Kushiel's Chosen

whole of it until I returned to court. As had been my wont in Delaunay's service, I took some few days' leisure to recover from the assignation, after being tended by an Eisandine chirurgeon.
    It had been my intention to contract the Yeshuite doctor who had tended Alcuin and me in prior days, but Joscelin objected adamantly. I gazed at his beautiful, implacable face, the khai pendant gleaming silver on his chest, and gave way, too tired to do battle with his conscience. Let no Yeshuite be offended by my nature; I would be tended by one of our own. Eisandines are mayhap the most skilled healers in the world, and I had no objection on that score. Delaunay had trusted the Yeshuite's discretion; they do not gossip
    about their clients. I resolved the matter by setting Fortun to contract the dourest Eisandine he could find.
    Joscelin had said naught when I returned to him in Severio's quarters; I daresay only we two knew the unspoken shoals that loomed beneath the surface of our cordial greeting. He had bowed, I had inclined my head, and perforce kept from wincing as my heavy cloak brushed against my freshly-lashed skin. I have had far worse than I endured at the hands of the young Stregazza and walked away with a steady gait.
    What Joscelin felt, I did not ask, knowing it well enough. The pain of the flesh is naught to that of the heart.
    Severio had come forward as my first patron, and allowed the amount of the fee he paid for our assignation to be whispered in the corridors. This I learned from my chevaliers, who had it from the Palace Guard-nothing escapes the Guard's ears-and from Cecilie Laveau-Perrin, who paid me a visit during my time of recuperation.
    "Twenty thousand ducats, they say," she related, eyeing me speculatively. "Is it true?"
    "True enough," I said, laying aside another stack of proposals. The offers had risen considerably with this batch; some were outlandish. One L'Agnacite lordling promised me a vineyard. "Do they say what I've done with it?"
    "No." Cecilie eyed me shrewdly. "I heard, though. I've ears still in the Night Court. You paid Favrielle no Eglantine's marque. Did you know it's said she was pushed?"
    "In the bath, when she split her lip?" I raised my brows. "No, but I guessed as much. I grew up in the Night Court too, remember. When she said she fell, she recited it like a Yeshuite catechism."
    "It was a fortnight before the eve of the new-made adepts' debut. They have leave to design their own costumes, at Eglantine." Cecilie picked up one of the proposals and glanced absently at it. "There was some dissent over the advantage it gave her, I heard. Jealousy is a cruel mistress. Who's the Baroness de Chariot and what do you want with a team of matched blood-bays?"
    I took the parchment away from her. "Nothing. But House Chariot breeds very fine horses. In Kusheth. And blood-bays ... oh, never mind, Cecilie, I'm not accepting it. What else have you heard?"
    "Are you feeling quite well?" Cecilie looked mischievously at me. "I think you should pay a visit to the Palace."
    More than that, she would not say, leaving me to learn it for myself. I bethought myself of visiting Thelesis de Mornay, but an opportunity came quicker than I reckoned when Ysandre sent an invitation to attend a concert held in honor of a tentative reconciliation between her uncle, the Duc L'Envers, and the Stregazza family. Echoing the theme of liaison, an Eisandine composer-music and medicine are among the gifts of Eisheth-and a Siovalese engineer had collaborated on a concerto involving a cunningly wrought instrument of Siovalese design that used a bellows-and-pedal system to force air through myriad pipes of differing pitches.
    It made for a strange and haunting sound that was not displeasing, full of odd harmonics. Seated toward the rear of a half-dozen rows of chairs, I listened with half an ear, my attention on the principles at the front of the salon. Tibault, Comte de Toluard-Marquis, now, as reward for his role in defending against Selig's invasion-sat beaming; an avid Siovalese scholar himself, he was also the engineer's patron. Many of Shemhazai's line are interested in such things. I daresay if Delaunay had been here, he would have wished to examine the instrument too. Severio Stregazza was seated between the Queen and Duc Barquiel L'Envers, and I noted how Ysandre leaned toward him and whispered from time to time. She was as anxious, I thought, to have this rift mended as Severio was to acquit himself