Chapter Two
Each time I took a job, I was certain it would be my last. It was such a strange occupation, the one I found myself in; in fact, I’d fallen into it completely by accident—or, depending on how one wished to view it, luck.
My career, as I suppose it could be termed, had begun a little over a year prior, after my parents decided to move from Verne, the rural border village of my youth, back to my father’s birth country of Stravast, to the north.
At first, my mother had half-heartedly urged me to join them, but depressingly for both of us, it was evident that her heart wasn’t in it, and it took only a single word of rejection from me for her to drop the act altogether.
I tried not to be offended by her behavior—mostly, I wasn’t offended, having known for a long time that my parents viewed me and my witch-ness as less of a golden goose than an odd duck, good for nothing except scaring off the neighbors.
In other cities, moneyed cities with ties to the Weaver lines, having a silkwitch daughter was cause for celebration, akin to discovering a secret family jewel or being handed a key to a previously locked door: Here, at last, was a way in.
Yet Verne was a small community, composed mostly of immigrants like my father and sheep farmers who were forever collecting wool behind their ears.
When my blessing arrived in my teenage years, half of the town thought I was a m?zer , a Stravastian changeling child; the Balmoorish half, who’d grown up with tales of silkwitches, avoided my parents’ house as though it were a dark cloud promising trouble ahead.
Strictly speaking, the Balmoorish government guarded girls like me as they did all other precious resources: Corruption of an unwed silkwitch, defined as the unlawful removal of even a single strand of hair from her exquisite head, carried with it a lengthy prison sentence.
But my kind were rare, and while our magic died eventually, the population’s hunger for enchanted goods never did.
For anyone willing to bear the risk, there was plentiful coin to be made, and so beneath the nation’s gilded foundations a thriving black market pulsed quietly in the dark, mycelial and spreading like a pale, sinister fungus.
Families who could afford to kept their silkwitches shut up until they reached courtship age, and occasionally even afterward, admitting Weaver suitors warily—like entrants into a vault—allowing them only a glimpse at the treasures within before ushering them back out again.
Those of us not born to rich parentage, though…
We became birds without a cage as soon as our gifts emerged, unhidden and unchained, but also wholly unprotected.
Vulnerable.
Girls brave enough to venture out into public took measures to ensure their hair was protected, bound in tight braids or guarded by cauls—anything to keep the black-market hawks from shearing it off.
In my case, my own mother and father tried confinement at first. The ploy worked, at least initially; I came into my blessing at age fourteen and spent the following six months in captivity, safe, sheltered, and supremely bored.
It was a dull existence, to be sure, a house-cat kind of existence, but even so—I did not appreciate, back then, how enviable such monotony truly was.
Then came the evening of my uncle’s visit.
My parents were out, gone to attend to some trouble with my brother.
To this day, I do not know if my uncle engineered their absence or if the timing was simply a stroke of good fortune, but either way I’d been left alone since dawn and was delighted when I heard him calling from beyond our cottage door.
Of my father’s three siblings, he was far and away my favorite—the youngest of the bunch, with a philosophical, sensitive disposition.
He was also a sympathetic figure; his wife, my aunt Vera, was dying.
When I opened the front door that evening, I saw only his kind eyes staring at me from across the threshold—only his familiar smile, dulled by grief.
I did not realize then how tragedy could change a person.
How it worked like rot on a peach, softening the exterior and hardening the core. I simply stood aside and let him in.
After he entered our cottage, my uncle apologized to me. Then he brought out his knife.
Idly, I felt for the hank of hair near the back of my neck, currently swept up and obscured by my bun.
Even four years later, I could still recall the precise place where his blade had swept through my tresses, still feel the puckered raise in my skin made by the bite of its edge.
My uncle had been merciful; that wound had been the only one he’d imparted on me before leaving.
Other girls, I knew, had dealt with far worse.
Dropping my hand to my side, I shifted my attention back to the stairway in front of me, and the task at hand.
