That night, Mariusz and I, and the rest of court, are to attend a ball at Parliament House. Apart from my wedding, it is the first time I have left the palace since I arrived here. The city seems less bleak at night. Gas lighting lends warm colour to the grey buildings, and the shadows, where they fall, hide all manner of sins. Like this, I can almost pretend I like the city, but when our coach draws up to the parliament steps and Mariusz helps me out into the crowd below, I remember that a city is made up of people as much as stones and my dislike hardens.

A young, pretty matchstick-seller presses her wares upon us, and is hastily, but gently, moved on by one of our guards. I think I see a coin pass hands. No doubt the girl will make a small fortune tonight, probably without losing a single one of her matches. Equally certainly, whatever she earns will be gone by the morrow.

Mariusz takes me on one arm and his mother on the other and leads us up the steps between our guards. We are not made to wait in the queue that is forming from the doors. Instead, we pass straight through, people parting ways for us and whispering.

Some of these people, I suppose, must be friends — of the court, at least, if not of Mariusz — but the stares that light upon me are hostile. I meet them with my own stare, determined not to be beat down.

"Smile," Mariusz says. "You look angry."

I try to find a smile to meet the gaze of a hateful looking woman.

"Don't smile," Mariusz says. "It frightens me."

He isn't smiling either. By the way he kept moving his feet and rearranging his legs in the coach, I had some idea he would rather have run away than attend this ball. But we have no choice. The ball, Dowager Duchess Maria explained to me, was arranged by the city to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Selician Parliament. Our presence here shows that we publicly support the existence of parliament, even though that very existence limits the power the duke can wield. If we did not come, the public — the non-titled politicians, wealthy business owners, judges, physicians, priests — would see it as a great insult, and perhaps a threat to parliament.

From the cool gazes of those around me, I suspect I am seen as an insult and threat regardless. Perhaps Mariusz too.

We are announced and descend into a grand chamber, marked out with a dance floor and an orchestra at one end. An elderly woman greets Mariusz and his mother, lets her eyes flick briefly over me, then pulls Dowager Duchess Maria away into conversation. I hold on tight to Mariusz's arm.

"Don't leave me," I say. "I can't talk to anyone."

"They will understand French," he says. "I am going to see if the food is out yet."

He moves with purpose towards a set of archways in the far wall. I keep my hold on his arm. People move to let us pass, rather than stop us with a word. Their eyes, however, quite definitely notice us.

"I am beginning to get the impression you are not very well-liked here," I say.

"It is you they are staring at," Mariusz says. "If you left me alone, they might spare me a smile."

All the same, he makes no effort to dislodge me from his arm. It occurs to me that perhaps I am shielding him from having to use his small talk. And perhaps that is why he is so tolerant of me tonight.

Through the archways, we come to a room laid out with little groups of chairs and settees and long tables of covered trays at one end. It is quieter in here than the main hall, with only a few sparse couples sitting down. We go to the tables, where Mariusz plucks some grapes from a bowl of fruit and eats them slowly. I dare not start to eat — I am sure it is not polite. We should be in the main hall with the crowds, trying to be sociable and pleasant, and saying what we are expected to say.

"Introduce me to someone," I say. "I will have to dance, yes? Introduce me to someone who will want to dance with me."

Mariusz looks up from his grapes. "Yes. You will have to dance." He chews another grape and swallows. "At ten, you might get a headache and we might leave."

"I feel quite well."

"I mean it can be one of our little deceptions."

"I know what you mean. But I feel quite well."

"Pfuh." He spits out a grape seed. "Eleven?"

"No headache. We will call for our carriage at half-past midnight. That is an acceptable hour, yes? No one will whisper we could not wait to leave. No one will suggest we overstayed our welcome."

"Fine." He looks annoyed. "Come with me. I will introduce you to some men — someone heavy, with two left feet."

We go back through the archways and Mariusz scans the crowd. He heads towards a pair of old, round-bellied men in shiny waistcoats. I clench my toes in my silk slippers and hope these men are truly important, not just the least likely dancers Mariusz can see. Fortunately, while they are rather cool to us, they accept our introductions in Mariusz's excellent French, and I learn that one is the Minister of the Mint and another owns the paper factory which supplies it. They must have been at our wedding too, but I have long since forgotten their faces and apologize profusely for my poor memory. This apology garners me a reluctant smile from the man who owns the paper factory. He, too, has a poor memory for faces, he says.

The ghost of an unsaid polite cliché hovers in the silence that follows that.

The Minister of the Mint clears his throat. The factory owner shuffles his heavy feet.

"Is your daughter here?" Mariusz asks the Minister of the Mint. "My wife tells me I must dance, and if I do not remember faces well, I do remember feet. Elvira must be one of my partners tonight."

"Elvira is with her mother in the country," the Minister of the Mint says.

Mariusz clicks his tongue. "Then my plans are foiled. You will have to dance with me instead, my dear Alexandra. I can see no other partner equal to Elvira in the room."

The factory owner shuffles his feet again. "My niece is here," he says slowly. "She is with my son. Perhaps, if you would like...?"

"It would be my pleasure, I am sure." Mariusz looks around the hall. "Which beauty is she?"

The woman pointed out is no true beauty, but Mariusz exclaims of her height and her grace from a distance. I squint at the tall, gangly youth hunched next to her. If the factory owner does not offer me his hand, I will make a play for his son. He looks eminently biddable.

