The Rulebook - Twelfth Seat 03

HOUSE XII -- CONTRACT OF THE CIRCLE

Extract. Articles of Candidacy. The full instrument runs to thirty-seven articles and is shown to no one outside contract.

Art. 4. The contract of the Circle is concluded between the Holder and the candidate, and between no one else. Candidacy, however, opens only on the recommendation of a Confidante or on the approach of the First -- never on the Holder's initiative, and never on an approach made to him directly. What passes through this gate is too valuable to be admitted by flattery, from either side.

Art. 5. Candidacy runs three months, and neither showing may be abbreviated. Contract may follow candidacy; the seal does not. The seal is given at the Sealing, after no less than a year served under contract without it.

Art. 6. During candidacy there is no intimacy with the Holder. She must want the House entire -- the Seat, the work, the years -- and the House must know that she does. A contract signed for a season's wanting holds no one.

Art. 12. Exit stands open at every hour of every day of the contract, without cause given, with settlement by years of service and silence bought at its full price. This article is read aloud at every Sealing, before the seal is given. The House calls it the golden door. The House does not joke about it.

* * *

The second door opened to his key at seven exactly, and Constance was standing a few steps back from it, which told Julian she had heard him arrive and had let him do the work of the lock himself. First lesson, unannounced: on this side of the wall, doors are opened by the person who intends to walk through them.

The sitting room he had been promised turned out to be a small square chamber off the candle corridor, with the shutters folded back on a courtyard he had never once seen from the public wing and nothing on the table but a gray folder. No sockets. No switches. Daylight was the only technology the room admitted. There was a brown water stain on the ceiling above the door, roughly the shape of a boot, that nobody had ever painted over.

"Sit," Constance said. She wore gray again, working gray with the sleeves to the wrist, and took the corner of the table beside him, close enough that the lesson would have no podium. "We have eight days until Geneva and you have fifteen years of knowledge that is going to try to kill you. So we begin there. Tell me what the Chamber is."

"Three retired jurists in Geneva. Arbitration between the Houses before disputes become visible. Kessler is their--"

"Stop." She had not raised her voice in all the time he had known her, and she did not start now. "Three sentences were about to happen. The first you know. The second you assume. 'Arbitration' is the word the Chamber uses about itself, and you were about to hand it back to me as fact. The third, Viktor allowed you to believe, which is a different thing again, and the difference is where men in your position die." She opened the gray folder and turned it and did not push it toward him. "This morning you will learn to sort your own sentences into those three stacks. It is the only skill I can give you in eight days that Geneva cannot take away."

They worked for two hours, and it was interrogation run in reverse, his own certainties laid out on the table and cut open one at a time to see what they had been fed on, while the light came round off the courtyard and across the folder and onto the back of his left hand. Article 3 went first, because he offered it first and she let him hear how he said it. Believed. Viktor had wanted it believed, right up until the night of the 14th. She did not say that last part. He heard it anyway, in the shape of what she skipped.

The Register took longer. He had couriered sealed additions to it twice in fifteen years, both times on an hour Viktor named the day before and never moved, and she made him say both dates aloud before she would let it go into known. He got one of them wrong by a month and had to be corrected from the folder. The Clearing he defended for most of an hour, because he had built two of the Liechtenstein cascade's lower terraces with his own hands, so to speak, and had never once seen the upper ones, only invoices that implied them, and at twenty to nine he put it in assumed without being told to.

At nine she let him read the Contract.

He read it twice, completely, with his hands flat on the table, and she watched him the whole time with her own hands in the same position. It was thirty-seven articles long and none of them were about devotion.

"Article 6," he said finally. "'She must want the House entire.'"

"The House is the Holder's. His Seat, his contract, his signature on every one of these pages, and the women in that salon know it better than you do yet." The pause that followed was almost dry. "Which is precisely why the gate cannot run through him. A man being offered devotion is the worst-placed judge alive of its sincerity. Viktor knew that of himself and counted the knowing among his assets, so the approach never comes to the Holder and the veto sits with me. You will not find that clause in Corvin's version, which is one of several reasons his court has forty women and no First worth the name. Questions."

"One. Who reads Article 12 aloud, at a Sealing?"

Something moved behind the gray eyes. He had the impression, not for the first time with her, that he had just been marked on a scale he would never be shown, and that the mark was a pass.

"The First," Constance said. "Because the woman kneeling has spent a year and more wanting to stay, and the sentence must be spoken by someone she cannot charm and cannot disappoint. You asked the right question, Mr.  Reeve. You asked who carries the rule, not what it says."

