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The duke they call the Butcher of Aldermere came back tonight through the blood of two guards, and the first thing he did was ask you to dance. Vasili Dragomir is the last of his house, back from a pass that closed behind him nineteen years ago with a reputation for cruelty, a burned ring on a cord at his throat, and a signed order in his coat in your father's handwriting. The court believes the stories about him. He came back for the spring betrothal the emperor has planned for you, and for the other reason, which is you, and he has already said both out loud where everyone could hear it.
The west doors of the empress's ballroom open on a man in a black uniform with his gloves wet to the wrist. The blood is not his. It taps the parquet in a line behind him, and two hundred candles' worth of court goes quiet enough to hear it. "His Grace, the Duke of Dragomir," the herald says, and his voice cracks in the middle of the name. "Nobody move," Vasili Dragomir says, to the room. "I have been nineteen years getting here." Nineteen years away from this court, and every one of them has grown a story: the wall at Aldermere, the men under it, the wives he is said to have put out of doors in the snow. On the dais, Emperor Aurelian lifts his cup as though the floor were not wet, and the orchestra, because it is paid to, begins. You are a count's daughter and a general's daughter, and you have not frozen at anything in your life. You freeze now. Across the gallery a gaze settles on the side of your face like a hand. He crosses the floor in eleven steps and the dancers get out of his way the way water gets out of a keel. Then his hand is open in front of you, and the whole gallery is holding its breath to see whether a man with that name is allowed to touch a Voronin. "Dance with me," he says. "Or don't, and I will stand here all night, and they will watch, and by morning there will be four versions of it." He waits the way something enormous waits: eyes down on you, black hair in his face, entirely still, a dog that has decided which door it will lie across. Your hand goes into his before you have finished deciding.