Chapter Three #3
His handsome features darkened then, or perhaps it was just a trick of the light, which had turned gray and sickly with the dual specters of evening and the return of the afternoon’s rain.
As we’d been speaking, water droplets had begun to plink against the windowpanes, and now the nascent storm was throwing itself against the glass as if begging to be let in.
It was a common enough sound in our capital, so much so that I barely flinched when a growl of thunder shook the room.
Local legend held that the Isle d’Eylau was once not an isle at all, until the skies drowned the land around it, turned it to sea.
“You are aware of my family, then?” Eliot said, drawing my attention back to him. “Who we are?”
I nodded, then spoke when it became clear he expected more. “Your father has served on the Virtuous Parliament for nearly two decades,” I answered Eliot over the murmur of the rain. “You claim one of the most recognizable surnames in the nation—of course I am aware of you.”
My answer was truthful, but rather than accept it, he chuckled. “A politician’s response, for a politician’s son,” he sniped, challengingly. “Yet, there is no need to censor yourself on my account, Miss Tamerlane. I can tell by your expression you know far more than that—go on.”
I caught my bottom lip between my teeth, then released it, annoyed by my own reticence and unwilling to let him glimpse more of it.
Censorship aside, it was evident the younger Lear was probing for something—yet which piece of his family’s history did he mean for me to unearth?
Again, my mind drifted to the most recent gossip I’d heard, the stories that had swept over the capital shortly after my own arrival last summer.
If the boy sitting beside me was Reginald’s son, it also meant he was her brother…
but no. Surely, he would not wish to discuss that.
In the end, I chose the safer route. “They say…There are those who say your father—your family—is in allegiance with Bastian Alaire, the man they call the Weaver King,” I admitted.
“That your father is merely his puppet, the mask he wears when he wishes to venture out in public. And…” I paused.
“I have heard that you, yourself, were raised alongside Bastian’s son, Noé Alaire.
The girls in town say you are practically brothers. ”
Eliot watched me silently as I spoke. Finishing, I tensed in anticipation of his ire—yet he only nodded, his expression weary.
“All correct,” he replied. “Though in my opinion, my father is too feeble even to be called a puppet. A worm, perhaps.” Scowling, he drove his thumbnail into the tufted fabric of his armchair before returning his attention to me.
“And his other child—my younger sister, Ophelia?” he pressed. “Have you heard anything of her?”
A bold-faced headline flashed in my vision, tar-black and ominous: Councillor’s Daughter Lost to the Sea .
Images followed, illustrations of sharp rocks and a grand stone house overlooking the cliffs, of a girl’s pretty face rendered in slick blue ink.
The ocean bride , the tabloids had called her.
She’d been all my clients could talk about last year.
The ideal silkwitch turned into a cautionary tale.
And now, it seemed, she was at the center of my encounter with her brother, as well. Ophelia.
“Less so, but yes,” I replied, unsure of where the conversation was heading. Painted in dimness, the gilded hotel room suddenly felt dingy, cramped, and overcrowded, like I should have left long ago. “It was a terrible accident—I read about it in the papers. I am sorry for your loss.”
Eliot scoffed, the noise mocking. “My loss,” he echoed, rubbing at his jaw. “How sanitary—thank you. You speak with all the grace of your fellow silkwitches, though you claim not to know any of them.”
I ignored the barb. “Ophelia was a silkwitch, too. Did she speak like me?” I asked, steering us back on subject.
There was volatility to Eliot’s sharp response that I didn’t like, in comparison to his previously cool manner.
It seemed to have risen with the topic of his sister and now hung in the air, ready to ignite.
I didn’t intend to be around when it did.
“Ophelia talked like our father, so no,” Eliot answered.
“She died almost a year ago now. At Fortblanche, Bastian Alaire’s estate, just before they’d planned to select his son’s bride.
” He cast his gaze back toward me, almost lazily.
“I assume you are familiar with the subject of which I speak. The competition known as the Vainglory.”
There was a pinch, like the nip of a needle beneath my skin—I attempted to keep my expression neutral, though within me I felt my pulse quicken.
