The hand on my shoulder was warm and firm. I around, with my heart in my throat.
It was Kael. He had pushed open the glass doors, and he stood in the doorway in his plain black mask. His breath came fast, as if he had run.
"Your Highness," he said, with a quick bow to Adrian. Then to me, in a low, urgent voice: "Two men are coming up the east stairs. They are Lord Pryce's . They will be here in a minute."
"I know," said Adrian. He slid the white silk mask back over his face, and the tired young man in the moonlight . In his place stood the smiling, easy prince again. "I will take the small door to the garden. If anyone asks, I am the ghost of a very bad dancer. Elise, remember what I said."
He was gone in two quick steps.
Kael took my arm and pulled me through the glass doors, back into the ballroom, into the light and the noise. The orchestra was playing a lively tune. The air smelled of and hot wax.
"I heard everything," he murmured, as we walked. His lips hardly moved. "Every word. I am sorry. I stood by the door."
"I am not angry," I said.
"The prince spoke the truth. I have… reason to believe it." He guided me carefully between the dancers, never letting go. "Stay in the center of the room, my lady. Stay in the light, with many people around you. A murderer does not like witnesses."
"And you?"
"I will be close. But I cannot stand beside you. Lord Pryce knows my face, and he knows that I was assigned to you. If we look like allies, we will warn him."
"Then be my shadow," I said.
He gave me a very small, very tired smile. "I have had practice."
He left me beside the great windows, where Nora was waiting. She grabbed my hands.
"My lady! Where were you? I almost came to find you, I swear. I was so afraid —"
"I am safe," I said. "And so are you. Did you drink anything?"
"Only water from the same jug, as you told me. I watched the girl pour it." She frowned. "But the room is so hot, my lady. I have never been so thirsty in my life."
The great clock above the doors said twenty past eleven. Forty minutes to the toast.
I looked around the room. Marcus's peacock mask was near the fountain, bobbing above a ring of laughing ladies. Vivienne stood alone by a pillar with her violet feathers . Lord Pryce's black coat was not in sight.
And all around me, the dancers . A hundred masks. A thousand hands.
I wondered which of them was holding my death.
It happened at twenty-five minutes to midnight.
I was watching Marcus, so at first I did not see her coming. A soft voice at my elbow said, "My lady, a refreshment, with compliments."
I looked down.
A girl in a plain gray dress stood beside me. The same gray cap, pulled low. The same neat . She held a small silver plate with two glasses of pale yellow , each with a slice of lemon on the rim. She curtsied with her eyes on the floor.
"With the compliments of the lady in violet," she said. Her voice was quiet, flat, and strangely polite. It was the voice of someone who had learned the words by heart. "She says that you looked warm."
The lady in violet.
My eyes flew across the room. Vivienne was still at her pillar, holding her own glass, looking at nothing.
And in the corner of my mind, something cold turned over, like a fish in a pond.
"Thank you," I said slowly. "What is your name?"
She lifted the plate a little higher. She did not look up. "I am only a servant, my lady."
"Every servant has a name."
For a second, the girl was still. I caught the faintest flicker beneath her cap. It might have been a smile. It might have been fear.
"Please take it, my lady," she said. "It will spoil in the heat."
I took the glass from the plate, and my fingers touched the cold crystal. The plate with the second glass was held out to Nora, and Nora, polite and thirsty, began to reach for it.
"No," I said, a little too sharply. "Thank you. We will wait."
The girl bobbed a curtsy, turned, and walked quickly away through the crowd.
When I looked for her again, she was gone.