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  “After all,” I considered, “much of what Kristos used to write his pamphlets came out of ancient Pellian work and from studying other systems. We don’t live in a closed world, do we?”

  “I suppose not. Though I might prefer it at the moment.”

  I sighed, understanding what he meant, and clasped his hand.

  The view of the sea was beautiful, emerald vegetation and bursts of sunset-hued flowers traipsing down easy hills to an ocean more blue than the most intense indigo that dye could ever produce. The shoreline itself varied—sometimes broad beaches of pale sand, sometimes narrow strands bordered by thick trees and vines.

  The surrey slowed at a road hewn from sand and stone, and the driver pulled the horses to a stop. He spoke to Theodor, who nodded and helped me down. “He can’t drive farther without sinking in the sand, but this is the place I was told we ought to see.”

  The driver stopped us and handed Theodor a plain canvas bag, speaking a few sentences that made Theodor laugh. “For our shoes,” he explained. “He suggests going barefoot lest we get stockings full of sand.”

  I laughed and agreed willingly, rucking up my skirts through the slits meant for my pockets to keep from trailing them in the sand.

  “You look like one of the farm girls at harvest time,” Theodor said. “Those skirts are quite fetching.”

  “Think I could make a fashion of it back in Galitha?” I asked.

  “If anyone could, it’s you.” He slung the bag over his back and took my hand. The sand was exquisitely warm and surprisingly soft, my feet sinking in nearly to the ankle. The path wound between walls of thick green foliage. Thick, sweet floral scents wafted from the trees. Suddenly, the path curved and we spilled out onto a broad sand beach bordered by huge rock formations framing open water.

  “Someone gave you a good tip,” I breathed. I sank onto a low rock and took in the scene, more like a planned mural than anything I’d seen happen in nature by chance.

  “I’m going in,” Theodor announced.

  “What?” I laughed.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t want to see what that water feels like,” he said. “I won’t strip naked and dive in off the sea stacks, I promise.”

  “You’re wading in with all your clothes on?”

  “Just up to my ankles,” he promised. “This place is fairly secluded, but it’s well-known among the Serafans at the summit. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few showed up—we ought to take advantage of the privacy while it lasts.”

  “Not too much advantage.” I laughed. “Is it—is it safe? The water?”

  “What could be dangerous about wading in up to your ankles?

  “I don’t know. Shallows-dwelling Serafan sharks?”

  “The only sharks native to northern Serafan waters are half-fin moon sharks. They’re nocturnal, and besides, they’ve only been known to eat reef bass and striped sunfish.”

  I hesitated but followed Theodor to the water. Galatine shorelines, at least near the city, didn’t lend themselves to bathing, and I couldn’t imagine dipping even a toe into the swift-moving, debris-swirled river that bordered the city. This was different—open, clear water.

  Delicious, open, clear water, I amended as I stepped in, letting the cool water envelop my feet. The eddies tickled my ankles, and I wished we could wade in deeper. I wanted the pure blue to wash over my entire body, to give myself over to something natural and beautiful with no restraint.

  Theodor moved closer to me, gently pulling me into him, and kissing me with such intensity that I almost fell into the water. I wouldn’t have minded. “You know that I love you,” he said, cupping my face in his hands.

  I murmured assent and pressed my lips into his, craving, I knew, more than the envelopment of seawater, but submersion in him. My skirts grazed the surface of the water, but I didn’t care. “I want you,” I whispered, knowing I couldn’t find the words to say what I meant—not just now, not just in stolen moments and private spaces, but a life fully entwined.

  I knew he took one meaning as I felt him press against me. An impossibility here—exposed on all sides—but I didn’t stop kissing him.

  A sharp crack interrupted us, and I pulled away, gasping. “What was that?”

  “It sounded like a gunshot,” he said, brow constricting. “Perhaps a local hunter in the forest?”

  I clambered toward dry land, letting the sand stick to my wet feet and my sodden hemline cling to my legs. “Perhaps.”

  Wordlessly, Theodor took my hand and we walked back toward the surrey. The delight I had felt in the sand turned to frustration as we stumbled in our haste, sand clinging to our wet feet and throwing clouds of grit over our legs. The driver met us halfway down the path.

