She paused at the head of the stairs and took a deep, steadying breath. Head high. Walk slowly. Try to remember that stupid train; try to forget about the stupid escort. Pause between each step…
She took each stair of the curving staircase carefully, and stopped at the halfway point to listen to the voices ahead of her. Lord Tylar was holding forth on something, but he sounded pompous, not irritated, which meant she wasn’t late.
Thank goodness for small favors.
She took the rest of the stairs at the same deliberate pace, knowing that if she rushed and looked the least bit undignified, Lord Tylar would be annoyed with her. He was going to have enough to be annoyed with her about before the evening was over; best not to give him more than she could manage.
He was watching for her; her heart sank as she saw him turn toward the staircase as soon as she came into sight, and examine her every move with a critical eye. Her stomach tightened and she found it hard to take those deep, serene breaths.
He’s going to hate the dress, the hair, the cosmetics… he’s going to hate how I’m walking.… It was an automatic reaction, one she had every time she had to confront him. How could she help it? All he ever invoked in her was dread.
He was a handsome man, even by elven standards, but even by those standards his expression and bearing were chill and detached. He stood much taller than Viridina and his daughter, by a head-and-a-half. His pale gold hair was worn as his grandfather had worn his, as if to invoke the memory of that formidable man; cut unfashionably short, and without the usual diadem or fillet that current mode dictated. His long, chiseled face bore no signs of emotion whatsoever, but Rena knew him well enough to be aware that the slight narrowing of his brilliant green eyes meant he was looking for faults to criticize.
He and Lady Viridina were dressed in the same colors—or rather, lack of them—of ice-white and gold. His costume hinted at armor without actually being armor, hers was a more elaborate version of the same gown Rena wore. On Lady Viridina, however, the gown of pearly-white silk with iridescent moonbirds looked beautiful. The only touch of color that either of them wore was in the emeralds and beryls of their jewels; again, the Lady’s jewels were copies of Rena’s, but she carried them as if she did not notice their weight in the slightest Lord Tylar’s jewels were simpler and fewer; belt, a single ring, a single armband, and a torque about his neck.
Rena paused on the last stair to wait, trembling inside, for her father to speak.
Silence stretched the moment into an eternity, as she strove to keep her trembling invisible.
“Good,” he said, finally, with grudging approval. “You are actually presentable.”
She kept her relief as invisible as her trembling, and took the last few steps across the marble between them. “Thank you, my Lord Father,” she whispered. She hadn’t meant to whisper, but somehow she couldn’t raise her voice any further than that.
“Well, let’s not stand here all night.” He turned before he even finished the sentence, and strode off down yet another pink marble hallway, this time heading for his study and the Transportation Portal in it
He could never have mustered the magic for a direct Portal to the Council Hall, but one had come with the manor. The Treves Portal would take them to the Council Hall, and from there they would use the Hemalth Portal to the estate, permitted to pass there by the magic signet impressed into the invitation. Only those who had access to such Portals would be able to take such a direct and immediate route to the fete—the ones who did not would be forced to take tedious journeys across country until they reached the estate the hard way. It was a measure of the power the House of Hemalth held that there were plenty of elven lords praying for the opportunity to make such a journey.
The ring on Rena’s right index finger was not one of Lorryn’s creations, but a simple signet, with a moonbird carved into the beryl (not an emerald) held in the bezel. That would be her key to the Portal that would allow her to return home; without it, she would be stuck in the Council Hall until someone came to get her. While emeralds were prized for their beauty and sought after by the human slaves permitted jewels, it was the more common beryl that was truly priceless to the elven lords, for only beryls could take and hold magic power, or be used as the containers for spells. Women wore emeralds, useless, lovely emeralds. Men bore beryls, as the outward signature of their power.
Rena trailed along behind her father, careful not to step on the train of her mother’s gown, with the guards following in her wake.
The door opened as Lord Tylar approached, and me little parade massed through it into the room beyond. There wasn’t much to mark the room that her father called his “study” as anything of the kind; it really held nothing but a white marble desk and a couple of chairs-—no books, certainly no papers; he left all of the tedious business of dealing with accounts and the like to his supervisors and underlings. The pink marble of the floor of the hall gave way here to soft, thick carpets of (leathered gray, and the pink marble of the walls to some unidentifiable substance the pale gray of rain clouds. There were two doors to this room, both of a darker gray than the walls; the one they used to enter, and the one that stood directly across from it—but the second was no door at all, but the Portal.
Lord Tylar stopped in front of the Portal, his hand on the latch, and turned back to frown at his daughter. Rena shrank into herself a little, involuntarily.
“Hold your head up,” he reminded her sharply. “And smile.”
Without waiting to see if she followed his orders, he opened the door and stepped through it. He did not hesitate a moment—but then, he was used to Portals by now.
The doorway held only darkness, and it was as if he had been devoured by that darkness the moment he stepped across the threshold. Rena had never actually used this or any other Portal before, although Lorryn who had, told her it was nothing to be afraid of. Still, something inside her quailed before the lightless emptiness of it, and she would have stepped back except for the presence of the guards behind her—
—who are probably there to make sure I don’t turn and bolt back to my room!
Lady Viridina seemed oblivious to her daughter’s fear, she didn’t even hesitate, simply followed her husband’s lead, stooped and gathered her train up gracefully, and stepped across the threshold into nothingness.
Rena froze.
One of the guards cleared his throat ostentatiously. She started, and turned to look at him, knowing her eyes were probably as wide and frightened as a rabbit’s.
“If my lady would please to follow the Lady Viridina?” he said, in a voice harsh with many years of shouting orders. His bland but implacable expression left no doubt in her mind that he had been ordered to pick her up and carry her across if she balked.
That indignity, at least, she would spare herself. She bent as her mother had, though with none of Viridina’s grace, picked up the end of her train in hands that were damp with sweat, and crushed the silk to her meager chest. Then, with her eyes shut firmly, so she would not have to see what she stepped into, she crossed the threshold.
Myre took a great deal of satisfaction in delivering Rena’s orders to Tanhya Leis, a particularly nasty piece of blond work that Myre had been longing to get stirred into mischief for some time now.
Mischief, after all, was a time-honored draconid tradition, and this was one tradition Myre saw no reason to abandon.
Tanhya had been banished from the harem for deliberate sabotage, and now was trying to make everyone else’s life miserable, engaging in histrionics and trickery in an effort to regain the comforts of her “rightful” place. She wouldn’t get it, of course; she was far too common for the tastes of Lord Tylar and she probably would have been disposed of soon anyway, but nothing would convince her otherwise. In fact, she was quite certain the place of Chief Concubine (now occupied by a slim and dignified brunette) was hers by right. Where she got that particular illusion, Myre had no idea—but forcing her to spend her evening cooling her heels in Lady Sheyrena’s dressing room should give her plenty leisure to nurse her grievances. With any luck, she’d have come up with some plan or other to rid herself of the obstacles in her path that would be even more entertaining than her last attempt at eliminating Keri Eisa—the one that had gotten her banished in the first place.