"Two." He had not planned a second question, and it arrived anyway. "The fourth ritual. You gave me the Asking this morning as a formula and a right of refusal, and you didn't say whose it is."

"It belongs to whoever wants. That is the entire design." Her hand stayed flat on the closed folder. "Any Confidante may speak it to the Holder. The Holder may speak it to any Confidante."

"That's two."

"And any Confidante may speak it to another Confidante, which surprises men more than the other two put together. It is also the oldest of the three. Either party may refuse, without a reason and without a cost, and no refusal is recorded anywhere, because a right that gets written down is a right that can be counted."

"Both directions."

"In principle." She was quiet long enough that he had the answer before she gave it. "In nineteen years, the Holder of this House never once spoke it. Not to me. Not to any woman who has ever worn this House's silver."

Julian waited. Nothing came.

"Is that a rule?"

"There is nothing in the folder about it. It simply happened, nineteen years running." She was already reaching for the schedule. "Put it in known, Mr.  Reeve, and leave it there with no reason attached. I am aware that is the least comfortable place in your stacks. You will be given the reason when you have somewhere to put it."

"And in the other direction? Did anyone ever speak it to him?"

"Ask me in a year." She closed the folder. "Now. Livia at eleven, for the political map of the Eleven. Hannah at three, for the money."

"And Noor?"

"Noor at whatever hour Noor decides, which is her privilege and my headache." She rose. "Tonight is your first Evening Order. Hannah designs it. You are invited as a guest." At the door she stopped on the weight of the word. "Watch that word all evening. It is doing more work than you think."

* * *

Nobody came for him when the lesson ended. He sat a while with the gray folder and sorted the morning's sentences into their stacks. Then hunger took him out into the candle corridor, ordinary, unceremonial hunger, the first thing since the funeral that had crossed the wall with him unchanged. The candles stood dead in their sconces, one of them leaning at an angle somebody had evidently meant to fix, and daylight was doing their work, and a smell of coffee was arriving from somewhere with the confidence of an institution.

The kitchen of the private wing lay down three steps at the corridor's end, with copper on the walls and a black iron range and a long deal table scrubbed pale as bone, laid with nothing that matched, and Hannah sat at the far side of it with coffee and bread and a boiled egg in a cup painted with a hen that had lost most of its comb to the washing-up, opening the egg with a spoon in small exact strokes. The small notebook lay beside her plate, closed. He had not known it could be closed.

"There's a pot on the range," she said, and went back to the egg.

He stood a moment by the table waiting to be told where to sit. The reflex was a day old and already structural, and nothing answered it. There was no card and no place, and no rule arrived to be obeyed. He took the chair opposite, found a cup on the open shelf with a small chip out of its rim, and poured his own. The coffee was very good, and nobody had designed it.

Livia came in as he sat, dressed for the working day, and drank hers standing at the range. "Did the First leave you alive?"

"Provisionally."

"Keep that word. You'll want it in Geneva." The wide mouth considered him over the rim of the cup, one degree warmer than the hour required. "Eleven o'clock," she said, already moving. "I have a committee at ten and a chairman to disarm before it." She was gone down the corridor at the pace of a woman whose minutes were billed.

Hannah finished the egg, took her plate and her cup to the stone sink, washed them and set them on the rack, ran the tap once more afterwards over nothing and turned it off, and left without a word, which he was learning to read as economy. After that the kitchen held one man and a coffee pot, and no one had produced an agenda or presided over anything, and no one had been received or had graded the pour, and it was the first room on this side of the wall that had not read him while he was in it. Tonight there would be candles, a designer, and rules explicit enough that they could not be failed by accident. This morning the House had simply let him eat. He could not yet have said which of the two was the greater courtesy.

* * *

Livia arrived at eleven with no papers at all, and within a few minutes he saw that this was the demonstration.

"The Eleven," she said. She took the chair across from him and crossed her legs with the unhurried precision of a woman who knew what the motion did and had decided the briefing could afford it. The dark blonde was pinned for the chamber, the charcoal suit was one the cameras would have approved of, and the wide mouth sat at its parliamentary calibration and did not entirely stay there. "Forget Viktor's reports. Reports tell you what a House did. I'm going to tell you what each of them is afraid of, because in eight days you will be standing in a room where fear is the only honest currency."