The Diplomat’s steps had become less grand the farther I’d ascendedfrom the lobby; by the time I reached the fifth floor and exited the staircase, it had turned into a tight coil, like a screw plunged straight through the heart of the building.
I was grateful for the contrast of the wide carpeted hallway, more so when I finally caught sight of my destination—room number twenty-three.
Pausing in front of the threshold, I dug into my reticule for the small, cloth-wrapped parcel I’d packed away before leaving my apartment earlier that afternoon, then raised my fist to the wood and knocked.
To my relief, the exchange was a quick one, Guillaume’s annoyance at my tardiness usurped by pleasure when he caught sight of the necklace in my palm, its heart-shaped locket carved with a delicate capital E .
Retrieving it from the apartment of Mrs.Pierce’s daughter’s former lover had been no easy feat—not that any of the jobs I took were easy, necessarily.
For most people other than myself, I assumed they would have been impossible.
I relied on that assumption, in fact. Impossibility—and my defiance of it—was all that kept me fed.
Even after the encounter with my uncle back in Verne, I’d still carried with me a single hope for the future, which I’d clung to like a guttering lantern throughout the interminable years spent bound to my parents’ house following his assault: the prospect of my eventual marriage.
When I left my home to stay with my elder brother, Markham, in his cramped apartment near the center of the Isle d’Eylau, I’ll admit that a foolish part of myself expected that I’d remain there only a few nights before some rich Weaver bachelor came along to sweep me up and make me his bride.
It was the kind of fate that had befallen other silkwitches my age, after all.
Minette Simon’s betrothal to Claude Hugo of the Hugo Weaver family had filled the papers’ gossip pages for much of the prior year.
A mandate cleverly disguised as a fantasy.
Despite the fact that silkwitch magic was in large part limited to the raw power found in our hair, the mere existence of my kind was regarded as an enigma by most of Balmoore’s citizens—in particular, the nation’s men.
Woven goods were valued the world over, but like Weavers themselves, silkwitches were native only to Balmoore, meaning supply of magesilk was always tight.
We were girls, but we were also the country’s most valuable export and most precious resource; it would not do to let us roam free.
It was this puzzle, generations upon generations ago, that the Weavers had stepped in to solve.
Unlike their common brethren, Weaver men were blessed with preternatural abilities, like us silkwitches—yet where our powers were tinderbox-quick, doomed to burn fast and then burn out, the magic of Balmoore’s sorcerers was the stuff of legend.
Like Elmont Drake, who with only a single word could coax a harvest from barren earth, or the brothers Mael and Arnaud Moreau, able to change shape at will.
Surely, to magicians of such caliber, managing a girl barely past her own adolescence would be no trouble at all—and thus, centuries ago, the marriage edicts were born.
Once a silkwitch came of age, she would be permitted a courtship period of three years to find a Weaver groom and bind herself to him, or, on her twenty-first birthday, she would be given over to the guardianship of the cloisters.
In return for his protection and sponsorship, the Weaver whom she wed would receive access to her shed hair—in essence becoming one of the sole legal producers of magesilk in the nation.
The Weaver lines of Balmoore, having already amassed considerable fortunes through use of their magic, became richer still under this new arrangement; the silkwitches, by contrast, became brides.
It was a bargain as old as our nation itself, and from far off one could almost confuse it for a romance. Sequestered in my small village with only my imagination for company, I certainly had.
Then I’d left Verne for the capital, and the illusion tore clean through.
It took me less than a fortnight following my arrival on the Isle to realize my mistake.
Whereas in my hometown, the lack of girls like me had turned me into a curiosity at best, a liability at worst, here in the capital there were far too many girls like me.
And the surprise introduction of a new, previously unknown figure into the marriage market was not cause for celebration; rather, I was competition .
Beyond that, I was competition with no family or sponsor to protect me, which meant I was quickly identified as easy prey.