Chapter Fifteen
I felt the turret door open when I was still several corridors away.
I’d departed the library without descending to offer my newly dubbed bridesmaids an explanation; dimly, I wondered whether Bastian would question my prolonged absence from the party he’d arranged, or if, having introduced his chosen game pieces to our board, he would be content to sit back and observe the match as it progressed.
I presumed the latter. Despite the speech his son had given me, I knew the Weaver King to be a schemer, like me.
He would not stoke a fire if such manual action could be avoided; rather, he would prefer to lay hot coals and watch a blaze spring naturally to life.
As if his enemies, despite their most valiant attempts to the contrary, could not do anything but fall.
The entrance to my old meeting place with Eliot was locked when I reached it. Drawing on my Wit, I took the knob in hand, and it bowed to me easily, the door creaking open to reveal the space beyond.
Eliot was kneeling in the center of the room, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together as though examining something on the ground. A fine gray substance drifted from his fingertips as I watched, glinting dully in the air. Cigarette ash.
He did not rise to greet me as I entered. Wiping his hand on his trouser leg, he sat back on his heels. “Has he been in here with you?”
His tone was indifferent, but his phrasing betrayed him. How he avoided speaking Noé’s name, picking around it with the reverence of a person referring to a deity—or a devil. Closing the door behind me, I answered him.
“Yes.” Immediately, his chin clipped over his shoulder, his eyes cutting to mine. Stepping forward, I asked, “Did you propose to Clio Lavoie after our meeting last night?”
His expression shuttered. In its reactive closing, I found my answer.
“Lovett…” Eliot stood, his voice reaching for me in the placating way I knew well.
I glanced away, my throat dry. Of all times, I felt his hold over me most keenly when I was looking at him—his beauty, which I had noted from the day of our first meeting, a weapon I seemed forever unable to shield myself from.
It was his nobility, I think, that undid me: his height, his features, the graceful curl of his hair, all so different than the crooked appeal which my fiancé possessed.
Noé was designed for back rooms; Eliot, for the stage.
I gritted my teeth. “And where does she think you are now?” I pressed. “Your fiancée?”
“I told her I needed to speak with you,” Eliot replied. “It is as I said in the library—our betrothal is not what it appears. I am still yours, Lovett. Clio knows that.”
Clio. Not Miss Lavoie. He did not seem to register his slight, though it pierced me as surely as a needle. When had the other silkwitch given her permission for Eliot to call her by her first name? Only last night, or some other instance—before?
Suddenly, it struck me how truly little time I’d spent with Eliot since my betrothal.
Our secret meetings, so all-encompassing to me, were but mere slivers of his days.
How did he spend the rest of them? I imagined it: a friendship springing up between Clio, former competitor, and Eliot, former judge, now tossed together in the Vainglory’s aftermath.
All the parties they might have attended together—all the evenings spent relying on one another for company—while I’d been here, trapped with Noé.
I felt myself fold. If I met Eliot with stubbornness today, would he turn to his fiancée in the evening? Perhaps Clio would comfort him, lay his head on her bony shoulder and murmur assurances in the gentle way I’d always been too callous—too cynical—to do.
The mere thought of it sickened me.
“Then what is it?” I asked. “Explain your actions to me, and perhaps I shall understand them.”
Eliot’s shoulders relaxed—he’d stiffened up at my speech, I noticed, as if preparing for me to fight him.
The realization made the pit of my self-disgust deepen.
“Clio approached me a few days after the Vainglory ended,” he started.
“I wasn’t entirely surprised—she’d made a couple overtures during the tournament itself, which I’d rebuffed, naturally—though I’ll admit, I found her boldness in coming to me so soon after the competition impressive.
She told me that it was evident my heart was elsewhere, but she required a husband, and she thought we could make a fitting match.
“I rejected her offer at first.” His justification came quickly, before I could interrupt—just as well, seeing as my mind was still caught on the notion of Clio’s overtures.
Of what sort had they been? Internally, I amended my earlier snipe at her: disloyal witch.
“I thought…Well, to be candid, Lovett, at that time I still believed I could convince you to leave Noé and come back to me. But months passed without any change in our situation, and then Lucie’s letter came, and… ”
Pausing, he rubbed his forehead.
