In person the Prince was much shorter than she thought he would be, slimmer and slighter; especially next to Pyrrha, who stood like a stone column. She was standing so unlike Pyrrha that for a moment Nona was fooled: she was standing so ready, so waiting, so upright, so uncomfortable in her own skin, that it was like seeing a mirage. But moving broke the spell, at least for Nona. Pyrrha crossed and uncrossed her arms in a way so comfortably and familiarly Pyrrha that Nona couldn’t mistake her.
Nona was impressed with the Prince’s looks. She had never seen anybody from the television in real life before. Thanks to the eye stuff, Nona could stare all she liked and not feel rude: at the Prince with his waxen skin and his lovely jacket and his glossy hair and his bluish-coloured eyes, standing poised a bit like a snake would stand, if it had legs.
The Prince said— “You’re nearly a minute late, Harry.”
23
NONA CROSSED THE BLACK-AND-WHITE floor beneath the electric lights. There was a big red square carpet laid out in front of the dais, so she stopped at its threshold, and she got a less shortsighted look at Prince Ianthe Naberius. The Prince suddenly came down off the dais and walked toward her briskly, and Nona inadvertently took a step back. This stopped the Prince.
“Look at me,” she said.
Nona said and did nothing. She swallowed, but felt it was all right to swallow; Harrowhark probably swallowed, every so often.
The Prince said— “What you’ve done is ridiculous. It can’t work. That can’t be your handiwork … not that I’m not impressed. Sure, you look dreadful, but I’ve had to turn up in some old thing from last season.”
Crown made a small noise in the back of her throat. The Prince turned to her and said, a little accusingly, “You didn’t tell me this little detail. Has she been blinded this whole time?”
“I told you she was here,” said Corona. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her eyelashes looked a bit too sooty. “I left out the details. So what?”
“There is so much you are not telling me and it makes me so cross,” said the Prince. “You see, my emotions are being expressed through two nervous systems, so I really don’t know what to do with them. I’ve been in Babs’s body for nearly three whole days. I hate it … Come on, Harry. Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?”
“No,” said Nona.
“I don’t know why I asked. I knew the answer. Ah,” she said, as Camilla caught up and stood at Nona’s elbow. “The dullest prodigal son returns … Those aren’t your glasses, Hect, and I am amazed you are permitted to wear them.”
“Noted,” said Camilla.
“Well, never mind … it’s just curious, is all. How’s it hanging, Hect? How’s tricks? Getting used to life without your necromancer? Going to parties, self-actualising, reshaping your identity? I don’t suppose you had much scope for it before.”
Crown said a little warningly, “Ianthe, don’t push it,” but Camilla said— “I don’t care.”
“I love it when people don’t care,” said Prince Ianthe warmly. “‘Don’t care was made to care; don’t care was hung.’ Really, why should you care? Who cares what I think? I’m only a Lyctor, a sacred fist and gesture holding the power of life and death, having ascended to the state your pompous moralising blowhard of a necromancer disdained … whereas you’re the big girl who made the Sixth House secede. Tell me, do they love you for that in Blood of Eden? You don’t need to answer, I know how the field lies … Corona’s the beautiful and talented token, and you’re the grim weirdo who never realised the price of revolution. And, I suppose, Harrow’s nursemaid. Well, it must have been nice for you … she is Sextus’s tedious distaff counterpart. Oh, come on, Harry, really? No comeback?”
“No,” said Nona.
“Well, this isn’t turning out how I wanted it to. I thought you and I would share a couple of saucy quips … I thought you’d come in here demanding the body of your cavalier.”
This was dropped into the conversation like a bomb. Nona let her gaze fall straight forward, blindly, not reacting at all and not knowing how to. The room was silent.
In the end, Ianthe said: “Has that fire cooled? Have you changed your mind on that one? Is Camilla the better model? I consider Camilla Hect an obvious upgrade; I imagine she hardly makes one ass joke a day…”
She let this trail off. Nona kept saying nothing. The silence extended until Ianthe filled it again, but this time her voice had changed to flat impatience. “Well, Hect, thank you for coming. I suppose you know why you’re here.”