Rian snorted at this frank assessment, but then fell silent, and let the break in the conversation stretch as Martine continued to unobtrusively search. The collection bequeathed by France’s great actor-playwright was more than extensive, but Rian did not need to puzzle out exactly what was missing. She knew her friend. Martine was not careless, and the loss of some prize of theatrical history would ordinarily spur her to decisive action. There was only ever one reason for that familiar pained betrayaclass="underline" Milo’s father.
"Martine," she said, keeping her voice even, uninflected. "What has Henri taken?"
(ii)
"Why couldn’t Henri stay safely out of the country?"
"That is rhetorical, yes?" Étienne Boulanger paused in checking his reflection in the Tower train’s darkened window to glance at Rian.
"He was established in Aquitania! A devoted patron, an adoring audience. A playhouse ready to set him up in any role he fancied."
"But Bordeaux is not Lutèce," Étienne said, with all the complacence of a born Lutècian. "It is particularly not Lutèce under the Gilded Court. You have no taste for the delicious, Rian."
"I like to see what I eat," Rian retorted, but that only sent her handsome cousin into peals of laughter, oddly deep and resonant in the thickened air beneath the Towers of the Moon.
"Or, at least, who," she added, with a faint quirk of a smile. "Anonymous games with masks sound all very exciting until you reflect on a few of the possibilities behind them."
"Does anyone on your Never list have wings?"
"No." Rian had never even spoken to one of the Cour de lune, let alone found reason to avoid them. "But wings will not necessarily make me like the person."
"And yet you go all the same," Étienne murmured, pausing for a long, evaluating glance. "What can Henri have taken from Martine that would send you chasing after him?"
"Does it matter?" Rian asked.
"It can’t be money. Martine has never had an amount worth the cost of all this." As a light outside the window marked their slow progress through the tunnel to the Island of Balance, Étienne gestured toward the extremely expensive clothing he and Rian were wearing. Fountain garb: the newest Court fashion.
While Étienne’s trousers and doubled layers of elaborate shirt and long-skirted coat were things of dark, durable cloth, Rian’s dress drifted about her in an airy shimmer. Not a single garment, but four slips worn one on top of another, and fashioned of tissue-thin, faintly glowing and extremely sheer cloth – Fela, produced by the Towers themselves. The innermost was a transparent sheath that reached all the way to the ankles, with a single side-split for movement. The layers that stopped at the knees, hips and sternum were no thicker and, although they were looser, the silken cascade tended to cling. When a couple danced together beneath the Towers – with all the swirls and lifting involved in dancing in the unnaturally low gravity – their clothing would represent the stonework and the water of a fountain.
Underwear was considered gauche.
"And it’s not as if Martine would have any amount of money for Henri to appropriate," Étienne was saying. "Let alone things he could sell to raise a worthy stake for the games. Everything else of hers he took long ago. But…yes, that’s it. Henri hasn’t taken anything of Martine’s worth your while. But he’s visited her at work."
"Let’s not play this game, Étienne."
"Very well. Shall we talk of you instead? Young! Rich! Notorious! Three grand achievements in a few short months, and I do not know which I am to congratulate you for more."
"I’m hardly the first to enter into the service of a vampire," Rian said, glancing at her own reflection, and then looking away from a face where almost twenty years had been erased. "I suppose becoming Keeper of the Deep Grove is an achievement, though I’m still working out exactly what I’m supposed to do in the role."
The duties of Keeper were nebulous indeed, especially since they involved few set requirements beyond service not only to her country, but to Cernunnos and the Great Forest. The lack of explanation did not bother Rian nearly as much as the sense that she had spent the summer performing not out of choice, but tugged here and there, following someone else’s script.
"Prytennian ceremonial offices are not interesting," Étienne pronounced. "But I hope you wallow in the resulting largesse at least occasionally."
Rian smiled. "Perhaps just a little. It’s something to not be forever adding up how much everything costs – though I suppose I still add it all up."
"Yes, and when you asked me to what it takes to visit the Gilded Tower, you winced at every second word. Cultivate insouciance, cousin! Let the diamonds drip from your fingertips with no more than a bored glance – and oblige me by ensuring I am there to catch them."
"I think you will have to be satisfied with tonight’s treat."
Étienne bowed elaborately, barely keeping his balance, but then said: "How is it, Rian, that Martine can be so clever and talented a person as to overcome disgrace and work her way from dresser all the way to curator of the costume exhibit at Lutèce’s most prestigious museum, and yet still be fool enough to let Henri anywhere near the collection in her charge? Now what has he taken? No, don’t tell me, I already know." In his enthusiasm, Étienne bounced on his heels, and had to lift a hand to prevent his head from hitting the train carriage’s ceiling. "Even Henri wouldn’t run about pawning part of the Sourné's collection, so it must be something he thinks he can borrow and bring back. And that makes it entirely obvious."
With weighty significance he took his mask from the seat beside Rian, and put on first the silver-patterned black cloth that covered his face from the nose down, and then the heavier black headpiece that sat like a low cap over his eyes and the top of his head. These were always animal-themed, and Étienne had chosen the traditional black cat design, with his brown curls hidden by a pair of ebony ears.
The headpieces were an old tradition of the Gilded Court, a constant maintained through centuries of often wildly differing fashions. The most recognisable item in all of the Léon Bonnaire collection was the mask he had worn to perform before the Gilded Court.
Well, the truth would have been obvious to Étienne as soon as they found Henri. No matter: her gadfly cousin could hold his tongue when he chose to. The important thing was to get the mask back to the museum before Martine paid for Henri’s folly with her hard-won job.
Rian glanced uncomfortably at her own headpiece, waiting on the seat. Pressed for time, she had selected a mask at random from a wall swimming with feathers and empty eye sockets, only to find herself holding the stylised visage of a white serpent with scales of golden leaves to cover her hair. A rare pattern, and not something she could dismiss as coincidence since she had, only a few weeks ago, given her allegiance to the Forest God Cernunnos, whose emissaries wore the form of golden-horned snakes.
She touched the laces that would hold the mask in place. Was this tangle with Henri another instance of Rian the marionette, dancing to the tune of gods? But what could Martine have to do with the oblique challenges Rian had been set after becoming Keeper of the Deep Grove? Those were most certainly related to Prytennia.
Yet it was not as if she had left Cernunnos behind by travelling to France, for the shadow of the Great Forest fell over all of the world. Not sea nor desert nor even polar ice would take her outside the Forest’s influence. Somehow, since returning to France, Rian’s feeling of powerlessness had only grown.
Lifting the veil portion of the mask, she settled it carefully into place before adding the headpiece. She looked at the world through a serpent’s slitted eyes and considered the dividing line between chance and arrangement. This was perhaps the greatest change to Rian’s circumstances, far beyond youth, wealth, and strange powers. This sense of being moved about. A pawn in a game she did not yet understand.