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the outward-most form of
melende
.
    So when her father bade her good morning, examined her from pink hair ribbons to satin-covered toes, and said, “Tomorrow we shall depart for Alsais,” she was able to reply with complete composure, “Very well, Father.”
    She reveled in the minute relaxing of his narrow lips that indicated approval, and said the thing she knew would please him most. “I will make my farewell visits to our dependents.”
    Visiting the dependents was the tedious but necessary dictation of personal messages to be dispatched to baronies of Alarcansa, then the equally tedious carriage ride to call on the principal guild masters and mistresses in Alarcansa’s capital, and last of all, on the palace people.
    She fully intended to carry out this duty. But first, the delicious triumph of giving the news in person to her two female cousins, who awaited her in the dining room as Cousin Falisse tried to coax Carola’s silver-tailed parrots to quote poetry.
    Tatia Definian, whose mother was younger sister to Carola’s father, would accompany Carola. Her joy was expressed in gales of high, tiny giggles and breathless, fawning praise. Carola smiled, turning as she always did to the mirrored insets along the wooden inlay in the wall in order to assure herself that her smile accorded with
melende
.
    Falisse Ranalassi, cousin through Carola’s world-traveling mother, was not to go to court. The Ranalassis were well connected, but Carola had so many excuses—the expense, the smallness of the palace suite allotted to dukes, the problem of servants—everything but the truth, which was that Falisse was as pretty as Carola, could dance as well, and she had a beautiful singing voice. Tatia was scrawny and plain, her chief skills shadow-kissing and scudding around noiselessly in her tiny court steps, spying on conversations, so that she could report them to Carola.
    Tatia was indispensable, Falisse unthinkable.
    A sly, triumphant glance from Tatia, that superior little smile when Carola’s light gaze met her own eyes in the mirrored inset, and Falisse could not resist observing, “I hear Princess Lasthavais is the most beautiful girl in court.”
    Tatia tittered as she swiveled to Carola, who broke her gaze from the mirror. “That’s what everyone says about princesses,” Carola retorted, watching the shape of her mouth as she spoke.
Melende
required that she never speak a word that made her lips ugly. “It’s a convention. Father told me they said it about the queen when she first appeared, though she looked like a toad standing on its hind legs.”
    Falisse flirted her fan in amusement mode. “From what I’ve heard, Princess Lasthavais is the image of the greatmother for whom she is named.”
    I assume everyone knows the history of Lasthavais Dei the Wanderer, who at the age of thirty-nine came to the court of Alsais, dusty and travel-worn, and the king, notorious for his casual affairs, never looked at another woman for the rest of his life. He not only married her, but rebuilt most of Alsais to please her and then began expanding Colend, some say to remake the world around her.
    This praise of the princess was not new to Carola. Far more irritating was Falisse’s glee. Falisse was a pensioner, her family too poor to keep their own house. Falisse was a dependent, but she never acknowledged it properly. And now? Now she was
gloating
.
    Carola whirled and with palm cupped, wrist straight, and arm propelled from the shoulder blade, struck Falisse across the face.
    Falisse gasped in shock, a hand rising to cover her throbbing cheek. Though Carola was in the habit of slapping her personal attendants (and Tatia, the rare times Tatia annoyed her) until now she’d respected Falisse’s mother, her quick-tongued aunt, enough to never strike her child.
    Years of pent-up anger at Carola’s slights and sweet-voiced cruelties boiled up inside Falisse. What was the use of
melende
when she was never to go to court, just