Chapter Fourteen #3
“What if there is another option?” Leif’s voice was quiet.
Both Mavis and Rafe turned toward him. “There’s a con I thought of back when we were all urchins, working as a team.
I could never figure out the finer points, and you weren’t old enough to be convincing, Magpie, but perhaps .
. .” He shook his head. “It’s a mad plan, one that will never work. ”
Something in his tone dug its nails into Mavis’s skin, and just a whisper of hope returned, dangerous in its potency, but she wasn’t ready to chase illusions again, to live a lie and pretend the cage she lived in was a palace.
“What are the chances?” she asked Leif.
He considered it, likely running all matter of mathematical equations in that glorious brain of his. “Five percent.”
Rafe scoffed, but Mavis held Leif’s gaze. “And what are my chances if I run tonight?”
This time, Leif didn’t hesitate. “Less than one percent.”
“Then the odds are in my favor,” Mavis said, a fragile smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. “Tell me your plan.”
As she told her story, Mavis didn’t look at Arden, keeping her voice level and her expression detached as she stared out at the still water and the crowd below the bluff.
She told him about her life before they met, as if it were someone else’s story, someone else’s bastard of a father, someone else’s time with the urchins, but Arden noticed the tension in her shoulders and how she kept her arms wrapped around her stomach, as if those arms were the only things holding her together, and he could see the effect the story had on her.
Even if she didn’t have a drop of Luster blood in her veins, there was no denying the woman standing before him was a master of illusions, in creating a facade that showed only what she wished—a mask of lies and aliases held together with confidence—but for the first time, Arden felt like he could truly see past it, to the young girl who’d been abandoned by the person who was supposed to care for her, fending for herself in an unkind city.
He could see the young woman she must have been mere days or weeks before he first met her, standing on that roof’s edge, idly toying with the thought of jumping.
When she had come to that part of the story, he’d started to inch his hand across the picnic blanket, to reach toward her, to offer some sort of comfort, before he stopped himself, clenching his hand in a fist at his side and letting her continue.
By the time she came to the moment where Leif suggested a con that had every chance of failing but Mavis had been desperate enough to accept, Arden wanted nothing more than to catch the next train back to Strall, track down Uriah Minstead, and kill the man with his own two hands.
And while he was there, he would try to find Mavis’s father and deliver the same fate to him.
But when Mavis fell silent and kept her gaze focused out at the sea, she didn’t look anywhere near as angry as he felt. She merely looked tired.
“The plan was me,” he said when he trusted himself to speak.
She let out a shaky exhale and turned to face him fully, still keeping her arms wrapped tight around her waist. “The plan was you—or rather, the plan was to convince the Lusters that I was one of them and persuade some wealthy sap to propose, thinking we could get enough fencing the ring to buy out our contracts.” She shrugged. “We refined it over time.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Arden said after a moment.
Mavis swallowed before giving a decisive nod, her gaze shuttering. “I don’t want pity, Arden. But you wanted to understand.”
And now he did. He understood what had driven her to blow through his life like a hurricane, leaving nothing but wreckage in her path. And more than that, he understood why she hadn’t felt guilty for it. From the vantage of her experience, the wreckage of his life must have seemed like a party.
When he failed to respond, she continued.
“I don’t know if you can ever understand it, really.
You could sooner understand the language of the seagulls than you could understand how I felt that morning, sitting on the ledge high above the city, corralled into a life I never asked for, without any choice in shaping it. ”
She paused, looking at him as if she expected him to argue, but how could he?
He didn’t have the slightest idea what it was to be in that position.
Even at his lowest, with his father dead in the ground and debtors closing in, Arden’s life had always been his own to direct.
Even when he’d heeded his aunt’s invitation and boarded that train to Garlin, even when his aunt offered to name him her heir and listed her conditions, he chose to agree.
His life had been defined by choices, and while many of them had been bad, they had all been his.
“I wouldn’t have done it, you know—I didn’t want to die.” Her soft voice drew him out of his thoughts. “I just wanted to actually live. I just wanted a choice that was wholly mine, not a path I was forced down in service of someone else’s greed.”
