“Will this make me look like the Prince?” asked Kel, trying to peer down his own shirt.
“Not quite. What it will do is make those who look at you, and already see a boy who resembles our Crown Prince in complexion and size, more inclined to regard you as Prince Conor. To hear his voice when you speak. Your eyes are wrong,” he added, half to himself, “but it does not matter; people see what they expect to see, and they will expect to see the Prince. It will not physically change your features, you understand? It will simply change the vision of those who look at you. No one who really knows who you are will be fooled, but all others will.”
In a way, Kel did understand. There were tales of the way magic had once been before the Sundering, when a spell could blow a mountain apart or transform a man into a dragon. Magic now—Ashkari magic, talismans and charms and poultices, for sale in Fleshmarket Square—was a shadow of a shadow of what had once been. It could incline and convince and direct, but it could not change the substance of things.
“I would suggest,” said Bensimon, “that, at this juncture, you speak.”
Kel tugged awkwardly at the chain around his neck. “I don’t want to do it,” he said. “But I ain’t got no choice, have I?”
Bensimon smiled thinly. “You do not. And don’t say ain’t. It makes you sound like a mudrat from the Warren docks.”
“I am a mudrat from the Warren docks,” Kel pointed out.
“Not tonight,” said Bensimon.
Kel was brought to the tepidarium: a massive chamber with two stone-bound pools sunk into the middle of a marble floor. A rose window looked out over the nighttime glow of Castellane. Kel tried to keep his eyes on the horizon as he was poked, prodded, and scrubbed with vicious thoroughness. The water ran dark brown into the drain.
Kel thought about whether he trusted this Bensimon and decided he did not. Bensimon said the Prince was sick—indisposed—but Jolivet had come to the Orfelinat a month ago. He couldn’t have known then that the Crown Prince would take ill tonight and need a standin.
Nor did the idea that he’d be sent home at the end of the night with a bag of gold make much sense. There was a well-known tale in the Maze about the Ragpicker King, the most famous criminal in Castellane. It was said that he’d once invited three rival criminals to his mansion and fed them a splendid dinner, offering them a partnership in his illegal empire. But none of them had been able to agree on anything, and at the end of the night the Ragpicker King had regretfully poisoned his guests, on the grounds that now they knew too much about his business. （He paid for glorious funerals for all three, however.）
Kel could not help but feel that he had already been told a great deal that he ought not to know, and was about to learn more of the same. He tried to think of what he would do were he playing a part in a game with Cas, but could imagine no better strategy than keeping his head down.
After the bath, he was dusted, perfumed, shod, and dressed in a steel-blue satin tailcoat with silver links at the cuffs and collar. He was given velvet trousers as soft as mouse’s fur. His hair was trimmed and his eyelashes curled.
When he finally went to look at himself in the mirror that covered the whole west wall, he thought, with a sinking feeling, that if he ever stepped out in the streets of the Maze looking like this, he’d be beaten six ways by the Crawlers and run up the flagpole outside the Tully.
“Cease shuffling your feet,” said Bensimon, who had spent the past hour watching the goings-on from a shadowed corner of the room, like a hawk planning its descent onto a family of rabbits. “Come here.”
Kel approached the adviser as the rest of the Palace servants melted away like mist. In a moment, he was alone in the room with Bensimon, who grabbed him under the chin, tilted his head up, and surveyed him unceremoniously. “Tell me again what you’re doing tonight.”
“Being C—Prince Conor. Sitting at the banquet table. Not saying much.”
Apparently satisfied, Bensimon let Kel go. “The King and Queen know who you really are, of course; don’t worry about them. They are well used to playing parts.”
Somehow Kel’s imagination hadn’t gotten this far. “The King is going to pretend I’m his son?”
Bensimon snorted. “I wouldn’t get too excited,” he said. “Very little of any of this is about you.”
That struck Kel as a relief. If everyone important ignored him, maybe he could make it through the night.
Bensimon led Kel back into the warren of corridors that seemed to make up the interior of the Palace. They took a back set of servants’ stairs down to a small but elegant room full of books; there was a tall golden door at the far end of the room, through which Kel could hear music and laughter.
For the first time, Kel’s heart jolted with real longing. Books. The only reading material he’d ever had were a few shabby novels donated to the Orfelinat by charitable patrons, satisfying tales of pirates and phoenixes, sorcerers and sailors, but of course they didn’t belong to him. The study books—histories of empires fallen, the building of the Gold Roads—were kept locked up by the Sisters, brought out to be read from during classes. He’d been given an old book of tales by a boatswain once, in return for running a message, but Sister Jenova had confiscated it. According to her, sailors only read two things: murder stories and pornography.
These books were as beautiful as the sun sinking behind Tyndaris. Kel could smell the scent of the leather that bound them, the ink on their pages, the bitterness of the stamping mill where the paper was made.
Bensimon was watching him with narrowed eyes, the way a professional gambler eyed a mark. “You can read, then. And you like it?”
Kel didn’t have to reply. Two people had swept into the room, surrounded by Castelguards, and he was stunned into silence.
Kel’s first thought was that these people were the most beautiful he had ever seen. Then he wondered if it was just because they were so fastidiously groomed, and their clothes were so lovely. He didn’t know the words yet for silk and satin and cloth-of-gold, but he knew when things looked rich and soft, and shimmered in firelight.
The King was familiar: unsurprising, since his face was on every coin in Castellane. On the coins he was in profile, gazing to the right—toward unconquered Sarthe, went the tale. But the coins did not show the breadth of him, his barrel chest or wrestler’s arms. He made Kel quail with his sheer size and presence. His eyes were light, high-set, his beard and hair a pale mixture of blond and early silvering.
The Queen had dark, flowing hair like the Fear River at nightfall, and smooth russet-brown skin. She was slim and tall, her hands heavy with rings, each set with a different, glimmering stone. Ropes of gold circled her neck and wrist, and her hair was dressed with pins in the shape of golden lilies. She had been a Marakandi princess, Kel remembered, and gold was a symbol of good luck in that country.
The Queen regarded Kel with the dark eyes that had been the subject of a thousand poems and ballads. The citizens of Castellane were competitive about the beauty of their Queen, and wanted it widely known that she was more beautiful than the Queens of Sarthe or Hind. The Queen of Hanse, Kel had been told, looked like a constipated waterfowl in comparison with Queen Lilibet of Castellane.