She walked him through them as she must once have walked new deputies through the Belgian chamber, by appetite and debt rather than by seat and holding. Corvin she did at speed, in two sentences. Seat I was the oldest capital at the table, it wanted the table entire, and nobody had yet found anything it was afraid of.

"Which is not the same as its having nothing," she said, and moved on before he could hold her to it.

Whitlock disciplined states for a living and had never once been disciplined himself, and what kept him awake was the idea of a payment moving that his rails had not seen. On Pemberton-Ashe she spent longer than he expected, most of it on a single word, because they never threatened anyone and had no need to so long as the word uninsurable existed in the language of the people they insured, and they would vote with any majority that let them go on seeming harmless.

"Brandt?" he said.

"Dull as a substation." She considered it. "And frightened of Corvin as an engineer is frightened of a man who doesn't read the load tables."

Vela, Okonkwo, Liang and the split House of Steiner-Ade she barely touched. She would put those four in front of him properly the night before he flew, she said, because they were the ones he might actually be able to use.

"Corvin counts five," she finished. "Himself, Whitlock, and Ferraz of São Paulo secure. Pemberton-Ashe and al-Rashidi of the Gulf by gravity. You need four and a fault line. That is the entire mathematics of your survival, and in Geneva he will try to make sure you never get the chance to learn the arithmetic."

He asked which fault line. She said Steiner-Ade, and then sat back and looked at him for rather longer than the answer had required.

"May I say something unhelpful." It was not a question, and the parliamentary calibration had gone off her mouth entirely. What replaced it was a slow grin with appetite behind it, unhurried and frankly hungry, the look of a woman who has finished assessing a thing and come to a decision about it that she does not intend to share yet. Her tongue came out and moved along her upper lip, once, almost tenderly, and went away again, and she let him watch it happen. "You have been in this room since seven o'clock being taught by Constance, and I can hear it. You are sorting everything I say into her three boxes while I say it, and it makes you sit like a man in an examination. Stop. Constance is teaching you not to be killed. I am teaching you something else."

"Which is."

"That in eight days you will be the newest thing to walk into that Chamber in a generation, and that this is not only a liability." The wide mouth allowed itself a millimeter, and then rather more than a millimeter. "Viktor prepared for that room for nineteen years. He also stopped being surprised by it somewhere past the halfway mark, and a man who is never surprised stops noticing when a room has changed shape under him. You will walk in having noticed everything, because everything will be new. Use it before it wears off. It wears off."

She uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way, and did not hurry it, and held his eyes for the whole of it. He was plainly meant to see it, and pretending he had not would have been the greater discourtesy. She was enjoying this as she enjoyed a vote she already knew she had won, and she was not troubling to hide the enjoyment.

"And since we are being unhelpful. I have spent four years in this House being extremely good at a job in a room that never once asked me a question it did not already know the answer to. Do you know what that is like? It is like being a very expensive instrument kept in a locked case." She let that stand while she found the rest. "You have asked me thirteen questions this morning. Two of them were stupid. One of them I am going to have to go away and think about, which has not happened to me in this house in a considerable time, and I would like you to know that I noticed."

"That sounded like a compliment."

"It was an observation about the briefing's efficiency," she said, as fast as a woman kicking a ball off her own foot. She caught herself doing it, and the color arrived at the tops of her ears and stayed there. It was the first thing in the briefing that had not been designed. "God. Four years of committee rooms. Very well. It was a compliment. Do not build anything on it before Geneva."

"Noted."

"Viktor's House," she said, standing and gathering nothing, since she had brought nothing, "was a very good machine. I say that with real affection. He made me what I am, and I have not sat down properly since yesterday morning. But it had not had a new idea since the year I joined it, and neither had any of us, because there was no point in having one. The man already knew. You do not know. It is going to be appalling for about a month." She was at the door. "I find I am looking forward to it rather more than is professional."

"Is that also an observation?"

"That," Livia said, and the grin came back at full width with no calibration left in it anywhere. The tongue went across the upper lip again, firmly this time and without hurry, from one corner to the other, and left the full lower lip shining after it. "That was flirtation. I would have thought fifteen years in this business might have taught you the difference. Then again, I suppose nobody was flirting with the furniture." From the corridor she looked back at him once and went over him from the shoes up, the audit of the first night reopened and read a second time, thorough and in no hurry and this time plainly enjoyed. "Eleven o'clock tomorrow, Twelfth. Bring the stupid questions. They are the ones that cost Corvin money."

