Free Without a Summer by Mary Robinette Kowal

more than her husband had. Offering his arm, Vincent led her a little away from the group.
    Jane lowered her voice to ask, “Would you really decline the royal wedding?”
    Vincent shuddered. “Any wedding. I do not do weddings, which His Royal Highness knows. He is merely teasing me.”
    “Ah.” Her mind drifted back to their own wedding, which had been a small affair, to her mother’s eternal regret. If Melody—when Melody was married, Mrs. Ellsworth would want more pomp than Jane and Vincent had obliged her with. Thinking of pomp … “Would a tableau vivant serve, do you think?” Jane pulled her gloves off and the wind found her newly bare skin, chilling it.
    “Admirably.” Vincent tucked in his chin and considered the lake. “Would you feel up to a Jack Frost?”
    “Of course, though it feels rather obvious.” More than that, she wanted some colour to relieve the ice and snow. “What about Persephone?”
    His eyes narrowed with thought. “Her return, or when Hades seizes her? Ah … her return, of course. The spring.”
    “My thoughts as well.”
    With a grunt of assent, Vincent cast a Sphère Obscurcie around them, making them vanish from view within the ball of glamour. Outside the Sphère, several of the Prince Regent’s guests gaped in astonishment. The technique that Vincent had developed was faster and more thorough a method for masking than any other Jane had seen. He took a single fold of glamour and twisted it to create a path for the sunlight to follow, guiding it around whatever lay in the Sphère ’s midst. Other glamourists masked objects by creating a trompe-l’œil and deceiving the eye with a fully rendered illusion of the space without the object. That technique took scrupulous care and sometimes weeks to complete.
    The speed of Vincent’s technique had allowed the Duke of Wellington to defeat Napoleon the previous year at the Battle of Quatre Bras. Her husband employed it more regularly, as he did now, to create a private space in which to prepare a tableau vivant.
    With haste, Jane sketched a Persephone around herself, looking back at Vincent’s Hades. Working so quickly meant that their glamours were less completely rendered than the ones that they were creating for Lord Stratton. Jane likened it to creating a watercolour instead of an oil painting. Still, it took effort. By the time they had drawn the rugged cave from which Persephone was emerging, Jane’s heart beat rapidly. A crowd had gathered around the Prince Regent in anticipation of their display.
    “Ready?” Vincent’s breath puffed in white plumes from Hades’s mouth, as though the lord of the underworld were breathing fire.
    Jane marked her hold on the slipknot she had ready. If Vincent’s forte was his strength and speed, Jane’s was her cleverness with knots. “Yes.”
    With a simple twist, Vincent dropped the Sphère Obscurcie that masked them. An audible gasp went up from a number of those assembled as the tableau appeared. Using his formidable stamina, Vincent managed all of the threads and folds surrounding him to make Hades’s arm reach for Jane’s Persephone. Jane answered by having Persephone step away from him. She would not have been able to do this before she had begun to work with Vincent. Her constitution had improved since then, though her heart raced as she held the threads, and her breath came rapidly. She had been cold before, but the exertion vanquished that.
    Jane released the threads she had bound into a slipknot and the ground around her seemed to bloom into a patch of green dotted with purple crocuses. For this brief moment, spring had come. Led by the Prince Regent, the crowd burst into applause.
    Jane and Vincent held the tableau for a moment longer, then released the folds masking themselves. They could, if the situation had warranted it, tie off the threads and step out of the illusion, but part of the charm of a tableau vivant was its transient nature. If their audiences were