Page 101 of Confounding Oaths
The plan for Miss Caesar to confront the fairy queen for redress stumbled a little here. Crowds are selfish entities and even the wonder of the Beauty Incomparable could not quite clear a way through the throng that now surrounded the Queen of the Other Court.
Matters were proving equally frustrating for Miss Bickle, who had certainly not come to a fairy ball only to leave without so much as glimpsing the queen clearly. Abandoning social convention, she managed—with some effort, and at considerable cost to her dress—to climb the tangled arch of life and marble which now replaced the far end of the hall. This put her perilously close to fairyland proper, which lay a few short meters behind, but for themoment mist shrouded it, and not even Miss Bickle’s boundless curiosity would quite let her wander unprepared into the unreal realm.
While the Queen of Light and Glory was distracting the rest of the room, the captain took the opportunity to pull the younger Mr. Caesar out of the ballroom and into a secluded alcove behind an arras.
“Get her out,” he told him, breathless and still furious.
“Mary?”
“Anne. Reyne’s after her, and I’m sure the fucker is moving tonight. I’ll send the lad with her.”
Mr. Caesar froze. “Here? What do we do?”
“We move fast,” the captain said, “and we move quiet.”
“Will it work? There’s still Titania to reckon with.”
The look in the captain’s eyes was steel, which, contrary to myth, is a far greater danger to my kin than iron is. “Right now she doesn’t matter. Do the first thing. Live. Do the next thing. That’s how it works.”
In the shadows, Mr. Caesar’s hands shook and his spine tensed. He gazed at the captain with that mix of admiration and yearning he always had. “In case we don’t. Live, I mean, then I should say—”
Catching Mr. Caesar about the waist, Captain James pulled him in and kissed him, quick and fierce and burning. “Save it. We’re not done yet and nobody’s dying tonight.”
The talk of death was not doing much to assuage Mr. Caesar’s temptation to stay in that alcove with the captain and pretend none of the rest of it was happening. Except pretending was what he’d been doing his entire life, and he was sick of it. So he nodded as decisively as he could manage. “Let’s go.”
The advantage of a masquerade was that two gentlemenappearing from behind an arras was no great cause for speculation, or at least no greater cause than anything else that went on at such an event. Doing their best to look the acceptable kind of disreputable, the captain and Mr. Caesar went at once in search of his younger sister.
With commendable social instincts, Miss Anne had returned to her family once the dance had ended and was now standing demurely alongside her parents, engaging in light small talk with a distracted-looking Miss Mitchelmore. The younger Mr. Caesar burst into the group with tremendous urgency and broke up the conversation with only the most distant pang of embarrassment.
“Orestes says we need to get you out,” he told his sister. Over his shoulder, the captain nodded his affirmation.
“Will she not be safer in a crowd?” asked the elder Mr. Caesar.
Captain James nodded in ayes, butsort of way. “She was, but this”—he indicated the tide of revellers that still flowed (appropriately enough, given her occasional lunar associations) towards the lady Titania—“is not a normal crowd. This is turning into cover. My advice is take her home now before we start seeing real chaos.”
Never one to keep her opinions to herself, Lady Georgiana sidled over to interfere. “I’m inclined to agree with the soldier. I have never known an otherworldly being to appear and make thingssafer.”
The assembled extended family discussed this matter a few moments more, but, as they did, Captain James took it upon himself to signal to Kumar, who in turn signalled to Boy William, who had positioned himself such that he could keep watch on both the lieutenant and Miss Anne without drawing too much attention to himself. Which meant that by the time the group had decided what was to be done, the Irregulars had moved seamlessly to cover their sight lines and the new plan could be implemented immediately.
“Right.” Captain James set everybody their assignments and, despite his misgivings about taking instruction regarding his children’s welfare, even Mr. Caesar acquiesced to the arrangement. “I’ll spot Reyne to make sure he doesn’t go anywhere. Boy William, you take these three”—he indicated the elder Mr. Caesar, Lady Mary, and Miss Anne—“get them home safe, especially the girl.”
Miss Anne did not especially enjoy being referred to asthe girl,but having at least some sensibility of the danger she stood in, she accepted it.
“The rest of us cover the exit, make it look like everything’s normal, and remember there’s still the queen, the Lady, and Miss Mary to think about.”
Few if any of the assembly were in any danger of forgetting the fact, but with the Irregulars running interference, the elder Caesars, backed by Boy William, navigated Miss Anne from the building with no fanfare and with few any the wiser.
There were, after all, far more interesting things for the guests to be looking at.
Chapter Twenty-one
The Queen of the OtherMoon was, at last, coming to the end of her circuit. She had accepted the greeting and tributes of princes, dukes, earls, and counts and was beginning to turn her attention to the lesser members of the company. Which was to say, the people who hailed only from the kingdom’s thousand wealthiest families, rather than its thirty wealthiest.
So at last Miss Caesar had an opportunity to speak her piece. And although she was now merely the second most radiant being in the hall (the Beauty Incomparable was a wondrous gift, but Titania would permit nothing to outshine her, although my lord would—of course—do so on many occasions despite her best efforts), when she and the queen came face-to-face they amplified one another. The queen was all light, and Miss Caesar all glass, and so the one poured into the other and danced and shifted and spilled out again across the ballroom, bathing the onlookers in a radiance the like of which mortal eyes saw once in their lives, and then only if blessed with remarkable fortune—of one sort or another.
And when the queen at last spoke, her voice was like hearing the dawn. Like children laughing on a battlefield. Like a storm in a heat wave. “What do you want, child?”
A glass face behind a glass mask, Miss Caesar had never looked, nor sounded, less like herself. But she spoke the words clearly enough. “I want redress.”
