4: A Solid

  By now, the cocktail party was well advanced; people had broken into knots and cliques with an arming amount of space between them. The pickings were slim to say the least. Fox had done a few trots around the dance floor, each with a different suitor. He could afford to burn no bridges, and he couldn’t afford to be choosy. Just now, he was entertaining a fantastical creature named Slub, ten feet if the fellow was an inch. His entire body was made of translucent green slime held tenuously together by what seemed to be force of will and the suggestive shape of his damp white tuxedo.

  Slub spoke slowly of the pce his family ruled, obviously hoping to impress. A single yellow eye floated around his face, sometimes disappearing beneath the wet greenish edge of his colr. His mouth was a gash in the slime. His hands would be unavoidably cmmy. For all Fox needed to win friends, especially rge ones, he found he couldn’t pay as much mind as he ought.

  Slub had been nothing but polite, turning down a dance “to preserve your clothes, Rev Liedan.” Slub had fetched him a drink. Wandering eye notwithstanding, Slub was the best prospect thus far. It wasn’t his fault he spoke slowly, and he certainly seemed intelligent enough to be going along with, but…

  But.

  Defted, Fox sipped his gin and tonic as he cast his eyes over the white-cd revelers. He ought not to be drinking; he was three deep. Here, the tall panes went around the entire rge room, narrowing at the top of the multilevel banquet hall, where they joined to form what seemed to be an oculus at the crest of a dome. But it can’t really be open, can it? He would have to find out.

  The wide dance floor gleamed beneath the dome. Except for a few couples dancing, the room was empty.

  Slub at st finished what he’d been saying about—about the Duchy of Slichtenstein, curse it. Fox id fingertips on his thick, slowly dripping arm. “So, you’re a Duke?”

  With a ponderous ugh, Slub nearly fell from his tuxedo altogether. He lurched armingly toward Fox, who froze in pce, ready to be enveloped, but it didn’t happen.

  “Oh—oh—oh.” A smile pulled Slub’s gash mouth wide. “You’re pretty good for a solid… you listened…”

  “I’m good for anyone, darling.” Fox dazzled from beneath the brim of his gambler.

  “I think… you must be.” Slub’s mouth went sck. “I… hate… to monopolize… you. Do come and… talk to me again… won’t you?” It took Slub nearly thirty seconds to say, but by the end Fox nodded thoughtfully anyway.

  He didn’t think Slichtenstein was a client state, but there was no need to burn bridges. He said, “I certainly will. It’s good to meet another man of intelligence, possessed of kindness and care for even something so small as my clothing.” That was precisely the truth.

  “You… have many words… for me, Rev Liedan.” Slub’s ssh of a mouth spread wide. He turned his back ponderously, but his face still worked on the grin. “I shall… remember it.” Slub jiggled away, shivering faintly inside the suit.

  “And I shall remember you,” said Fox quickly, and escaped down the white stairwell with perhaps-unfttering haste. Alone at st, he pulled out a white linen handkerchief and tried to wipe green slime from his fingertips. It clung in a sticky film that smelled improbably of lime, resisting his attempts to scrub it off. He had hoped above all to find someone he could work with to effect an escape, no matter what he had to do to convince them. Slub was very kind, to be sure, but he wasn’t sorry to have missed out on whatever this terrifying substance might do to his ass.

  He stopped at the bar for a wet cloth and a fresh drink. He ought to quit while he was ahead.

  Never mind it. He knocked back half the drink at once, then passed the curving white bar on his way to the other side.

  Where were all the people? This pce had been meant to accommodate far more—not that it was a bad thing, he supposed, that his captors hadn’t captured more. There was a particurly raucous crowd gathered around a four-seat table near the end of the bar.

  As he approached, the bodies parted slightly to show him a glimpse of the crowd’s heart: a very young woman, small and slim, with rge eyes and a wealth of chestnut hair. Fox had a pinch of pity for her. Many of the men he’d seen on the dance floor and no few of the women compassed her about. There was no escape for her, and when she spoke it was subdued, so he couldn’t make out her words.

  Sir Rennathaisgalloniston, a perfectly odious fellow who’d introduced himself to Fox as an “Elfish knight,” was closest to her. He preened long hair the color of pale sunlight, constantly adjusting tiny braids to lie down the front of his tuxedo jacket. “There must be some dragon I can sy for you, my dy,” he told her. “Only give me a name.”

  Her voice pitched high above the others. “I’m warning you. I need some air!”

  “You heard her.” Sir Rennathaisgalloniston made an imperious but utterly ineffective shooing gesture, fpping his hands at everyone. Likely he found everyone as distasteful as Fox found him. “Back! Back, I say!” His tuxedo was patterned with a subtle raised weave like a winter forest. Grudgingly, Fox admitted in silence he looked very fine.

