House of Shadows by Neumeier Rachel Read Free Book Online Page A

filled a covered tray with plates of duck breast in cherry sauce, pureed parsnips with butter and slivers of sea-urchin roe, and cream-filled pastries. Then she slipped through the near-empty living quarters of the House, up the back stairs, and along to the House’s small dance studio.
    The studio was, unsurprisingly, occupied.
    Rue might have gone to the party, but large parties often took a raucous turn utterly unsuited to Rue’s own gift. Rue was a connoisseur’s keiso. Mother never asked her to attend the loud half-drunken parties that were the greatest pleasure of most of the younger keiso.
    Instead, Rue was standing before the wide studio mirror, back straight and face blank, in an esienne stance, one foot on the polished floor and the other arched with just the toes placed delicately before the other foot. Leilis’s entrance did not elicit even a flicker of attention from the keiso. The woman shifted slowly from the esienne stance through a floating cloud exchange and then to a kind of elongated cat stance, and from that back to esienne.
    Rue repeated the steps again. Leilis sat down against the wall, set the tray on the floor beside her, wrapped her arms around her knees, and waited while Rue went through the sequence yet again. And then again, this time adding three gliding cat steps and a long dipping turn back into esienne. Leilis finally recognized part ofthe middle sequence of the Departing Swallows dance from the Autumn Lament. Evidently Rue was considering an adaptation for the dance. It looked fine to Leilis, but Rue continued rehearsing and adjusting the steps, her face calm and intent, until she reached some level of perfection perceptible only to herself. Then she stood still a moment longer, in the esienne stance once more, the tips of her fingers brushing the rail.
    And then, at last, the remote intensity in her face slowly gave way to an awareness of the studio, and Leilis, and the tray. A smile broke into her dark eyes and she crossed the floor quickly and dropped down with a dancer’s automatic grace to sit next to Leilis.
    “Thank you.”
    Leilis uncovered the food. “It would be better hot.”
    Rue laughed. Though not beautiful, the woman had a beautiful voice and a warm, quiet laugh. “When do I ever have my supper hot?”
    This was true. Rue spent most of her afternoons and many of her evenings either with the dance master or alone in the House studio, and even the more penetrating bells of the timekeeper seldom broke through her focus. She exclaimed in pleasure now, seeing the duck. “A cherry sauce? Wonderful!”
    Leilis leaned back against the wall and watched the keiso eat.
    Rue’s father, a Samenian, had given her his narrow face and long bones; Rue was thus tall for a dancer, but she was not willowy. Her wrists and ankles were strong and her limbs muscular, so that she lacked the delicacy that made for true beauty. Her hair was Samenian black: not the desirable jet prized in the flower life, but muted with reddish highlights.
    None of that mattered. Rue had left the household of her wealthy father to become keiso because her heart was given to dance. A wife must be a wife, and a mother a mother; a lady must be a lady; only a keiso could make art the center of her life. Rue had become keiso on her nineteenth birthday, had bought out her contract at twenty-three, and now, at thirty-four, was one of the great ornaments of CloisonnéHouse and of all the flower world. Neither needing nor desiring to tie herself to a man, even the noblest or richest, Rue had no keisonne and would probably never accept one. Further, too secure within herself to concern herself with issues of status and rank, Rue was one of the easiest of all the House keiso for residents of lesser rank to approach.
    “The House has gained a new deisa,” Leilis told her.
    “Yes, even I could not miss the word of it.” Rue ate a slice of duck breast with concentrated pleasure and began to nibble the orange strands of