“Do you know where I might find her?”
“She was in the Lion Room, last I saw,” said the taller one. “Wearing a green gown.”
“You can’t miss her,” said the short one, “she’s a real bitch.”
“Martha!” gasped her companion, with a shocked giggle.
“Am I wrong?”
Shane had spent much of his adult life in soldier’s camps, and while the language hardly shocked him, the apparent cruelty did. But he could hardly say something without making himself conspicuous, so he bowed his head and murmured something noncommittal, then turned on his heel, seeking the Lion Room.
Is Lady Silver unpopular here, then? Beartongue said to seek her out, and I assumed that she was another operative like Marguerite, and thus would go out of her way to ingratiate herself with the court. But there are many things about spycraft that I do not understand.
He reached the Lion Room. It had a large central fireplace built into a pillar, and the snarling heads of lions emerged from above the mantels. Unlike the ballrooms, the floor here was covered in thick rugs, and even though the fireplaces held only coals, the room was pleasantly warm.
A knot of women were conversing off to one side of the pillar. The tallest of the group had her back to him, and was wearing a green gown over a silvery undertunic and what appeared to be a silver wimple with some kind of headpiece. Lady Silver? Shane made his way toward the group.
“Pardon me,” he began, and the woman turned.
Shane’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and he forgot what he was going to say.
It wasn’t a wimple. Nor was it an undertunic. Lady Silver’s arms and neck were covered in short, dense fur that ran down her arms to the backs of her hands, leaving her fingers bare. What he had taken for a headpiece was a pair of stiff, upstanding ears. And her face…
The dog-headed woman smiled at him. The corners of her mouth drew up in a grin, with just a hint of teeth. “You arre! parr!doned,” she said. The R’s came out high and sharp and explosive, almost a yip.
Shane realized that he was gawking and immediately bowed, half-expecting a nun of the Dreaming God to appear out of nowhere and slap him on the back of the head for his rudeness. “Forgive me, madam,” he said. “I was given your name only, and…” He realized that he had no idea how to end that sentence without sounding unforgivably boorish, and stared at the rugs.
Lady Silver laughed. “And you were not warned that I was of the People, yes?” She extended a hand to him and he bowed over it, then straightened. “You may look at me,” she told him. “The People
do not take offense to humans looking. It is like ourr sniffing. You look and be done and I will sniff and be done and then you need not starrre from corrrners and I need not sniff the ground wherre you have walked, yes?”
“Certainly,” said Shane, not quite sure what was going on, but hoping that he was not committing some kind of interspecies incident. He had heard stories of cynocephalic people before, but had always thought that they were found primarily in the margins of illuminated manuscripts.
Lady Silver leaned in, rather closer than Shane was expecting, her nostrils flaring. Her nose was deep gray, a shade darker than her fur. She had large copper eyes and her muzzle was short for a dog, with black lips and flat silver cheeks. She took several deep breaths, then stepped back. Her forehead had deep vertical wrinkles that gave her a pensive air, but her voice was light and amused. “Metal and incense and many deaths. You are a warrior, are you not?”
“Sometimes,” he said. He glanced around at the other women. They were all human, and they were all watching with varying degrees of fascination and humor. One matron was clearly smothering giggles. Perhaps they were used to the impact that Lady Silver had on the unsuspecting. “I am Shane, bodyguard to the merchant Marguerite.”
“And I am Lady Silver, chosen representative of the People to the courts of humans.” She grinned at him again. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Likewise. Ah…” He suddenly remembered that he had a message and fumbled for it, attempting to regain his composure. “I was tasked with giving you this letter, Lady.”
Her coppery gaze flicked to him, then she plucked the letter from his fingers. Shane fell into his formal rest position, hands behind his back, waiting. The other women drifted away, murmuring to each other, occasionally glancing over and chuckling. Shane wondered if he was doing something amusing.
She held the envelope up closely in front of her eyes, clearly nearsighted, then sniffed the paper.
“Ah. A message. Verry well.” The R was less yip than growl this time, not hostile, but less interested.
“I will send a page later if you require a rresponse.”
She turned away in clear dismissal. Shane wondered if he had offended, or if Beartongue’s name on a letter was unwelcome. He bowed anyway and moved away, wondering what he had set in motion, if anything at all.
EIGHTEEN
WREN DRAGGED herself into the room they all shared and collapsed into a chair with a grunt. “I hate this,” she said, to no one in particular.
Marguerite made a sympathetic noise from behind the desk, where she was writing out invitations to a perfume testing. “Long day, I take it.”
“I stand and talk and stand and talk and say absolutely nothing,” said Wren. She sighed heavily. “I knew it was tiring, from when I was young, but somehow I thought I was misremembering. But I think it’s actually worse.”
“Any luck?” asked Shane, who was sharpening his sword. He was always sharpening his sword, as far as Marguerite could tell. It was a wonder he didn’t go blind.
Wren waved her hand. “Nothing useful. Most of the women here won’t talk to me because I’m so terribly unfashionable, but a couple of wallflowers will, mostly because I talked to them first. And Lady…err…I forget her name, sounded like “corrugated”…”
“Coregator,” said Marguerite, signing another invitation. “Middle-aged, has outlived two husbands, likes fast men and faster horses.”
“She seemed nice,” said Wren meekly.
“She’s lovely, actually. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her and she prides herself on being so unfashionable that she’s come out the other side. And if she likes you, that goes a long way.”
Marguerite made a note to add Lady Coregator to the perfume testing.
“She talked to me for nearly an hour,” said Wren. “And she was very kind. I think.”
“You’d know if she wasn’t.”
Wren sighed again. “Would I? At least three people have come over and been fake-polite to me so that they could deliver what they thought was a really cutting insult, then scurry away and giggle.”
Shane’s hands stilled on the sharpening stone. “Tell me their names,” he growled.
Wren rolled her eyes and shared a look of mutual exasperation with Marguerite. “That won’t work, brother. You can’t go rattling your sword at giggling heiresses. For one thing, it’d blow your cover as Marguerite’s bodyguard. You’re supposed to hold me in thinly-veiled contempt.”
The paladin bowed his head as if accused of a severe dereliction of duty. “You are correct,” he