  “You, too, buster,” the young woman muttered as Fox passed. He stopped in pce and looked over at her, but the bodies closed again, demanding her attention. “Seriously, seriously…” she said. Her growing desperation convinced Fox to stay where he was. Unless he missed his guess, she would soon need assistance with a less than patable aspect of existence.

  “Please, Lady Katherine. Point me—”

  But there was a terrible spttering sound. The next moment, the bodies sprang away. People couldn’t leave fast enough. Sir Rennathaisgalloniston knelt next to the table positively dripping with bilious green vomit. It was in his eyebrows.

  “Princess,” the girl muttered, and wiped her mouth with a cocktail napkin. A line of the same unpleasant green had spattered across the table. “Princess Katherine.”

  The Elfish knight stared at her. Slowly, without a single word, he rose from where he’d bent the knee, made a sharp turn on his heel, and marched away. She watched him go with a sweaty, queasy look of satisfaction, trying to hunker inside the beautiful low-waisted dress she wore. It was small and strappy, covered in diagonal rows of beaded white fringe. Her limbs were lithe with muscle.

  Then she turned to look straight at him. When she moved, she moved like Eagle, swift and economical—no matter her physical state. She rested her right arm over the back of her chair. There was a scar, a diagonal long cut mark of the kind made by accident in fencing practice. “What do you want?”

  “Everything, darling,” he said, sweeping off his hat in a proper, elegant bow. How could he resist an opening like that? He liked her already.

  “You can probably get it too.” She raised an eyebrow, smirking, and he saw precisely why so many hopefuls had gathered. She struck him like a hammer blow. Even with her rge brown eyes sunken in deep hollows, she was exceedingly beautiful, like standing near a tiny, perfect statue of a goddess of love and war. He could practically taste the vengeful fire.

  “Eventually,” he said, flipping the hat back onto his head. “Eventually. In the meantime, I’d settle for a change of venue. What do you say, Princess Katherine?”

  “You have the advantage of me.” With a groggy chuckle, she added, “Always wanted to say that.” She struggled to her feet and swayed heavily when she got there.

  “Call me Fox.”

  “Katie.”

  Overcome with unaccountable nerves, he seized her gss from the table. “Here. Rinse your mouth.”

  “Okay.” She took the gss with her right hand and held it in shaky fingers. To her credit, she hid the left very well, but Fox caught sight of it as she whisked it quickly behind her back.

  Katie, or so he would call her, gred ftly up at him over the rim of the gss. He could hear Eagle in his mind, demanding, “What are you gonna do about it?”

  “Forgive my eyes,” he said. “It’s none of my business.”

  She spat water on the floor—to the side, away from his shoes—and lifted her left hand from her side. Her hot eyes didn’t leave him at any point.

  I’m going to touch it, he tried to make his eyes say.

  What’s the difference?

  He supported her elbow and hand carefully. How had he not noticed? But then, she had been hiding it all this time. A ft, wrought iron bracelet clung to the seared flesh of her wrist. Around it, the skin was angry, swollen, as if the metal burned her. Yellow pus leaked from the edges.

  “Gentry,” he said, meeting her eyes again. Who would be so great a fool? Even the Revanar steered clear of Gentry nobles, to say nothing of the princesses! Their captors were utterly insane.

  “Yeah.” No wonder she looked so exhausted. “Sort of. Look, I have to sit down. This is not—it’s not—I don’t—” She stopped and sagged in pce. At least they had given her fts instead of heels. Even the low sort that would go with her dress would have been too much for her. “Standing is bad.”

  Fox offered his arm thoughtlessly, but she thought long and hard about taking it; he watched calcution struggle across her face, but at st, she csped her right arm through it. Great dark eyes turned up to his.

  How could she trust him so quickly? He felt as sick as she must.

  “Will this hurt you? The iron?”

  “Ah, no. It doesn’t do to my people what it does to yours.” Fox steered her to a nearby couch, the one nearest the exit to the stairs. She fell on it, worn out by the ten-foot journey, and curled there in silence—and in agony so clear to him now he wondered how he could have missed it.

  He sat to her right, away from the bad arm, making a long line with his body and stretching his legs slightly in front of her as if to protect. For her to be in such a bracelet at all, made of metal anathema to her physiology, and for her to be in this room besides—he sucked in air at the cruelty of it, every time he looked at her. No one from the earlier crowd approached them, but a few of the men cast him hateful gnces. He ignored them all. If he wound up taking a beating for this woman—this girl—

  Well, then again, it might be worthwhile. If he could help someone so vulnerable survive a terrifying situation, however she might help him was a secondary consideration. Still, he hoped she would consider it. How could he get the bck-uniformed tablet-wielders to remove the iron bracelet? That would be no small favor.

  He sat up with his hat on his knee, grimacing. Why was he thinking this way? She wasn’t one of the High Ones, that he should be so on his guard, so ready to entrap her. She kept gncing at him and giving him nervous, sickened smiles when he caught her. If she decided she was attracted to him, how would she act? He wished she weren’t so ill for her sake—and his own.