Even living at the edges of the Isle d’Eylau’s good society as I had been for the past year, some topics still rippled far enough to reach my ears; this one, in particular, had gripped the capital like a fever.
I recalled the flurry of reports in the papers, the whispers that spoke of ten silkwitches chosen by the Weaver King to vie for his son’s hand in marriage, and the dozens passed over.
“I am,” I replied. “Though I was not so lucky as to receive an invitation myself.”
Eliot paused, then glanced slowly back at me. “And if I were to extend one to you now?”
For a moment, I could say nothing. “Excuse me?”
“To the Vainglory,” he clarified calmly—unflustered once more, as if his previous emotion had only been a passing breeze. “You said you were not chosen to participate last year. Well, I am offering to choose you.”
My heart was beating very quickly now, my thoughts of escape all but forgotten.
“I…It is impossible,” I replied uncertainly.
“The competition is long since finished. As you’ve just stated yourself, it was ended before a victor could be named last year, in honor of your sister’s…
” I trailed off, hesitant, for some reason, to invoke Ophelia’s death in front of him, lest the mention spark a blaze I could not quench.
“Precisely,” Eliot cut in, frowning. “It was suspended without a bride—and thus it was never truly concluded. The competition will recommence this year.
“They need a silkwitch to fill my sister’s now-open spot,” he continued before I could question him further.
“I can ensure that girl is you. We’d need to give you a pseudonym, naturally, and you couldn’t continue your thieving—at least, not while you’re at Fortblanche.
A few etiquette lessons wouldn’t hurt, either…
” He furrowed his brow, as though ticking off boxes on a mental list.
I barely heard him. Without my directing it, my chin swiveled back toward the rain-slick windows, rendered as opaque as dark mirrors by the storm.
Though I couldn’t see it, I knew that somewhere beyond them, a grand, turreted house sat peering down at us from where it was perched at the peak of the Isle d’Eylau: the legendary residence of the Weaver King, Fortblanche.
Technically speaking, of course the Alaires were no more royals than I was myself.
While powerful, they were Weavers like any other; in truth, though, the lore that surrounded the reclusive family made them stand fully on their own.
The Alaires’ artisans can craft Woven clocks that unwind time.
The Alaires manufacture half the products on the black markets—no, they own the black markets.
Bastian Alaire can see into a man’s mind like a well.
The Weaver King knows your most sordid desires, and your wretchedest fears.
The rumors were plentiful, but still, last year one had emerged that usurped all the rest: that of the Weaver King’s Vainglory.
I could not recall the exact day I’d first heard of it; awareness seemed to spread gradually, like a spring thaw, so that by the time the news reached me, the affair had already commenced.
In retrospect, I knew that the gossip had begun sometime in the weeks before Noé Alaire’s eighteenth birthday—murmurs of a ball unlike any other, to be thrown by the Weaver King himself in honor of his only child’s coming-of-age.
At the center of the discussions were its ten maidens, coveted positions reserved only for the most promising silkwitches in the nation, each one carefully chosen to compete for a single prize: a chance to become the future heir’s bride.
The details of the proceedings were little more than hearsay for all except the few invited to attend, but it was claimed that over the course of ten days, the chosen maidens would be tested, ranked against one another, and gradually eliminated until, at the climactic evening of the affair, a single one amongst them was to be crowned the victor, and Noé Alaire’s betrothed.
The opportunity to bind oneself, inseparably, to the most powerful family in the nation.
A life of wealth and prosperity, of a ring around one’s finger, like a bullet between the watching eyes of the cloisters.
It was an escape unlike any other—one that, last year, had inflamed the heart of every silkwitch, not just in the capital, but in all of Balmoore.
The process by which the ten maidens were to be chosen was as much a mystery as the competition itself, and at first, the vagueness led to a sense of infinite possibility.
Any action, even a task as mundane as walking to the market, could be an audition; Bastian Alaire’s representatives could be anywhere, searching through the dankest alleyway for the flash of a pearl amidst the murk. Waiting to pull it free.
And then, just as the hysteria was nearing its peak: the sudden crash of Ophelia’s death. A single incident, and the competition was over, finished while those of us on the outside had been waiting for it to begin.