I nodded at Mathilde, agreeing, though the prospect felt cumbersome, and the hour was late.
“Yes, but…” Rosie looked down at her lap. “The one I want to dance with isn’t interested anymore.”
“You don’t know that,” Mathilde protested.
Her sister gathered her skirt in her hands. “Should I have worn blue?”
Rosie’s wet eyes and dashed hopes pained me, enough that I could set aside my own disappointments. I took one of her hands. “Oh, darling. He was always going to dance with other women. That doesn’t diminish his interest in you. He could hardly dance with one person for the entire night. And he picked you first. After his cousin, that is.”
“There’s not a girl here in a prettier dress than you,” Mathilde offered.
But it only caused Rosie’s tears to spill over. “I could not bear it if he chooses her.”
“He will not,” I said, but I had a suspicion that making the promise would undermine all my others.
When we came back into the ballroom, Elin and Simeon were still partnered on the dance floor. The mirrors reflected them back and forth, so that, from our vantage point, we were surrounded by infinite Elinsand princes—a glass ball that extended to eternity. The dissonance of watching my hopes fulfilled, but with the wrong daughter, was like listening to a song I knew played in the wrong key.
By morning it was the talk of the kingdom: The prince had danced with Elin, and only Elin, for the rest of the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Early in the morning, I went to Lucy. She was still asleep on her perch—shoulders dropped, eyes closed, wings crossed over her back, one foot invisibly tucked up inside of her feathers. Such peace. Utter stillness. The light just breaking, the interior of the mews dark. If I found my falcon spectacular in the midst of a hunt—the thrill of a fast-paced stoop, fledged body hurtling through air—in slumber, she was breathtaking. A statue’s stillness belying predatory might. I wanted to reach out and touch her, to run two fingers along her feathered breast, but some inner hawk’s sense alerted her to my presence, and she was up, head high, staring at me with flinty eyes.
“Morning,” I said, mildly.
She blinked at me.
“I see you’ve not made your castings.” I gestured down at the ground, which was empty save for the chalky excrement beneath her perch. “And you know very well I cannot take you out to hunt until you do.”
Lucy fluffed the downy feathers of her neck.
“We’ll keep up your carriage, then, and go for a short walk.” I nodded, as if she’d suggested the idea. Using one hand to untie the falconer’sknot that kept her on the perch, I extended the other—gloved—and she hopped on, mantling her wings for a moment before settling on the gauntlet. Properly secured, she clenched her formidable talons tightly on the leather.
Back outside in the gloam, we went along the edge of the orchard. Lucy’s face turned to a sky that threatened rain. We walked until I could see Moussa’s coach dimly lit in the trees ahead of us. I slowed and stopped and looked over at my bird. She looked back at me and, steadily, turned her head sideways, then completely upside down, so her beak was to the sky.
“Lucy!” I said, in delight. She had not played in such a way since she was young. Without taking my eyes off her, I reached out and plucked a dead leaf from the nearest tree. She righted herself and took it in her beak in one swift movement, crunching on the foliage, and then, after a few noisy munches, tossed it into the air. The pieces fell around my feet in a tiny cascade.
Enthralled, I plucked a second leaf and watched as Lucy repeated the game. The crunching, then the scattering of the pieces.
“You are just what I needed,” I told her. Less enthusiastically, I reverted my gaze back to the jongleur’s camp. “Now, let us hasten to conclude this whole affair.”
When we got a bit closer, I saw that Moussa’s coach had been turned into a poor facsimile of a wealthy man’s carriage. He had used gold paint to make the wooden frame look gilded. And the curtains and drapes I had seen from a distance were just sheets of canvas that had been tacked inside of the windows. Moussa was wiping paint from the door of the carriage, removing a poorly drawn coat of arms.
“It is amazing,” I said, when I was close enough, keeping Lucy near my body, “what can be passed off as opulent in the absence of informed comparison.”
“And with darkness as an aid. I added apples,” he told me, gesturing to the heraldic symbols in front of him. “For the apples, of course. And a bird for Lucy.” He nodded to the falcon. “Morning, Luce.”
“No one has apples in their family crest.” I frowned. “And Elin already has a crest. It’s on the lintels.”
“This isyourfamily crest,” he explained.
“Moussa.” I exhaled. “How could you?”
After we’d gotten back the night before, I’d waited until I heard his carriage return. He’d driven Elin all the way up the drive to the front door, and she had exited and slipped inside. I didn’t leave my room to welcome or confront her, but it was only after they were home that I allowed myself to sleep.
Moussa dropped his rag and stood, slowly, a hand on his back.
“Do not give me that routine now,” I scolded. “You should have discussed it with me!”
