“However, the dancers are not technically arriving until the day after the festival starts, so you’ll first have to pose as a House Nyx servant.”
Laila nodded tightly. “Makes sense—”
“No! It doesn’t! Why does she have to pretend to be an Order servant?” demanded Tristan, rising to his feet. “She’s not part of the Order! None of us are!”
“Tristan, my love,” said Laila with dangerous calm. “If you get in the way of a woman’s battle, you’ll get in the way of her sword.”
Tristan sat back down, his face flushed.
“Oh, sosweet!” said Hypnos. “You don’t want her tainted by association with me, I assume. Fair enough. However, it would be unwise for you to smuggle all the tools you might require in one travel excursion. Far better, I believe, to separate the burden. What’s the saying? Don’t put all the baskets on your head?”
Enrique rolled his eyes. “It’s ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket.’”
“I hate eggs. I like my version better,” said Hypnos. He pulled out the next golden card. “The next invitation goes to our government official, Claude Faucher. And, don’t worry, every guest is required to wear a mask, and as far as I know, I am the only member of the Order who cares to know what you look like.”
Séverin took his invitation, pushing down twinges of relief, guilt, and, though he hated it, outrage. All this time and all that he’d done, and the Order had never once looked his way. His guilt was sharper, though. His mother’s Algerian bloodline showed only subtly in his features, but otherwise he could hide in plain sight as a Frenchman. Others could not.
“And finally, an invitation for the Russian Baroness Sophia Ossokina.”
Zofia looked around the room even though Hypnos held the card out to her. “Me?”
“Oui.”
“I’m to be aRussianbaroness?”
Zofia might be wandering in a cloud when it came to politics, butunder Tzar Alezander, Russia had no love for Jews, andshehad no love for Russia.
“You’ll be grand,” said Hypnos, tossing the invitation into her lap.
With nothing left in his hands, Hypnos glanced down at them, unsure of what to do next. He clasped them behind his back. It looked painfully childish. In the light, his emerald-studded shoes looked less grand and more gaudy. Everything about him had been so carefully put together. But it didn’t matter how well one’s clothes fit if the skin didn’t.
Not one of them looked at Hypnos. Or thanked him. Séverin understood that. He saw how each invitation flew in the face of each person’s self-image. But he also understood how Hypnos had seen the scenario, how he had worked to ensure that each person could access the Château de la Lune without incident.
“When you are who they expect you to be, they never look too closely. If you’re furious, let it be fuel,” Séverin said, looking each of them in the eye. “Just don’t forget that enough power and influence makes anyone impossible to look away from. And then they can’t help but see you.”
He didn’t meet Hypnos’s gaze, but he saw the lines of his shoulders relax.
“Now, as for the Château,” he said, bringing up the blueprints by mnemo hologram. The others leaned forward eagerly.
Hypnos’s jaw dropped. “How’d you getthose?”
“I have my sources,” said Laila, smiling.
“Part of her useful legion of lovesick men,” said Séverin quickly. He didn’t want to linger on the pining men in Laila’s arsenal. “Now, the mansion itself is nothing we haven’t seen in the past. Two salons, grand banquet hall, kitchen, dining room, chapel, crypt, and boot room. The matriarch of House Kore commissioned particular Forgedstaircases that lead to the servants’ quarters, which will be challenging.”
The Château itself was situated on nearly fifty hectares of land, and surrounded by a collection of smaller buildings. Squares of purple marked the gardens: the winter and spring orchard. A star marked the observatory. A leaf marked the greenhouse—a sprawling building—and a handful of blue circles marked the estate fountains. A redXmarked the library. Their target for where the Horus Eye was held.
“These are the core features of the estate,” said Séverin. “Tristan, the only one of us who has actually been to House Kore’s country estate, noted that aspects such as the tent arrangements and entertainment pavilions change by the season. These”—he pointed at the alternating black and red dashes haloing the buildings—“mark the positions of the hired guards. A total of one hundred men and women with rifles. Every eight hours, the House is paying for the guards to be switched out. Twenty incoming. Twenty outgoing. Presumably so that no one stays long enough to commit any unsavory acts.”
Enrique whistled. “One hundred guards? I don’t mind leaving parties with holes in my memory. My body, however, is a little different. I’m not trying to end up in the catacombs.”
“You’re assuming the rifles will be loaded,” said Séverin.
“They won’t be?”
“Only half, according to our man in the police force. Guess what two places they’re guarding the most?”
“Library and greenhouse,” guessed Zofia.
