I wished for a shred of darkness: my eyes ached at so much radiance. Hundreds of revelers moved across a floor of polished marble, blazing nearly as brilliantly as the chandeliers overhead. The masquers seemed to course through a forest of flame. Evergreens were everywhere trees that would have dwarfed the theater but here made copses of green and silver, their boughs so heavy beneath dripping candles that I marveled they did not break. Beside each one stood a Saint-Alaban child, clad in shifts of diaphanous yellow so that their slender forms were silhouetted in the candlelight. The children held salvers of water, and laughed and sprayed one another until their costumes hung wet and limp. I wondered aloud at this unreliable method of firefighting.
“Oh, there’s never any problem,” Adonia assured me “The candles are set far beneath the leaves, and beside the trees were all cut this morning. Green wood shouldn’t burn.”
A young boy from Illyria sidled beside her. A wreath of pine cones crowned his black curls. “The masquers from Illyria want to know where their seats are during dinner, he said.
Adonia’s hand fluttered before her face. “Oh! I forgot and put them with that spado from Persia—well, come quick, Hilary, you can help—”
Her fingers brushed my mouth and she kissed me fleetingly, so that I had a quick taste of the raw fear beneath her coy posings. Then she was gone, the spangled hem of her tunic lost among the masked harlequins and columbine and mock-Raphaels milling about the room.
I looked around at the trees like waterfalls of fire, the white smoke curled beneath the domed ceiling high above me. I inhaled the heady scent of evergreens, fir resin, and the hundreds of red roses the Botanists had brought from their greenhouses and piled beside the tinkling fountains where the children refilled their salvers.
She is afraid, I thought. She is thinking of the lazars and the Madman in the Cathedral.
I glanced at those around me: Persian dominatrices with tattooed eyelids; three swaggering boys from Miramar; an Illyrian gynander swathed cap-a-pie in ropes of emerald feathers woven to look like verdant leaves. Did they know the lazars had planned an attack this evening? If so, why were they here?
Why was I here?
I grabbed a passing girl, a Saint-Alaban with chalk-white face and eyes painted to resemble holly leaves. She went with me laughing, but her smile died when she saw who held her.
“Greetings, cousin,” she said gravely. “You honor me, Sieur Aidan.”
“What is your name?” I pulled her into a small alcove where a fountain bubbled gaily, hidden behind sheaves of dark-green holly and magnolia leaves. She trembled in my arms. “I will not harm you—”
“I know.” Her pupils had dilated with fear, but she did not resist as I drew her face to mine. “Tansy. Tansy Saint-Alaban. I was paired with your consort Justice last year at the Glorious Fourth.”
“Tansy,” I repeated. I would tap her, learn what it was that made her come tonight and perhaps face her death. “Kiss me, Tansy.”
She turned her face from me. I could see tears in her cornflower eyes.
“Why are you afraid, Tansy?” I asked, taking her chin and forcing her to look at me. “I am Aidan Arent, a Player. You’ve seen me?”
“Yes,” she answered, her voice scarcely audible above the fountain. “At the Chrysanthemum Carnival at Illyria.”
“Then why are you afraid of me? Why are you here if you are so afraid?”
She gave me a look of such sadness that I let her go. “This is my House,” she pronounced with dignity. “In ‘The Duties of Pleasure’ it says that great sorrow will come to it, but also that a Saint-Alaban will be the one to wake the Magdalene from Her long sleep. We believe that the Final Ascension is coming, now. We believe it will begin at Winterlong. So we are afraid, all of us upon the Hill; but we will not run away. Too many of us are already dead, and what good will it do to flee and join our cousins who have gone to serve the Lord of Dogs?”
I turned to the fountain. The water tasted of oranges, and I splashed some upon my cheeks. “That doesn’t answer my question,” I finally said, drying my face on my sleeve. “You are afraid of me. Why?”
She smoothed her costume, a chemise of blood-red silk that barely covered the tops of her thighs. “Because they say you are the same one who rules in the Engulfed Cathedral, the one who commands our cousins to slaughter us as offerings to him. The Gaping One. The Hanged Boy.”
“But I’m not,” I said. “How could I be? He rules the Cathedral, and I am a Player. I have never been near the Cathedral—”
She stared at me with huge eyes blank as a small child’s. “I do not know how this can be true. But I saw the great star the night of the Butterfly Ball. And for three nights running I have dreamed of monstrous things, wolves with the faces of men racing through a flaming forest, and myself lying dead in the snow. I do not know what any of these things mean, and I am afraid. But I will stay here tonight with my people to await the waking of the Magdalene.”
Before I could stop her she turned away. “I will leave you now, Aidan Arent.”
Anger throbbed in my temples. I started to snatch her back, to force myself upon her and draw from her that dream, as though it might help me understand this madness. But as my hand fell upon her arm she turned and smiled, then leaned forward to kiss my mouth.
“May the Magdalene guard you through Winterlong, Aidan,” she said, and left.
I lingered for a few more minutes by the fountain, splashing idly at the falling water. So that is why they are here, I thought. My anger melted away. This was like the old religions Dr. Harrow had taught us about, the ones that had been suppressed by the First Ascension. To see the waking of the Magdalene. Not even lazars would frighten them from it, and Justice was too embarrassed to tell me.
As I walked out of the alcove I laughed, so loudly that an Illyrian malefeant admiring an evergreen’s young steward dropped her whip in surprise. As she retrieved it she bowed, then flashed me a quick smile. “May She guard you through Winterlong, young Aidan.”
“May She guard all of us, cousin,” I replied.
Our performance of The Spectre’s Harlequinade was not the evening’s highlight. The little play went well, my appearances as the Spectre—costumed after Raphael Miramar, and wearing a crimson death’s mask until my final revelation as the ghost of the dying heroine’s beloved—provoking not gasps but enthusiastically polite applause. But the Paphians in the treelit ballroom awaited other entertainments.
We took our bows. Adonia beckoned us to where she reclined with visiting Regents and the suzeins of the other Paphian Houses. Gower Miramar sat there, clad in a simple tunic of dark green, his only ornament a wreath of holly. He greeted me but did not smile, nor make the Paphian’s beck. I turned to help Miss Scarlet onto the cushion between myself and Justice. Jane Alopex stood nearby, biting her nails as she gazed across the room.
The Great Hall had grown eerily silent. Paphians stood grouped around the blazing fir trees, their bright costumes incongruous with the air of trepidation that had replaced the afternoon’s urgent revelry. Beside them stood the Curators, holding their skull-crowned staves. They glanced often at their Regents, but they too were silent. I heard only my own breathing, the hiss of candles, and the purl of water in the fountains. Burning wax nearly overpowered the scents of balsam and roses and musk. Only the youngest children waited with expectant faces, grinning and smirking at one another beneath the radiant trees. Miss Scarlet slipped her hand into mine, her glove not disguising how cold it was, nor how her long fingers trembled. Behind her simple black domino her eyes glanced nervously about the room.