  “Safe?” he panted in Galatine.

  Theodor answered in Serafan, and the two exchanged terse words while I warily looked around us.

  “It’s fine,” Theodor said, realizing I had no idea what they had discussed. “There was a shot fired in the woods—the driver doesn’t think it could have been a hunter, but no one has come out of the woods.”

  The driver added a few more details, and Theodor nodded as we headed back up the path.

  When we arrived at the road, the surrey was gone.

  “What in the world?” Theodor turned to the driver, whose face was drawn, the bronzed tan turned ashen. He repeated his question in Serafan.

  The driver merely shook his head, and then began to speak very quickly.

  “No, no, you’re not—I’m not—stop!” Theodor said. He turned to me. “He thinks I’ll punish him, have him sacked, that I think this is his fault.”

  “Someone stole the surrey,” I said. “And I’m guessing they also fired that shot to get him away from it long enough to get away with it.”

  Theodor nodded and turned back to the driver. I stared down the wide avenue leading back to the diplomatic compound—our drive had taken enough time that, though I knew we could make the walk back, I didn’t relish the thought. The sun was oppressive, and any refreshment from the sea was sucked into the humid fog of late afternoon heat. Worse, we were effectively alone and unguarded here.

  Our driver seemed trustworthy enough, but it was entirely possible he’d been in on whatever scheme, whether random horse thievery or something more pointed at Theodor and I, was playing out. “There’s little choice but to walk. Perhaps someone will meet us on the road and take pity,” Theodor suggested with weak confidence.

  The sand scratched inside my stockings, and the sun was hotter on the main road than in the shade of the thick forest on the small path we’d taken to the beach. “Damn it all,” Theodor muttered. “There’s no way we’ll be back in time for dinner, and West Serafe was making a bid on the Open Seas Arrangement. It was rather important to attend.”

  I caught his arm. “Could someone have intended for you to miss that meeting?”

  “Hang it all,” Theodor said. “It’s entirely possible. Though why, I haven’t the faintest notion. Someone who thinks Merhaven would make a better representative of their interests. That’s as far as I can get with it.” We hiked in silence for another mile, then crested a short hill and a wide plantation lay before us—a low, sprawling stone house and wide swaths of tall trees and low shrubs.

  “Oranges,” I said as we grew closer. “And what are the shrubs?”

  “Citrine berries, I believe. They don’t transport well, so I’ve only ever encountered them in preserves.” As we approached the house, the field hands tending the berry shrubs stopped to stare. They wore simple undyed linen trousers and most had bare chests, their heads wrapped against the sun in white linen scarves. I tried not to stare back, but I was curious—I knew how hiring day laborers in agricultural regions of Galitha worked, the nobles who owned the land making the work available first to the residents of the villages nearest them, then to itinerant workers who followed planting and harvest seasons in waves of migration across Galitha’s fertile valleys. Did these workers live here, I wondered? H
ow were they compensated? Or were they traveling specialists, like those in Galitha, here for a certain task and gone next week?

  “Wait here,” said Theodor in a low voice as we approached the main house. An arbor stretched in front of the house, laden with showy red vining flowers above and populated with benches below. “In case our hosts are not particularly friendly.”

  I waited as Theodor knocked on the door and then spoke in quick Serafan to the boy who answered. His white servant’s garb was similar to that of the diplomatic compound’s staff. While he waited on the doorstep, I watched the field hands work. They seemed to be pruning the bushes, snapping off shoots and pulling dead foliage from inside the bushes. Occasionally one glanced in my direction, still as curious about me as I was about them. Though only partially obscured behind the huge red flowers, I felt at a great distance from the workers who made up most of the population here. I had come to Serafe confident, and concerned, that learning the various cultures I would be surrounded by would be part of the journey. I saw how limited that education was bound to be, shut inside the diplomatic compound and speaking only to the elite leaders of these nations.

