Chapter Twenty-Nine #3
I gave no reply. Sensing his opportunity, Bastian hunched still nearer.
“I know you have experienced it,” he said. “What of Eliot Lear? His emotions toward you have shifted in recent days. As soon as you stepped out of his shadow, you became a threat to him, yes?”
My heart clenched. Changing the subject, I asked, “Did you give his fiancée a key to my room?”
Bastian blinked at my pivot, then smiled, leaning back in his seat. “Ah,” he said. “Yes, I did. She asked for it—and I assumed if you were clever enough, you would evade her attacks.” He flashed me a jaunty grin. “Well done.”
I did not thank him for the congratulations.
Moves and countermoves. I couldn’t understand all the layers of the Weaver King’s strategy.
Was the deal he’d made with my bridesmaids truly another test, as he claimed, or was that explanation merely an excuse?
Did he want me to win, or did he want me dead?
“How many games are you playing right now?”
Bastian chuckled enigmatically. “Games are like weapons—you should never have just the one,” he replied. “There is the blade you show people, and the one you keep hidden. The second is far more important than the first.”
He winked.
“But we have wandered too far off topic,” he said. “I wanted to ask how your search for Miss Dabos’s killer is progressing.”
I gathered myself. Bastian listened quietly as I relayed Noé’s and my findings, only moving occasionally to twist at his ring. All in all, there wasn’t much. I grew even more conscious of the fact as I spoke—how truly little I had to tell.
Bastian looked contemplative when I finished speaking.
For a moment, he appeared lost within himself; then he blinked and returned his attention to me.
“The veiled lady,” he mused. “Bernard did mention a woman like that to me. I looked into her after Miss Dabos’s passing but couldn’t find anything substantial.
” His mouth twitched. “You say Miss Moreau’s creature believes she is a silkwitch? ”
I nodded. “But not one of the girls who competed in the Vainglory,” I replied. “I wondered if—perhaps—she was another witch you were acquainted with?”
He lifted a brow.
“Your workrooms are active again,” I elaborated. “I’ve seen your artisans at their spinning wheels, though I have yet to give them a single strand of my hair. I can’t help but wonder where they are getting their supply.”
It was as though a bolt had passed through him. “Now, that question, my dear,” Bastian replied, “relates to my second blade. It falls outside the parameters of our game.” His eyes narrowed. “I would not press too hard on it, or it may cut.”
My neck prickled. The manner in which Bastian was regarding me was dissimilar to any which I’d seen him adopt before: There was no mirth to it, no friendly rivalry, only an icy calculation like the steel gaze of a gun barrel.
Then he exhaled, and his cold fury seemed to rush out of him like ice melt. “I’m aware that I have not made things easy for you, with your fellow bridesmaids. Allow me to even the scales,” he said. “You mentioned a pair of lost gloves just now. Miss Tremblay’s, I believe.”
He smirked when I glanced at him.
“I can’t help you find them, but I do know that when she was dismissed from the Vainglory, Manon Blanc left with a pair which did not belong to her,” Bastian continued. Tilting his head, he inquired, “Will that suffice?”
The gloves. My thoughts focused. Of the leads I’d unearthed, it was by far the least compelling one; with the recent information Nathalie had given me about the veiled lady, I’d all but abandoned it. Still, it was better than nothing. “I suppose,” I replied.
A sudden flare of warmth from my dress pocket prevented me from saying anything else. The monocle. I’d brought it with me on our drive. Had the hands on its clock shifted again?
At that same moment, a presence moved past the bars of the nearest cloister building’s gates. A man. The sight of him startled me: a pale-faced shadow, dressed in a long crimson robe.
He seemed to have been drawn by Bastian’s presence. I made out the word master as he called out to us from his place behind the gate, the rest of his address muffled by the fog.
The Weaver King frowned. “Excuse me. It appears as though Adélard is in after all. I’ll be just a moment.”
I tried to contain my relief as he climbed down from the auto. The cloister gates lifted silently at Bastian’s approach. As soon as they’d shut again, I dug the monocle Nathalie had given me out of my pocket and lifted it to my eye.
The message on the other side of the glass had changed. I read the new missive: The path opens at dusk.
Below the words, where the clock hands had previously been, a glimmering thread now extended—shooting away from the place where I stood, trailing down the road behind me, and disappearing into the distance. When I lowered the monocle, the string disappeared. Clever.
I assumed that thread was my path.
Raising the object back to my vision, I studied it more intently. Along the bottom rim of the monocle, a second sentence had appeared in conjunction with the first. Its letters glittered dully in the sun, winking at me through the lens.
Reading them, I understood what I had to do.