“We are unobserved?” The words were a matter of ritual, given to her by Robert. Speaking them was entirely new to Belinda, but she was comfortable with ritual; it had shaped much of her life. Most of it, perhaps, even before she knew she was being shaped.

“We are,” came Lorraine's response, tart with impatience. “We do not have a rash any longer, girl. We thought we told you, eleven years ago, to dispose of modest coverings in the spring, not in the dead of winter a lifetime later.”

Triumph rose in Belinda's breast, flowing so brightly she loosened a smile of delight at the floor. Ah, she had changed, she had fallen: the woman she had once been would never have allowed such a transparent change of expression. But the woman she had played over the past six-months had laughed too easily, smiled too readily; Beatrice Irvine was easy to cling to. A joyous smile was an indulgence she ought to have excised, and yet she was glad of it.

“I beg forgiveness, your majesty,” she murmured, and did nothing to still the wide smile directed at the floor. This was no way at all to present herself to her monarch, her mother, but the threads that held them together were dark and deep and buried. To play the single one that lay in the light, and to have it recognised and struck back as a matching note, was a risk and a gift beyond revelation. “I was not at court that spring, and loathed the thought of disappointing your majesty in any small way at all.”

Lorraine Walter, queen of all Aulun, gave a snort that sounded very much like the one Belinda had indulged in earlier. “Stand up, for pity's sake. You look like a rose ready for the plucking, down there in all that pink. Whoever heard of a woman wearing such a colour?”