However, after we go over and get through the next round of introductions, the factory owner, shuffling his heavy feet, suggests that as his niece is dancing the first dance with Mariusz, I might offer him the pleasure (dubious, by his tone) of taking it with him.

I accept, no better offer on the horizon. Before the dancing begins, however, Mariusz and I, circling around the room, are able to gather more partners for future dances. There is something disconcerting about watching Mariusz smile and utter flattering clichés at people who all too clearly are not warm towards us, and whom I doubt he is fond of either. At least in his rudeness, he is genuine with me, I tell myself.

It is a very thin silver lining.

The dancing begins. I am sure my toes are black and blue by the end of my dance with the factory owner, but I stalwartly ignore the pain and seek my next partner. He is an army general in formal dress, still straight-backed and stiff-limbed despite his advanced age. Throughout our dance, he converses with me in French as stiff as his limbs. Would I kindly share King Edmund's intentions for the Severni people? I have never heard of the Severni people. Then perhaps I can inform him of King Edmund's view of increasing the Selician military presence in the northern mountain ranges? I did not know there was a military presence in the northern mountain ranges.

By the end of that dance, I have thoroughly disappointed the general with my ignorance.

I take a short break to get myself a glass of wine. While I am sipping it and searching the room for my third partner, I feel a soft touch at my elbow and turn to see Konrad. He looks particularly elegant tonight, in a well-fitting dark suit with a cherry-red waistcoat and black bow tie. His hair is slicked back with so much wax that not a strand moves when he bows.

"May I beg the honour of a dance?" he asks.

"I'm afraid I am already taken. I was just looking for my next partner. Lord... Rol...? Lord Rodney? No. I can't remember the name. He owns race horses."

"Lord Orla. He breeds race horses." Konrad scans the room and discreetly gestures to the man. "I promise I dance I better than he. Perhaps after Lord Orla I might find you?"

"After Lord Orla you will find me dancing with Mister... He manufactures rifles?"

"Mister Mazur. After Mister Mazur, might I have the pleasure of your company?"

"I am afraid not. I am partnered for every dance of the night."

"Too late, too late," Konrad says ruefully. "I will have to content myself with poor imitations."

It is a particularly greasy compliment, and not typical of Konrad's usual speech in my language. I wonder if he cribbed it from a book of manners.

"Excuse me," I say. "The music is starting. I must go."

As I dance with Lord Orla, who leads me through the dance as though I were one of his horses, I notice that Konrad has found a partner in time. Indeed, he dances every dance of the night with a different woman, his smile and feet unfatiguing.

At midnight, I find my last partner of the night, a banker, and I am just repeating my very well-rehearsed remark on the crush of the ballroom when Mariusz appears by my side.

"My darling, you look exhausted," he says in French. He fetches out a handkerchief and flutters it over my brow. "Might I be ever so rude, Lord Volan, and beg my wife be excused from this dance? No, don't protest, my little cabbage, you are perspiring, positively swampy."

Lord Volan shudders slightly. "But of course, your highness. I will gladly dance with Princess Alexandra on another night."

He leaves, haste in his step.

"I'm not swampy!"

"A little damp at least." Mariusz presses the handkerchief against my palm to prove it.

"Ugh. It's wet! That's not me. What did you do to it?"

"I poured a little wine on it," Mariusz admits in Rothalian. "In case Volan was stubborn. It is after midnight."

"Two minutes after. We leave at half-past," I say in French.

"I'm weary of dancing," Mariusz says, still in my language. "I'm tired of talking. Come. Let us sit, and eat, and rest. No one will bother us if we are together. They will think we are making love."

"Another little deception." I let myself lapse back into Rothalian with relief. I'm tired too. "Fine. Let's sit."

We go back to the refreshment room, which is much more crowded now, and sit down together in the quietest corner we can find. Mariusz fetches us wine and pastries. I eat and drink slowly, realizing only now how painful my feet are in their tight, sweaty dancing slippers.

"Who are the Severni people?" I ask after a while.

"Hm?" Mariusz looks up from his pastry. "They live in the mountains. They have their own customs, their own language, but they are my people."

"And we have a military presence there?"

"At the border, yes." Mariusz narrows his eyes. "You should not be asking me these things. You are not meant to be involved in politics."

"Must I be entirely ignorant then?"

"It makes it harder for you to spy on us if you are."

"If I were a spy, I would not have to ask such ignorant questions."

"Hm." Mariusz picks the spinach from a cheese pastry. "Why were you in the library with Konrad today?"

"Do you think he's a spy too?"

"Maybe. What were you doing with him?"

I want to keep it secret but there is no easy, believable lie. "He teaches me Selician," I say reluctantly. "One hour, sometimes two, each morning."

"I don't like it."

"Why not?"

Mariusz deposits his unwanted spinach neatly in his empty wine glass. "I don't trust him."

"You don't trust me either."

"Exactly. It makes you both more dangerous."

As we speak, Konrad himself enters the refreshment room, one of his dance partners on his arm. She is laughing riotously, but Konrad is only smiling. Mariusz watches as Konrad fetches the woman a glass of wine, bows, and leaves the room.

"I don't like him," Mariusz says quietly.

"Then perhaps you should teach me Selician instead."

Mariusz shakes his head. "I don't have the patience."

"Then you have no right to complain."

He scowls. "Just learn it quickly, will you?"

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2024-08-04: I don't like that last line, hm. Hard to find something snappy this chapter.