CHAPTER FIVE

Autumn

Brixham was quiet when I returned home. It was too late for the tourists and the fleeing of schoolchildren, and the driveways and streets were still empty of parked cars. Only across the road from my own house was there movement, where a father talked in undertones to his son about the night shift down at the fish market. Beyond the whitewashed picket fence of our garden, however, all was still. As the front door slammed shut behind me, I could still hear the jangling of the keys in the lock racing along the vacant hallways, breaking through the silence of a house that was used to its own company.

Grandmother, why do Mother and Father live so far from London when that is where they work?

Because your father does not enjoy London society, child.

He doesn’t enjoy it? But how can he not enjoy it?

My sword followed me upstairs, my thoughts ever lingering on the arrival of the prince. Why? was the imperative question. There was always a why with the Athenea, and I had no reason to doubt that this occasion was any different. As I stowed my sword beneath my bed, those thoughts wandered farther, back to the whispers in London. The Extermino gather . . .

My hand was still clasped around the buckle of my scabbard and I yanked the sword back out, replacing it between my bedside cabinet and the bedpost; it was a small comfort in an empty house.

In the fridge several containers were set out, my name scribbled on Post-it notes stuck to the lids. Peering into one I found a tomato-looking sauce and behind that, egg-free fresh pasta. From the colorful, fruit-adorned cardboard crate on the top shelf I pulled a few mushrooms and an onion. Reaching up to the hooks lining the wall, I lifted a heavy-bottomed copper pan down.

Here were the signs that I had not a surname but a House of; that I was Al-Summers and not Summers, and that we were not a family of little means. The Mauviel pan I was filling with water cost well over three hundred pounds; our entire collection of cookware—extensive, due to my father’s love of cooking—was the same brand. Every day, a new box of fruit and vegetables was delivered to our door from the local organic farm; the countertops were brand-new, replacing the old ones which were barely a year old.

We were not a bustling London household of thirty that entertained, or the peers swamping the Athenean court on Vancouver Island, but that was only through Father’s choice.

And what a choice to make.

The pasta did not take long to cook, and even less time to eat while I thumbed through that day’s edition of The Times. It told little, as did its Sagean sister, Arn Etas. Even Quaintrelle was silent. I was surprised. I had expected the prince’s move to be mentioned, especially in the latter, which had covered in extensive, agonizing detail the prince’s breakup with his Australian girlfriend the June before.

I placed my plate into the dishwasher, having learned to use it exactly a year before, when my parents had first gone away on business. I smiled to the empty room. If the prince thought it was a disgrace that my title was not used, then what would he think of this? A lady Sage—worse, a duchess—cooking and cleaning and, as she stripped out of her uniform, dressing herself. Not exactly royal behavior.

No . . . I should be at a top school, studying politics and law and preparing for my first council appearance, which was supposed to be on my sixteenth birthday, this November . . .

I wasn’t going. It wasn’t mandatory, and in my absence the Athenea sat in my empty seat and made decisions for me. It was mutually beneficial: they had more power and I could stay away from court. Nobody was exactly going to protest the situation.

On my desk, I warmed my laptop up, placing a strong cup of tea beside it. It filled the room with the scent of jasmine, steaming up one corner of the laptop screen. I folded my skirt and blouse and placed them on the floral-patterned cushions on the chest at the foot of my double bed. Opening the mahogany wardrobe in the corner, the only item of furniture I had convinced my parents to let me bring from the lodge at St. Sapphire’s, I felt my hands run themselves down the material hung inside. There were dresses, flowery, and black trousers for work. Beside my school jumper, reserved for the winter, were pleated skirts of every color—and stowed at one end, wrapped in gray polythene, were ball gowns, too small now, and corsets, lightly boned but still so tight they restricted breathing; eating was out of the question.

In one of those bags, I knew, there hung a pale yellow court dress, with white elbow-length gloves and a pair of satin shoes, laced with white ribbons. It was the dress I had worn to court when I was twelve. It had not been my first visit; it had not been the first time I had met the Athenea—my grandmother had been close to them—but it was the first time I had truly talked to the Athenean children; it was the first time I realized who I was and what I would become. When all the other little girls stared at me with jealous eyes and the adults treated my grandmother and me with reverence, I realized what it meant to be a member of the House of Al-Summers: to be second only to the Athenea themselves; as near to royalty as one could get.

Does he remember those weeks the duchess and her granddaughter spent at his home?

In another bag, tucked behind the others, was a black dress. Mourning dress. He will remember that day.

I pushed that thought away and pulled down a loose shift, slipped it on, and curled up on the seat in front of my laptop, proceeding to write a long rant of an e-mail to Jo, an old Sagean friend, so very far away when I needed her most.