“Eight years.” Antonetta looked down at the city below. The sunset’s bloody glow tinted the edges of her pale hair.
“Why now?” Kel said. He wondered if anyone else had asked her. “Did Charlon ask you to come?”
“Well, he thinks it was his idea. That’s what matters.”
There was a shout. Kel glanced over to see that Charlon was making a triumphant gesture, presumably after hurling a pie. Falconet was drinking from a bottle of scarlet rabarbaro, a liquor derived from Shenzan rhubarb. Kel thought it tasted like medicine. Conor stood a little distance away, watching his friends with an unreadable expression.
“I was worried about Conor,” said Antonetta. “After last night.”
Kel leaned against the stone parapet. “You ought to forget that. He was drunk, that’s all.”
Now Antonetta glanced up at him. “I heard he might be getting married. Perhaps he’s sad at the idea of having to marry one of those foreign Princesses.”
So that’s what this is about. Kel felt an unreasonable frustration go through him. He told himself it was because she seemed to know Conor so little, despite whatever she felt for him. Conor was angry sometimes—furious, frustrated, jealous, operatically disappointed—but not sad. Sad did not seem to describe anything he’d ever felt.
“I don’t think so,” Kel said. “He does not want to get married, and I doubt House Aurelian can force him.”
“Because he’s a Prince?” Antonetta said. “You’d be surprised. We can all be made to do things. It simply requires finding the right way to push.”
Kel was about to ask her what she meant when Charlon called out to her. She leaped down from the low wall without a second glance, crossing the roof to where Falconet was holding out a pie. She took it, smiling that false smile that made Kel think of the painted masks worn every year on Solstice Day.
He remembered all too clearly when he and Antonetta had still been the sort of friends who climbed trees and chased imaginary dragons together. When he was fifteen, he had given her a ring—not a real ring, but grass he had fashioned into a loop—and asked her to be his bandit queen. He had been surprised how hard she had blushed, and later Conor had teased him. “Charlon will be furious,” Conor had said. “He’s been looking at her differently himself—but you’re the one she’s always liked.”
Kel had stayed awake that night, thinking of Antonetta. If she’d liked the ring. If she looked at him any differently than she did at Conor, at Joss. He determined to study her the next time he saw her. Perhaps he could read her thoughts; she had never taken enormous trouble to hide whatever she was feeling.
It never happened. It was not Antonetta he saw next, but her mother. She had rarely taken much note of Kel before, but after a Court dinner, Lady Alleyne had taken him aside and told him in no uncertain terms to stay away from her daughter. She knew they were young, but this was how trouble started, with boys getting ideas above themselves. He might be a minor noble of Marakand, but he had no land or wealth or significant name, and Antonetta was destined for much greater things.
Kel had never felt so humiliated. He told himself that it was not Kel, himself, who had been humiliated, but Kel Anjuman, the part he played. He told himself Antonetta would be furious at her mother’s interference. Instead Antonetta had vanished from their group, disappearing into House Alleyne for months, like a prisoner vanishing into the Trick.
Kel never spoke to Conor of what Lady Alleyne had said to him, and Joss, Charlon, and Conor seemed to feel Antonetta’s disappearance was only to be expected. Girls, they seemed to feel, went off and did mysterious things in order to become women, who were fascinating, strange entities.
He heard Antonetta giggle, and then she was gliding back across the tower. The sun had almost entirely set, and the stars were not yet out. She was mostly a shadow as she approached him. He was surprised she had come back, but equally determined not to show it. “I don’t have,” he said, “anything else to tell you about Conor.”
“What about you?” She tilted her head to the side. “Marriage, proposals. That sort of thing. You—”
Marriage is impossible for me. It will always be impossible. He said stiffly, “House Aurelian has given much to me. I wish to repay that debt before I think about marriage.”
“Ah.” She tucked a curl of hair behind her ear. “You don’t want to tell me.”
“It would be odd for me to confide in you, Antonetta,” Kel said. “We hardly know each other now.” She blinked; looked away. He said, “I remember the girl I was friends with when we were children. Who was bold and sharp and clever. I miss that girl. What happened to her?”
“You don’t know?” She raised her chin. “That girl had no future on the Hill.”
“She could have made a place for herself,” said Kel, “if she was brave enough.”
Antonetta sucked in a breath. “Perhaps you’re right. But how lucky for me that bravery, like cleverness, is not much valued in women. Since I lack both.”
“Antonetta—”
Kel thought for a moment he had spoken, said her name. But it was Conor, calling, gesturing for her to come over. Saying that they needed an objective observer to judge the winner of the contest.
For the second time, Antonetta stepped away from Kel and went back to the other side of the tower. Charlon threw an arm around her shoulder as she came close, the sort of gesture that might have been intended as friendly, if it had not been Charlon making it. Antonetta, leaning away from Charlon, had turned her attention to Conor, was smiling as she spoke to him. That brilliant false smile that no one but Kel seemed to notice was false.
He remembered the first time he’d seen it, that smile. At the ball her mother had thrown for her debut into the society of the Hill. He had gone with Conor, as Kel Anjuman, and at first he had looked around for Antonetta eagerly, not seeing her in the room.
It had been Conor who tapped him on the shoulder, directing his attention to a young woman speaking to Artal Gremont. A young woman in a dress of ornately patterned silk, edged everywhere with lace, whose curled blond hair was tied up in dozens of ribbons. Slim gold chains circled her wrists and ankles, and diamond baubles hung from her ears. She seemed to sparkle like something hard and bright, metal or glass.
“That’s her,” Conor said. “Antonetta.”
Kel had felt his stomach drop.
Somehow he had imagined that once she saw them all—and they were all there: Conor and Kel and Joss—she would come back to them, rejoin their group of friends. Complain about her mother. But though she greeted them all with smiles, with fluttering lashes and breathless giggles, there was nothing there of the old camaraderie that they had shared.
At last he had found a moment to speak to her alone, behind a statue bearing a tray of lemon ices. “Antonetta,” he’d said. He felt sick with how pretty she was. It was the first time he had really noticed the fine-grained softness of a girl’s skin, the color and shape of someone else’s mouth. She had become someone new: someone thrilling, someone horrifying in her distance, her difference. “We’ve missed you.”