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position he had bullied her into, for their turns felt simultaneously easier and more dramatic. Was he
pleased that she had managed to hold on, to stay with him through these initial revolutions?
Three turns in, he stopped. “Don’t drop your chin.”
“I did not drop my chin.”
“You looked at me,” he said. “You must not. Not to me or to the other couples on the floor or
those in the audience. Look to the ceiling.”
“The ceiling? How will I know where I am going?”
“You are a woman. You do not need to know where you are going. I will take you there.” His
narrow eyes narrowed more. “You do not trust me?”
Trust him? She did not know him. The women who trust strange men, she thought, those who
close their eyes and lean back…they are carried away on any number of dark waves, some of them
never to be seen again. Her sister Mary’s face flashed through her mind, unbidden as it always was.
But he had already accused her of fighting him, so it would be pointless to argue further. Not in
the grand ballroom of the Winter Palace in Russia of all places, when she was so very out of her
element and so far from home. She was here to protect the Queen and her granddaughters, after all,
not to argue with some strange man about how to waltz. With a sigh that Emma hoped Konstantin
would take as evidence of compliance, not exasperation, she lifted her arms as wide as they would
reach, tilted her hips towards him, and raised her chin.
As if satisfied by her surrender, he began again, the turns wider and more vigorous. For a
moment she was dizzied, but quickly realized that it helped if she directed her gaze toward something
specific with every turn. Fortunately, the top of the theater had no end of things to attract the eye.
Each corner of the room held a stage set, presumably for the upcoming ball. A peasant cottage in one,
looking like something from a child’s fairy tale book and nearly complete. A balcony in the next,
presumably for the lost scenes from Romeo and Juliet, and then a half-finished ship with a mast and
riggings, and in the final corner there was a canopy of green branches that were evidently the
beginning of some sort of forest. These four environments, each so strange to behold, gave Emma
something to spot as she turned, a way to orient where she was on the enormous floor. Cottage,
balcony, ship, and forest.
For a few minutes, it worked. And then he began to take her into a series of reverses which
scrambled the sequence she had come to expect, and she began to lose her form. He stopped.