Psyke's Very Bad Day, pt 1/3

These are a few (longish) scenes that never made it into Kings & Assassins.

Why this didn't make the book?: It was a prologue that references a whole lot of people who would be irrelevant to the plot of Kings. Plus, the nervous debutante was just the wrong feel for the rest of the book. Those of you who've read Kings will find certain phrases or parts familiar--they were cannibalized for use later. Still, I have a fondness for these scenes; they gave me my first look at the kind of woman Psyke Bellane might be.

Spoilers? Only for Maledicte. A chapter told from a differing viewpoint.

1.
At the heart of the spider-webbed streets of Murne, on the darkest night of the year, the great ballroom near the palace blazed like a solitary ember in a cooling fire. The rest of the city hunkered dark and quiet, the confounding tangles of the streets made worse by the extinguished street lamps. Small, shy sparks of gaslight glimmered here and there behind shuttered windows, and red glows seeped out beneath lintels, hinting at hearth fires lit against the cold.

It was the Dark Solstice, and in its wealth of long night, the boundary between the living and the dead turned fragile, when Haith, the horned god of Death and Victory, allowed his charges their chance to plunder the living world. Superstition only, but superstition with generations of force behind it.

What did it matter that the gods were dead when the city remembered Haith's presence in a thousand hearthside tales? No one could be faulted for caution, not when the stories claimed one Solstice, generations ago, at the entreaty of the man who would be the Cold King, Haith had brought his dead up into the streets, fed them well on the breath of the living, so that when dawn broke, the city broke open with it, and the Cold King walked in and claimed the throne.

So the city doused its lights and hunkered down, as silent and still as a fox watching the hounds sweep by. All silent and still save the court who feared nothing so much as their own boredom. The gods were gone after all, and while in some houses there was debate that this only allowed the dead greater freedoms, theology was far less interesting than the opportunity for gossip and scandal.

On the north side of the city, the streets showed shadowed movement, as carriage after darkened carriage left the aristocratic estates and town houses, making their disjointed ways to the palace and the Dark Solstice Ball.

Lady Psyke Bellane, veiled and costumed, had slipped out of one such carriage, her chaperone two paces behind. Before her, grey-clad palace servants opened the wide double doors to the ballroom, revealing an enormous room with its size gone deceptive and vague in the spinning wake of hanging mirrors scattered throughout. If the winter night outside was the greediest of nights, a night that swallowed an all too short day, then here, within the court's ballroom, were the missing hours. Half the circular ballroom was painted in rose and gold, with pale streaks of sun-touched blue; the gas lamp sconces there burned ruddy and warm with the addition of colored oils to tint the flames. The other side was shades of dust and twilight, edged with silver draped balconies and the gas-lamps were filtered through nacre to give off the proper pearly light.

Lingering on the edge of the room, Psyke studied it all, the musicians, the courtiers, the richness of clothes and food and accent and laughter, and thought this time, this season, she must end it wed. That determination tasted bitter, not inexplicably so for a woman of six and twenty, whose past years had been spent trapped as a child in her mother's home, yielding and compromising in a house far too crowded with adult women. Her two widowed sisters laid claim to her time as a chaperone and tutor to their young daughters; her mother gently overrode Psyke's wishes on the management of the staff and household funds even while seeking her advice, and her younger sister, Gwena, as trapped as Psyke, had a temperament that took every thwarted desire as a deliberate affront. At nineteen, Gwena's talents, which should have been dancing and flirting, lay in her ability to keep her spite fresh, and her revenges as numerous as they were petty.

Psyke dreamed of a husband, not with a young girl's hopes of great romance, but a no less fervent desire for a house of her own, with hours turned to her own purposes.

At her age, she was far too old to be a debutante; her come-out had been ten years prior. To ape the debutante now, to return to pale, demure gowns better suited to girls with unformed personalities galled but nothing else declared her intent to be wed so clearly.

Any other year, and her grasping for debutante status would have been savagely ridiculed, but this year--this year was so steeped in scandal and suprises that Psyke's presence was a mere footnote in the annals of gossip.

