Conor sank into a black armchair. “Of course.” His eyelids were half lowered, as if he were tired, or suspicious of something. Behind hung a mural displaying scenes from an orgiastic celebration; the setting seemed to be the marble steps of a temple, on which a crowd of young worshippers were in the act of coupling. A woman with spilling golden hair wrapped her legs around the man arched above her, her face a mask of ecstasy; a man pinned another against a leaning column, one hand between the other’s legs; a woman, her hair wound with scarves, knelt to pleasure her female companion.
Alys looked from the painting to Conor, and smiled her cat’s smile. “Refreshments, Monseigneur?”
Conor nodded, eyes already on the Castles board. A silver bell was rung, and a few moments later the doors were flung open. The room began to fill with courtesans. Some carried platters of silver and laid them down on the low rosewood tables. Oysters, shining like pearl earrings, shimmered on beds of ice; fat cherries lay beside pomegranates bursting with seeds. Cups of rich drinking-chocolate were dusted with gold and saffron. Kel caught Conor’s quick, amused look: All the foods were, of course, aphrodisiacs, intended to stoke sexual hunger.
He could hardly blame Alys; after all, she didn’t make her money from card games played in her salon. As she left the room, she laid a hand on Kel’s shoulder. He could smell the myrrh in her perfume as she said in a low voice, “That meeting you wished me to arrange—is now a good time for it?”
Kel nodded.
Alys patted his cheek. “On my signal, go to the library,” she said, and swept from the room in a swirl of skirts.
Kel turned to see if any in the room had noticed his interaction with Alys, but none seemed to have; they were concentrated on Conor. Courtesans had begun to perch themselves on the Prince’s chair like birds in the boughs of a wind-bitten tree. Others circulated within the room, chatting among themselves. The Caravel had become one of the most expensive pleasure houses in the Temple District since House Aurelian had begun patronizing it, and its courtesans reflected the taste of its customers. All were beautiful in one way or another, and all skilled and patient. Both men and women were dressed simply, in white, like Temple sacrifices in the old days. The white clothes against all the black lacquer was a striking sight, duochrome as the face of the Windtower Clock.
A girl with red hair brought Kel a cup of chocolate; he looked at her quickly, but she was not Silla, of whom he was still fond. The last time they had come to the Caravel, Silla had told him she had saved enough money to set up her own house down the street from the Caravel. Perhaps she had already done it?
Conor captured one of Falconet’s pieces and chuckled. Kel noted it in the back of his mind, where his awareness of Conor always lived. He wondered if mothers were like this about their children—always knowing where they were, if they were wounded or pleased. He did not know; he had little experience of mothers.
Falconet, unmoved by his loss, stretched back to kiss the blond girl hanging on his left shoulder. She leaned in, her hair falling like a veil across the velvet nap of his jacket. By this time, several other wealthy patrons had arrived. Kel recognized only one of them: Sieur Lupin Montfaucon, who held the Charter for textiles. An aesthete and bon vivant, his voracious appetite for food, wine, sex, and money was known to everyone on the Hill. He was dark-skinned and elegant, with several dueling scars: one on his cheekbone, and another at the base of his throat. When younger, he had set the fashion for every young man at Court, having started crazes for everything from lynx-fur trousers to paper hats. He was now somewhere in his thirties and, Kel suspected, more than a little bitter about ceding his position as tastemaker to Conor.
He bared his teeth at the half-finished Castles board. “What are the stakes? Gold would seem dull for you, Falconet.”
“Money is never dull,” said Conor, not taking his eyes off the board. “And not all money is gold. Currently we are playing for shares in the latest dye fleet.”
“That will annoy Roverge,” said Montfaucon, speaking with some satisfaction of the family who held the dye Charter. Most of the Charter Families, though forced to work together in the Council, disliked the others, like feral cats defending their territory.
“I will play the winner,” Montfaucon added, tossing his gold broccato jacket across a chair back. “Though I would prefer cards.”
“You could play Kellian,” said Conor, not looking up.
Montfaucon glanced at Kel. While Joss seemed to like him well enough, it was always clear that Montfaucon did not. Perhaps his jealousy of Conor expressed itself through disliking his constant companion. After all, to dislike the Blood Royal was treason. But Kel, even when posing as the Prince’s cousin, was not royal. His only claim to lineage was through Marakand, not Castellane.
Kel smiled pleasantly. “I do not think I would present much of a challenge for Sieur Montfaucon.”
It had taken Kel years, back in the beginning, to learn all the Court’s honorifics: Monseigneur for a prince, Your Highness for a king or queen, Sieur for a nobleman, Chatelaine for a married noblewoman, and Demoselle for one as yet unmarried. Most of the nobles, having been told he had lately come from Marakand, had been patient with him. Only Montfaucon had once slapped him, for forgetting the Sieur; now that Kel was an adult, he continued to use it, deliberately. He knew it was an annoyance Montfaucon could do nothing about.
“Nor, would I imagine, do you own any fleet shares, Amirzah Anjuman,” said Montfaucon. He used the Marakandi term for a nobleman to refer to Kel; it was probably intended to annoy, though it did not work. It only amused Kel to wonder what Montfaucon would think should he ever discover he was conferring a nobleman’s title on a mudrat from the gutters. One who might not be Marakandi, either. Over the years Kel had grown used to being addressed as if his background were the same as Conor’s. Not that it mattered. Being who he was, he had no history to unwrite.
“I do not. It is a shame,” Kel said. “But I see others are arriving; perhaps one could be interested in a hand of red-and-black.”
Indeed, the room was slowly filling up with young nobles from the Hill, and a few wealthy merchants. Falconet rose to his feet to greet them, ceding his position at the Castles board to Montfaucon. Kel kept a discreet eye on Conor as a group of newcomers surrounded a young, Hindish courtesan, who had before him a stack of telling cards. He was reading fortunes for nobles and courtesans alike.
Once, years ago, a fortuneteller had come to the Palace, brought by Lilibet to enhance some festivity or other. Conor had argued that she should read Kel’s fortune, too. She had taken his hands and looked into his eyes: In that moment, he had felt she could see through him, as if he were made of Sunderglass. “You will live a life of brilliant strangeness,” she had said, and then tears had come down her cheeks. He had hurried away, but always remembered: the words, her tears.
Brilliant strangeness.
He had always wondered what the fortuneteller had told Conor; Conor had never revealed it.
A movement at the door caught Kel’s attention. It was Charlon Roverge—his elegant tunic straining over his broad shoulders—escorting Antonetta Alleyne and two other noble young ladies: Mirela Gasquet and Sancia Vasey, whose family did not have a Charter, but had grown wealthy from landholdings in Valderan.