Diane stroked her husband’s brocade sleeve. “I’m sorry, William. Of course they must be acknowledged. People have had a glorious time gossiping about the runaway Tremontaine daughter; it wouldn’t do to have them talking about the babies, now, poor mites. Go ahead and send them something; silver, perhaps, with our swan on it. Something from the cabinets; we can’t afford new, and anyway, it will seem more important if it’s family silver, crested.”
“Goblets?” He smiled. “Or rattles?”
“Whatever you like,” she said warmly. “I trust to your selection.”
Her husband squeezed her arm. “We’ll come through, my love. It wasn’t all on our daughter’s shoulders.” The duchess wisely held her tongue. He did not know about the wreck of the Everfair. Nor did he know what she had mortgaged to fund that expedition.
“Tremontaine’s been leaking cash for years,” the duke went on blithely. “But no tradesman in this city will refuse credit to us, or to any other noble for that matter. Why, some of our friends—”
The duchess shuddered. “You know how I feel about credit, William. I do not like to owe anyone anything. And it does not become the House.”
“Another loan, then . . . ?”
“And I know how you feel about loans!” She put her fine hand over his big one, gave it a squeeze. “When we put the Catullan vineyards up for security against that loan for the improvements at Highcombe, you didn’t sleep a wink until they were completed, repaid, and the vineyards out of danger.”
He looked down at both their hands. “Not a bit!” he said softly. “I knew we’d made the right decision. Couldn’t let my father’s house go to ruin. I spent some happy years there . . .” He smiled at something she couldn’t see. “And then we got that phenomenal Catullan harvest, as you predicted—and what a laugh, to pay them back with profits from the very vineyards they were hoping to get their paws on if we failed!” He grinned at her, a boy’s grin. “I’m only sorry I couldn’t share the joke with everyone I know.”
The duchess squeezed his hand harder. “But you know you mustn’t, don’t you? Not ever. For anyone to know we were taking out loans, much less putting up Tremontaine land for them . . .” He nodded. But she pressed on. “We can enjoy the joke together, the two of us, my darling—but that’s as far as it goes.”
He lifted her hand and kissed it. “You keep a most careful house.”
“Because I must, William!” The duchess smiled ruefully. “The cook and the staff all hate me, because I make them do so very much with so very little. To their credit, they always come through. But the ball for Honora’s presentation was a triumph of ingenuity over penury. And how I’m going to manage our Tremontaine Ball this year, I do not know. I’ve got the musicians all hired at reasonable rates, but there’s the invitations all to be handwritten and . . .”
“Why not have them printed? There are some fine engravers.”
“William.” She looked at him with her clear grey eyes, a tiny frown between them. “Tremontaine does not print invitations. To anything.”
Her husband smiled. “Sometimes I think that you are more Tremontaine than I am.”
His duchess chuckled. “You were born to it. You didn’t care.”
“I cared. But my father was such a dreamer. He wasn’t at all practical. I think he spent his time longing for the old kings, and the lost glories of Tremontaine.”
His hand wandered up from her shoulder to stroke the exposed white stem of her neck. “But that was in my favor, in the end. If the old duke hadn’t been so set on the family’s glorious past, he would never have insisted that I marry the only remaining daughter of a dying branch: a very young girl, with very little fortune beyond her wit”—he kissed her ear—“her grace”—kissed her brow—“and her beauty.”
Duke William tweaked one curl of his wife’s perfectly coiffed head, careful not to disarrange anything. “I’m sure my mother objected to that match every bit as much as you do to Honora’s. So you see? It’s a fine old family tradition.”
“Thank you, William.” His duchess rested her head against his brocade-clad chest, despite what it did to her curls. “I am sure I do not deserve you.”
Her husband kissed her nose. “And I am sure you deserve far more.”
“Now,” the duchess said briskly, “let us go downstairs. I shall get my maid to tidy me up, while you read me your lovely speech.”
It was not difficult to slip the papers in her petticoat pocket, nor—when she got to her rooms—to close them in a cabinet drawer before her maid could find them.
• • •
Ixkaab Balam, first daughter of a first daughter of the House of Balam of the Traders of the Kinwiinik, stood on the dock enjoying the feel of the land still moving under her like a ship on the waves. She knew it was an illusion. A Trader and a daughter of Traders, she was used to ships. She could sail one herself, if she had to; she and her cousins had grown up coaxing the nimble river ships around the Ulua’s turgid bends to their family’s home in the mountains when the elders were occupied at sea, or at war.
She’d been at sea before, herself, though never for as long or as far as these ninety days past on the merchant ship Wasp, leaving the warm waters of Binkiinha behind for the cold north. She knew the sensation of rolling ground would pass, and figured she might as well take pleasure in the contradiction while it lasted. Ixkaab hated to be bored.
She had tried not to be bored on the ship. She’d badly needed to be distracted on this voyage, while making sure that her particular skills did not rust. But there was very little of interest to glean on the Wasp about twenty-one gut-led Kinwiinik sailors, two Tullan outlaw runaways, a crippled old Xanamwiinik sailmaker, and a deaf-mute cook, on a cargo ship full of feathers and parrots, spices and maize flour, and a king’s daughter’s ransom in processed cacao beans—along with five Traders, each of whom she was somehow related to. Besides the obvious facts that Uncle Koxol’s sister’s son’s wife was pregnant, Mother’s Cousin Mukuy was already dyeing his hair, Father’s Cousin Chokan was sneaking twice his ration of tamales from the galley, and the captain wrote poetry to the cabin boy, what was there to learn?
And so Kaab had wisely applied herself to studying everything she could about these North Sea people, these Xanamwiinik, amongst whom she was bound to dwell for a while, at least until her part in the disastrous affair of the Tullan Empire mission had blown over.
It was a dismal prospect. This grey and smoky little backwater with its piddling river was hardly the broad, sunswept avenues of the Tullan capital, or even the flower-laced lanes of her sweet Binkiinha. Ixkaab set her jaw. All-knowing Chaacmul knew she’d seen uglier places—though not, so far, colder ones. As the Wasp had drawn nearer this side of the world, she had finally understood why everyone insisted she bring all her quilted clothing. “A damp cold,” Aunt Saabim used to write her mother, and now Kaab knew what she meant. Of course, there would be Local clothing to put on, better suited to the climate—she eyed the ship’s agent’s heavy wool jacket, which he wore unbuttoned in defiance of the chill. It looked scratchy. What kind of animal made wool like that? Would she be forced to wear it? Why hadn’t her people tried importing decent fabric to this place—something with some color in it . . . Spoken like a Trader, little bee, her mother’s voice said in her head. Now, think like an agent.
An agent whose wrists are bound by one mistake, Kaab argued with her mother in her head. What else is there to find out here? Two generations of Kinwiinik Traders had surely learned everything there was to know.
She feared that there was nothing for her to do here.
“. . . And that, milady, up there on the right, is our Hall of Justice.”
She carried the map of