Chapter 23: Four Languages

The Lycan court stood in a hall of black stone, under a ceiling so high the torches didn't reach it.

Four hundred nobles lined both sides of the floor in silk and old jewelry.

Every one of them looked at me and did not smile.

"A pack girl," a woman murmured, in Italian, behind her fan. "From the Americas. They say she cleans her own floors."

"Perhaps she'll be given a mop," her friend said.

Soren's hand tightened on mine.

I turned my head, smiled, and answered the duchess in her own Italian, in the accent of her own city.

"I do clean my own floors, Your Grace. I'm very good at it."

The fan stopped.

A heavy man in a green coat said something in German to his neighbor, about breeding and thin blood.

"My mother's line is eight generations," I told him, in German. "Yours, I think, is three, and the third was a banker."

Somebody coughed. Somebody laughed and was hushed.

An old man at the front said, in Latin, with a thin smile, that a girl thrown out of her own house was no consort for a crown.

I looked at him for a moment.

"Quae eiecta est, rediit," I said. "She who was thrown out has come back."

"Ask the people who did the throwing, sir. They stood in a hall like this one and watched me go."

A hush fell over the hall, and then, from the far end, a single dry laugh rang off the stone.