Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [125]
‘Lady Lowlander, would you honour me with your hand for this dance?’ he enquired.
She had no idea who he was, but his familiarity suggested that they had already been introduced. In truth, she had not paid her neighbours much attention during the meal. Seeing him standing so solemnly before her, she began to feel curiously off-balance.
‘Of course,’ she said nonetheless, because she could not back down now. Even then the drummer was moving his fingers over taut hide, producing a patter of fluid sounds like no drum Tynisa had heard before. Dancers were moving into place as if drawn by some magical resonance, each to a precise spot.
‘We shall join the lower tier, of course,’ her partner told her bafflingly, and then abandoned her to take his position across the room. In the end, she only knew where to go when two concentric circles had formed, with a single glaring gap in the outermost.
Faster than she was expecting, the music struck as soon as she had found her feet there, and she tried to move with it, but in a moment she realized that a Commonweal dance was something far removed from her experience of either Spider-kinden or Lowlanders. The inner circle of dancers had taken to the air immediately, converging in the chamber’s centre and circling one another, whilst the outer ring began following some complex pattern of its own that seemed to have no relationship to that of their fellow dancers aloft. Small groups of them would come together, turn about one another with solemn grace, now facing in, now out, and then their smaller circle would scatter in a single instant, each leaping to another point either on foot or by wing. It should have produced a chaos of tripping and collisions, but Tynisa realized very swiftly that each and every one of the participants knew their moves as if they had been rehearsed in them. This was no Beetle bumble with some half-drunk dance-master calling out the moves, nor a Spider-kinden improvisation where individual inspiration was all. These noblemen and women had been schooled in some intricate dancing art, move by move and step by step, so that they worked together to an invisible pattern that she had no access to.
Tynisa soon backed out hurriedly, because the alternative was to get in someone’s way, and already she had hopelessly lost the rhythm of the music. Across the room she saw the young man who partnered her also retiring, his face kept carefully neutral.
She was embarrassed. It was a new feeling for her: she had discovered something that she could not do. Worse, Alain would have noticed her fail at it. Even though the dance went on, she felt all eyes on her. Achaeos’s mocking laughter sounded in her head – and she knew that Salma’s imaginary smile was merely polite now. She had failed his people, and he had witnessed it, for all he was a year buried in the earth.
Those angry thoughts kept her busy until the dance reached its preordained conclusion, and Tynisa hoped naively that they might pass on to some other entertainment. Instead, she saw a swapping of partners, hands changing hands, and a new pattern being laid out in feet and bodies, whilst the musicians conferred briefly. No signal had been given, but as soon as the drummer started tapping away, everyone there immediately recognized the measure and was ready for it, leaving Tynisa again clinging at the sidelines, frustrated and surplus to requirements.
This time, Alain was partnering another young noblewoman, an iridescent creature who reminded Tynisa far too much of the Butterfly-kinden that Salme Dien had fallen for. Grimly she watched the two of them pirouette and soar together, each beat of the music grating on her nerves, until she felt that she would have to quit the gathering, or else do something she might regret.
Instead, some stubborn part of her had rooted her feet to the floor,