“Are you sure?” she asked.
“I have made my decision, Mother. I hope you will accept it.”
He had expected a ferocious dressing-down. A furious Styrian tirade. Or, worse yet, the deadly gliding off followed by days of icy silence. But all the Queen Dowager of the Union did was cock her head on one side and calmly consider him.
“You have grown up, Orso. A bittersweet moment for a mother.”
“One you were no doubt hoping would arrive a dozen years ago.”
“Better late than never. The time comes when you realise the world is not yours any more. The best you can do is pass it on to your children.” She touched him very gently on the cheek. “You understand why I was always so demanding, don’t you? Because I know you have it in you to make a great king.”
“Your approval means… everything to me. It always has. And there is one thing I need you to do while you are here. One thing with which I trust no one else. Certainly not myself.”
“Name it.”
“Find me a wife.” He counted the points off on his fingers. “I only ask that she be beautiful, tasteful, passionate, cunning and superbly bred. And Carlot, make sure she has a sense of humour.”
Carlot waved it away. “That would only be wasted on you.”
A flicker of interest had crossed his mother’s face. “A Styrian bride?”
“You know as well as I do that they make the best women in the world here. Speaking of which, has our guest arrived?”
“She has.” And Carlot gave a loud clap.
The door was swung open to reveal a tall woman in extremely impressive middle age. Orso had not seen her in ten years, but she looked every bit as elegant as the day she left Adua. If there was anyone in the world who rivalled his mother for deportment, after all, it was her oldest friend, and far more than a friend, Countess Shalere.
“Orso, you beautiful creature!” she said. “It has been far too long.”
“Countess.” Orso snapped his heels together and gave an extravagant bow. “Or should I say sorceress, since you have not aged a day.”
“And people say you have no talents!” She clasped his head and kissed him on both cheeks in a waft of perfume that took him straight back to being a boy. “I swear there are no better liars in the Circle of the World.”
Orso’s mother had not taken her eyes from Shalere since she came into the room. “This is… a surprise.”
“A pleasant one, I hope.” Shalere raised one brow. “I have been waiting for you for a long time.”
“I… told you not to do that.”
“Everyone must be disobeyed occasionally.”
A naïve observer might have thought it an insignificant meeting. But Orso knew his mother far better than that. He saw the slight parting of her lips, the slight glimmer at the corners of her eyes, the slight movement of her collarbones with her quick breath.
For her, that was a whirlwind of passion.
“Well,” said Carlot, making for the door and jerking her head significantly towards it. “I have some… things to do.”
“As do I.” Orso felt suddenly as if he was intruding on something painfully intimate. “Immensely important… things.”
No one acknowledged him. He glanced back as Carlot drew him through the door by his elbow. Long enough to see Shalere had taken both of his mother’s hands, their eyes fixed on each other, unwavering. His mother was smiling. Her face lit up with it. He wondered how long it had been since he saw her smile like that. Since he saw her smile at all.
He had been desperate to escape her smothering influence for years. Now that he had finally done it, he had to push the door shut before anyone noticed the melodramatic quivering of his lip.
All Tastes, No Judgements
If there was one thing Leo valued, it was honesty, and Cardotti’s House of Leisure might’ve been the most dishonest place in the world. A place where everything was pretending to be something else.
It was decorated like the palace of some dissolute emperor, all fake marble columns and false velvet, lulling music and forced laughter, clinking glass and whispered secrets. There were bronzes of naked people, paintings of naked people, colossal urns decorated with naked people. If it was possible to make nakedness boring, the decorators of Cardotti’s had managed it.
Women glided about the hallway with high shoes and hungry smiles, with hair piled and twisted, with clinging clothes of shimmering pearl-white and glistening oil-black. Clothes that gave tricking glimpses of thigh and shoulder through slits and slashes, showed the laces and buckles of elaborate underwear.
“By the dead,” muttered Glaward.
“Very much so,” croaked Antaup, staring around with eyes wide in his mask.
Everybody wore one. A Sipanese tradition, like fog, deceit and the cock-rot. Masks of crushed crystal and lace, leering devils and porcelain dolls. Glaward’s was a whale, appropriately enough, and Jurand’s a bird, Jin’s a gatehouse and Antaup’s a unicorn complete with crystal prong. Leo had, of course, a lion. What else? It had felt foolish when he put it on but now, among so many others, it started to feel dangerous. No one knowing who anyone was. No one having to take responsibility for what they did. No one bound by the usual rules, or by any rules at all. The thought made him excited and worried both at once. His palms itched from it.
A woman swayed towards them across the mosaic floor, snake-hipped, feathers fluttering at her shoulders, holding long arms out in a showman’s flourish. “Welcome to Cardotti’s House of Leisure, my lords!” she crooned in a voice overripe with Styrian song.
“Who says we’re lords?” asked Glaward, grinning.
“We treat every visitor as if they are.” She brushed him under the chin with a gloved fingertip, then looked at Leo. “You are the Young Lion?”
“Some people call me that.”
“It is our honour to entertain so famous a hero.”
He would’ve enjoyed the compliment more if he’d felt she was telling the truth. If he’d felt she was capable of it. “Well, thank you—”
“King Jappo is most keen to speak with you but… otherwise engaged just now. The entertainments of Cardotti’s stand entirely at your disposal in the meantime.”
“I like the sound o’ that,” said Jin, giving Leo a punch on the arm that sent his weight onto his bad side and caused him a twinge of pain. It had been a mistake to walk here. Antaup’s map had led them wrong three times and the damn leg was hurting worse than ever.
“Here at Cardotti’s, we cater for all tastes and make no judgements.” The greeter led them past a half-open door, three figures lurking by lamplight beyond. They were dressed, or perhaps undressed, in much the same way as the women, but they were decidedly not women. Stubbled jaws. Chiselled bodies. By the dead, did he glimpse a muscular pair of buttocks in the shadows? “We stand ready to indulge every whim.”
“Perhaps we’ll just gamble to begin with,” snapped Leo, disgusted. And strangely hot around the ears.
She led them into a panelled room noisy with the flutter of cards, the click of dice, the whirr of the lucky wheel, surely the unluckiest invention of all history for its players. A band with masks like leering faces stroked and tickled and kissed out music which managed to sound somehow dirty. Masked guards lurked. Masked men pushed gambling chips wearily through pools of light stained by coloured Visserine glass. Masked women hung upon them, giggled at tiresome comments, swayed with the music and caressed old grotesques as if they never saw such beautiful gallants.