The Silvered Read Online Free Page B

had been right.
    She could hear the bass rumble of thunder in the distance.
    The tragic love story of
Onnesmina
was the gem of the Bercarit Opera Company and they hauled it out for polishing every other season. Mirian had seen it half a dozen times and not even Emilohi Okafor, the visiting soprano—lauded in the program for her beauty of tone and dramatic acuity—could capture her complete attention.
    Lord and Lady Hagen were in Lord Berin’s great box, across the theater and a tier lower from the much smaller box that came with her parents’ subscription. Lord and Lady Berin, who had grandsons with the Hunt Pack, were the height of Bercarit society, and Mirian’s mother had fought to get the box with the best line of sight. It looked as though the Pack Leader and his wife had been accompanied by every member of the Pack currently in Bercarit.
    “If there were only a way of telling which of the men were unattached,” her mother muttered, peering at the box through her opera glasses. “Do you feel an attraction to any of them, Mirian?”
    “I don’t…”
    “Well, you won’t if you keep staring at the stage!”
    Catching a sigh behind her teeth, Mirian directed her own glasses away from the stage to Lord Berin’s box. With the glasses, the blur her own eyes would have offered at that distance resolved itself into individual faces all staring enthralled at Okafor whose performance was definitely giving those who’d never seen
Onnesmina
before an amazing introduction to the opera.
    “Well?”
    “No, Mother.”
    “Try harder.”
    A second glance showed they weren’t
all
staring enthralled. Lord Berin appeared to be dozing and Lord Hagen seemed distracted. All things considered, Mirian found that unsettling and watched the Pack Leader with an intensity that made even her mother happy.
    At the first intermission Lord Hagen was up and out of his seat almost before the curtain had closed. The male members of the Pack charged out of the box after him, leaving the women to follow more sedately.
    Mirian found herself nearly lifted out of her seat and dragged onto the upper concourse, her mother’s hand like a steel band around her wrist.
    “The Pack will, of course, have gone to the café in the lower lobby,” she said, moving purposefully toward the stairs.
    Wishing for the courage to dig her heels in, Mirian lifted her skirt in her other hand, trying not to step on her small train and end up taking the stairs headfirst. “Your subscription doesn’t allow you into the café,” she pointed out a little breathlessly as they reached the lower level.
    “We don’t need to go in. We’ll just walk by so they can get your scent.”
    “Mother!” Feeling the blood rush to her face, Mirian began to wish she
had
taken the stairs headfirst. A fall would have been significantly less embarrassing. It didn’t help that the makeup of the crowd swirling about the wrought-iron barrier between the café and the lobby suggested the idea was not her mother’s alone.

    “You mark my words, Annalyse. In your lifetime there will be a Pack member on the stage.”
    Danika kept half her attention on the discussion going on across the small table between Lady Berin and her granddaughter-in-law—the Pack loved opera and many of them had amazing voices, but not even the youngest and most rebellious would do anything so vulgar as take to the stage—and half her attention on her husband standing over by the far wall. He was deep in conversation with Neils Yervick—his wife had sent her excuses and Danika had to admit shewas just as glad not to have her attention split by Kirstin’s sharp tongue. While their verbal fencing often made her more boring social obligations bearable, tonight the Imperial army was at the border and Danika neither wanted nor needed the distraction.
    Among the uniformed men surrounding Ryder and Neils, she could see General Narvine of the 2nd, Colonels Greer and Aryat of the 2/2 and 2/4, and a number of