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and through the servants’ narrow passages. The new girl had hair spun out of the dusky fall of twilight. Her skin was flawless, the soft color of the best Enescene porcelain. The curve of her throat… those fine delicate bones… Even her tears scattered like pearls, and her face did not blotch when she wept.
    The new girl might well be tearful, thought Leilis. Though probably she feared the wrong things and for the wrong reasons. New girls always feared Mother, feared the senior keiso. But any new girl should instead fear the whispers that spread among the deisa. Those were the girls who would like to see a rival fail and sink into obscurity or mere servitude within the House.
    Curiosity drove Leilis down from the keiso-trodden regions of the House to the laundry to see if the laundry maids needed extra hands, which of course they always did.
    “Have you seen the new girl?” one of the laundry maids asked her. The maid was a tiny bit of a thing, too plain to dream of ever taking a flower name of her own. Her thin little voice was wistful.“More beautiful than the stars over the mountains, they say. Mother paid two thousand hard cash for her and would have paid twice as much. You should go see if she’s truly so beautiful and come tell us, will you, Leilis?”
    The maid, tucked away in the laundry, could not herself run up to see the new deisa. Few of the residents of Cloisonné House moved as freely as Leilis between the public and private regions of the house, between the servants’ areas and the keiso galleries and halls. Not that anyone but a laundry maid was likely to envy Leilis her unusual freedom. It was assuredly a poor enough trade for keiso glamour.
    Leilis made a noncommittal sound and took a set of the very best silk sheets up to Mother’s apartment.
    Narienneh was speaking with the embroiderer, who was showing her an overrobe embroidered with a frothy lacework of white and pale pink. “She’d look like an apple blossom in this,” Mother said, waving a dismissive hand at the froth. “Like an entire orchard. Something innocent is what we shall want, a clean design, something almost plain.”
    The embroiderer nodded, sketching quick patterns in charcoal for Narienneh to examine. Leilis slid past into Mother’s bedchamber and made the bed, then came back out to the front room. She snipped the faded flowers off Mother’s white roses and tidied away the clutter of discarded paper the embroiderer had produced. The embroiderer gathered up a rustling stack of sketches and went away.
    Mother sighed and sat down at the table in front of the window. But she did not gaze out the window at the river. She lowered her head against her hand, pinching the bridge of her nose and looking, now that she was alone, uncharacteristically frail. Mother’s hair, braided up into a crown on the top of her head, was flawlessly white, but her age was not what lent her this unexpected air of fragility. It occurred to Leilis to wonder for the first time how much Narienneh might really have paid for the new girl. Could it have been so much?
    Leilis slipped quietly away. Going again by the laundry, she gathered up another armload of sheets. Thus armored, she went up at last to the deisa gallery, where the new girl would have a narrow bed at the end of the row where all the deisa slept.
    The girl was there, sitting perfectly still in one of the straight-backed chairs by the window, her hands gripped together in her lap. The clutter of deisa belongings was scattered about: plain practice harps with extra strings coiled on shelves nearby, a kinsana, sets of pipes. Scrolls for the poems the deisa were learning were pinned open on a low table by the window, the narrow pallets taking up the rest of that wall. There were half a dozen small chests, one at the foot of each pallet, for each deisa’s personal possessions; the room’s single large closet would hold all their daily robes and slippers, which they did not own themselves. Leilis