Princess of the Midnight Ball - Jessica Day George [36]
King Gregor was in the council chamber with his ministers, talking over the snub from Breton. Rose sat in one corner, quietly hemming handkerchiefs. One of the girls always sat in on royal councils, as their mother had done, to offer the king silent support.
“But, sire,” the prime minister protested, “my spies in Analousia say that there have been meetings between their prime minister and the Belgique ambassador. And Spanian relations are frigid at best now.” He clenched his fists and barreled on. “They are saying that these princes are not dying by accident, that these are very cleverly arranged assassinations. Your Majesty, they are pointing the blame squarely at you. Our foreign relations are in a worse state now than they were during the war! What are we to do?”
The hush that followed Schilling’s words was profound. Rose dropped her sewing, and the small ping of her needle hitting the polished wood floor was far too loud. The prime minister looked at her with hard eyes.
“We are to ignore it,” King Gregor said, voice grim. “I don’t care if we do look like fools: we will continue to smile and seek peace while they mutter and rattle their swords. It is all we can do. This country will not survive another war.”
Rose shuddered. She and her sisters knew full well what price had been paid to ensure that Westfalin would win the Analousian war. If another war came … she could not imagine what would become of their poor country then. She dared not make the bargains her mother had made. Westfalin would have to rise or fall on its own strength, and right now that strength was not great.
“Then at least rescind that ridiculous proclamation,” the prime minister was pleading now. “No more princes will be coming. Don’t flaunt the fact that every royal house in Ionia has lost a prince because of your daughters.”
There was a collective gasp from the other councillors.
“You go too far,” King Gregor said in a low voice. “My daughters are innocent. These deaths … are terrible. …” He rubbed his mouth with one hand as though washing away a bad taste. “But how can anyone say it’s Lily’s fault when a horse in Polen throws its rider? Or little Petunia’s idea for two young hotheads to duel?”
With a sick heart, Rose noticed that her father would not even look in her direction when he said this.
Schilling chewed his mustache, clearly biting back a retort. When at last he spoke, his voice was barely under control. “Paying the discharge wages for the army nearly bankrupted us. Now relations with both our former enemies and our allies are strained to breaking point. If we are accused, directly, of having their sons killed … If the archbishop hears these rumors, rumors that we are causing these accidents from hundreds of miles away …”
There was another silence after that, for not even Schilling knew what else to say.
Rose sat, clutching her sewing in clammy hands. She felt like the floor was falling away beneath her chair and had to struggle to breathe evenly and not let her distress attract attention.
Before the silence became truly unbearable, Rose’s father simply repeated his orders for everyone to “hold firm,” and the council was dismissed.
Rose tucked her snarled thread into her sewing basket and stood up.
“Rosie?” Her father gave her a look that was equal parts hopeful and angry.
She knew what he wanted: he wanted her to tell him their secret. Or at least, to tell him it was all over with, that the sleepless nights—on everyone’s part—were done. He had talked at breakfast of sending the younger set to the old fortress in the mountains, and Rose had had to tell him that the shadowy figures in the garden would return, and that this time they might enter the palace itself. She couldn’t say any more, but the expression on her face and the faces of her sisters had been enough to convince him to let them be.
She gave him a tight smile and slipped out of the room. She stopped in her own