“I told you most of what she wrote to me after our meeting, but I didn’t tell you all of it,” Eliot admitted.
“She didn’t turn us down—she turned you down, specifically.
Told me if I could find a more…the term she used was ‘appropriate’…
silkwitch to act as the figurehead for our movement, she’d support us. ”
He sighed.
“Clio has no expectation of romance—she knows I could never care for her in such a manner,” Eliot continued. “All she desires is protection for herself.”
His argument delivered, he went quiet. I pressed my lips together, taking in his words. “So you’re discarding me,” I said. “Swapping me out for another girl, like I’m nothing but a card for you to play.”
Eliot’s eyes flashed. “What else am I to do, Lovett?” he questioned curtly.
“Turn down the single ally we’ve managed to gain thus far?
I tried to negotiate with Lucie before arriving at the Winns’ party, but she was clear: Either I accepted her terms, or she would not accept me.
And besides, Clio is nearly twenty-one. If I do not marry her, the cloisters will take her in a matter of months. ”
He hesitated, his features softening.
“I thought it was the path you would have wanted me to take,” he ventured, in a low tone. “To save another member of your kind from the fate you so fear.”
I snorted. “Clio Lavoie is not my kind,” I said. “There is no comradery between the two of us. An argument could be made that the cloisters are no worse a fate than she deserves.”
Eliot blanched. I startled at the intensity of his physical recoil, his entire body drawing up as if it were him I’d insulted rather than her.
“Why would you speak about her in that way?” he spat. My cheeks colored, embarrassment flushing me at the sheer force of his reaction. What was happening? When had he become so protective over her?
“Clio told me what you did during the Vainglory’s final trial,” Eliot said. “She would have fought only until first blood, but you—you tried to kill her, Lovett.”
Rage snapped against me. The final trial. So, that was the story she’d given him.
“I tried? I—” My volume rose. Calming myself, I restarted. “Your fiancée has deceived you, Eliot. That conniving leech attempted to kill me. She is alive today only because I showed her mercy in Fortblanche’s tunnels.”
It was true. Hadn’t I spared Clio—tried to reason with her, even, at the end of the Vainglory? And this was my reward. She’d drawn a line between us, and my own partner had taken her side over mine.
Abruptly, my fury fled. “Do you truly think me so vicious,” I whispered, my chest heavy, “that you would believe her claims over mine?”
“No.” Guilt surged in Eliot’s tone. “Possibly. I don’t…
” He cut himself off. “Frankly, Lovett, I don’t know how to think of you as of late.
You come here to meet me, ready to accuse me of betraying you, as if you did not commit the very same act at the end of the Vainglory—as if you did not do it first. Can you imagine what it felt like to watch you walk out to Noé the final night of the competition?
” His voice broke; I felt its fragments pierce my bones.
“To see you betrothed to him, as if all that we’d shared previously meant nothing?
What wound have I inflicted on you, which you have not also imparted? ”
The hurt in his speech was genuine. And yet…
what was wrong with me, that I felt anger at his confession, rather than sympathy?
Over the course of the past months, I had shown Eliot everything—had unfurled for him as I hadn’t done since my arrival on the Isle d’Eylau, laying bare my vulnerabilities like trinkets for him to collect.
Had stowed my pride and knelt for him in the weeks that followed the Vainglory’s conclusion, supplying an apology whenever he demanded it, all in an effort to prevent this very sort of rift from growing between us.
I had made myself his dog, and still, he did not trust me.
When I spoke again, my words were icy. “So you proposed to spite me.”
“I proposed”—Eliot seethed—“because it was the necessary thing to do. A concept which you may not be familiar with.” He stopped. “Do you think this is a game?” he questioned suddenly. “That you can con your way through it with witty remarks and sly glances, as you did during the Vainglory?”
He shook his head. The motion was brutal somehow, like the swing of a knife. “You are fighting for something far bigger than a husband now, Lovett. There are choices which need to be made, regardless of whether or not my making them hurts your feelings.”
Resentment whipped through me. “I won the Vainglory because I was the sharpest girl there,” I snapped.
“Do not diminish me, nor my efforts. I took action while you lounged around, worrying about your precious morals. You know my dedication to this cause.” I glared at him. “You are behaving like a child.”