message, no warning.' The tight way Aunt Tilly choked out the words really frightened me. The house vibrated with sympathetic anger. 'You can't possibly still maintain you have a claim.'
'Indeed, we can and we do. The contract clearly states that Diarisso ownership extends until the twentieth birthday. Ownership reverts to the Hassi Barahal family only at sunset on the evening that begins the natal day, when the subject attains her legal majority.'
Bee tugged on my wrist, having more self-possession than I did. We set foot on the stairs, creeping toward the next floor.
'I believe the proper legal term is rei vindication he went on. 'I am here to reclaim ownership of what you have been generously allowed to keep possession of.'
There was a man whose pretensions wanted slapping down!
