“I need a partner for this one, darling,” Mathilda said as he caught it in his and raised it to his lips. “And if you won’t dance with me, it’ll have to be Tiph here, and that would be a scandal.”
“Delia can make me dance in public, but only at home on our own barony and when she’s not nine months pregnant,” Tiphaine d’Ath said. “Besides, how did our Lady Regent put it…”
She nodded towards the spot where the Lady Regent and a few other dowagers and lords with a good deal of gray in their hair sat, with pages offering tiny crystal glasses of liqueurs or brandy snifters on trays.
“…ah! Modern Protectorate culture doesn’t handle gender confusion well. Which reminds me, since it’s from her private stash I could use another cognac. Lioncel…no, serve His Majesty first.”
A tow-haired young squire slid forward noiselessly and poured for them both. Lady Death, as she was commonly known, was dressed to fit her nickname tonight; her tight hose were onyxine black, as was the sleeveless neck-to-thigh jerkin of soft chamois, fastened up the front to the throat with ties of black silk and jet. Her soft Court shoes were chamois as well, and the toes turned up-moderately. The loose black knee-length houppelande over-robe had buttons of some dark mottled tropical wood so hard it seemed metallic carved like black roses, and a collar open at the front and ear-high behind; the lower hem was dagged, and so were the turned-back sleeves that hung almost as low, showing a dark forest-green lining. Only the links of her belt and the buckles at the ankles of her shoes showed brighter colors.
“I wear hose and houppelande fairly often too, Tiph,” the High Queen replied.
“Yes, but not at formal dances, Matti…Your Majesty,” Tiphaine said. “Delia has to arrange it carefully even at Montinore Manor, or people end up turning and bonking heads and knocking each other over when they should be switching line, trying to figure out where I fit.”
“Now you’re drawing the long bow!” Mathilda laughed. “Young gentlewomen learn who’s on the right and left by dancing with each other.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Tiphaine shrugged, deadpan. “I spent my teenage years as your mother’s assassin.”
Mathilda gave a chuckle that was half a wince; that was a joke, and the more effective for being literally true, which was how Tiphaine’s rare excursions into humor usually worked.
“Half the time in a youngster’s dancing class it’s all girls anyway,” Mathilda said.
“Yes, but it would be fun if it all seized up like that, wouldn’t it?” Tiphaine said, her face expressionless as she sipped her brandy.
Sure and the prospect of a battle relaxes her, Rudi thought, amused. I’ve rarely seen her so whimsical.
“I would be honored to dance with you if all else fails, Your Majesty,” Rigobert de Stafford, Baron Forest Grove, said gallantly with a low bow, sweeping off his round chaperon hat with its rolled brim and dangling liripipe tail.
“Yes, but you’d outshine me totally, my lord Forest Grove,” Matti said with a smile and a little mock-curtsy in return.
“Or, since he’s wearing a skirt, I could dance with His Majesty…”
“In your dreams, Rigobert,” Rudi said genially. “And it’s a kilt. Calling it a skirt has been known to turn Mackenzies berserk.”
De Stafford was a ruggedly handsome man in his forties, with a short-cropped golden beard and bowl-cut hair too fair to show the first gray strands, broad shoulders, thick wrists and large hands that were shapely but scarred where they rested on his belt of golden flowers. His court dress emphasized gold and scarlet down to the parti-colored hose-nothing too gaudy by northern fashion, but still a blaze of color and jewelry, including the chain of office that marked him as Marchwarden of the South.
For height and coloring, he and d’Ath could have been siblings, though he was six or seven years older. His wife Delia was Châtelaine of Ath, an arrangement which suited all three of them very well indeed for a multitude of reasons.
Mathilda’s teasing manner dropped away. “This one’s a little political, Rudi,” she said. “The High King has to participate in the last dance of the evening. Sort of a fealty thing.”
“I haven’t even been crowned yet and already there’s protocol!”
Mathilda nodded, entirely serious. “It’s a chant du Brabant step, but with a new lyric. Or so Mother told me. One of her troubadours came up with it, modifying some old Society piece, I think. She says they hardly need to be prompted anymore.”
“Yes,” Tiphaine said, in her ice-water voice. “Apparently a genuine monarch blessed by a visitation of the Virgin-”
“That was Father Ignatius…Lord Chancellor Ignatius, now,” Rudi pointed out. “I’m a pagan and I had a vision of the Threefold Goddess.”
“Ignatius was one of the Companions of the Quest,” d’Ath said. “In propaganda terms, the Lady Regent assures me you each bask in the other’s reflected glory, but it shines more strongly upward.”
Is that irony, or is she just copying the way Sandra usually speaks? Rudi thought.
The Grand Constable of the Association went on:
“- a High King married to our Princess, accompanied by signs and wonders, with a magic sword gained on a heroic Quest, gets their artistic juices flowing to the point where they barely need a subsidy from the Crown.”
“She used the phrase creaming their hose, in fact,” Rigobert said. “Archaic vocabulary, but expressive.”
Rudi sighed gently and set his brandy snifter on a low round table of polished granite. His mother-in-law had always been shrewd enough to know that song and story were as much tools of power as hoarded gold or castles and catapults and men-at-arms. Sometimes he suspected that she didn’t really know quite how powerful they were, though. A glance in her direction brought her up to her feet and then down in a curtsy, spreading the pearl-gray silk of her skirts and sinking gracefully, her smooth middle-aged face smiling and revealing nothing except her usual catlike satisfaction as he bowed slightly in return.
Sometimes when she’s sitting with a white Persian in her lap, it’s downright eerie how similar they look, he thought whimsically. And I will never know precisely how much of what’s happened hereabouts these last two decades was by her plan and will, and what wasn’t, and what wasn’t but was fitted and shaped to suit her afterwards behind the screen of her wit, like my blood-father killing her husband…the end result of which is that her grandchildren, and his, will rule all of Montival. So who was the victor and who the vanquished, on the Field of the Cloth of Gold?
“All right, acushla,” he said to his wife. “I will be most honored and pleased to lead the dance.”
“And I’ll be back in a moment. Don’t discover an emergency elsewhere, my love, or I will challenge you to a joust à l’outrance with sharpened lances.”
Their eyes met, and for a moment he lost himself in the warm brown depths of hers.
“Get a room, you two…monarchs,” de Stafford said.
Rudi laughed. “The palace isn’t built yet, my lord.”
The Sword of the Lady was hung in his quarters, with a score of the High King’s Archers as an honor guard-not that he thought any human agency was much threat to it. It had been hard enough for him to come to it undamaged. But that absence let him pretend he was simply a man among his own kind tonight, and such chances were rare enough to relish.
Mathilda moved back into the open, circulating among the younger noblemen and ladies. A lady-in-waiting and a squire-
Yseult Liu, Demoiselle de Gervais, he reminded himself.