Chapter 35
By the second corridor, my arms hurt.
By the third, enough of the school had seen me carrying my mother’s dress to make pretending otherwise impossible.
Conversations thinned as I passed. A woman in faculty gray took one look at the black box and found urgent business elsewhere. I assumed to report on me.
Let them watch. Let them whisper.
No one had forbidden me from leaving my room with the dress. Only leaving the academy with it.
And if the Council wanted my mother’s dress to become a public spectacle, I was willing to begin early.
The upperclassmen quarters were on the east floor, near the tower where Cosima held court, and the east floor swallowed sound better than the other corridors. Even my shoes seemed to understand they had entered a place where money carried comfort.
Cosima must have heard my footsteps anyway. She was already standing in her open doorway.
She took in the box in my arms, my face, and the corridor behind me.
“You carried it here.”
“I think that’s pretty obvious.”
“Through the main corridor.”
“Well, I wasn’t taking the long way. It’s heavy.”
“Yes, and highly visible.”
Cosima held my gaze for one beat longer than comfort required.
Then she stepped aside.
“Come in.”
Her room looked exactly as I should have expected: neat enough to be ascetic, with a wide bed and down pillows, a writing table, two chairs, and no object anywhere that had not been chosen to survive inspection.
A small marble basin stood in the corner, dark.
On the table lay three notebooks, a clean pen, and a folded square of cloth.
She shut the door.
“Set it there.”
I set the box on her table. The brass clasps knocked against the wood.
Cosima’s eyes met mine.
“You found something.”
I nodded.
“Caspian’s note told me to bring it to you,” I said.
For a second, she looked exactly as hurt as she was.
Then she corrected it.
I wished I hadn’t seen it.
“He got to the dress before it reached you,” she said.
“Apparently.”
“I’m glad.”
But she didn’t sound glad. She sounded sad.
I took the note from inside my coat and handed it over.
Cosima read it.
Then she folded it along the same lines Caspian had made and gave it back.
“Keep that on you.”
“As evidence?”
“As leverage. Evidence is what people call leverage after someone powerful agrees to read it.”
“You do make the world sound so friendly all the time.”
She reached for the box.
I caught her wrist before I meant to.
Cosima’s eyes dropped to my hand and I let go.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “It is your mother’s dress.”
That was the cruelest kindness she could have chosen.
She let me open the box.
The dress still lay under the tissue, beautiful enough to make betrayal look tasteful.
Cosima didn’t touch it at first.
She studied it the way she studied everything: as if the dress were a document with a hidden code she had to decipher.
“Show me.”
I folded the tissue back from the left sleeve.
Cosima’s lips drew down.
“Yes, I see,” she said.
“Yes, Caspian was right, or yes, my evening is about to get even worse?”
“Both.”
She took the folded cloth from her table and laid it over her palm before lifting the sleeve. The green silk slipped across the white cloth. The new band at the wrist caught the light.
“Do you see how the stitches change direction here?”
I leaned closer.
The silver thread looked like decoration until she put one finger beside it. Then the pattern broke. The leaves around the wrist were smaller than the others, tighter, crowded into a narrow ring.
“Someone opened the sleeve,” I said.
“Someone opened it, added the band, then closed it badly enough to be found by someone who knew to look.”
“Caspian knew to look.”
Cosima’s fingers stilled for half a second.
“Caspian always knows what to do. When he trusts himself to do it instead of doing as he’s told.”
Those words stirred more than I wanted to touch.
“So what is it?” I asked.
Cosima set the sleeve down.
“A quieting band. This sits over your Mark. If the thread has been treated properly, it makes resistance look smaller than it is.”
My wrist began to ache.
“Make it look smaller to whom?”
“To the basin. To anyone watching for the air around your wrist instead of the lines themselves.”
I looked at the sleeve.
My mother’s sleeve.
Not my mother’s sleeve.
“So if my Mark objects...”
“The basin may not hear it clearly.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then they can write that your mouth refused while your Mark offered no protest.”
A choked laugh escaped me.
“They found a way to make even my own body tell the story they want to hear.”
“They are trying to.”
Cosima crossed to her table and opened the smallest notebook.
“What are you doing?”
“Writing it down before they do.”
