Andrea Höst - The Towers, the Moon

Rian’s attention, however, was for the woman seated on the opposite side of the King from the Dauphin, Dauphine and their son. The Dauphin’s older child, Princess Heloise. And, though it was impossible to be certain at this distance whether it was the correct mask, standing behind her chair was a slim man wearing the face of a lion.

"Midnight approaches, and with it the night’s primary challenge," Alexandrine said. "The rules are beneath the Time of Red Petals."

This seemed to be an enormous arrangement of flowers, not too far to Rian’s left.

"What–?" Rian began, but Alexandrine was gone. Rian had been given the means and now she, somehow, had to work out how to take advantage of the opportunity.

The thick scent of roses swamped Rian’s senses as she approached the Time of Red Petals and found a clock the size of a cartwheel. Twenty minutes before midnight. Immediately below the clock’s face, an elaborately curlicued notice set out the rules of an elaborate three-stage challenge.

A hunt. A hunt combined with hide-and-seek. It would cost potentially all of Rian’s Tears of the Night to play, put already-inadequate clothing at risk, and the winner would walk away with, according to the notice, A Pool of Tears . A fortune dazzling enough to momentarily steal Rian’s breath.

Forfeit is a game you play to lose .

Étienne would appreciate all this enormously, and in other circumstances Rian supposed she might find herself stimulated. But the need to win the Mask of Léon overshadowed every distraction. How? There was no obvious path to the viewing platform where the royal family were located. Would D’Argent enter the challenge? And what did the rules mean by "participants will be determined by song’s touch"?

Rather than dither, Rian found the nearest convenience and tidied herself, and then collected a small plate from one of the many tables of refreshments. Sitting down, she ate and looked for solutions.

Music. Dancers, effortless and graceful in the sweeping movements dictated by low gravity. A swirl of la clochettes. A few feet away from Rian three red-winged women faced a taller blue-winged woman.

One of the threads around the taller woman tugged at Rian, and she cautiously followed it, wary of ending up on the floor again. But – perhaps because it was not her own thread – she was not thrust so completely into experiencing a possibility , but saw it more as an image. The blue-winged woman, sword in hand, held the red-wings at bay.

That was most likely a challenge during the reign of the Tower of the Drum. Swords were not at all easy weapons to use in low gravity, but there was a long tradition of using them during the Drum’s reign. Rian was not quite close enough to hear whatever the leader of the red-winged women was saying, but all four departed together.

A few minutes of experimentation showed Rian she could not follow every thread or ribbon of those in her view, but only those that tugged at her when she concentrated on them. Distance did not seem to limit this ability, so she turned her attention hopefully back to the Sun Court’s balcony.

Although the man in the lion mask had a generous swathe of ribbons attached to him, none of them tugged at Rian. Perhaps it was too far. She tried the Princess instead, and then the King, but nothing happened. Frustrated, Rian let out her breath and watched, hoping for clues to reaching the balcony, as the Dauphin and Dauphine rose and collected their young son, ushering him toward a rear door.

A ribbon attached to the boy tugged at Rian, and she followed it and saw him a few years older, shouting angrily, then breaking off to scratch at two stretched red lumps above his shoulder-blades. Wings, in their first stage of visible development.

Rian blinked away from the image, and stared at the small family. The boy was a chrysalide: a child born to one of the Court of the Moon and a human woman. And thus not the Dauphin’s son, and not heir to France after his supposed father.

Did all the members of the Tower of Balance know this? Was this the means Rian had been given to regain the Mask of Léon? Princess Heloise would certainly…what?

Heloise had been the Dauphin’s only child until she was fourteen. The birth of her brother had meant that instead of eventually ruling beside a carefully chosen husband, she would be a tool to strengthen alliances. Common wisdom expected a marriage to Prince Gustav of Sweden within the year.

Rian, who had met Gustav and liked him, and would never ever want to be married to him, did not know enough about Heloise to guess whether she would find his energy – and collection of mistresses – at all tolerable. The princess had been a noted participant in the salons during the Sky Tower’s reign, when the Arts were celebrated above all else. She was also a patron of the theatres, but her reputation, balanced between honouring the Court of the Moon and matching the multiple intersecting definitions of a proper woman in France, kept her generally circumspect. The friends known as her myrmidons were at least not openly her lovers.

What would D’Argent do with information about the young prince, if Rian tried to use it to trade for the mask? Should Rian attempt to approach the princess instead?

Was this her small choice with large consequences?

Setting the question aside, Rian looked about her until she spotted an arbiter, and went to ask what determined by song’s touch meant.

"Chosen by the sweet-singers," the man said, rather unhelpfully, and then added: "Listen. You can hear them."

The fluting music had died away, to be replaced by a single pure tone. Thin at first, but swelling into a knife that cut through the breastbone and exposed something quivering. At the point where it became painful, the sound transformed into a chorus, an exchange of notes, and then they came, flooding up from the sloping curve beneath the balconies. Tiny motes in shades of soft fawn and dark brown, moving as a cloud but then dispersing and settling toward the room’s revellers.

Rian had expected birds, and so it was not until one of the motes dropped onto her head, and then scuttled down her arm, that she saw that the sweet-singers were tiny furry animals – similar in design to squirrels, except with a stretch of skin between front and back limbs. Not-quite wings. The one that had landed on Rian was smaller than her hand, but with twice as much plumy dark tail, currently wrapped around her wrist.

"There," said the arbiter, faintly amused. "You have been chosen."

"I’ve never heard of them before," Rian said, lifting her hand to better study the tiny creature. Primarily pale faun, with stripes of chocolatey brown edging to black across eyes, cheeks and neck, and then down the spine. Another shot past, not using its wings for flight, but instead vibrating its tail.

"It is rare for them to come to the Towers," the arbiter said.

Rian wondered whether the sweet-singers, like other inhabitants of the Court’s Otherworld, were reborn human souls but, before she could ask, a murmur of interest rose and the arbiter turned, watching gravely. Rian followed the line of his gaze and saw that several of the tiny motes had zipped up to the level of the balconies.

"The current leaders of the challenges, the season’s champions, stand with the Dukes," the arbiter told her.

But attention was not for the four largest balconies. Instead, the crowd – or at least the humans among it – watched King Florentin, and beside him his granddaughter, directly in the path of one tiny, swiftly-moving creature.

The air of anticipation in the room was palpable. The Sun Court’s princess might dress herself in impractical clothing and sit to watch the Gilded Court’s revels, but participating, even behind the feather’s breadth of deniability of the masks, would be the height of poor judgment. There was an enormous gap between believed to be doing and seen to be doing .