Psyke would have traded this uneven acceptance for another peaceful month compiling her father's memoirs on the Xipos War. Perhaps it was too much reading, as her mother said, but the court held little appeal for one so immersed in the somber politics of the war years. Perhaps it was only that she had garnered only disappointment and pain from prior seasons. Her first, a heady delight of splendor and excess, ended abruptly when her betrothal to Dionyses DeGuerre collapsed in scandal. Her second, a more sedate affair, ended with her betrothal to Nicholas Rue, a second son of a minor baronet. His ambition, however, was the end of that betrothal; he stepped into the position of second-captaincy in the kingsguard, a position granted solely to bachelors.

Two betrothals, broken one so soon after the other, had an effect, not only on her heart, but on the whispers of the court. Two betrothals broken off, and spite began to whisper that perhaps it was Psyke at fault, some peculiarity of hers that made Rue prefer a career to her as wife, and Dionyses--well, perhaps Psyke had a hand in his ruin also.

When Psyke looked over the court now, she saw wagging tongues and spiteful eyes. She frowned, realizing her impressions were, at least partially, false. Yes, there was spite aplenty, but there was a greater emotion in the air. Fear, she identified it. Fear, in the debutantes who huddled together too closely for mere gossip. Fear, in the young noblemen whose gambling took on a frantic note, desperate to distract themselves. Fear, in the way the grey-clad servants of the king seemed more attuned to the doors than to the guests they were meant to be serving. Fear, even in the way the king's dais was thickly decked with guards, the boy prince surrounded by his dogs, and Aris's pale eyes watching everything with the wariness of a wounded man.

Some level of unease was expected; after all, hadn't the earl of Last simply disappeared? And he, not only the brother of the king, but a notable swordsman. If he could disappear, and with no blame to be laid, then who might be next? It granted an edge of superstition to the Dark Solstice not seen in decades.

Her chaperone, a widowed friend of her mother's who lodged with them, pinched her lightly at the intersection of glove and arm.

"Best be smiling, young miss," Olympia said. "Your mother--"

Psyke raised the sheer edge of her veil, revealing her obedience. A dark glitter caught her eye, a man's elaborate costume of feathers and jet, a beaked mask; Psyke ushered Olympia to the seating for chaperones, losing herself in the woman's sheltering bulk, in the froth of elegant costumes the other debutantes wore and the courtier Maledicte passed by, unseeing. Psyke let out a shallow breath in relief, before greeting Selena, Harriet, and a shrilly giggling Lucy with a smile rather more real than her earlier one. These girls might be debutantes, but they were sweet natured, rarely making Psyke feel the cuckoo in their midst.

Even so, their innocent speculations as to who they would dance with tonight, and who they might allow liberties with, secure in their masked status, palled quickly and Psyke's attention wandered.

Behind his black mask, Maledicte paused to look at the King's dais, his servant one step behind him. The manservant leaned close and Maledicte tilted his head up to receive words.

"Seeking Ixion," Lucy said, a discreet whisper in her ear, the rough brocade of her mask making a tiny snag in Psyke's veil. "Do you think he will dance with you tonight?"

"It seems impolite to wish otherwise," Psyke said. Lucy giggled again, and Psyke kept her smile with practice. Lucy no doubt thought Psyke's wit dry, rather than her tongue truthful.

"I would give my eyeteeth to dance with him," Harriet said fervently.

"You're too tall," Psyke said.

Harriet flushed, sensitive to her extra inches, but Lucy laughed in quick comprehension. "You mean to say it's only for vanity that Maledicte seeks you out? I own he is not overtall. . . ."

"Not overtall," Psyke agreed. "But decidedly over-vain. And I am the shortest debutante this year."

"And for several others," Harriet said, a tiny slap for Psyke's comment on her height.

Psyke let the comment on her age slide by, thinking it deserved. She had been accidentally cruel, wounded a friend for no reason except that Maledicte made her uneasy and caused her tongue to grow as carelessly abrupt as his own.

Were it not for Maledicte's attentions, Olympia was fond of saying, Psyke might have stayed unnoticed for the entire season. Psyke would have preferred that to the eyes that lingered on her now, waiting to see if Maledicte would seek her hand again. Even the King's eye had been drawn to her, the dancing partner of his favorite courtier.

