Chapter 6 The First Cup #3
Mirelle Vex stood without moving beside the ewer, and her smile had not left her face, and for one fraction of a breath it notched at one corner, the only crack Lira had seen in the countess all night. Then it closed over, smooth as water over a dropped stone.
"Sweet girl," Mirelle said, and the words came out warm and empty as a bell struck in an abandoned tower. "The dead will remember you kindly. I hope the rest of the house does as well."
She turned and walked back to the dais, and the hall let her go, and the evening settled back into its currents.
But Lira sat with her folded hands and her small smile, and she felt the shape of the night change around her.
She had come to this hall to be read, and she had been read, and she had read back.
The countess had wanted her to drink for a reason that had nothing to do with the cup, and every eye in the hall had been meant to watch her do it.
She had denied them the spectacle, and she had made an enemy of the patient kind, the kind that does not forget and does not hurry, and she had done it in front of every house in the Ever-Night.
At the high table the lord had not moved.
She could not see his face against the lamps, and she did not know whether he was pleased or angry or nothing at all, and that, more than the countess's notched smile, was what she carried out of the hall with her when the evening finally ended and the doors let her go.
He met her in the corridor beyond the doors, where the lamps burned low and the servants had already begun to dim the house for the small hours.
He did not speak at first. He walked beside her, a presence at her shoulder like a held breath, and the girl Renna fell in behind them at a distance, and no one said anything until the sounds of the hall had faded to a murmur behind them.
"You poured out the countess's cup," Kael said. His voice gave her nothing, as it had given her nothing all night.
"I poured it for her house's dead, my lord." Lira let her voice be small and tired, the voice of a girl who had been brave in company and was coming apart now that she was not. "I did not mean to offend. In Vess we always pour for the dead before we drink."
He was quiet a long moment, walking, and she felt his gaze on the side of her face like a weight she could not turn from without giving herself away.
"The countess will not forget that you out-courtesied her in front of her own houses," he said. "She will be more careful with you now, and you should be more careful with her. That is all I will say on it."
"Yes, my lord."
They walked on in silence, and the corridor opened into the wide one that ran to the east tower, and Lira thought about the young man with the silver torque and the calm eyes, and about the warm cup she had poured onto the stone, and about the man walking beside her who had known the countess would pour for her and had not warned her of the cup itself.
He had warned her of the countess's hand.
He had sent her his supper and his steward and his promise that she would not be unwatched, and she could not tell, for the life of her, whether any of it was for the peace or for her, and she did not dare ask, because a girl who asked that question would have to explain why it mattered.
At the foot of the tower stair he stopped, and she stopped with him, and the lamps threw their shadows long and separate across the stone.
"You did well tonight," Kael said. "The way a bride is supposed to do well, which is to say, no one will know you did anything at all."
It was the closest thing to praise she had heard from him, and she did not know what to do with it, so she curtseyed, low and exact, and when she rose his face had already given her back its wall.
He watched her go up the stair, and she felt his watching on her back the whole way, and when she reached her door and closed it behind her she stood in the warm dark of her room with her hand pressed to the small hard weight at her wrist, and she thought about the countess's notched smile and the lord's unreadable one, and about which of them was the more dangerous door in this house.
Tomorrow, Lira decided, she would write the Sisters of the Star another letter.
It would be a very good letter. It would be the best letter she had ever written, full of a frightened girl's careful trembling and one small false thing, planted like a seed, for the ear behind the mirror to carry down to the countess.
Let her read it. Let all of them read it.
The wire was a door, and Lira had spent the evening learning which way it opened.
She crossed to the desk and sat down in the dark and laid her hand flat on the paper, and she did not light the candle.
Somewhere below, the hall was emptying. The countess was smiling at her own tables.
The lord was walking back through the dim corridors of his keep with his hands empty and his hunger held.
And in the east tower a girl who had been told her whole life that the dead must be avenged sat very quiet in the warm dark, and did not write to anyone at all, while the mirror listened.