Free Shadows of Falling Night by S. M. Stirling Page A

turning away to take a champagne flute from a tray. Her companion was a young-looking man in full fig of shaggy brown hair held back by an embroidered headband, long mustaches, tie-died shirt, fringed buckskin vest, bell-bottoms and love beads.
    And for some reason it’s more disturbing than all that
Masterpiece Theatre
and
Downton Abbey
stuff.
    Her own grandfather might have dressed that way, if he’d been a privileged college kid in 1969 rather than a blue-collar draftee humping bad bush in Vietnam. She briefly met eyes as blue as her own before they reverted to slits of hot yellow.
    She turned away and cleared her throat as she returned to the thought that had struck her: “Juste Aurèle Meissonier!”
    “Who?” Adrian said.
    “The designer who did this place. Juste Aurèle Meissonier. He wasone of the Rococo greats. He did commissions all the way from Lisbon to St. Petersburg.”
    “Did I mention that?”
    “Nope.”
    Adrian’s brows went up. “Very thorough research. I remember hearing the name as a child, before Harvey…removed…me from the Brézé family, but offhand I would not know how to find out otherwise. The records all perished long ago in fires or other convenient accidents. Even the municipal maps show no building here, the databases have false images and data.”
    “Research, hell,” Ellen said, glad to distract herself for a moment. “I
thought
I recognized the touch. All that overlapping asymmetric carved plasterwork on the ceiling and the surrounds? And those mirrors with the ormolu frames, and the engraved mahogany legs and intaglio tops on that side-table? Right out of
Livres d’ornements en trente pieces.
He was the Frank Lloyd Wright or Julia Morgan of his day, he designed everything from the building down to the shape of the chamberpots—he’d do your snuffbox, too, and the buckles on your shoes, if you’d let him.”
    “Isn’t she a charming asset, not least culturally?” a warm voice said, a tone like a knife stroked over velvet. “I compliment myself on your taste, and vice versa.”
    “
Merde alors,
” Adrian said very quietly.
    Ellen turned, making herself do it at a natural speed and sternly suppressing mingled impulses to scream and flee and draw her knife and attack. No nausea; she wouldn’t permit it. Control the sudden pounding of her heart, and the rush of rage as Adrienne cocked an ear at the sound and sent her an air-kiss and playful-predatory snap of the teeth. The Shadowspawn woman was wearing a gown that was a shimmering black sheath, with her neck and shoulders covered in bands of wrought platinumand a headdress of the same framing her face. Ellen decided that she looked like a very elegant wasp.
    For once, truth in advertising.
    Then Adrienne smiled at Adrian, a roguish expression, as if inviting him to share a private joke. As they stood within arm’s reach of each other, their likeness was shockingly apparent, the way identical twins would look if they came in different genders.
    “How are the children?” she asked.
    “Well, and well cared for,” Adrian said neutrally. “Unfortunately I have not had time for much…personal interaction yet. They seem happy, from their auras and behavior.”
    “I told them that they might be visiting with their father’s household and that they should not worry,” Adrienne chuckled. “And of course I walk in their dreams.”
    “You told them?”
    “I had a Seeing to that effect.”
    Adrian’s brows rose; that was a term of art for detailed prescient dreams. They showed
a
future, since the course of events was probabilistic, not fixed, but a powerful adept could deduce how likely it was. Often the distinction between a high probability and utterly inexorable fate became very thin. The world had a massive inertia at times.
    “I have always been more prone to those,” he said clinically; an expert exchanging data with someone in the same field.
    Adrienne nodded at her twin. “Yet they come to me occasionally,