“Do you think…” Elswyth started.
“You’re the botanist. Surely you’re aware of recessive traits and how they function. If it helps, the rest of the Florissants are as pale as her father.”
Elswyth grimaced. She watched as the man Petunia had been speaking to drifted away, losing interest. She was still speaking when he left, and her look of excitement faded into a frown.
“I doubt she even knows,” Silas said, “but everyone else does. Beautiful she may be, but no respectable family will pollute their line with bastard blood.”
Elswyth risked a look at Silas, searching for a reaction. He merely stared at Petunia pityingly, his eyes dark and serious.
“Now: Miss Calanthe Thistle, in the gray gown, standing by Lord Barnett.”
Elswyth scanned the room. Calanthe fidgeted with her wineglasswhile she talked to some elderly lord. Her smile was strained, and her fingers kept drifting toward her hair.
“Premature warping,” Silas whispered. “Nothing serious, of course, only cosmetic. But rumor has it she makes a servant trim her growths before every ball. If you look closely you can see the stumps on her scalp where the branches have been clipped.”
“That’s awful—to lose control of one’s floromancy so young,” she said.
“Yes, perhaps,” Silas said. “It would be quite tragic if she weren’t such a reprehensible person.”
Elswyth turned to him. “She is suffering from a disease.”
“And that absolves her? She dismisses all her servants without a reference once she’s done with them. All but assures they never work in another noble house. Their families go hungry, and Calanthe gets to keep her little secret. The saddest part is that everyone already knows.”
Elswyth watched the girl—lovely, blond, well bred. Seemingly so innocent. “That’s monstrous,” she said.
Silas smiled, eyes tracing over hers. “We are surrounded by monsters, Elswyth. The sooner you learn that, the safer you shall be.”
“I do not believe that. Good exists everywhere, as does evil, with the poor and the rich alike.”
“One could argue otherwise. That to have privilege and power—like everyone at this ball—and to not tirelessly use that power to do good is, in effect, a form of evil. Sometimes evil is the things we do, and sometimes evil is the things wefailto do.”
Elswyth looked around the party at the beautiful girls fussing over their gowns, at their fathers drinking and eating, at their mothers flattering and posturing. She thought of the sick andstarving in the Rows and how no one, not once that evening, even deigned to mention them.
“Then that would of course include the two of us, Sir Silas,” Elswyth said.
“Of course it does. That’s the difference between us. I don’t pretend to be good.”
He was staring intently at her, his amber eyes serious. Their gaze locked for a moment, and something passed between them, a frisson that carried up her spine and through her chest. She could feel his hard body beneath his suit, pressed so firmly against hers.
She looked away, her cheeks burning.
“If what you say is true,” Elswyth said, “then the existence of power is the existence of evil. One cannot exist without the other, and those with the most power, no matter how they wield it, are inherently the most evil. I wonder, then, what that says abouther.”
Elswyth nodded subtly toward the queen. Viscaria was speaking with the prime minister, but her rheumy eyes lingered on Elswyth and Silas.
“You do not need to muse philosophically about Viscaria’s evil, Elswyth. I assure you, it is quite concrete.”
“Wearing a crown does not make her evil,” Elswyth said. “Cruel as she may be.”
“Perhaps the crown does not. But her actions do. Famine in India, opium in China, massacres in Africa… even the poverty and violence in her own city.”
“She is a figurehead, Silas. Those things are the fault of the empire, yes, but the empire is a more complicated beast than a single woman. Those atrocities were committed under different political regimes, at least five prime ministers…”
“And yet she is the only constant. For almost a hundred yearsshe’s sat on that throne, whispering in the ears of politicians and generals. Her power might be subtle, but it is power, and Viscaria is the spider at the center of the empire’s web. They do not call it the Whispering Throne for its branches alone.”
Elswyth looked to the great elderwood throne where Viscaria sat. Thousands of white leaves scraped against each other, barely audible behind the music, like the distant voices of ghosts.
“It is not so simple,” Elswyth said.
