The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

will answer me.”
    “The theatre,” she said, as thickly as she could. “There was a fire—”
    He did not let her finish, sticking the cheroot into his mouth and reaching forward with his one unbandaged hand to fondle her breast. The crowd around them gasped at the cold determination of his face as much as his brazen action. With the sternest resolve Miss Temple’s voice did not shift in the slightest, nor did she pause as he continued to forcefully grope across her body.
    “—from the lamps, there was smoke, and shooting … it was Doctor Svenson. I did not see him … I was on the table. Miss Poole—”
    Francis Xonck slapped Miss Temple hard across the face.
    “—disappeared. The soldiers took me off the table.”
    As she spoke, just as she had seen in the theatre, and with pleasure, her hand shot out toward Francis Xonck, doing her level best to stab him in the face with the serpentine dagger. Unfortunately, he had seen the blow coming. He parried the blow with his arm against her wrist, then took hold of her wrist and squeezed. As it would give her away to struggle, Miss Temple released the dagger, which hit the floor with a clang. Francis Xonck lowered her hand to her side, and stepped away. She did not move. He looked past her at the officer, flared his nostrils in a sneer—which she was sure meant the officer had shown his disapproval of what he’d justwitnessed—and picked up the dagger. He stuck it in his belt and turned on his heels, calling airily over his shoulder.
    “Bring the lady with you, Captain Smythe—and quickly. You’re
late
.”
    Miss Temple could only risk the barest glance for Elöise as she walked away, but Elöise was gone. Captain Smythe had taken her by the arm, not roughly but with insistence, enforcing her compliance with their speed. She allowed herself a look at the officer, masking herself with an expression of bovine disinterest, and saw a face that reminded her of Cardinal Chang, or of the Cardinal beset with the burdens of command, hated superiors, fatigue, self-disgust, and of course without the disfigurement of his eyes. The Captain’s eyes were dark and warmer than the bitter lines around them seemed to merit. He glanced down at her with brisk suspicion and she returned her attention to the receding, well-tailored back of Francis Xonck, parting the crowds ahead of them with the imperious ease of a surgeon’s scalpel.
    He led them through the thickest knots of the gathering crowd, their passage a spectacle for whispers and gawking—Xonck reaching to either side for handshakes and hearty back-slaps to particular men and brief kisses to similarly high-placed or beautiful women—and then beyond them, skirting the ballroom proper to an open space at the meeting of several corridors. Xonck gave Miss Temple one more searching stare, crossed to a pair of wooden doors, opened them, and leaned his head from view, whispering. In a moment he had pulled his head back and shut the door, ambling again to Miss Temple. He pulled the cheroot from his mouth and looked at it with distaste, for he was nearing the stub. He dropped it to the marble floor and ground it beneath his shoe.
    “Captain, you will position your men along this corridor in either direction, specifically guarding access to these”—he pointed to two doors farther down the hall away from the ballroom—“inner rooms. Colonel Aspiche will provide further instructions uponhis arrival. For now, your task is one of waiting, and making sure of this woman’s continued presence.”
    The Captain nodded crisply and turned to his men, detailing them along the length of the corridor and at each inner door. The Captain himself remained within saber’s reach of Miss Temple, and, for that matter, Francis Xonck. Once he had spoken however, Xonck paid the officer no further mind, his voice dropping to a whisper as coiled with menace as the hiss of a snake preparing to strike.
    “You will answer me quickly, Celeste Temple, and I will know if you lie—and if you
do
lie,
do
know it means your head.”
    Miss Temple nodded blankly, as if this meant nothing to her either way.
    “What did Bascombe tell you on the train?”
    This was not what she’d expected. “That we should be allies,” she replied. “That the Contessa desired it.”
    “And what did the Contessa say?”
    “I did not speak to her aboard the train—”
    “Before that—
before
! At the hotel—in the
coach
!”
    “She said I must pay for the