She held out her hands for the slithery armfuls of satin.
“You can change in the little room beneath the stairs,” Trey offered, looking relieved. “It’s a long way back to your rooms.”
“And a longer one back to your own home,” Jenny pointed out, her hand on the latch of the concealed door. “Did you send for this specially, then?”
Trey regarded her with guileless surprise. “Oh, no. When Zyerne knew Gareth was returning, she told us all we’d come here for a welcome dinner: my brother Bond and myself, the Beautiful Isolde, Caspar of Walfrith and Merriwyn of Longcleat, and all the others. I always bring two or three different dinner gowns. I mean, I didn’t know two days ago what I might want to wear.”
She was perfectly serious, so Jenny repressed her smile.
She went on, “It’s a little long, but I thought it looked like your colors. Here in the south, only servants wear brown.”
“Ah.” Jenny touched the folds of her own gown, which caught a cinnamon edge in the glow from the antechamber’s lamps. “Thank you. Trey, very much—and Trey? Could I ask yet another favor?”
“Of course,” the girl said generously. “I can help...”
“I think I can manage. John—Lord Aversin—will be down in a few moments...” She paused, thinking of the somewhat old-fashioned but perfectly decent brown velvet of his doublet and indoor cloak. But it was something about which she could do nothing, and she shook her head. “Ask him to wait, if you would.”
The room beneath the stairs was small, but showed evidence of hasty toilettes and even hastier romantic assignations. As she changed clothes, Jenny could hear the courtiers assembling in the hall to await the summons for dinner. Occasionally she could catch some of the muted bustling from the servants in the dining hall beyond the antechamber, laying the six cloths and undercover so necessary, according to Gareth, to the proper conduct of a meal; now and then a maid would laugh and be rebuked by the butler. Nearer, soft voices gossiped and teased:
“... well, really, what can you say about someone who still wears those awful smocked sleeves—and she’s so proud of them, too!”... “Yes, but in broad daylight? Outdoors? And with her husband?”... “Well, of course it’s all a plot by the gnomes...” “Did you hear the joke about why gnomes have flat noses?”
Closer, a man’s voice laughed, and asked, “Gareth, are you sure you found the right man? I mean, you didn’t mistake the address and fetch someone else entirely?”
“Er—well—” Gareth sounded torn between his loyalty to his friends and his dread of mockery. “I suppose you’d call him a bit barbaric. Bond...”
“A bit!” The man Bond laughed richly. “That is to say that the dragon has caused ‘a bit’ of trouble, or that old Polycarp tried to murder you ‘a bit.’ And you’re taking him to Court? Father will be pleased.”
“Gareth?” There was sudden concern in Zyerne’s lilting voice. “You did get his credentials, didn’t you? Membership in the Guild of Dragonsbanes, Proof of Slaughter...”
“Testimonials from Rescued Maidens,” Bond added. “Or is that one of his rescued maidens he has with him?”
Above her head. Jenny felt rather than heard a light descending tread on the steps. It was the tread of a man raised to caution and it stopped, as her own had stopped for a moment, at the point on the stairs just behind where the light fell from the room beyond. As she hastened to pull on the stiffened petticoats, she could feel his silence in the entwining shadows of the latticed staircase.
“Of course!” Bond was saying, in the voice of a man suddenly enlightened. “He has to carry her about with him because nobody in the Winterlands can read a written testimonial! It’s similar to the barter system, you see...”
“Well,” another woman’s voice purred, “if you ask me, she isn’t much of a maiden.”
With teasing naughtiness, Zyerne giggled. “Perhaps it wasn’t much of a dragon.”
“She must be thirty if she’s a day,” someone else added.
“Now, my dear,” Zyerne chided, “let us not be catty. That rescue was a long time ago.”
In the general laugh. Jenny was not sure, but she thought she heard the footsteps overhead soundlessly retreat. Zyerne went on, “I do think, if this Dragonsbane of yours was going to cart a woman along, he might at least have picked a pretty one, instead of someone who looks like a gnome—a short little thing with all that hair. She scarcely needs a veil for modesty.”
“That’s probably why she doesn’t wear one.”
“If you’re going to be charitable, my dear...” “She isn’t...” began Gareth’s voice indignantly. “Oh, Gareth, don’t take everything so seriously!” Zyerne’s laughter mocked him. “It’s such a bore, darling, besides giving you wrinkles. There. Smile. Really, it’s all in jest—a man who can’t take a little joking is only a short step from far more serious sins, like eating his salad with a fish fork. I say, you don’t think...”
Her hands shaking with a queer, feelingless anger, Jenny straightened her veils. The mere touch of the stiffened gauze fired a new spurt of irritation through her, annoyance at them and that same sense of bafflement she had feltbefore. The patterns of human relationships interested her, and this one, shot through with a web of artificiality and malice, explained a good deal about Gareth. But the childishness of it quelled her anger, and she was able to slip soundlessly from her cubbyhole and stand among them for several minutes before any of them became aware of her presence.
Lamps had been kindled in the hall. In the midst of a small crowd of admiring courtiers, Zyerne seemed to sparkle bewitchingly under a powdering of diamonds and lace. “I’ll tell you,” she was saying. “However much gold Gareth was moved to offer the noble Dragonsbane as a reward, I think we can offer him a greater one. We’ll show him a few of the amenities of civilization. How does that sound? He slays our dragon and we teach him how to eat with a fork?”
There was a good deal of appreciative laughter at this. Jenny noticed the girl Trey joining in, but without much enthusiasm. The man standing next to her must be her brother Bond, she guessed; he had his sister’s fine-boned prettiness, set off by fair hair of which one lovelock, traildown onto a lace collar, was dyed blue. Beside his graceful slimness, Gareth looked—and no doubt felt—gangly, overgrown, and miserably out of place; his expression was one of profound unhappiness and embarrassment.
It might have been merely because he wasn’t wearing his spectacles—they were doubtless hideously unfashionable—but he was looking about him at the exquisite carvings of the rafters, at the familiar glimmer of lamplit silk and stiffened lace, and at the faces of his friends, with a weary confusion, as if they had all become strangers to him.
Even now. Bond was saying, “And is your Dragonsbane as great as Silkydrawers the Magnificent, who slew the Crimson-and-Purple-Striped Dragon in the Golden Woods back in the Reign of Potpourri the Well-Endowed—or was it Kneebiter the Ineffectual? Do enlighten me, Prince.”
But before the wretched Gareth could answer, Zyerne said suddenly, “My dears!” and came hurrying to Jenny, her small white hands stretched from the creamy lace of her sleeve ruffles. The smile on her face was as sweet and welcoming as if she greeted a long-lost friend. “My dearest Lady Jenny—forgive me for not seeing you sooner! You look exquisite! Did darling Trey lend you her black-and-silver? How very charitable of her...”
A bell rang in the dining room, and the minstrels in the gallery began to play. Zyerne took Jenny’s arm to lead in the guests—first women, then men, after the custom of the south—to dinner. Jenny glanced quickly around the hall, looking for John but knowing he would not be there.