Her gaze catches on me as on a hook. She gestures to one of the less glowingly dressed women and pulls her close, a hand curled possessively around the other woman’s arm as she speaks to her.
Why have I been so stupid as to stare? Praying the wall will hide me, I head for the far entrance, but before I reach it I am intercepted by the steward whose dour face kills all hope in my heart.
“You stupid country girls.” She pinches the underside of my arm so hard I choke down a yelp. “You were expressly told not to walk through the atrium. In these kitchen clothes as well, the worst sort of alley dress. Lady Menoë is displeased you have spoiled the efforts we made to have all the decorations exactly as she wishes. Believe me, you will regret you came to her attention. You have lost your pay for the week. Be in my office at dawn. What is your name?”
“Coriander,” I squeak in a voice not my own.
Mercifully she releases me to scurry on my way.
I make it out to the courtyard just as the atrium swells with the excitement and noise of more arrivals. When I glance back, I catch a glimpse of Lord Gargaron accompanied by my father. Unseen musicians sing the famous prayer for victory from the play The Firebird’s Revenge, which ends with the beleaguered general defeating all his evil foes, although, in typical fashion, he dies just before the messenger, who is his lost son, arrives to announce that the enemy has been utterly vanquished.
I flee past the courtyard and hurry through the bustling servants’ wing, where I find a random surface to place the tray. It is a relief to tug the smothering mask off my face, although I leave it pushed atop my hair just in case. A woman waves me down.
“Here, girl, take this to the kitchen.”
She hands me a bucket brimming with glistening oysters still in their shells and stinking of brine. I wander dazedly to the kitchens, gripped by the scents of baking bread and roasting fowl, the platters of fruit carved into the shapes of winged dragons and horned lions, and the sculptures of dates and honey built into miniature facsimiles of famous buildings like Saryenia’s lighthouse or the Gem Gardens of ancient Saro, where the last emperor was murdered beneath a flowering peach tree.
Steam wafts over me like the breath of the firebird. Smoke from grilling meat stings my eyes. I have no idea what to do with the oysters. Just as I have identified a table where I can stow them and flee, another woman accosts me, takes the bucket, and directs me to a table where girls are chopping onions, leeks, radishes, and cucumbers. I am set to peeling grapes, which a woman arranges in pleasing patterns on lacquered trays. My head is thick and my limbs move as if encased in lead. An anchor weighs down my heart. Seeing my father has set me as into a stormy sea, tugged this way and that but ever caught on the cable that ties me to him.
Can I really save them? Is it possible to unbury the dead?
How long I stand with the smell of food making me ravenous I do not know. But when a procession of young men in formal skirts and jackets appear to carry away the trays of grapes, figs, and cut melons, I wake as from sleep. Fruit marks the last course of the feast. Soon Kalliarkos, Thynos, and Inarsis will make an excuse to leave. If I’m not in the palm grove, Kalliarkos may decide to prove himself by sneaking in to find me, and that would be a disaster.
Fortune favors me. I am marshaled into a group given baked fish wrapped in lettuce to feed the wagoners making ready to return to Saryenia. Outside, some wagons are already leaving in a rumble of dust and noise. I hop onto the back of one as if I am part of the cavalcade and gulp down the delicious fish in its moist wrapping. With such a vast procession departing, the guards take not the least notice of me as I lick the last lingering taste off my fingers.
The wagons roll along the beaten earth lane, their way lit by young men pacing alongside with lanterns. I scan the heavens. The Four Sleeping Sisters have already risen. The moment the shadowy ranks of date palms come into view I jump off. Not until the procession has faded into the night do I run into the palms. To my relief, Kalliarkos and Thynos await me.
Kalliarkos hurries to greet me, grasping my hands and staring so intently at me that I can’t take my gaze off his dark eyes. “I thought you were captured! I was about to go in and rescue you!”
A spark of brilliant joy surges up from my weary, grief-stricken heart. I squeeze his fingers a little more tightly, enough to make him really notice how strong my grip is. “That’s why I had to hurry. I was afraid you would run in to rescue me and get caught and then I would have to rescue you from your rescue of me.”
He laughs, glances at Thynos, and defiantly plants a quick kiss on my mouth. “You never stop competing, do you?”
