Winchester Castle loomed elegant and understated a few hundred feet away, dove-colored like the sky overhead, gracious from its low holly hedges to the ivy that climbed between leaded windows over its four stone stories.

I took a deep breath and steadied my shaking frame on the edge of the carriage, feeling it rock as the others climbed down behind me. When I looked down, I saw the wheel had left my green dress streaked with grease. Perrault eyed the mark significantly, his pretty mouth disdainful.

Yu nodded at me. His dark eyes were unbothered, practical, cool and calm as ever. “You’ll have time to put yourself together.”

I stared at the castle, courteous and dignified in the English morning, and wondered if even with all my thoughts assembled, all my pieces in order, I could put myself together well enough for a place like this.

18

My new room was wallpapered with soothing pastoral scenes, its window draped with chintz hangings that matched the ones around the chestnut four-poster. Smallish framed paintings of green fields and dogs and horses paneled the wall over the wooden mantel, and a fire crackled in the fireplace against the damp gray day, so much cloudier and cooler than late spring in Potomac. But the decor—charming, bucolic, expensive but not opulent—did little for the anxiety grinding at my bones.

Seven o’clock, Perrault had said when he came bearing the news. A court banquet. Your first official meeting.

I fretted and dawdled so long that, in the end, I had to hurry, hands fumbling as I put on makeup and the dress Perrault had laid out for me. “This is pretty, very ladylike,” he’d said, almost as if to himself, as he’d plucked it from among my things. “Tasteful. The right first impression.”

The dress was all right—a demure lavender thing with long sleeves, just another of the too many elegant garments in my trunk. But the fact that he’d chosen it for me, like I was a child, made me want to wear something else.

Hopping into a pair of white silk slippers, I charged into the hallway between our rooms. “Ready?” I was nearly breathless; the contrast I posed to the five of them waiting calmly for me made me go faintly red. Perrault opened his mouth to reply, but with no warning, the door beside Lang’s swung wide.

The older of the two men who stepped into the corridor was small and thin, with a gray beard and glasses and papery-white skin so thin that blue veins showed beneath. His younger companion was lanky, a little over six feet tall, his skin tanned, his dark hair rumpled. The boy’s blue eyes were narrowed on me, his mouth a thin line.