Eloise removes the shoes from their wrappings and holds them out. “Come on—once we get downstairs, you can sit, but we need to go.”
Biting back my dread, I set the shoes down and slide my battered feet into them. Pain spikes in the blisters along the pads of my toes. Eloise picks up the jeweled wooden walking cane fashionable with young Moquoian men and hands it to me. Shifting my weight to my heels, I plant the cane on the floor and rise. Eloise nods in satisfaction and turns for the door. I wobble gracelessly after her and out into the hall.
The first impact of my heels on the hardwood floor sounds like a clap of thunder. I hurry after her, my collar hot, almost reluctant to use the cane and add a third clack to the cacophony. I think of my mama’s forest scouts—in order to earn the rank of Woodwalker, they have to be able to tread past a series of blindfolded sentries so quietly as to escape detection, all while carrying a forty-pound pack. I, at the moment, sound like a drunken elk on cobblestones.
We pass into the atrium at the end of the hall. Like the other windows in the palace, the ceiling is constructed from absolutely massive panels of glass—Moquoia’s primary industry and probably the single greatest feat of manufacturing of our age. I still haven’t gotten over my awe at the soaring panes, the biggest three times my height and half that across. Water runs down them in rivers, muddling the view of the stormy sky and tangled forests rolling away from the palace.
“I wonder if we’re ever going to get a tour of the grounds beyond the palace,” I say, straining to see past the streaming rain. I want so desperately to get out into those forests, to see more of the giant maples shaggy with moss and the bracken ferns dense enough to swallow a coach. I want to travel south along the coastline and see the fabled redwoods, trees that I’ve heard surpass even the grandmother chestnuts back home in height and girth. We only caught distant glimpses of the groves as we traveled to Tolukum, and since we arrived, we haven’t left the palace once.
“Probably not with that fever on the rise,” Eloise says. “Everyone’s been so anxious about venturing outside for too long.”
I frown, remembering all the dire warnings about rainshed fever we received when we first arrived. Keep all windows closed, they told us. Sleep in long sleeves. If you must go out, wear lemon balm or cedar oil. The illness is apparently carried by mosquitoes, which thrive in the humid forests, and as such—even on rare days when there’s a break in the rain—the palace has remained sealed tight as a bubble. It makes me feel like a goldfish turning circles in a bowl.
“I still don’t understand why the fever is so bad here in Tolukum, when we barely heard about it in the towns we passed through on the way here,” I say. “The environment along the coach road was no different from here, but we saw plenty of open windows and folk moving about.”
“Well, it’s a curiosity we probably won’t have time to investigate,” Eloise says, picking up her hem in anticipation of the approaching staircase. “We’re not here to sightsee in the countryside. If we are able to secure any kind of outing, it should be to the sand quarries and glass forges—they’re the main thing this alliance is hinging on. In fact, I hear Minister Kobok is back from his tour of the glassmaking factories. We should try to schedule an appointment. Can you take the stairs?”
My collar heats more. “Yes.”
She starts down the sweeping staircase, her shoes barely clipping against each step. I clamp my hand on the railing and follow, my own heels cracking like a smith’s hammer.
“At least we get a taste of the forests inside,” she says, gesturing into the open space on either side of the staircase, where we’re almost instantly surrounded by living branches. Trees planted inside—another astounding facet of Tolukum Palace. Their crowns reach up toward the glass ceiling; their roots are buried five floors below, flanked by tiled pathways, carved fountains, and vibrant flower beds.
“These forests aren’t real,” I say, the pain in my feet making me irritable. “They’re just a show—all make-believe. The trees may be alive, but I haven’t seen a single brown leaf or bent twig in four weeks. No worms in the soil, no pollinators on the flowers. They must have an army of servants just to groom everything to perfection.”
“Veran . . .”
“Have you noticed—they don’t even take the folk names, like we do. We’ve always called them Tree-folk, because of the redwoods, and the northern rainforests, but they consider that archaic, like they don’t even care about the forests at all—”
Eloise stops on the landing so suddenly I run into her. I splay my cane out to keep from falling. She turns to me, her usually cheerful face arranged into displeasure. She purses her lips—she looks startlingly like her mother when she does that.
“Oh,” I say, realizing what I’d just said.
“Veran . . .” she says again.
“I’m sorry,” I say quickly, embarrassed. “That was rude of me.”
“Yes. It’s just . . . I know Moquoia is different from the Silverwood—in a lot of ways—but you can’t let it affect your respect for the people in court.” She looks out at the cedar trees, their needles immobile in the enclosed air. “Do you remember what Uncle Colm always said at the beginning of each semester?”
Do I. His was my very first class at the university, and those introductory words became the undercurrent for my studies from there on out. I can hear him now, plain as that day.
“Ethnocentric bias,” he said.
The scent of evergreen and the drumming of rain on glass give way to memories of cool adobe and dry, sunny skies.
“Ethnocentric bias. Cultural supremacy,” Colm said, standing in front of a massive map, his gray university bolero piped with the same blue as the illustration of Lumen Lake. “Everyone has a lens through which they view the world, and the inherent urge to classify everything within your lens as right and everything else as wrong is the most basic and fundamental error you can make. The notion of cultural supremacy ruins the scholar’s ability to adapt to new ideas, to work collaboratively, and to create peaceful relationships. Never allow yourself to devolve into a dichotomy of right and wrong, of normal and not normal. This is the most important thing you can learn from me.”
None of his students would dare challenge the validity of that statement. We’d heard the stories, we’d read the history accounts. He was in many of the history accounts, along with his wife, Gemma, the provost of the university and Last Queen of Alcoro. To a group of starry-eyed freshies, they were living legends. To me, the awe always went a step further. A mention of Colm’s name is usually never far away from his sister Mona’s, queen of Lumen Lake, or Rou’s, her husband and international ambassador . . . or my own parents’, king and queen of the Silverwood Mountains.
The familiar weight of all their names, titles, accolades, and accomplishments settles over me like a blanket, stifling my breath.
So much is riding on us not screwing up. On me not screwing up.
“Sorry,” I say again. “I wasn’t thinking. I’ll be more respectful.”
“I know the Moquoians manage their forests differently than your folk do,” she says. “And don’t get me started on their trade records—my mother would have a fit. But it’s not necessarily wrong, Veran—just different.”