Chapter 25 Yael
25
Yael
Yael counts each step it takes to reach the ballroom, to pass through the gates, to skirt the waltzing guests on the dance floor. Faces blur around them and they can hardly hear the musicians’ instruments over the sound of their own shuddering breath. (Somehow, there seems to be far more of it going out than coming in.) They slip among the crowd, miraculously unseen, then through a pair of ornately carved wooden doors at the far end of the ballroom into a private chamber holding one of the mansion’s offering altars. This one’s meant for guests looking to find favor with both the family and its patron, but the next nearest altar is two floors down, and Yael isn’t sure they can make it that far.
The moment they’ve closed and barred the doors behind them, they slump to their knees and plant their palms against the stone floor. In front of them is the low table, its top—a thick slab of polished gray stone sliced through by veins of raw, glittering gold—piled high with offerings from guests attending the ball. A fist-sized leather pouch stuffed so full the ties have come loose to show the cut gems inside. A pewter flask stamped with the crest of the Wayanette household. A (presumably ceremonial) dagger with a bone handle exquisitely carved into a faun’s naked form. A large violet egg that smells of fireplace ashes. All of it useless to Clauneck except as it increases the wealth of Yael’s family (and what’s a fire lizard’s egg compared with the favor of the most powerful family in Harrow?), which increases the glory of the Clauneck name.
Yael crawls forward and sweeps it all onto the floor to place their palms on the tabletop. Their eyes strain as they stare into one of the dozen flickering purple candles in silver holders that keep the altar room in a state of half light and half shadow.
“Can you help me?” they gasp.
You would ask me to help you betray your family? Find some loophole in the pact you’ve already made with yourself?
“No,” they answer, feeling as though they’re withering from the inside out. “You were right. I’m thoughtless, and cowardly, and…and I don’t think I’m strong enough to live like this for a day, or a week, or a season, let alone forever. Not even to save Bloomfield. I will lie awake every night and imagine myself climbing out of bed and making my way back to Margot, until the night I give in to myself. I need you…I would ask you to help me stay.”
For a second that seems interminable, Clauneck is silent. Then:
I will make it feel as though it was your choice entirely to return to Ashaway—to us—and you will know beyond a speck of doubt that it was the right choice. You will know in your bones that you are where you are supposed to be. And in the knowing, you will be free of this pain, this self-loathing, this loneliness. You will become what your family needs you to be, who you were born to be, and so you will never be alone again.
“Do it. Please.”
Yael closes their eyes and finds that the icy purple candle’s flame has seared into their vision—a disquieting light in the dark it may be, but it is the only light they have.