Savine tried not to think of the children in her mill in Valbeck, before it was destroyed. The bunk beds wedged in among the machines. The stifling heat. The deafening noise. The choking dust. But so awfully orderly. So terribly efficient.
“Confidence has been struck,” lamented Curnsbick. “Markets are in turmoil. But from chaos, opportunity can come.” He gave his lectern another blow. “Opportunity must be made to come. His August Majesty King Orso will lead us into a new age. Progress cannot stop! Will not be permitted to stop! For the benefit of all, we of the Solar Society will fight tirelessly to drag the Union from the tomb of ignorance and into the sunny uplands of enlightenment!”
Loud applause this time, and in the audience below, men struggled to their feet.
“Hear! Hear!” someone brayed.
“Progress!” blurted another.
“As inspiring as any sermon in the Great Temple of Shaffa,” murmured Zuri.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say Curnsbick has taken a stiffener himself,” said Savine, and she ducked behind her fan and sniffed up another pinch. Just one more, to get her ready for the fight.
Battle was already joined beneath the great chandeliers in the foyer. A sparser melee than at recent meetings. Less buoyant. More bitter. Hungrier dogs, snapping over leaner pickings.
The press reminded her of the crowd in Valbeck when the Breakers brought food around the slum. They wore silk rather than rags, they stank of perfume rather than stale sweat, the ever-present threat was of ruin rather than violence, but the jostling and the hunger were very much the same. There had been a time when Savine was as comfortable in this crawling activity as a queen bee in her hive. Now her whole body tingled with chilly panic. She had to smother the urge to lash out with her elbows and run screaming for the door.
“Calm,” she mouthed to herself, trying to let her shoulders relax so her hands would stop shaking, instantly losing all patience and flexing every muscle instead. “Calm, calm, calm.”
She squeezed her face into a smile, snapped out her fan and forced herself into the midst of the press with Zuri at her shoulder. Eyes turned in her direction, expressions harder than she was used to. Assessing, rather than admiring. Scornful, rather than envious. They used to crowd around her like pigs around the one trough in the farmyard. Now the most tempting morsels went elsewhere. Savine could scarcely see Selest dan Heugen through the swarm of gentlemen competing for her attention. Only a flash of that garish red wig. A snatch of that hideous, brash, overdone laugh that other women were beginning to imitate.
“By the Fates, I despise that woman,” muttered Savine.
“The highest compliment you could pay her,” said Zuri, with a warning glance up from her book. “One cannot despise a thing without acknowledging its importance.”
She was right, as always. Selest had enjoyed success after success since she invested in that scheme of Kaspar dan Arinhorm’s, the one that Savine had so pointedly turned down. Her own interests in Angland’s mines had taken quite the beating since he began to install his new pumps across the province.
And those were far from her only disappointing investments of late. Once she made businesses bloom just by smiling at them. Now every apple she bit into turned out rotten. She was not left alone, that was sure. But her fan was busier beckoning the suitors in than waving them off.
She was obliged to talk to old Ricart dan Sleisholt, who had some mad fantasy of making power by damming the Whiteflow. You could tell at a glance he was one of life’s losers, the shoulders of his jacket liberally dusted with dandruff, but it was vital that she look busy. While he blathered on, she sifted the flood of conversation around her for opportunities as a prospector sifts the Far Country’s icy streams for gold.
“… cutlery and drapery and crockery and clocks. People have money and they want things…”
“… heard Valint and Balk called in his loans. Magnate in the morning, beggar by afternoon. Salutary lesson for all of us…”
“… property in Valbeck. You wouldn’t believe the price I got on some vacant land. Well, I say vacant, but these scum are easily moved…”
“… impossible to know which way the Closed Council is going to fall on tax. There’s a hell of a hole in the finances. The entire treasury’s a hole…”
“… told ’em if they wouldn’t do the work, I’d bring in a crowd of brown bastards who would, and they soon got back to their machines…”
“… nobles furious, commoners furious, merchants furious, my wife isn’t furious yet, but it never takes much…”
“And so you see, Lady Savine,” Sleisholt was working up to a grand finale, “the power of the Whiteflow is languishing unharnessed, like a stallion unbridled, and—”
“If I may!” Curnsbick caught Savine’s elbow and steered her nimbly away.
“Unbridled, Lady Savine!” Sleisholt called after her. “I am available to discuss it further at your convenience!” And he dissolved into a coughing fit which faded into the chatter.
“Thank the Fates for you,” murmured Savine. “I thought I’d never escape that old dunce.”
Curnsbick glanced away while rubbing significantly at his nose. “You have a little something just here.”
“Fuck.” She dipped behind her fan to wipe a trace of powder from the rim of her sore nostril.
When she came up, Curnsbick was looking worriedly at her from under his grey brows, still flecked with a few stubborn ginger hairs. “Savine, I count you as one of my closest friends.”
“How lovely of you.”
“I know you have a generous heart—”
“You know more than me, then.”
“—and I have the highest regard for your instincts, your tenacity, your wit—”
“It takes no great wit to sense a ‘but’ coming.”
“I’m worried for you.” He lowered his voice. “I hear rumours, Savine. I’m concerned about… well, about your judgement.”
Her skin was prickling unpleasantly under her dress. “My judgement?” she whispered, forcing her smile a tooth wider.
“This venture in Keln that just collapsed, I warned you it wasn’t viable. Vessels that size—”
“You must be delighted at how right you were.”
“What? No! I could scarcely be less so. You must have sunk thousands into financing the Crown Prince’s Division.” It had been closer to millions. “Then I hear Kort’s canal is hampered by labour problems.” Utterly mired in them was closer to it. “And it’s no secret you lost heavily in Valbeck—”
“You have no fucking idea what I lost in Valbeck!” He stepped back, startled, and she realised she had her fist clenched tight around her folded fan and was shaking it in his face. “You… have no idea.” She was shocked to find the pain of tears at the back of her nose, had to snap her fan open again so she could dab at her lids, struggling not to smudge her powder. Never mind her judgement, it was getting to the point where she could hardly trust her own eyes.
But when she glanced up, Curnsbick was not even looking at her. He was staring across the busy foyer towards the door.