None of this rough handling distracted her from her more pressing question. Why had her father summoned her? She prayed to whatever powers would listen that he had not come up with yet another scheme to try to force her to manifest a bloodshadow.
Father had never been able to accept that, saintblooded though she was, descended in a direct line from the Risen Saints themselves, she was unhallowed and had no sorcery. He kept trying to drag magic out of her soul using his own bloodshadow as block and tackle. How many times had he racked her with his own power, ripping away at her very soul in the effort to provoke some latent power to rise and defend itself? Year after year, that had been her fate, until her brother, Guillaume, had manifested his bloodshadow.
At last, Father had a viable heir, undamaged, ensorcelled, and of the correct gender. Ever since, Father had done everything short of exiling her to pretend Isabelle didn’t exist, a dearth of attention for which she was profoundly grateful. Please don’t let him start in again.
Isabelle’s heart fluttered with dread, and her skin was cold. A squadron of governesses herded her toward the audience chamber. She reached the glass promenade, a long, tall hallway with an entire wall of windows that looked out over rolling pastureland to the rocky Oreamnos Hills, which clung like barnacles to the skyland’s rim.
Marie was already waiting there, looking very pretty, and very nervous, in her best ball gown, pale blue. Her cincture had only one knot, signifying a maiden betrothed. Some lord from the Craton Massif had picked her for his son as soon as she’d become eligible. She was to be delivered in two years, when she’d ripened to fifteen.
Which reminded Isabelle of the second reason Father ever called her: to parade her in front of old men who were searching for brides for either themselves or their sons. Had the merchant ship in the harbor brought her a suitor? She could imagine herself married to an aeronaut, soaring on one of the great ships … but usually suitors got one look at Isabelle’s wormfinger, learned about her magical blight, and made their good-byes. Even the fact that Isabelle was le roi’s cousin did not impress them.
Her lack of marital prospects was not a good thing. She was twelve; the bloom was very nearly off her rose, and she had been made to understand that the world had no use for princesses who could not manage to get married.
Yet if some new suitor had come, why summon Marie? She could only make Isabelle look homely by comparison. Half a girl wide and a girl and a half tall, with a long face, Isabelle was well on her way to being horsey.
Marie fell in beside Isabelle and whispered, “What’s going on?”
“I have no idea,” Isabelle said.
“Is this because we ran off?”
“No. They were looking for us before they knew we’d run off, remember?”
“Hush, you two,” said the governess.
Marie stiffened up. The doorway to the audience hall loomed before them.
In the silence that congealed while everyone marshaled themselves to stand before the comte, voices drifted through the door, muffled almost below the level of hearing.
An unfamiliar voice that sounded like it had been hammered out of copper said, “… royal blood cannot be diluted or corrupted.”
“I do not care about your pet theory,” her father replied, dry and disdainful. “In the meantime, this charade grows wearisome.”
“Have you also grown weary of your prize, or shall I take that from you as well?”
Isabelle’s curiosity flared and she strained to hear more of the conversation. Who would dare speak to her father like that in his own house? And what prize were they talking about?”
Alas, the doors swung open and a short fanfare of trumpets announced her presence in the audience hall.
Isabelle pulled herself even straighter and did her gangly best to glide into her father’s presence. The audience hall was built to classical proportions, like an Aetegian chapel, with height, width, and length as strict multiples of the golden mean, a fact that Isabelle was sure only she found interesting. Everything in the chamber was clad in polished white marble. A double colonnade of classical columns surrounded the main floor, with a two-step dais in the position traditionally occupied by an altar.
Two thronelike chairs sat upon the dais. The lesser chair was empty, as it had been for the ten years since Isabelle’s mother had died giving birth to Guillaume.
The greater chair was made of loxodont ivory, the legs and arms carved from great curving tusks. Isabelle’s father was ensconced therein. He was dressed in his court finest, white brocade doublet embroidered with thread of silver and festooned with pearls. One of Isabelle’s secret books said ivory was a kind of tooth. With Father’s bloodred shadow spilled out in front of him like a tongue, the whole arrangement gave the impression of a great mouth about to bite him in half, though that was too much to hope for.
Standing to one side of her father was a Temple hormougant. Isabelle had never seen one, but their vestments were unmistakable. Most Temple officers wore yellow, but the hormougant wore a white chasuble trimmed with black and silver interlocking gears over a black cassock. The panels of his long stole were embroidered with black winged daggers. His skinny body was bent over a distended gut that swayed like a kettle when he shifted his weight. Both his eyes were white as lumps of lard, but a single green gem glowed from a metal setting in the center of his forehead. In one hand he held a staff of quondam metal, an artifact left over from the Primus Mundi. She could tell because the metal was the color of brass with a purple patina. It was capped with a spiny ball, like an urchin.
But what was a hormougant doing here? They were the Temple’s prophets, interpreters of ancient signs, judges of Enlightenment who decided which new discoveries comported with the Template of Creation and which were heresy. Was he here for Isabelle? Did he know she’d been studying math?
Curiosity had been Saint Iav’s great sin. Her striving to understand the secret of life had unleashed the Breaker and shattered the world. The penalty for a woman prying into forbidden secrets was to have her eyes plucked out. Isabelle’s thoughts fled to the cache of books hidden in a gap behind the molding of her bedroom’s wainscoting. Had they brought Marie here to witness against her?
Isabelle’s heart squeezed so tight she thought it would implode. She and Marie made their way at a stately pace down the white carpet that bisected the glossy white floor, designed to show off bloodshadows. They curtsied at the foot of the dais.