Nobody ever suspects the furniture, Sarah had said once, in the dark, tracing his jaw with one finger, and she had meant it as a compliment about camouflage. It had taken a Belgian deputy in a charcoal suit about ninety minutes to turn the same five words the other way up.

She went off down the candle corridor without hurrying, and Julian sat on in the empty room with the shutters open and the light moving on the table. His hands had been flat and still on the wood for the better part of the day. He became aware that they now wanted very much to do something. He had no stack to put that in. He noted the fact and did not sort it, and Constance would probably have called that progress.

Hannah came at three with paper. It was real paper, hand-drawn account trees unrolled across the table and weighted at the corners with whatever the room offered, which turned out to be the gray folder, his watch, and two pencils of Constance's that he had not noticed her leave behind, and for two hours she showed him where the Twelve's money slept, and it was never where it was reported to sleep. She spoke perhaps three hundred words. At the end she rolled the trees up again, precisely, made a small entry in the small notebook, and said, "You didn't pretend to follow the parts you didn't follow. Continue that." From Hannah, he gathered, this was a citation for valor.

Noor found him at dusk in the corridor, barefoot, carrying two letters.

"A test," she said, and put them in his hands. "Viktor's. Both from the private files, both to the same registry clerk in Lisbon, three years apart. One of them I wrote last night. Which is true?"

He took them to the window light and did everything he knew to do, going over the paper and the ink and the pressure of the hand and the little hesitations of an old man's pen, and the hand was identical in both, and he had read fifteen years of it and could not have told anyone what he was looking for that he had not already looked at. He weighed them for a long time and chose the one that asked after the clerk's sick daughter before it asked for the schedule, because the kindness felt like Viktor. It was private and efficient, affection deployed at the exact moment it was cheapest.

Noor's whole face lit with delight, which was how he knew he had failed.

"You checked the paper," she said, taking both letters back. "Paper is easy. You should have checked the appetite. The real letter wants something small and is a little rude about it, because real people are. Mine wants to be believed. You can smell it if you know the smell. So it brought a sick daughter along as a witness." She tucked both letters into one hand. "That is this House's product, Twelfth. Viktor could see it. He found me because I fooled him exactly once, and he never let me forget the once." She stopped at the candle burning in the wall sconce and fed one of the two letters into the flame. Watching the paper go, he realized that he did not know which one it was, and that she knew he didn't.

"Tonight is Hannah's Order," she said over her shoulder. "Wear what you're given. Say nothing you aren't asked for. And Twelfth." She gave the ritual word its flirtation weight. "Watch the household. In this House even the service is a text."

* * *

The card came to the sitting room at seven, in a hand he didn't know, small and upright and hotel-perfect. The Order of this evening is Hannah's. Dress is laid out. The guest is received at nine. The guest speaks when addressed by the designer. There was no signature, since a household does not sign. The card had been cut with a blade and a straightedge, and there was no printed edge to it anywhere. Somebody had made this object by hand.

The dress laid out for him was black and unadorned and softer than anything he owned, a suit that behaved like clothing instead of armor. At nine the double doors stood open on the long table he had seen through their gap the night before, built now into something out of a colder century, black cloth and white candles and white china and the geometry exact to the centimeter, with four places and a fifth set apart at an angle for the guest, positioned so that he faced the table without belonging to it. He spent the first quarter hour believing the strictness was aimed at him and the second working out that it had been built around him. Rules this explicit could not be failed by accident, and a guest who could do nothing wrong had been given the only real safety this House knew how to offer.

The Confidantes came in by an order that was itself information, with Hannah last because the evening was hers. All three were in what the design demanded, black and high-collared, no jewelry but the three narrow rings of blackened silver, hair pinned. Even Noor's hair was pinned. Even Noor's feet were in plain black flats, which on Noor read as fancy dress. Constance came after all of them, in her gray, which the design had evidently allowed her, and took the seat at the table's head that was not the head. The First stands slightly outside every Order, even this one.

The household served.

She came in with the first course and he knew her at once from the gap in the doors. She was in the same black to the wrist, with the same narrow band of black velvet at her throat. She was somewhere near thirty, middle height, and built, he would think later, for being underestimated. The dark mahogany hair was pinned as severely as it had been the night before, and the velvet band underlined the long pale neck like a rule. Her gray-green eyes touched nothing they had not been sent to. The black service dress had been cut by someone instructed to say as little as possible, and it obeyed, and it still could not suppress the deep curve of a full bust above a narrow waist, or the long line of leg that the hem administered rather than showed. She moved through the room's strict geometry the way water moves through a lock, exactly and without hurry, without one wasted centimeter. She served the guest first, before even the designer, and that gave him a small shock. Her eyes met his for the precise duration courtesy allowed. What passed in that measured second was a professional's acknowledgment that she was being watched by someone who could see the work.