“And Leif offered you one,” Arden said.
Mavis nodded. “I suppose it was the first real choice I ever made in my life. As Leif said, it was a mad plan. It didn’t help that we rushed into it.
Leif and Rafe stole some gowns and dresses from a few modistes—spreading out the thefts so they would go unnoticed.
My jewelry was borrowed from the dancers at Minstead’s club, nothing more than paste and glass. ”
“And your bracelet?” Arden asked. Without that bracelet, she would never have managed to step a toe into a Luster ballroom.
Mavis’s fingers went to brush the bracelet she wore even now on her wrist, the one that conjured light and formed illusions that had fooled even the most shrewd-eyed Lusters.
“Leif acquired it. I don’t think he told even Rafe where it came from.
If we were ever caught, he wanted to ensure whoever he acquired it from was protected. ”
Arden frowned. “You never found out who made it?”
Mavis shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, really—it secured the illusion, no pun intended.
While the details came together, I read every gossip column about the Lusters in Strall, every description of a ball, every profile of an eligible bachelor.
There was a lot of information about you in the papers, though I’m sure you’re aware of that. ”
Arden was. Five years ago, it had been a flattering annoyance, but in the years since, when his family’s fortune disappeared, the press had turned scathing. Arden was certainly no longer considered an eligible bachelor in Strall, by anyone’s standards.
“We needed someone young enough to be prone to romantic fancies, someone with a power that wouldn’t prove dangerous to our plans, someone with more money than sense.” She paused, glancing sideways at him. “No offense.”
“None taken.” It was, he knew, an accurate description of him at the age of twenty—as well as a dozen of his peers. “Why me?”
Mavis shrugged, glancing away again, though this time a flush of pink tinged her cheeks. “There were photographs that accompanied the columns, and I liked your face. You looked kind.”
Part of Arden was flattered at that, but he understood, too, that it hadn’t merely been about aesthetics.
It was a dangerous line of work she was in, tweaking the noses of people with far more power than her.
He tried to imagine what his reaction would have been if he’d discovered her ruse before its end.
He never would have physically hurt her, but he would have been embarrassed and incensed, and it took a good deal less than that to turn a fair few men he knew violent.
“You chose me, then,” he said.
Mavis smiled, but her eyes were sad. “The second real choice I made for myself. I can’t be sorry about what I did, but I am sorry I chose you, knowing how things turned out.”
I’m not. And Arden realized with a jolt it was the truth.
He hardly felt sentimental about the fallout of that choice, but when he thought back to five years ago when he’d first seen her enter that ballroom, her bright-green eyes sweeping across the room and colliding with his, her full mouth curving into a smile that had haunted his dreams ever since, he knew he wouldn’t have wanted her to choose anyone else.
Mavis continued, oblivious to his thoughts.
“When you broke our engagement, you had to pay me twenty thousand solas,” she said, as if that was something Arden could ever forget.
“None of us knew how much progress we’d made on our debts to Minstead over the years, but Rafe and Leif both had contracts with him for five thousand solas, just like I did.
Twenty thousand should have been enough to buy our freedom, with more left over to start new somewhere, away from Minstead’s control, plus whatever we could pawn the ring for.
It should have been plenty. But when we sought a meeting with Minstead and Rafe laid out the money on his desk, Minstead only laughed. ”
Mavis scoffed, her voice turning bitter.
“He brought out our contracts—documents we were too young and uneducated to read properly before—and pointed out that after so many years in his employ, we weren’t less indebted to him, but more.
Every night spent under his roof came with a cost: every meal he provided, every stitch of clothing and pair of shoes.
Not to mention the interest on what he classified as a loan.
Leif has the exact figures, but even now we owe Minstead somewhere around one and a half million solas between us.
The twenty thousand we got from you was a pittance in comparison.
But we had succeeded in one thing—Minstead saw a better way to use us, and so here we are, still under his thumb, still toiling away at a debt we will, shy of some miracle, never repay, but at least we’re together. ”