She wrote quickly, not in the official hand I had seen on Council pages, but in the looser one she used when she was writing the truth.
I watched the pen move.
“What did you say?”
“That Selene Verita’s formal dress arrived in your room before supper. That you brought it to me unopened by anyone but the delivery staff and yourself. That the left sleeve contains post-inventory alterations inconsistent with the age and wear of the original garment.”
“That’s a very tidy way to say they delivered me a trap.”
“Tidy things survive scrutiny.”
“Do they?”
She lifted her head.
“More often than screaming and drawing attention does.”
That was possibly a dig pointed at me, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt.
Cosima tore the page from the notebook. Something I’d never imagined I’d see her do. She treated her notebooks like they were more precious than gold or silk.
I stared at her.
“Did you just damage your own notebook?”
“Try to survive the shock of it.”
She folded the page twice and held it out.
“Put this with Caspian’s note.”
“Won’t they search me?”
“Probably. So don’t keep both in a place they’ll be found.”
I took the page.
“Where would you put it?”
Cosima looked at the dress.
“In the box.”
“The box that potentially knows when it is opened according to Caswell?”
“The box we just opened. No one’s come running, have they? You have got to stop believing everything you are told, Verita.”
She lifted the tissue at the bottom of the box and showed me a gap between the inner lining and the leather wall.
“There. Slide it flat.”
I did.
The paper disappeared.
Cosima closed the tissue over it.
“If the dress is inspected, my note stays with the garment. If the alteration disappears, the note says it existed. If they find the note, they will know someone saw the sleeve before the fitting.”
“And if they know it was you?”
“They will suspect it was me. I have no illusions about that.”
“Cosima.”
“They already suspect me of many things. The trouble for them is that they can seldom prove it.”
“That doesn’t make this safe.”
She looked at the dress again, and for one second I saw the child underneath: fourteen, frightened, obedient, wearing whatever they had told her to wear. Bonding herself to whomever they chose.
“Safe is what they call a room after they lock you in it from the outside,” she said. “I am tired of being locked in rooms.”
I swallowed.
“Did they do this to yours?”
Her hand hovered over the sleeve without touching it.
“No. They did not need to. I was already quiet enough.”
My throat closed around every response I might have given.
Cosima saved me from trying.
“You cannot remove the band yourself.”
“I wasn’t planning to sit on the floor with scissors.”
“Good. That would be stupid.”
“I do try to avoid the obvious stupidities, believe it or not. It leaves room for creative ones.”
“This is not a time or place to be creative.”
“Then what do we do?”
“At the fitting, you let them put the dress on you.”
Every part of me recoiled at the idea.
Cosima saw it.
“Listen before you decide my ideas have become useless.”
“I’m listening.”
“You let them put it on you,” she said, “but you do not let them fasten the left sleeve.”
“How?”
“You ask for the brooch first.”
My hand went to my pocket.
“Why?”
“Because Selene’s brooch belongs at the left shoulder. If they have studied the inventory, they know that. You ask for it before the sleeve is fastened. You make the dress incomplete without it and refuse to wear it.”
“And while everyone is arguing about the brooch...”
“I look at the sleeve in front of witnesses.”
“You’ll be at the fitting?”
“I will be asked to be.”
“You sound very sure.”
“I sent the request before breakfast.”
“Before you knew about the sleeve?”
“I knew enough to suspect.”
She closed the box.
“They want me there because they think I will make you behave.”
“Will you?”
“I will give the impression that I’m making you behave.”
“And I’ll give the impression I’m listening to you.”
I looked at the black box between us.
For the first time since Caswell had knocked, the dress felt less like a hand around my throat and more like a problem that could be solved.
Still poisoned.
Not necessarily deadly.
Cosima picked up the box.
“You should not carry it back alone.”
“I carried it here alone.”
“Yes. But that part is done now.”
“And this part?”
“This is the part where you let someone help you before pride does the Council’s work for it.”
I was irked by how reasonable that was.
“Fine.”
Cosima opened the door.
She took one end of the box, and I took the other.
We carried my mother’s dress between us, down the upper east corridor, toward the room where the Council had expected it to wait for me alone.
This time, the dress did not go back alone.