"Mara," Constance said quietly, when the first course stood complete. It was the only introduction the design permitted, one word. Mara inclined her head a centimeter to the table in general and withdrew to the sideboard and stood there, hands folded, as still as Hannah, until she was needed.

Hannah conducted the Order itself almost without speech. Wine was poured at her nod. Courses turned at her glance. Once she addressed the guest. "Mr.  Reeve. Viktor held forty-one of these dinners a year, in this room, across his nineteen years as Holder. Tell the table one thing you organized for him on the other side of the wall, on a night we sat here." He saw the question's kindness only while he was answering it. She was stitching his years to theirs and giving the two halves of the dead man's life one table to lie on. He told them about the polling institute in Tallinn, delivered in under a fortnight because Viktor had wanted it operational before a particular Estonian election, and Viktor had never told Julian why, and Julian had never asked, and had stood in a car park in the sleet outside the rented office on the morning it opened and thought it was the best thing he had ever built. Noor said softly, to her wine, "We know why." He had half a question made, something about the election and whether the man who had won it had ever, and then Hannah's glance turned the course and he let it go. Nobody laughed, quite. Something in the geometry eased by a degree, and Hannah permitted it.

The candles burned down one course-length at a time. Julian told things that had happened, and the others told things they had felt. It was the most intelligent evening he had ever attended, and no one had told him anything at all.

It ended when Hannah rose. Nobody said anything to close it, and the Order was over.

* * *

What happened next was shown to him, and the showing had terms.

The table was let stand. The Confidantes moved to the fire end of the long-table room, pins started coming out of hair, and Noor's flats came off before she had finished standing up. The room exhaled. He was seeing the House at ease for the first time. Constance appeared at his shoulder with the quietness she saved for instructions.

"Livia has asked that you remain," she said. "Understand what you are being offered. The household's evenings are its own. What Livia and Mara hold is theirs, contracted, renewed, and none of the House's business except that the House protects it. Your terms: the chair by the window. You do not speak. You do not move. Either of them ends it at a word, and if the word comes, you leave without looking back." The gray eyes measured him once, briefly, as they had at the sill the night before. "Livia does nothing without a reason, Mr.  Reeve. Tonight she is showing the new Holder what trust looks like when it is built correctly, because in eight days you will stand in a room full of the other kind. Sit well."

The chair by the window faced the fire at an oblique, the observer's angle. It was the same grammar as his chair at dinner. Only Hannah left, notebook in hand, with a nod to Livia that was blessing and abstention in one motion. Constance took the near end of the deep sofa. Noor had the far end and a glass she had been generous to herself about. The House watched, and that, he would see later, was half the point. Nothing behind the second door was private from the House, only private within it. The long-table room held five people and a dying table of candles, and Livia said, without raising her voice:

"Leave the table, Mara. The evening is ours now."

He watched the sentence land. It was the same woman, with the same exactness and the same unhurried water, and it was a different woman entirely. The service stillness became another stillness, deeper, chosen a second time. Mara set down the cloth she held, folded it, and placed it square on the sideboard, one last act of the first vocation closing itself out with honors. She turned and stood for Livia in the middle of the emptied floor with her hands loose at her sides and her chin level, and waited to be looked at.

Livia looked. She took her time about it and circled once, slowly, proprietary and grave at once, reviewing standards both women held sacred. "The service tonight," Livia said, "was flawless. Hannah's designs are the hardest to serve. She'll never tell you that, so I am telling you." She stopped directly behind her, lips near the velvet band. "I counted one deviation. The guest's wine, second course. You poured a half-second early."

"The guest reaches for his glass when he is thinking," Mara said to the middle distance, serene. "He was about to think. I chose not to make him wait."

"She reads the room better than the room reads itself," Livia said. It was said to Julian, the first acknowledgment of his existence since the terms were set, and it was praise wearing a ruling's clothes. To Mara, in a register gone private and exact, she said, "Anticipation over protocol. Defend it or yield it."

"I defend it."

"Correctly defended."