In the beginning of the year, Psyke had rather admired Maledicte, a creature maddeningly lovely and daring as well. Traits she wished she possessed herself, being cautious in manner and only pretty in the common sort of way--fine, regular features, and fashionably pale hair and eyes.

As the year progressed, and Psyke was thrown into company with him at nearly every turn, her appreciation turned sour. What good was daring when it was bent to malignant doing? When his cunning was used to manipulate or wound? Even his beauty failed to appease in the end, yoked as it was, irretrievably to vanity.

Lost in thought, she allowed herself to drift away from the edge of the ballroom. The first she realized of it was when Lady Mirabile brushed past her, setting Psyke aside with, a hand tight on her sleeve, and a hissed accusation through a curved, scarlet mouth.

"He's mine."

Psyke shivered, stepping back toward the shelter of the chaperones. Olympia stopped nattering with the young Lady Sweet's chaperone, and rose to Psyke's side. "All right, dear?" she asked, with the cultivated awareness only a long-term family retainer possessed.

Psyke nodded. The lady Mirabile was unpleasant to be sure; the young debutantes compared stories of her set-downs and cuts direct, grown increasingly more brutal as the years passed. But it was her eyes that had chilled Psyke: behind the white, feathered mask, they had gleamed nearly as red as her lips.

"But oh--my dear--however did you do it?" Olympia's smooth brow wrinkled beneath the thin layer of white clay maquillage she favored, years out of style. "I made sure of the stitching before we left, since your sister was fussing so and the gods know her temper can not be trusted."

Psyke followed her gaze to her own sleeve. "I think we can not blame this one on Gwena's tantrums. Not when Lady Mirabile thinks so poorly of me," she said. The tiny rents in the thin green silk discoloured as she watched, tiny brown edges forming in small circles, as if the silk had come too close to a candle flame.

"Did she reach your skin? Should we go home?"

Psyke shook her head, denying herself the reprieve. Did she leave, her mother would fuss and fret for weeks about chances gone to waste. Better by far to endure the evening. "The silk is stronger than it appears. Her nails never got so far as flesh."

Olympia's lips thinned, outrage hovering in the air, but Olympia preferred to lead by example and so, as Psyke expected, said nothing at all regarding Mirabile's conduct. Wise of her, Psyke thought. Mirabile's treatment of the debutantes was notoriously rough; her treatment of those she considered beneath her in rank could be considered criminal--had such victims any recourses to law. The nobility protected its own, be they innocent or monster.

Instead, Olympia turned Psyke this way and that, comparing the two sleeves, and finally sighed. "There is no help for it. The sleeves must come off and what your mother will say. . . ."

"We all have limbs," Psyke said. "I know it to be a fact; Chryses DeGuerre illustrated it for me before we left the schoolroom. In truth, there seems to be little substantive difference between our limbs and those of other creatures; those little monkeys brought back from the Explorations, for instance, show--"

"Smile, my lady, and don't speak," Olympia murmured.

Psyke sighed and said, "Natural studies aside, I think Mother can not complain if I bare my arms--not tonight, any road."

Olympia surveyed the decorative, provocative crowd. women clad in costumes more designed to reveal than mask. Even young Lucy revealed legs as freckled as her cheeks, her gauzy Kyrdic skirt nearly raised to her knees. "I concur, but you must recall--you cannot be masked so neatly as others."

She ushered Psyke into an alcove behind a mirror and a hanging drape, lit softly by a single gas-lamp, and began snipping the delicate threads that bound the sleeves to her chemise. Psyke, peering through the space between the drape and silver-backed mirror, was treated to the edifying sight of Mirabile dancing with Maledicte, white-feathered mask to black-feathered mask, no aid in hiding their identities. But then, such scandalous creatures prided themselves on notoriety. For them, anonymity was a greater sin.

Mirabile leaned close, her head of a height with Maledicte, which could not please him, no matter what words she uttered. Like twin sides of a mirror, she thought them, laughing at their own malign cleverness.

Olympia clucked disapproval at Psyke's shudder, and Psyke let the drape fall all the way closed. What two such wild spirits as Maledicte and Mirabile got up to could affect her in no way.
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