  These men were, like the field-workers in Galitha, cut off from their capital and its politics. Yet the agrarian workers in Galitha had, according to Byran Border, organized themselves and joined the loose association of willing revolutionaries bound by letters and homemade red caps. These Serafan farmhands may have been invisible to the privileged Ainirs and Ainiras I had met at the summit, but I saw them. I saw their strength, their numbers, their potential.

  Theodor returned. “The overseer is having a wagon hitched as quickly as he can to take us back to the compound.”

  “It seems curious that we haven’t been invited inside,” I said.

  “The family isn’t here; the overseer can use the family’s farm equipment, but to invite us inside their home would be beyond his purview,” he replied.

  The overseer was a lithe man with pockmarks pitting dark skin made deeper brown by a lifetime under the sun. He and the driver exchanged words briefly, deciding the logistics of returning the wagon, the driver said.

  “The workers,” I whispered to Theodor. “Why not have one of them drive with us?”

  He shook his head slightly. “Most of them are indentured, either to the plantation itself or to a labor exchange. Many were forced into indenture to pay debts or penalties, so they’re not typically trusted with a responsibility like the family surrey.” I glanced back at the linen-clad field hands, bound here in service. If every citrine berry and goldenfruit plantation in West Serafe relied on a supply of forced servitude, no wonder the nation felt threatened by populist rumblings out of Galitha.

  “Will we get back in time for that meeting?”

  “I’m not sure.” He sighed. “Merhaven had better not say anything stupid.”

  29

  WE ARRIVED BACK WITH A SCANT QUARTER HOUR TO SPARE BEFORE dinner. It was enough time for Theodor to put on a fresh neckcloth and comb his hair, making himself, almost by magic, presentable enough for the dinner still wearing his plain dove-gray suit. The fine worsted wool had survived the misadventure with barely a wrinkle. I, however, would never have enough time to change from my rumpled cotton caraco into formal silk and brush all the sand out of my hair, let alone powder and dress it, so Theodor went on without me.

  I had food brought to the room, and indulged in a bath in my sunken tub, and then lay barely dressed on the bed with the refreshing breeze from the open balcony drying my hair. Onyx paced the bed, begging ear scratches and chin rubs, then flopped on his side and fell asleep.

  When morning sunlight pierced the gauzy curtains by the balcony, I realized that I had fallen fast asleep, too. My legs were sore—city life had meant plenty of running errands on foot but little overland hiking—and my feet were rubbed raw in a few spots where I hadn’t adequately cleaned off the sand before putting my stockings and shoes on. I rose, stiff, and padded to the door between my room and Theodor’s. I rapped lightly, and it swung open.

  “I didn’t want to wake you,” he said, striding into my room. He looked as though he hadn’t slept at all, and given that he hadn’t changed out of the clothes he had been wearing yesterday, I presumed he hadn’t. His haggard shoulders slumped. “I saw something last night at the dinner.”

  He was harried, haunted as though he had seen a ghoul or a ghost. “Saw something?”

  “Charm casting.”

  I sank onto the bed. “Casting?”

  “With music. Like mine.” He ran a hand through disheveled hair, his neat queue abandoned. “There were musicians playing during the dinner. When the Serafan delegate began to speak on their proposal for the Open Seas Arrangement, I expected them to stop. But they didn’t, they kept playing. I started to feel strange, light, as though I’d had too much wine. The delegate kept talking, and I thought all of his ideas sounded wonderful.” He paused, looking right past me, as though seeing the whole scene again. “Then I saw it, golden threads snaking around the room, licking at all of us, binding us together…”

  I realized I had the coverlet clenched in my hand. “No one else would have seen,” I whispered. “It’s not you they wanted to prevent from being at the dinner last night!”

  “You’re right,” he said. “It was you. They know you’re a charm caster, you’d be able to see it…” He broke off, disgusted. “At any rate, the delegate called for a short vote, right there. Not entirely outside protocol, but unusual. I had the presence of mind to move for a stay on it, but—by the divine, Sophie, they could have coerced the whole summit into the deal.”

  “Would it have worked?” I thought of the ballad seller I had encountered in Galitha City, her untrained casting prompting me to fish a coin from my pocket, and of Theodor’s casting, which I had easily bent to my designs, yet neither was schooled in whatever art of coercive casting was at play here.

