Page 71 of Stardust Child

That wasn’t the sort of thing one ought to say to a little sister.

“Tonight, we are dancing for their pleasure,” Selenne observed. “So they might see and hear only things of beauty while they visit us.”

“Then they should have no complaint,” he returned lightly. “Surely there is no more beautiful sight in the Empire than the one before me. You look made of starlight.”

Selenne turned her face away. “Please stop that. I don’t like it.”

“It is only the truth. But I will desist. You dance well, cousin.”

“I like dancing. I am told my Grandfather Agnephus did as well. You must be as skillful as you can, to please him.”

Ceneric glanced down at her with a flicker of genuine interest in his eyes. It was rare that she saw anything but his smiling courtier’s mask.

“Can you keep up, I wonder?”

“I will rely on you to take care of me well, like a good older brother,” she said demurely, following him through a complicated figure as Ceneric led her to the center of the floor. He was not shy. The other dancers immediately moved aside to give them space, and his eyes flashed a challenge as he moved into the lively, leaping forms of the Imperial galliard. He was a very good dancer. Selenne couldn’t help laughing as he lifted her, her feet flying.

“Very good,” he murmured. He played fair; his hand shifted on her lower back to warn her where he would move next, and he knew how to manage her long skirts, flying hair, and fluttering sleeves. More than one of her partners had gotten rather lost between them before, but Ceneric made them part of the music.

If it was a ploy to intrigue her, she had to admit it worked. Selenne was pink and breathless when he landed her perfectly at the end of the song, to a round of applause from observers.

“Have I pleased Grandfather Agnephus, Your Highness?” Ceneric inquired, inclining his head in a gesture that looked like a bow but also brought his handsome face disconcertingly close.

“It is a fine beginning,” she said, snapping her fan open an inch from his nose. “Pray, go and please him some more.”

“Anything for my cute little sister,” he said drolly, and handed her to her next partner, one of the Pomeret sons who had elbowed his way to the front of the pack.

Every noble House had brought a few sons to shove her way, even ifthey were red-faced and sweating, barely able to look her in the eyes. Selenne danced with young men from the riverlands and the desert, with sons of Tries with salt in their veins and even one fellow named Julot from some House she had never heard of. She smiled to set them at ease, remembering her father’s admonishment that the men she refused would one day be lords of their own Houses. And then she halted, her smile dropping in surprise as her next partner held out his hand.

“Surelyyouhave not come to press your suit,” she told Duke Ghislain Berebet, a lean man an inch shorter than herself with neat salt-and-pepper hair. His wife was thirty paces away.

“There are many kinds of allies, Your Highness,” he observed, leading her into the next dance. “And many reasons for an alliance.”

“Then what sort do you want?” Selenne was growing tired of indulging everyone else’s games. “You are already married.”

“True, you need not fear on that account,” he replied, amused. “Would you believe I have come to spare you everyone else’s machinations for a dance?”

“What, no machinations of your own, Your Grace?” Duke Berebet did not have a reputation for charity.

“Out of sympathy for your choices, perhaps,” he said, with an expressive roll of his eyes toward the young men ringing the dance floor. “I am ashamed that the Empire could not offer you something more compelling. But how else would Pomeret and Firkane keep your Prince Consort under their thumbs?”

“Is that what they are doing?” Selenne glanced at that corner of the dance floor, startled. The young men from those duchies were very young indeed, striplings who had scarcely tasted the sands of the Court of War. And she had only thought that they would pose no challenge to her, without recognizing the challenge of their families.

“We have a riddle, in Berebet,” Duke Berebet was saying. “About the Mazes of Oleron. Have you heard of them?”

“The marshes, you mean?”

“Marshes beyond anything you will ever see, Your Highness,” he agreed. “High reeds and a humid mist that lingers even to midday, with a sucking mud to pull you down on one side and islands of matted roots that seem solid, until they swallow you whole. And so you might imagine that we pose this question to our children, to bring them safe through the mire.You have come to a place where the road splits left and right, andboth paths lead to an unhappy end. Which way do you go?”

Selenne waited, but that was the end of the riddle.

“How could you choose without knowing more?” she asked.

She was still frowning over his answer when he escorted her from the dance floor a few minutes later, fortunately in the direction of her guardsman. Lucan was waiting with some urgency, intercepting the noble sons of Pomeret and Firkane before they could ask for the next dance.

“Your divine father sent me to fetch you, Your Highness,” he said, bowing. “The invocation will begin soon.”

“Very well.” Selenne nodded at Duke Berebet, who bowed and took his leave. Lucan was the only one of her guards who she thought washers,rather than her mother’s creature or her father’s. He had been her guard since she was twelve and he was eighteen, and as they approached the doors at the entrance of the Hall of Radiance, he abruptly pivoted, turning his body to block her from view.

---