Chapter 258: Meera Joins The Dinner [1]

The dining hall had never been so quiet with so many people in it.

The long table gleamed beneath the chandeliers. Silver caught the candlelight. The first course had been served, a clear broth of river fish with saffron and leeks, and the steam rising from six bowls was the only thing in the room that moved freely.

Ulrich sat at the head of the table.

Airam sat at his left, as she always did. Esther was beside her, as she always was, with Hermione next to her. Ceres had taken the seat, obviously, on Ulrich’s right.

Mark was not there. He had taken his supper early with Fabian, then gone down to see to the carriage that would return him and Ceres to New Ruben before the roads darkened.

And at the far end of the table, in the chair that faced Ulrich directly down its whole length, sat Meera.

She had not asked for that seat.

She had simply walked to it, as she had two years ago, and Fabian had drawn the chair for her without a word, and now she sat there in her white and foam-blue silk with the candlelight in her sea-colored hair as though the chair had been carved for her.

She was, quite obviously, enjoying herself immensely.

The sisters had not been warned.

Ulrich had considered it, briefly, while dressing for dinner, and had decided against it. Warning them would have required explaining, and explaining would have invited questions, and he had answered enough questions for one afternoon.

So they had come down the stairs together, Esther chattering about the rivers of southern Skargardia and Hermione correcting her, and they had walked into the dining hall and stopped.

All three of them.

At the same time.

Ulrich had watched it happen from his chair. Esther’s mouth had fallen open. Hermione had gone rigid from her shoulders to her heels. And Airam, who did not stop for anything, had stopped for a full second in the doorway with her black eyes fixed on the far end of the table before she walked to her seat and sat down without a word.

That had been a quarter of an hour ago.

None of them had said a word since.

Ulrich lifted his spoon.

Five spoons lifted after his.

He ate.

The broth was good. The kitchens had outdone themselves at very short notice, which he suspected had less to do with Fabian’s orders than with the fact that half the staff had heard who was at the table and wished to give her nothing to remark upon.

They had not succeeded.

“Divine,” Meera spoke up.

She had taken one spoonful and set the spoon down again, and now she pressed her gloved fingertips to her breastbone as though the broth had reached her heart.

“Count Rubenhart, I have dined at the tables of three great nobles, and I say without flattery that the meals served in the Rubenhart house remain the finest in Skargardia. Your cook is a treasure. You should lock her in a tower before someone steals her.”

“She is a man.”

“Then lock him in a tower. The principle stands.”

She lifted her wine glass, turned it once so the candlelight ran red through it, and drank. Her eyes closed. A low hum of pleasure escaped her throat, entirely unladylike and very much with purpose, and lingered a moment too long.

Hermione’s spoon clicked against her bowl.

Ulrich did not look up.

He could feel the sisters looking at him. Three separate gazes, each with its own weight. Esther’s was wide and bewildered and kept flickering between him and the far end of the table as though she expected one of them to explain. Hermione’s was ruby-red and upset and trying very hard to be neither. Airam’s was simply there, calm, black and unreadable, resting on the side of his face like a hand.

He ate his broth.

He had decided, somewhere on the stairs, that he would give them nothing tonight. Not a word, not a glance. Whatever they thought they knew, whatever Hermione had seen or Esther had heard or Airam had concluded in that quiet, merciless way of hers, they could keep it.

The soup bowls were cleared.

The second course came. Roast pheasant, glazed with honey and Rubenhart wine, on a bed of chestnuts and autumn pears. The servants moved around the table without a sound and withdrew to the walls.

Meera picked up her knife and fork and cut a piece of pheasant with quite a precision, and then, as though she had only just noticed, she turned her attention down the length of the table.

“But how remiss of me.”

She smiled.

“I have been so occupied with the food and with our host that I have neglected the company entirely. Lady Airam. Lady Hermione. Lady Esther. How you have grown. When I saw you last, I do believe the youngest of you could not see over this table.”

“It was just a month ago…” Esther said, in a very small voice.

“Of course it was, darling. Forgive me. It is only that you are so much lovelier now that my memory cannot keep up.” Meera’s gaze moved to Hermione. “And you, Lady Hermione. You were watching the Count and me from afar as I had left.”

Hermione’s face went from pink to scarlet in the space of a breath.

“I—I wasn’t watching!”

“No? How strange. I recall it perfectly. You seemed pretty upset,” Meera cut another piece of pheasant. “And Lady Airam. You have not changed at all. You are still looking at me as though you are deciding where to put the knife.”

Airam did not answer.

She did not look away, either.

Meera’s smile widened by a fraction, warm and unbothered, and she turned at last to the one face at the table she did not know.

“But here is someone I have not had the pleasure of.”

Ceres had not looked up from her plate since the pheasant arrived.

She had eaten very little. She sat with her back very straight and her green hair falling forward to hide the right side of her face, and her hands rested on either side of her plate, not quite touching the silver. From the moment she had entered the hall and seen the woman at the far end of the table, something in her had gone watchful and still, the way a small animal goes still when a shadow passes over the grass.

Now she raised her head.

Her left eye, the green one, met Meera’s across the table, and it was not friendly.

“Count Rubenhart,” Meera said, without taking her eyes from Ceres, “who is this new pretty girl at your table? I do not recall you having four wards. I would have remembered. I remember everything about you.”

Ulrich set down his knife.

“The daughter of a lesser lord in the south of the county,” he said. “He died in the spring. She had no other family. I took her in.”

It came out smooth and without hesitation, in the voice he used for grain reports.

Meera looked at him.

She did not stop smiling. If anything, the smile grew a shade fonder, the way one smiles at a child who has told a very earnest lie about a broken vase.

“A lesser lord,” she said.

“Yes.”

“In the south.”

“Yes.”

“With green hair.”

“His wife was Arcadian.”

“How tragic for them all.” Meera turned back to Ceres, and her voice softened into something that sounded almost genuinely kind. “And what is your name, sweet one? The Count has told me your father’s fate but not the one thing that matters.”

Ceres’s fingers curled inward against the tablecloth.

“Ceres,” she said.

“Ceres.” Meera tasted the name as she had tasted the wine. “That is lovely. That is a name from the old stories. Did you know that? The Elves named their spring festival for—”

“W—Who are you?”

The words came out of Ceres in a rush, too fast and too loud, and her hands had closed into fists on either side of her plate. Her shoulders had come up. The hair over her right eye had slipped a little, and beneath it, for just an instant, something amber caught the candlelight and was hidden again.

The table went utterly silent.

Esther, who had just lifted her water glass to her lips to have something to do with her hands, froze with it there.

Meera did not so much as blink.

She set down her fork. She set down her knife, laying it precisely parallel to the fork. She dabbed the corner of her mouth with her napkin, folded the napkin, and laid it beside her plate. Every motion was slow and graceful and perfectly correct, and every one of them was designed to make the whole table wait.

Ulrich wondered even if she hadn’t taken etiquette class just to put on a better show each time she showed up at his doors.

Then Meera folded her gloved hands beneath her chin, tilted her head, and smiled down the long, gleaming length of the table at the girl who had dared to ask.

“Why, darling,” she said. “I am the Count’s mistress.”

Esther spat out her water.