  “I’m not sure. I don’t know how long it lasted, I was so shocked at the whole thing. And the delegate looked shocked, too, that I moved for a stay. I suppose the other delegates’ reflexive caution outweighed whatever charms were used and they voted with me.”

  “Maybe they’re not very strong charm casters.”

  “Or maybe they didn’t use very strong charms.” Theodor leaned, heavy, on the bedpost. “It doesn’t really matter. This is… this is beyond the pale. It can’t go on.”

  “What do you propose to do?”

  His lips narrowed into a line. “I suppose I can’t go about hurling accusations of magic that no one else can see, can I?” I shook my head. We hadn’t even told anyone else that Theodor could cast. “And I certainly can’t ignore my duties here to investigate, looking for magic in places I’m not supposed to be.”

  “No, you can’t.” Our position here was tenuous enough, with a new king on the throne in Galitha and unrest threatening disruption of trade and alliances. The rest of the delegates didn’t, presumably, even know how badly things were deteriorating in Galitha. “But perhaps I can.”

  I dressed as quickly as I could, forgoing dressing my hair and hiding it under a large cap. When Theodor left for a renewed discussion of the Open Seas Arrangement, I hurried toward the common rooms of the compound, the library and game room and reception lounge with its perpetually refilled tables of fruits and candied nuts. Jae stood next to a samovar of tea, chatting amiably with Duana and an East Serafan gentleman. I waffled next to a table of tiny pastries, unsure how to interrupt, how to ask him to come with me to the university. Unsure of everything.

  “Lady Sophie,” he said. “I couldn’t help but notice you, looking like the cat who ate the prize hamster.” He mistook my breathless look for confusion at his expression. “We raise ornamental hamsters in Tharia. For fun?”

  “Of course.” I bit back laughter—of all the strange hobbies the Galatine nobility indulged in, fancy hamsters was something I’d not encountered. “I—I don’t want to impose but, well, if you are not tied up, could I
ask you to come to the library with me?”

  “The university?” He grinned. “Of course! I’m free all day. And I wanted another look at those maps, anyway.”

  As we left the compound, Jae asked, “And what is your interest at the library today?”

  I blanched, hiding my face under the brim of my hat. “It’s such an impressive collection, I simply wanted to use it as much as I can, while I’m here,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie.

  Still, I didn’t want to elaborate, so I changed the subject. “Did you and Annette enjoy the garden tour the other day?”

  He grinned. “The tame deer were something to see,” he said. “They eat right from your hand, imagine! And of course Lady Annette was a lovely companion.” My smile grew strained as he continued to extol her virtuous features, but Jae didn’t notice.

  When we arrived at the library, he peeled away and I began looking for Corvin, chiding myself for the fool’s hope that he would be waiting as though expecting me. Scholars in their variegated shades of gray moved easily here, homing in on shelves and stacks of books, passing one another with rote greeting, gathering in clutches to compare work or debate. I watched for a few minutes, absorbed by the notion that a whole group of people, hundreds of them, could be as fulfilled by words and ideas as I was by fabric and thread.

  “Miss Balstrade! I had not expected you today. Did I forget an appointment?”

  I turned, finding, to my surprise and relief, Corvin. “No, I hadn’t—no.” I forced a smile. “I had hoped I might run into you and we might arrange an appointment.” Or, I wished fervently, that he might have time to help me now.

  “Ah, of course, yes.” He fidgeted with the hem of his robe’s voluminous sleeve. “I would be pleased to work with you right now, if you will only excuse me to rearrange another matter.”

  “No, I couldn’t dream of interrupting your plans!”

  “It is nothing, no. A… personal favor I can complete anytime. Do excuse me?” He almost ran away, leaving me to wonder what pressing matter I was pulling him away from. Who was I to command such attention—did Corvin think I was a higher-ranking Galatine than I really was? Or perhaps, I thought with sobering realization, I was regarded as high-ranking. I was going to have to adjust to an entirely new set of expectations, especially when it came to inconveniencing other people. No one would think of denying a favor to a princess.