"I put about the truth — that you were recovering from your ordeal," Lily added. "Of course, since I was the one who said this, most people didn't believe it, and thought I had locked you up. I suspect that only the fact that your servants could come and go freely stopped the rumors that I'd had you murdered in your bed."
Rosa nodded. This morning for the first time ever she had turned up for Morning Court, and had defiantly taken her place beside Queen Sable, something she had not done since the Queen had arrived.
The Queen had given her a cold stare, but then, the Queen gave everyone cold stares, and there wasn't a particle of difference between this one and the one she bestowed on someone she really did not want to hear petitioning her. They sat side by side on matching smaller thrones — the larger one for the King had been removed to the back of the dais — listening to petitions. Breaking fast, of course, was done in the private apartments, so this was, officially, the first time the two of them had been together since Rosa's return. The Lesser Audience Chamber had been so full of frozen politeness that it was amazing icicles weren't hanging from the noses of the courtiers before it was all over.
"It was all I could do to keep from laughing during Court," she said with a grin. "You do know I was deliberately imitating you, don't you?"
Lily chuckled. "We believe," she said, a deep chill in her voice, "that the petitioner should reconsider his position. But we would like to hear the opinion of the Princess Royal."
"The Princess Royal has no opinion," Rosa replied, with the same distant manner and chill. "Except that the Royal Consort is a stranger here, and thus, may have the analytical distance required to asses this situation." They both laughed.
After Morning Court was the large meal of the day, dinner. This was the meal at which everyone who was anyone had to turn up, unless he or she was ill. When Rosa entered at the same time as the Queen, and the two sat side by side at the high table, it caused an immediate stir, because again, Rosa had not sat at dinner since the Queen had been installed. Dinner was a piece of balletic extravagance that only a country as wealthy as Eltaria could afford. There were seven courses, and each course had several dishes. One was not expected to eat everything, or even to taste most of the dishes — though Siegfried had made good inroads on many of them. Rosa wished she could have been there to see the reaction of the two men the first time they had been presented with such bounty.
"What happened at the first dinner — with our tagalongs, I mean?" she asked.
"Siegfried's eyes nearly jumped out of his head. I had put them on either side of me and he muttered something about not expecting the feast day in Vallahalia. Leopold was...impressed. But he spent most of the feast trying to impress me by pretending to be casual about it all."
"At least Leopold didn't try to pocket the knives and forks," Rosa said dryly.
After dinner — which took place in absolutely uncanny and unnatural silence, since virtually everyone was waiting and watching to see what Rosa and the Queen would do — the two had stood up simultaneously. The Queen announced, in a stern voice, "Princess Rosamund will be pleased to attend us in our chambers. Alone."
Rosa had bowed stiffly and replied, "It pleases us to do so." Her manner had made it very clear that she was doing so only because she felt like it. The moment that they had exited, the Dining Room had erupted with the buzz of speculation.
Once the two of them were safely behind the locked doors of the Queen's Chambers, however, they had nearly collapsed with laughter. They held each other up, giggling helplessly, and every time one of them would manage to get herself under control, she would glance at the other and go off again. Once they had wiped their eyes and settled down, though, it had been time to get down to business, and the first order of business, it seemed, was drinking that Dragon's Blood and obtaining the gift of tongues that would come with it.
"Now, about the gift of tongues — it will also help you get through strange accents and even muddle through languages you don't already know," Lily said, as she uncovered Jimson's mirror. "Not as clearly as with animals, but human language is much more complicated than animal language. Siegfried had a nice dose of Dragon's Blood after killing a particularly nasty one when he was just ten. That's why Siegfried can actually bumble through Eltarian without having learned it before he crossed the border."
Rosa was a little distracted at the moment, because she was hearing two things from the birds outside in the garden, one set of information layered over the top of the other. She heard the perfectly expected birdsong from them. But she also heard a tangled jumble of other things. From the robins, "I'm here! Here! Here!" From the larks, soaring above them all, "Look at meeeeeee! Look! Look!" From the meadowlarks, farther out where the stables were, "My place! Mine! Mine!" And from the starlings, squabbling over the kitchen midden, "Gimme, gimme, gimme!"
"It's working already," she said, and made a face.
Lily watched her, and nodded sympathetically. "You will get used to it, and you'll soon be able to tune the nonsense and useless things out. Meanwhile allow me to introduce you to a most intelligent little source of information, the one who actually told me about Siegfried and the dragon." She went to the window and whistled, holding out her hand. In no time at all, a little brown bird whisked off the roof and alighted on her outstretched finger. The bird tilted its head to the side and chirped. What Rosa heard, under the melodious chirping, was, "I don't suppose you have any of that lovely cream cake, do you, Godmother?"
She nearly jumped with surprise.
"Of course I do, little friend," Lily said fondly, and brought the bird into the sitting room, where she let it hop onto the table where a slice of crumbled cake was waiting in a white porcelain saucer. The bird happily stuffed herself — the voice that Rosa had heard had definitely been female — and Lily waited patiently.
"I tend to believe in serving my guests dinner before I interrogate them," she said to Rosa, dryly. The bird looked up and gave a wink, before going back to the cake crumbs.
When the bird was at last full, it hopped onto the back of a chair and regarded them out of intelligent black eyes that sparkled like two beads of jet.
Rosa stared at her, fascinated. Her fingers itched to touch those tiny feathers. "I don't suppose...you'd let me stroke you, would you?" she asked tentatively. "I've never stroked a live bird before."
"Have you any nasty lotions on your hands?" the bird sang. "Or perfumes, perfumes are nasty, too. Oil is bad for my feathers."
Rosa shook her head.
"All right then." The bird waited for Rosa to hold out her hand, and hopped onto the finger that Rosa offered. Her claws felt very light, very delicate, like two bits of thistledown that had contracted a little to hold on, and to Rosa's surprise, they were quite warm. Carefully, she stroked the bird's head with her other index finger, just barely touching the amazingly soft, smooth feathers for a while, then growing bolder, carefully, gently scratching with index finger and thumb, as she would scratch a young kitten. The bird closed her eyes in pleasure and very nearly purred. "Ooh, you do that very well," she trilled. "I like you. You're as nice as Siegfried."