Chapter 3: The Midnight Ball Has One Forbidden Dance

Valmere holds a ball at midwinter in which every guest wears a mask, every candle is enchanted to burn a different color, and no one is permitted to ask a stranger's name. It is the one night when a disgraced healer might walk through the front doors of the palace, provided she has borrowed a gown of sea-green silk and the arm of a man who is, officially, nobody.

The envoy had arranged it all. The gown fitted her as though it had been waiting for her, and she did not ask how he knew her measurements. She decided, with some firmness, not to think about it. The ballroom opened before them like the inside of a jewel: a thousand floating flames, gold and violet and a blue so deep it hurt, and beneath them a sea of masked faces turning, turning.

"Stay near me," he said, low against her ear. "Watch the Queen's left hand. When she raises it, we are in trouble. When she lowers it, we are in worse." He said it lightly. His fingers, resting at the small of her back, were not light at all.

Then the music changed. The musicians shifted into a slow, winding measure that made the older courtiers go quiet, and the floor cleared itself as if by magic, which, in that room, it might have been. Elowen felt the envoy stiffen. "The Veiled Turn," he murmured. "A dance for two, in which neither partner may look away. Refusing it is an insult to the Crown."

So they danced. She had forgotten, in three years of mixing salves in a chandler's attic, how it felt to be turned slowly by someone who knew exactly where she would be next. His eyes held hers through the slits of silver, and she saw in them something unguarded, something that was not the envoy at all but whoever lived beneath him. The candles overhead leaned toward them, flames bending like a crowd that has stopped pretending not to stare.

On the final measure he dipped her low, and she felt his breath catch. Across the ballroom, the Queen's left hand rose. Slowly. Deliberately. And all around them the music faded, the enchanted flames flickered out one by one, and the great doors at the end of the hall began, with a long, patient groan, to close.

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