It was the nightly audit, two perfectionists performing it on the art they shared, and the verdict was the caress. Livia's hands went to the pins in Mara's hair and drew them one at a time, unhurried, laying each on the sideboard with a small click like a clock assembling, and the dark hair came down over the black cloth and the velvet band. At some signal Julian could not detect, and would spend days failing to reconstruct, the black dress was being undone. Livia's hands did it and Mara stood still for it, and the firelight did to plain black wool what it had done the first night to gray. What emerged from the service uniform was the figure the uniform had spent the whole evening understating, and he saw now that the understatement had been deliberate craft. Her skin was pale as the white china, with a single small dark mark below the left collarbone like a jeweler's signature, and the full, heavy curve of her breasts came free of the falling wool above a waist that explained the dress's discretion, and below it were the long strong legs a hotel's marble corridors had built. She was made of the same exactness as her work and was composed even in this. When the last of it was gone, drawn off unhurriedly and folded by her own hands and set square on the sideboard beside her pins, the narrow black band at her throat was the only thing she wore in the room, and she wore it like rank.

She crossed to the cushion that stood before the fire as if it had always stood there and knelt on it, back straight, palms on her thighs, naked in a room of clothed people and not diminished by one degree of it. The geometry of her kneeling had the same signature as her card, cut with a blade and a straightedge, and gravity had nothing to do with it. It came to him with the force of a language arriving all at once that this was her work, the second vocation, and that her pride in it was identical to her pride in the flawless pour.

Livia sat in the great chair before her and let herself be served. Mara poured the wine from the kneeling position without a tremor, an exhibition piece, and Livia set the glass aside on the little table at her elbow and did nothing else at all for the length of a slow breath.

"Now," she said, and let the silence stand in front of the sentence as she let silences stand in committee. "The reward."

What followed, Julian watched from the window chair without moving, as instructed.

He had expected, insofar as he had permitted himself to expect anything, that a reward in this register would be something done to her.

He had it precisely backwards, and the correction arrived before she had covered a yard of floor.

Mara came off the cushion and crossed to the great chair on her hands and knees, the mahogany hair swinging forward off one shoulder and the firelight running the whole length of her, hip and waist and the heavy sway of her breasts.

She stopped at the chair and sat back on her heels, lifted Livia's left foot into her lap, and kissed it gently, once, through the leather. She took the shoe off it as she would take a cork out of a bottle, steadily and without event, and set it down beside her upright and square to the chair leg. The right got the same, the kiss and then the shoe. Then she folded down over them and put her mouth to the arch of one bare foot, and stayed there.

Nobody in the long-table room said anything.

The kissing was unhurried and entirely serious. The instep. The arch. The hard fine joinery of the ankle. Her hands cupped underneath as though what had been put into them were breakable and had been entrusted rather than surrendered.

Her eyes were closed. They had not been closed all evening, not for one second, because a woman in service does not close her eyes. That was the tell, and Julian felt it go through him like a flat hand laid against his sternum. She had put down the watching in front of all of them, and she had been permitted to.

Slowly the perfectionism came off her too. Her tongue came out and stroked the skin, with none of the kissing's order in it and no placement, only the flat warm drag of it along the arch and up over the bone and back, unhurried, and then again. What had begun as flawless service loosened by degrees into something with no standard in it at all. Julian watched a woman who had spent the whole evening holding a bottle at the correct angle stop caring, for the first time that night, whether anything she did was correct.

She still placed the kisses. Those stayed deliberate, short and considered and set down one at a time in particular spots as though each had been decided on separately, her eyes shut through all of them.

She turned her face and took one of Livia's toes into her mouth.

She began, carefully, to suck, and her eyes opened.

They went up, for the first time that evening, directly to Livia's. They went past the room and the fire and the guest in the window chair, straight up the length of the great chair to the face at the top of it, and held there. From across the room, with his hands motionless on the leather, Julian found he could read the look without any help at all. It looked, more than anything else in the world, like thanks.

Livia drew her feet back.

Mara took it as it was meant. She straightened where she knelt, precisely as far as she had been before, hands returning to her own thighs, chin level, the whole shape of her restored at once, and said to the floor between them, in exactly the voice she had used for he was about to think:

"Thank you, Mistress."

Livia leaned forward then and took her by the chin with two fingers and a thumb, no pressure in it at all, the grip you use on a thing whose answer you already hold. She drew her in and did not stop drawing her in, so that Mara came up off her heels and forward on her knees until she was inside the arms of the great chair and between Livia's knees, looking up from a distance of about a foot.

"Yes, Mistress," Mara said, to a question nobody had asked out loud.

-- End of Chapter Three --