The invitation arrived on a Wednesday.
It came in the form that all official palace correspondence arrived — sealed with the palace household crest, delivered through the estate's formal mail channel, addressed in the handwriting of one of the queen's secretarial staff with the specific, elegant impersonality of someone whose job was to make correspondence look like a gift.
Gorgina opened it at the breakfast table.
She read it.
She set it beside her tea cup.
She continued eating.
Gerffron, across the table, looked at the envelope.
He looked at Gorgina.
He returned to his eggs.
Lady Elowen, who was conducting her morning correspondence with one eye on her letters and one eye on the room in the way she managed most mornings, said without looking up: "The queen's spring tea."
"Yes." Gorgina said.
"The whole court has received one, apparently." Lady Elowen turned a page. "Lady Ashbeth sent a note last evening. She's going. She described the invitation as a reconnaissance exercise and said she intended to wear the blue."
"Sensible." Gorgina said.
"The date is—" Lady Elowen checked the envelope that she had clearly already reviewed "—the fourteenth. Three weeks from tomorrow."
"I know the date."
"You have the eastern district council on the fourteenth."
Gorgina was quiet for a moment.
The eastern district council was not an obligation that could be rescheduled. It met quarterly and its quarterly meeting had not changed in date since the current arrangement had been codified twelve years ago, and the specific consequences of a ducal absence from the council — in terms of the estate's relationships with the six eastern tenant houses, who were already managing the lingering awkwardness of the past three years of the Wadee household's social withdrawal — were consequences that Gorgina had been working to mitigate and could not afford to extend.
She looked at the invitation.
She looked at the date.
She looked, briefly and with the expression of a woman performing a rapid calculation that she does not particularly enjoy the result of, at Gerffron.
Gerffron looked back at her.
He had been in the middle of eating his breakfast with the focused appreciation he brought to mornings when the kitchen had done well, and the kitchen had done well this morning — the eggs were correct and the toast was the right darkness and the tea was the temperature that it should be — and the invitation had arrived and the calculation had happened and he could see where it was landing before it landed.
"No." he said.
Gorgina looked at him.
"I know what you're calculating," he said. "And no."
"The estate should be represented," Gorgina said.
"Then send Orreth."
"Orreth is household staff. This is a noble social occasion. The Wadee estate needs to be represented by a member of the household with appropriate rank."
"Lady Elowen—"
"Has a prior engagement that afternoon that is not negotiable," Lady Elowen said, without looking up from her correspondence, with the smoothness of someone contributing a fact they happen to have available.
Gerffron looked at her.
She turned a page.
He looked at Gorgina.
"It is a tea party," Gorgina said. "It lasts two hours. You will sit, you will drink tea, you will make the appropriate conversation, and you will come home."
"I am under house confinement," he said.
"The king's instruction was that you be kept under the Wadee household's protection and responsibility," she said. "It specified the estate as your primary residence. It did not specify that you were prohibited from leaving the estate in the company of appropriate representation."
"You have parsed that instruction very carefully."
"I always parse instructions carefully." She picked up her tea. "The queen's palace is within the household's escort range. You will attend with Selfi and the household carriage. You will represent the Wadee estate at a social occasion as is appropriate for someone in your position. And then you will come home."
He looked at his eggs.
"I haven't attended a social occasion," he said, "since the birthday banquet."
"Yes."
"Which the last time I attended a social occasion before the birthday banquet—"
"Was the Winter Ball," she said. "I am aware. The birthday banquet was a considerably better outcome. I see no reason the current occasion should produce anything different."
"The queen will be there."
Gorgina was quiet for a moment.
"The queen," she said carefully, "is the host of a social occasion to which the Wadee estate has been invited along with the rest of the court. She will be a gracious host and you will be a polite guest and you will drink the tea and come home."
"You make it sound very simple."
"Most things are simple if you decide they are."
"That," he said, "has not been my experience."
She looked at him across the breakfast table with the amber eyes that had been conducting their private renegotiation for two years and which this morning had a quality he had learned to read as the quality she wore when she had made a decision and was informing rather than consulting.
"You are going," she said.
He picked up his fork.
He ate his eggs.
He said, to the eggs: "I am going to need something to wear that is not the gray."
Something moved through Gorgina's expression that was almost imperceptible and which Lady Elowen, who had been watching over the top of her correspondence with the practiced peripheral vision of a woman who had been managing this household for twenty-five years, noted and filed.
"I will speak to the estate tailor," Gorgina said. "He will come to the library tomorrow afternoon."
"Fine."
"Fine," she said.
Lady Elowen returned fully to her correspondence.
The breakfast table continued.
Gerffron thought about the tea party and the queen's apartments and the specific social territory of the Zenos court nobility in a spring garden setting and felt the familiar, particular nervousness of a man who has been out of the social world for a while and is about to re-enter it at a higher altitude than he would have chosen.
He also thought, because he was Deepak Sehwal underneath the Gerffron Wadee and Deepak Sehwal had spent enough time being sent to things he didn't want to attend to have some practiced strategies: he thought about what he wanted to learn. Who would be there. What the queen's purpose was. What a careful observer could pick up from two hours in a garden with the carefully selected guests of a woman who did nothing without purpose.
He thought: if I am going to be a pawn of convenience, I may as well be a useful one.
He ate his toast.