“She didn’t do it,” snarled Blazeann. “She’s done it at every stop this season, she’s hardly been sober the whole time, and now when there’s someone here to see, she doesn’t do it. Curse her.”
“I think Impi may suspect Glisten’s reasons for being here,” said Chatoyant. “He’s no fool.”
“Curse him. Curse him, curse him, curse him!”
Crystal light flashed and something smashed on the ground.
“Will you kindly not wreck the place?” said Chatoyant. “No, don’t throw anything else.” Another crystal flashed through the linen spread and something clicked softly onto a table surface.
“‘Call in the Elders,’ you said,” snarled Blazeann, through what sounded like clenched teeth. “‘They’ll see things for what they are,’ you said. Well, they’re not going to see anything, are they? And in the meantime, that mad old rat wrecks the place and that man raids the family’s coffers and fills the house with his kin.”
Mad old rat. Nice way to refer to your mother, I thought.
“So what other bright ideas do you have, cousin?”
“If she’s not going to overindulge on purpose, she will have to be made to overindulge by mistake,” said Toy. “Here...” There was a rustling of paper. “This is that ghost powder called Open. Slip all of it into tomorrow’s smokeweed and Splen’ll fall over during the next blessing.”
The blood rushed to my head at her words. I almost yelled out a protest. How could they?
Blazeann let out a thoughtful huff. I could almost feel her shoulders relaxing.
“Lucient might notice,” she said. “He often mixes Mama’s pipes.”
“That’s why it’s dust, and why tonight you mix it carefully into the rest of the smoke potion and give the whole thing a good shake,” said Chatoyant, as if explaining to a child. “Honestly, darling, can’t you work that out for yourself?”
“Hmm,” said Blazeann.
I heard Chatoyant’s feet gliding away towards the roof top stairs again. She was probably doing her Salute to the Setting Sun. Chatoyant was very assiduous in her religious observances, and believed in the discipline of mind and body. She went on about it often enough. “Oh, and by the way, you owe me twenty lumins for that Dew of Edilon you just broke,” she added.
Blazeann was moving too, though she was going for the stairs.
“Twenty lumins?” she said, in a voice almost as nonchalant as Chatoyant’s. “Don’t be penny pinching, darling. When we get rid of Impi, all of us will be getting much bigger allowances. You’ll be able to bathe in Dew of Edilon.”
The moment Blazeann was out of the room, I saw the glow of magic again and heard a slushy crunching sound. When Chatoyant had gone back upstairs and I was able to climb out from under the bed, I saw that she had gathered up the broken bottle and spilled ointment and slopped the lot into a bowl on the perfume table. No doubt when she had finished her precious exercises, she would spend some time separating the skin lotion from the rubbish and put it in another bottle. I could imagine her having that level of magical control; and that level of thriftiness too. No doubt she’d still extract the twenty lumins from Blazeann as well. Rat. Child of a dog.
I was deeply tempted to knock the bowl back over—no, to steal it and toss it down the jacks. But I kept my hot red anger in check and scampered off as quickly and quietly as I could.
Curse those two rats for planning to ruin tomorrow’s Blessing. Did they have no conscience, no sense of responsibility to the mundanes who relied on our family? Think of the omen if the Matriarch collapsed during the ceremony. The mundanes would be so shattered the harvest would probably fail.
And tomorrow Splendance would be blessing all the new babies. Bright Lady! Imagine what a blighted life such children would lead. They would be marked forever as unlucky children, and maybe their children, too. Damn the mages. Why did they have to involve the mundanes in their little political schemes? I had to put a stop to this. But how...?
Dusk was falling. Up here in the Eyrie, the candles had been lit and servants were rushing in and out of rooms carrying robes and buckets of hot water as everyone dressed for dinner. I could hear Lumina shrieking at some unfortunate. I wondered if any of our girls would be brave enough to take service with her this year, and if they would last or come trailing home after a couple of weeks with a black eye like the last brave one had.
As I hurried past Auntie Splendance’s room, I heard Lucient’s voice call out my name. I stopped and peered tentatively round the door frame. Splendance’s bedchamber, the second biggest in the house, was hung with ivory and blue, and Auntie Splen was lounging on her bed, sharing a long dreamsmoke pipe with Great Uncle Nate. Lucient was packing another from a blue and white jar on the dressing table. The men were also wetting their throats with glasses of a gold-coloured alcohol. Honestly, the ability of my family to absorb befuddling substances never ceased to astonish me. Mixing drink and dreamsmoke would have left me dribbling, but to them it was merely a little pre-dinner nerve toner.
“Darling, we’ll sit together at dinner, won’t we? And you’ll come and spend the evening with me again?” asked Lucient.
I smiled and nodded, though inwardly I sighed. How was I going to do something about Blazeann and Chatoyant if I sat in Lucient’s room all night? My eye fell on the jar on Splen’s dressing table, no doubt the very jar that Blazeann would later pollute with the ghost drug. The sight sparked something in my brain. I knew how to foil the plot. And Lucient would be the perfect ally.
“Of course, Lord Lucient,” I cried, giving him a big hug and a kiss on the cheek as if we really were having a Blessing affair.
By the time I’d washed, dressed, fussed over Katti—who was curled up on my bed and seemed to be healing well—resolved a heated dispute between Hilly and Tane over whether we needed to cook ten or fifty extra rissoles after the feast (“What about the late night snackers?” wailed Tane, as if the mages might die of hunger over the lack of a few rissoles) and scampered downstairs for dinner, I’d formulated a plan. Find out when Blazeann drugged Auntie Splen’s smokeweed and replace it as quickly as possible with some clean weed. Splen would keep the weed close all night so the switch was most likely to take place when the women were assembled upstairs for the Blessing prayers.
My biggest problem had been getting some clean smokeweed to replace the polluted stuff. Smokeweed was way beyond the means of us at Willow-in-the-Mist. But as I had hoped, Lucient had plenty and when I whispered to him what I heard in the Retiring Room, he was furious and more than happy to supply me.
“Those rotten rats,” he kept muttering. I don’t think he cared much about the failure of the Blessing, but he was clearly excited to thwart Toy.
The other benefit of confiding in Lucient was that after dinner, he sent his extremely efficient valet, Busy, to watch Auntie Splen’s room. Instead of ducking round the balcony trying to avoid being seen, I was able to relax in Lucient’s room, drink a delicious after-dinner digestive and listen to the singing and playing of his heavily pregnant little maid, who had a divine voice and was clearly the apple of Lucy’s eye.
“If only I was mundane and could pair-bond with Sharlee,” sighed Lucient into my ear, leaving me in little doubt that they were lovers. I wondered cynically if Sharlee would have wanted to pair-bond with a mere mundane, but she seemed fond of my cousin.