contain the word that described this. His eyes brimmed. His school, the dream he’d cherished for years, his reason for being here, his reason for living. Gone. Forever out of his reach. Tears spilled over his lids and ran freely down his face as he careened out of the building into the light, headache be damned, walking, speeding up, running, heedless, over the flagstones and down the steps, right into the Duke Tremontaine.
This man was the last thing he needed. “Oh, for the land’s sake,” he spat. “Out of the frying pan, into the imbecile.”
“Now, now,” said the duke, placing his hands on Rafe’s shoulders. “And after you saved my life last week and then told me you wanted never to see me again.”
“Get out of my way.” Rafe’s stomach clenched; he couldn’t think.
“Or what?”
“I don’t know! Or I’ll hit you!” He hadn’t hit anyone since his little sister broke his toy galleon.
“Won’t that be fun!” Rafe looked for mockery but the smile on Tremontaine’s face was genuine. “Please, I insist.” The duke stepped back and offered his face, all privilege and cream. Rafe shrugged off Tremontaine’s hands and shoved past him.
He didn’t get very far before he stopped in his tracks and turned around, his anger stopping the flow of his tears. “If you knew what you and your damned Board of Governors have just done,” he cried, his voice hot and tight, “you wouldn’t be issuing that invitation with quite so cavalier an air.”
“Oh, you mean the examination committee decision?”
“You know damn well I mean the examination committee decision. Which way did you vote?”
“Why on earth should it matter?”
“Which way?”
“Come take chocolate with me and I’ll tell you,” said Tremontaine, and immediately looked startled, as if he’d said something completely different from what he’d expected to say.
Finally the duke made a gesture and spoke. “My carriage is this way.” He paused. “If, that is, you’re willing to enter it.”
“I’d consider it,” said Rafe savagely, and stalked toward the carriage.
• • •
Oh, Holy Ixchel, not the baby again.
As Kaab entered the room, Chuleb was once more on the floor, enraptured by the offspring of whatever cousin or aunt or sister the infant had come from. “Yes, widdle baby . . . where’s the wattle now?”
Kaab smoothed the wide cotton belt she wore over her blouse, embroidered with the double eagle pattern—Ixmoe’s favorite—and thanked Xamanek that, if she had to face this scene, at least she could do so in civilized clothing.
“Where is it? Where’s the wattle?” The creature’s eyes widened as it began to search for the acacia-wood toy that Chuleb, chuckling, had moved just west of its line of sight. Making stupid faces, waving its fat little arms, it looked like nothing so much as a party guest playing Blinded Hunter. An ugly party guest. “Is it east? Southwest? Where’s the wattle?”
Kaab looked up to the alcove in the red south wall at the goddess Ixchel, jade inlaid with cinnabar and feathered with gold, and repeated under her breath the blessing carved in intricate glyphs on the statue’s forehead: Protect us, Ixchel, from the spear by day and the jaguar by night. And, she added, babies. She had no idea what mystical power they had to transform adults around them into drooling idiots, but she, for one, was relieved to be immune to it. Chuleb looked ridiculous.
Well, at least Auntie Saabim, at her dark cedar desk, a single xukul nicte flower over her east-facing ear, reading trading records with the eye of a matriarch reviewing a treaty, seemed far enough away not to have succumbed.
The door to the room opened too forcefully and hit the wall behind it with a thud. The baby hiccupped. Please, Kaab thought, looking heavenward, please do not begin wailing like a spider monkey.
The baby, in its infinite mercy, deigned to grant her request.
But her uncle and aunt were looking at Dzan, standing in the doorway. “Forgive me, master. There is . . . a woman here to see you. She says she is the Duchess Tremontaine.”
“Today?” Saabim exclaimed, and Kaab looked immediately in her direction. It was clear from the catch in Saabim’s voice, the way Chuleb shifted his weight, the quick glance the two exchanged, that her aunt and uncle were surprised and, if not frightened, then unsettled at her arrival.
Chuleb rose, straightened the velvet of his Local-style doublet, white as the limestone stucco that covered Kaab’s house in Binkiinha, and cleared his throat twice.
“She is waiting for you in your office, master.”
“What does this woman want from us, Uncle?”
“That, Kaab, doesn’t concern you,” Aunt Saabim said.
“Forgive me, but as a first daughter of a first daughter of the Balam, I believe that a visit important to our interests here concerns me deeply. I would like to meet this duchess.”
“Absolutely not,” Chuleb said. “You made enough mischief in Tultenco. I think, for the moment, that you are safest here, watching the baby.”
Ixchel preserve me. “But Uncle —”
“In our house, I think you’d best take our counsel.” Kaab looked down, knowing when to stop. “Dzan, prepare chocolate.”
Dzan grimaced. “I suppose you want me to ruin it by dumping it full of cream?”
“Cream?” said Kaab, mystified. “Why on earth would you put cream in chocolate?”
“Cream in a pitcher on the side,” Saabim ordered from her desk, and then, to Kaab, “It is not our place to tell Locals what to do with the product we sell them.”
Chuleb stepped to the western threshold of the room. “That,” he said, turning back for a moment, “doesn’t mean that I don’t want to.” And he closed the door behind him.
Kaab stood. Yes, she had made mistakes. But to prevent her from using her powers of observation to further the family’s interests was nonsense. What could have so worried Chuleb and Saabim?
And she absolutely didn’t want to watch the baby. She stood up.
Chuleb would be furious, but Kaab wasn’t worth the maize it took to feed her if she let a trifle like that stop her, so after a quick change of clothes and a brief word with Dzan, reminding him of a certain indiscretion with Bapl the cook that she had witnessed a few days earlier and remarking on how unhappy Saabim would be were she to hear about it, she took a deep breath, held her arms out for the tray he carried, turned, and walked through the door.
“. . . of course, my lady. Ah, this must be Dzan with the choco—” Chuleb stopped, his eyes widening almost imperceptibly and his lips pressing together only very slightly.
But she knew what her uncle looked like already. She was much more interested in the woman sitting across the desk from him, whose expression was so bland and impassive that it could only have been achieved under great control. This was not a woman to be underestimated.
Conversely, it would be quite wise to allow the woman to underestimate her.
“Forgive, master,” Kaab said, thickening her accent until she sounded as she had when she was five, first encountering the spiky vowels of this language, “but Dzan been sent errand, warehouses. I serving chocolate instead.” She deposited the tray on the north wall table beside the niche altar to Xamanek, took hold of the chocolate grater, and turned to the duchess. “How you taking chocolate, mistress?”
The woman smiled at Chuleb as if he were the one who had spoken. “Since I am your guest, Master Balam, I should think it a wasted opportunity not to take chocolate in your people’s own fashion.