The Leroux Townhouse, Uptown, Vienda
Adalgarius had spared no expense. The bottom two floors of his family’s town house had already been full of flowers when Fenella – Adalgarius’s new wife, not yet three months out of Brunnhold and six years younger than him – had suggested that it would be so lovely to have the party feel like a garden indoors. Like a little goodbye from Bethas, she had giggled, smiling at her husband.
The end result was a riotous tapestry of flowers and plants. The entryway into the house had been planted and re-planted with rainbow ivy, coaxed into thriving by a living conversationalist to bloom for the party, so that one arrived surrounded on all sides by yellow, violet, red and orange flowers, set on a distant, half-invisible bed of green. Crawling tendrils stretched over the brick-laid path, wrapped themselves around the decorative arches, and the path from the street to the door thick with crushed blooms within an hour of the party starting. There were so many that it almost didn’t matter; those who arrived late were treated to both the sight of flowers above and around, and what had effectively become a crushed carpet underfoot.
There were so many flowers in the ballroom that dancers had needed to move them out the way to make enough space for a waltz; flowers hung from the ceiling and draped over the walls. Different rooms had different (absurd) themes: one smaller study on the second floor was dedicated to the plants of Mugroba, cheerfully mixing bright, beautiful Muluku Island blooms with odd cacti from the Shifting Desert and even a pot of tall grasses from the Wakesho Steppes. Another, downstairs, seemed to have been utterly infested with Poorman’s Violets, with the occasional white flower only making the rest look more purple by comparison. Their sweet, sugary smell was so strong in the room that many too-drunk revelers had needed to leave, promptly, to avoid being sick. Most had succeeded; long-suffering human servants had swept invisibly in behind to clean up what those who failed had left behind.
Orchestral strains drifted from the main ballroom, out through the thrown-wide doors and down the corridors of the house, made narrow by awkwardly placed ferns and hanging pots. The stairs were so difficult to navigate that more than one wife had flatly refused to go upstairs, and dragged her husband back down to the ballroom (or, else, forsaken him entirely, and left him to his own devices on the second floor).
The only thing more plentiful than the plants was the alcohol. Here, too, Adalgarius had spared no expense. There was wine, yes, and naturally champagne, but most importantly there was liquor of all conceivable varieties, some circulating steadily. There were shots, of course, entire trays stacked high with gleaming little glass cups, and there were mixed drinks. There was, perhaps unsurprisingly, something of a flower theme. The Violet Airship was popular, with crème de violette, maraschino liquor, gin and lemon juice – dry and not too sweet. Fenella’s creation, the Princess Violette, was a mix of crème de violette and champagne; it might well have been lovely, but was utterly spoiled by the addition of three hearts peach liqueur. The end result was a sticky sweet purple mess, whose vibrant colors had reappeared more than once.
More conventional drinks were also available, of course. Adalgarius had set up bar stations throughout the house, for ladies who wanted a starfly or gentleman who preferred a simple glass of Gioran (cognac, naturally, being reserved for the smaller room, such as the cards room he’d had set up on the second floor, but whiskey available throughout) or Twemlaugh. Anything that either of the two galdori had thought of could be ordered - and plenty of it was on offer whether one would really want to order it or not.
It had been a rainy, miserable sort of morning, hot and thick and humid to start, with sheets of pouring rain that had swept through Vienda from the last morning through the mid-afternoon. Then, almost miraculously, the rains had slowed – stopped – the sky had cleared. By the time the sun had set, even the humidity had almost broken, and the night was cool and pleasant, the sky clear overhead. One could not have been said to be able to see stars, precisely, but there was a faint and distant shimmer in the sky, and one could certainly imagine that, if not in the thick of uptown Vienda, stars would be visible.
