2 #2
“You are a sick Beta who cannot go two weeks without medicine before her body rots from within.” Maevra rose, circling the table with unhurried steps.
“You have no rank to register before the Council. You have no bloodline to present at the citadel. If you tried to set foot through Vhal’s gates to claim an inch of soil, the guard would arrest you before you reached the parade grounds. ”
She stopped barely two feet from where I still knelt. Her scent of dried rosemary was so suffocating it burned my throat.
“Falsifying a designation before the Royal Alchemists is high treason,” she continued, staring down at me.
“Impersonating a noble at court is punished with the border mines or the gallows in Asteria’s square.
Your mother knew this. That is why she died hiding on this estate, begging me not to let you starve in an alley. ”
I drove my nails into my palms. The lie was so brazen, so burnished by years of repetition, that it almost carried the weight of truth.
My mother had never begged Maevra for anything. My mother had died with her hands locked around mine, whispering that I must search for the tide seal once I was strong enough to run.
“Finish the hem,” Maevra ordered, turning her back on me. “Celene must try on her shoes before supper.”
I bent over the green velvet once more. My fingers shook so badly it took three tries to thread the needle, but I didn’t speak again.
There was no need. I had already learned what I needed to know: Maevra feared the Royal Alchemists. If selling the eastern parcel were as simple as she claimed, she wouldn’t need to travel to Asteria with two trunks of documents to persuade the chancery.
On the sixth day, a dense fog rolled down from the hills and swallowed the estate, erasing the outlines of the pens.
Maevra went down to the stables by mid-afternoon to haggle with the carter over the hire to the capital. Celene had shut herself in her bedchamber with a vial of rosewater to soothe the headache brought on by hours of hair trials.
The sewing room was quiet.
I sat by the window, mending the black velvet ribbon Celene planned to wear around her throat to conceal the pale scar of an old scald. The gray light from outside was barely enough to trace the stitches.
The door creaked.
Oria slipped in without a sound, barefoot on the floorboards so as not to alert the maids in the kitchen. She carried her wicker sewing basket under her arm. Sitting on the low stool across from me, she pulled out a skein of waxed thread.
“Mother will be down there for half an hour,” she whispered. “The carter is demanding four silver pieces to haul the heavy trunks to Asteria.”
I kept stitching without looking up.
“Your mother won’t pay him four.”
“She’ll pay three and promise him grain come spring.” Oria dropped the skein onto her lap. “She always does.”
I pulled the thread taut. The knot sank into the underside of the ribbon.
“Why are you here, Oria?”
She dug into the bottom of her basket, brushing aside shears, bone buttons, and bits of tailor’s chalk.
When her hand emerged, she was holding a small key of polished brass with two slender wards at its tip.
It wasn’t the key to the larder or the attic.
It was the key to the traveling escritoire Maevra kept in her bedchamber.
Oria didn’t press it into my hand. She slid it inside the wooden spool of waxed thread and set the spool on the worktable, right beside my shears.
“It slipped from her shawl pocket while she was going through the clean cloaks,” Oria whispered, watching the open doorway. “She said she’d look for it after supper.”
My needle hovered over the ribbon.
“Oria…”
“Don’t say anything.” She rose from the stool, smoothing her skirts with quick, nervous motions. “I only came to find thread for the hem of my cloak. If I lose a spool, Mother will make me pay for the wood.”
“If she discovers you helped me—”
“I didn’t help you with anything.” Her pale eyes, so like her sister’s yet devoid of command, held mine for an endless second. “I’m just clumsy. Everyone in this house knows I always leave things in the wrong places.”
She turned and slipped out of the sewing room, her steps light and swift, like someone fleeing a fire before the smoke has even begun to rise.
I looked down at the wooden spool on the table.
Inside its hollow core, the brass key gleamed with a dull luster. I drew it out with the tips of my fingers and tucked it into the inner seam of my left sleeve, right beside the flake of blue wax I’d carried there for the past six days.
Cold metal brushed the skin of my wrist.
The key to the traveling escritoire. The place where Maevra kept the documents she didn’t dare trust to the office shelves.
Night settled over the estate with a biting wind that whistled through the roof tiles.
I waited until the landing clock struck eleven. By then, the maids were asleep in the rear garret, Mina had retired to her cottage by the henhouse, and the stable boy was snoring in the hayloft.
I stepped from my room barefoot, carrying Maevra’s traveling cloak over my shoulders—I’d finished brushing it that very afternoon. If anyone caught me in the corridor, I would say I was on my way to hang it in the landing wardrobe before the damp night air ruined the fur lining.
The second-floor corridor was dark. A solitary candle guttered in a clay dish at the foot of the stairs, casting long, warped shadows across the family portraits.
I hugged the north wall, where the floorboards didn’t groan. Every step was a calculation of weight and balance.
Maevra’s bedchamber lay at the end of the hall, separated from Celene’s room by a small sitting parlor. As I neared the ajar door, a slit of golden light cut across the shadows on the floor.
Voices. Low, muffled by the heavy timber, yet clear enough for anyone who knew their cadence.
I flattened myself against the linen press, holding my breath.