Gorgina had always been better at managing large things than small ones.
She could manage a duchy. She could manage the political complications of the Crown Prince's orbit and the king's court and the six noble houses that orbited the Wadee estate with various degrees of closeness and interest. She could manage trade negotiations, household accounts, the complex choreography of a noble family's social responsibilities in an empire that ran partially on the fuel of other people's good opinion.
She could not, apparently, manage a birthday guest list.
She had been staring at the same piece of paper for twenty minutes.
The paper contained seventeen names. Seventeen was, in the context of a banquet being held in the main hall of the Wadee estate, an embarrassingly small number. The main hall sat sixty comfortably, eighty if the side tables were arranged, and the last event of any significance it had hosted had been the winter gathering three years ago — before the ball, before the fall, before the household had contracted around its collective shame and retreated from the social world with the thoroughness of people who understand that the best way to stop being talked about is to disappear.
Seventeen names.
She set the paper down.
The truth — which she examined with the same cold-eyed honesty she applied to everything that she could not afford to be sentimental about — was that the seventeen names represented the full extent of her genuine social circle. Not professional contacts, not political alliances, not the hundred and forty people who would accept an invitation to a Wadee estate event because declining would cost them something. Those she could fill a hall with easily.
The seventeen were the people who would come because they actually wanted to.
She picked the paper up again.
Among the seventeen: Lady Elowen. Count Remal and his partner, Lord Jazaan. Lady Ashbeth. Lord and Lady Rozana. Baron Acquikth, who was poor enough that the invitation would be a financial inconvenience and who would come anyway because he was one of the few genuinely kind people in the empire and kindness was apparently incompatible with declining invitations from people he considered friends.
And then there was Teivel.
She had written his name and crossed it out and written it again.
The Teivel situation had reached a state of equilibrium that she found unsatisfying in the way of all equilibriums that have been achieved through mutual understanding rather than genuine resolution — they both knew what they knew about each other, they both understood the new parameters, and they had constructed, over the six months since the assassin's revelation, a relationship that functioned through the mechanical application of their previous forms without the previous substance.
She wrote his name in ink and did not cross it out.
He was still politically necessary. She was not ready to lose that particular connection entirely, even if the nature of it had changed in ways she had not finished calculating. A birthday banquet was a social occasion with a clear social logic for his attendance — she could invite him without it meaning what it had previously meant, and he was intelligent enough to understand that and attend on the new terms.
She added his name to the final list.
Then she put her pen down and looked at the number.
Eighteen.
She rang for Orreth.
"We need more people," she said, when the head housekeeper arrived.
Orreth looked at the list with the expression of a woman who had been managing the social logistics of the Wadee household for fifteen years and had developed strong opinions about the relationship between guest lists and the avoidance of awkward table configurations.
"The hall sits sixty," Orreth said.
"I know what the hall sits."
"Eighteen guests at a sixty-seat table—"
"I know," Gorgina said. "That is why I said we need more people."
Orreth considered.
"There are seventeen additional houses in the greater estate district whose invitations would be expected," she said. "Given the circumstances of the past three years, their omission would be noticed and their inclusion would signal a return to normal social relations."
"Add twelve of them," Gorgina said. "The remaining five can feel the omission and consider why."
"Yes, Your Grace." A pause. "That brings us to thirty."
"Still thirty empty seats."
Another pause.
Orreth said, with the careful neutrality of a woman raising something she knows is potential territory: "The former consort maintains some social connections from his time in the household's active service. Count Remal is already on the list. There are others."
Gorgina looked at the list.
She thought about Gerffron in the library, in the garden, in the two years of house confinement that had produced, gradually and without announcement, a version of domestic cohabitation that was entirely unlike anything she had expected or planned for. She thought about the conversations over the library hearth in the evenings. She thought about the way he had taken to the rose beds in the garden with a focused competence that had impressed even Weld, who was not a man easily impressed. She thought about the birthday in the cedar bedroom — his birthday, three months ago, which had passed without ceremony because neither of them had mentioned it, but which she had known about and had instructed the kitchen to produce a better dinner than usual and had watched him eat it without comment and had found, in the watching, something she could not cleanly name.
"Tell him he may invite his own guests," she said. "Within reason."
Orreth's expression adjusted very slightly.
"Within reason," she repeated.
"He will know what that means."
"Yes, Your Grace."
"And send Selfi to him with the instructions. Directly, not through the general message system."
"Of course."
"Tell Selfi—" Gorgina paused. Chose. "Tell her to keep her ears open."
Orreth nodded with the understanding of a woman who has spent fifteen years in this household and knows how to translate instructions that have two layers.
"I'll speak to her this afternoon," she said.
— — —
The instruction reached Selfi at the fourth bell, in the corridor outside the library, in the specific form that instructions from Gorgina always arrived when they were delivered via Orreth: precisely worded, with the additional weight of Orreth's own interpretation layered carefully underneath.
"You will deliver the invitation allowance to the former consort," Orreth said. "You will remain available to assist him in compiling his list. You will note who he chooses to invite and report to me."
Selfi looked at her.
"Report," she said.
"The Duke's instruction," Orreth said, with the finality of someone declining to elaborate.
Selfi knocked on the library door.
He was at the window when she entered.
She had noticed this — his preference for the window over the desk when he was thinking rather than working, the way he stood at the glass rather than sitting, as if the glass gave him something the room did not. She had been noticing things about him for six weeks and finding the noticing increasingly inconvenient.
"The Duke instructs that you may invite guests to the birthday banquet," she said. "Within reason."
He turned from the window.
There was a look on his face that she had come to recognize over six weeks — the brief, internal processing look, the one that appeared when information arrived and he was deciding what it meant before he responded to it. It lasted about two seconds and then resolved into the expression he presented to the world, which was careful and calm and gave very little away.
"How many seats?" he said.
"She didn't specify. I believe the current confirmed count is thirty. The hall seats sixty."
He nodded.
He went to the writing desk and sat and pulled the correspondence box toward him.
"I'll have a list by tomorrow morning," he said.
She stood in the room because she had been told to remain available and she was going to remain available with the full, precise competence with which she performed all her duties.
He wrote for a few minutes.
Then he looked up.
"Selfi," he said.
She looked at him.
"You don't have to stand by the door," he said. "You can sit."
She looked at the chair he was not gesturing to but which was the obvious available chair.
"I'm fine standing," she said.
"I know," he said. "I'm suggesting it would be more comfortable."
She sat.
He returned to his writing.
She sat in the chair and looked at the bookshelves and did not look at him and thought about Gorgina's instruction — keep her ears open — and thought that this was the most complicated simple instruction she had ever been given, because keeping her ears open meant staying in this room, and staying in this room meant sitting in the chair he had pointed to, and sitting in the chair he had pointed to felt, in a way she could not immediately resolve, like crossing a line she had not meant to cross.
He was writing his guest list.
She was sitting in his library.
The afternoon continued around them with its usual indifference.