Where The Lowborn Kneels

The DeNova estate was not awakened by the sunrise. It was awakened by the servants, an hour before sunrise, in a silence so carefully cultivated that a stranger might have thought the place asleep.

By the time the greyed light of a Myraval winter spilled over the grain terraces of Varethe Hall, the kitchen fires had been stoked, the ashes from three hundred hearths drawn out in felted buckets, and the true business of the household already conducted in hushed tones downstairs. The maids knew who among the Duke's guests had left the estate by the east gate before the cockcrow, and who had not left at all; the grooms knew whose carriage had had its wheels wrapped in sacking, to muffle the sound of gravelly wheels. The cook, having been ordered to prepare no breakfast for certain men, knew how many of them had been found snoring in the cellars.

The masters of the manor knew none of this. It was, as the old steward liked to say, a great house, and like any great house, the family at its heart was the face, while the servants were the flesh and bone.

On the third floor of the east wing, the face of the House of DeNova sat before a window, her back stiff with the careful poise of a woman used to being looked at, as her maid unbraided her hair.

Evangeline DeNova was seventeen years old, and already she was learning to be beautiful. Her hair, a long mass of auburn falling to the small of her back, caught the light like banked embers and took twice as long to smooth as the average girl, because Evangeline's maid, Perrin, counted every stroke in precisian hundreds, as the Duchess of DeNova had done before her. The color of Evangeline's eyes was a cool green, the lids heavy with the pleasant boredom of a woman who had been taught from childhood that beauty was a kind of weapon, and the men in her household wanted her to be the most dangerous kind. She was tall for a woman of her station, with the fine, fine bones one saw in the dolls sold at the marbled shops on the thoroughfare, and her face was the kind that painters whispered about, begging to be allowed to frame the delicate angles and high color. All her life, people had told her that she was beautiful. She had learned to accept it, like another of her father's debts, that she would never repay.

"You're frowning, my lady," said Perrin, as she set the brush aside. "You're thinking again."

"I am not thinking."

"It's the same expression."

Evangeline's mouth tightened, and she said nothing, but her eyes flicked toward the window, to the view of the courtyard as it slowly began to fill with the dull, necessary business of men. A cart rolled past, piled high with turnips fit for the winter stew, and a boy staggered along behind it, balancing a pail of water on his shoulder. Two men in the grey livery of the Duke's household walked ahead, the long bundle wrapped in oilcloth balanced between them, heads bowed as though in solemn conversation. They walked carefully, these men, as though they carried something that might break or spill.

Evangeline turned her eyes away before she could decide which it was.

There were things in the house of DeNova that she had learned never to notice, and she had learned the lesson well, for she could not quite remember the day she stopped wondering. The carts that rolled quietly past the north gate after dark, when the household was asleep. The names that came up at dinner, always in the same careful tones, always followed by laughter, that were never spoken of again. The way her father's steward lowered his voice when the Emperor's tax-gatherers came to call, as if the furniture itself might turn its head and listen. She told herself that the wealth of DeNova was in its grain and its vintage and its lands, and that grain and wine and land needed no defense.

It was easier to tell herself that, standing before the tall glass in her morning dress, a deep green that clung low over the bodice and flowed out in a wide, dramatic sweep. She looked at the girl in the glass and saw someone cool and contained and unerringly well-dressed, and nothing at all like the woman she had been in those sleepless nights before, listening to the sound of horses in the courtyard and counting every step.

Duke Alaric DeNova received his daughter in a room that smelled of beeswax and old parchment, standing at the long window with his hands clasped behind him, like a man surveying his holdings.

He was a handsome man, broad-shouldered and florid at the temples, with a voice like well-honed steel. He had sat at the right hand of the Emperor for two decades, and men of the court had once called him a pillar of the state. Evangeline had never been especially charmed by pillars.

"You look like your mother this morning," said the Duke, without turning. It was not exactly a compliment. "Like she'd died only yesterday, instead of nine years ago."

"Father," said Evangeline.

"Sit," said the Duke, and she did, because he had always been the part of her life that made sitting a duty. The chair, as always, was a hand's width shorter than his, and she noted it at once, as she had noted it when she was twelve, and had never stopped.

The Duke faced her. "The coachman's hands have failed him."

Evangeline blinked. Of all the things she had expected to hear, this was not one of them. "Old Garrick?"

"He dropped the reins at the Imperial Square last week. The Marchioness of Hale's carriage nearly run into the fountain." The Duke's mouth tightened. "It seems that every one of the capital has known about the DeNova coachman, and now they know that he is not fit to drive a man of rank." He stopped, then, because his daughter had gone whiter than usual. "I will not be mocked in my own livery."

"Then dismiss him."

"I have. He is to get four crowns a year and the cottage by the mill for his service. See that he is easy in his old age." The Duke crossed to his desk and with a gesture so casual Evangeline nearly missed it, withdrew a heavy book from the top and deposited it, with a soft click, in the bottom. "I have heard that a boy from the city is steady, knows his horses, and is willing to work, and that he will be your coachman for the Vesper Gardens on Thursday. I trust he will have the same care with you and your sister that old Garrick had with the Duke's guests."

"I don't care who drives me."

"No." Alaric DeNova smiled very slightly. "You never have."

She did not think of it again, until she was walking past the long gallery where the portraits of her ancestors hung, every man a little fatter and happier than his son, as the Duke's household always wished to be. She did not think again of the last footman, the surly, round-shouldered man with the ledger-clerk eyes who had been dismissed that spring, for she had never seen him drunk.

She had, once, seen him standing in the rain at the north gate at midnight, holding a stub of a candle and a scrap of paper, counting the carts that passed.

She stopped before the portrait of her great-grandfather, the first Duke of DeNova, who had built the estate in the years when Myraval's throne was still newly bloodied from the last coup, and had painted his eyes the color of the woods along the river. Evangeline DeNova had the same eyes.

We are, she thought, the kind of people who serve the right people.

It was not a comforting thought. She put it away with the others.