It had grown late, now, late enough that some of the partiers had started to leave – the older incumbents, the political invites, the important people, had found that their evening had stretched on long enough, and some were beginning to leave. Not all, of course; there were those, even those both Fenella and Adalgarius accounted among the elderly, who never left a party before it was at its absolute dregs. But as the night wore on, more and more of the respectable trickled away. This, now – this was where Adalgarius and Fenella both had promised their friends that they must, they absolutely must, stick around. This, Adalgarius had proclaimed, was not going to be one of those boring political season parties in which the dancing slowed around 27 o’clock and the party began to wind down. Yes, there were meetings the next day – but there was only one spring equinox a year! Fenella had phrased things a bit differently – just because we’re out of Brunnhold now, she had said, does that mean we’re old and stuffy and dried up and boring?
Niccolette Ibutatu rested one gold-ringed hand against the edge of a large marble pot, grimacing slightly and shifting away to avoid the brush of a too-exuberant fern. “Darling,” she said, firmly, “he never deserved you.”
The noise of the party trickled through the cracked-open doors to the Leroux’s back garden, light and sound both spilling out onto the marble terrace. It was still quieter there than inside, other than the occasional faint rustle from the dark bushes beyond. But Niccolette, at least, was an old hand at thoroughly ignoring anyone stumbling back inside through the darkness, no matter how rumpled.
“I know,” Francoise Rochambeaux sat hunched over on a marble bench, crimped red hair frizzed from the night’s excesses, once flawless make-up smeared from too much crying. She clutched Niccolette’s handkerchief in her hand – having long since used up her own – and sobbed a little more. “I know!” She wailed, the words slurred between sobs. “But Aurelien has been bored of me for years. Oh, Nicco, you just don’t understand! Uzoji is – is – is perfect! You don’t know what it’s like! I am a woman – I need to be loved! I yearn for it! And my husband – he simply – he simply doesn’t –”
“I know, I know,” the Bastian shifted to the bench, and sat next to her friend. She curled one arm around the other woman’s shoulder, squeezing her gently into her embrace. “Shh, come now. You cannot mean to say you loved Clarence!”
“No! No, of course not,” Francoise snorted noisily into the delicate fabric. “But I thought he loved me!” She began to wail once more. “And now – now – to see him at this party, laughing with some – Hessean!” Francoise sobbed into the handkerchief, wobbling back and forth, until she had thorough soaked Niccolette’s handkerchief as well.
“Nicco, why is the terrace spinning?” Francoise groped for the delicate glass off to her side on the bench, and drained the last of it the violet a substantial gulp. She sniffled.
“I think you are drunk,” Niccolette said, soothingly. “Come, Franci! We will go inside – we will find you some other handsome man – you will forget all about this dreadful Anaxi.”
Francoise’s eyes were sliding shut.
“Ah,” Niccolette said, inelegantly struggling with her friend’s abruptly heavy weight. She grimaced, shifted – and managed to at least catch Francoise’s head before it hit the hard marble bench, taking the sopping wet handkerchief from her friend’s hand and tucked it beneath her head.
The Bastian sighed, patted her friend’s too-ridged hair, and rose from the bench. She glared around – the patio was empty, naturally, not even a convenient embarrassed silhouette in sight.
Niccolette stalked to the door, the narrow confines of her tight sapphire skirt swishing with her movements. The high-necked dress was set off by glittering gold jewelry, sapphires tucked into her ears; a glittering asymmetric display of sequined embroidery stretched from the neck down along the front of the dress, disappearing into a tight, corset-like waistband - fashionable, expensive, and, thus far, surprisingly untouched by the decadence of the party.
The Bastian opened the door, and looked into the hallway. She paused, gaze settling on a small, delicate looking Anaxi – more or less the only other soul in sight.
“Pardon me,” Niccolette said, in a tone that seemed to leave no room for disagreement, her Bastian accent thick in her voice. She raised an eyebrow at the galdor. “My friend has – swooned,” Niccolette made a little face. “Would you fetch a servant or two and bring them out to the terrace? Quickly,” she made a little expectant gesture with one hand.