Chapter Eleven
The party that followed Noé’s announcement was a nervous one, and volatile because of it.
No one was bold or foolish enough to leave the Alaires’ celebration before it had run its course, yet many of the guests, I could tell, had been unsettled by the nature of Bastian’s son’s first test. They jittered at the edges of the dance floor; they refused glasses of wine and then downed several in rushed desperation, like drowning men greedily gasping in a breath before being plunged back under the waves.
I understood their anxieties, naturally.
I had not yet learned all my fellow maidens’ Wits, but the ones I did know of were more than enough to give any attendee with a secret to hide cause for concern—like Manon’s ability to scent hidden things, or Anais, with the power to pull the truth from a person’s lips with a kiss.
And then there was Sybil, whom I glimpsed chatting with a petrified young man near the balcony, her gloved hand resting on his shaking arm.
If she removed her silk coverings, would he feel ice slide into his veins at her touch, the same way I had?
Would she find something curious in him, too?
For my part, I slipped out of the ballroom early, making my way back to my bedroom without bidding Eliot farewell.
His shifting attitudes exhausted me, and whether he was playing a part or not, I could not make myself forgive him for his charity comment just yet—for the way he’d made me look like a beggar in the other maidens’ eyes.
Instead, when I reached the familiar corridor that held our quarters, I found my door, closed it behind me, and waited.
I sat alone for a long time on the edge of my mattress in the dark as the night spread its wings around me.
Gradually, the hallway outside filled up with noise as the other nine girls returned from the ball themselves, some of their approaches marked by talk and laughter, others silent except for the click of heels against the floor.
Then they, too, continued into their respective quarters, and all went quiet again, the atmosphere growing full and drowsy, like a cat kneading a cushion before settling in to sleep.
An hour more, and the silence flattened, turned as smooth as the surface of a lake. When all I could hear was the steady rumble of the girl snoring in the room next to me, I got up.
My door slid open on its hinges without a sound.
Past it, the corridor was empty, watery moonlight streaming through the columns that overlooked the open cloister beyond.
The rain had left sometime earlier in the night, tiptoeing out on soft feet, and now all that remained of it was a thin, pale fog hanging in the air like a haze of smoke.
I stepped carefully into the hall, the gauzy nightgown I’d changed into when I’d come back from the party brushing kittenishly against my calves.
My hair, which I’d woven into a loose braid upon my return, slipped over my shoulder as I pulled my door shut behind me.
In the past year, I’d heard talk of society silkwitches who wore satin caps even during slumber, determined to catch any and all loose strands of hair for their dower, but Eliot’s molding of me aside, I could not force myself to go that far.
Besides, I assumed the caul-less style would serve as a decent disguise in the case that I met with any servants while out of my quarters.
With my untidy plait and my bare feet, I could guess what the Alaires’ staff would see, were they to glimpse me: a silly girl, lost in the labyrinth of the great house.
And I expected to get very lost indeed.
Breathing in a lungful of night air, I padded forward.
The doorknobs of the other silkwitches’ rooms winked invitingly at me in the silvered light, but I turned away from them, having learned my lesson with Sybil earlier.
Stealing a secret from one of my competitors would do me the double favor of passing Noé’s trial and tarnishing a rival in his eyes, but my fellow maidens were veterans at this game.
I’d narrowly evaded Anais’s questions earlier; I could not risk sneaking into another girl’s quarters and stumbling on a trap she’d set for me.
Or, arguably worse, having her wake and find me lurking there like a spider in her corner—a discovery that would surely only solidify my status as the group pariah.
I shook my head and kept walking, rounding the corner at the end of the hall and continuing left along the square of corridors that bordered the open cloister below until I found a passageway that veered off from them.
Squinting into the gloom, I parsed the dark hallway for the murky shape of a maid; then, encountering no one, I turned down it.
Unlike the wide, airy walkway I’d just left behind, the space I now found myself in was cramped and small.
Doors lined the passage’s walls, identical and anonymous, their knobs bronzed eyes in the dimness.
The sight of them made my Wit stir within me, my fingers itching with the sudden, restless need to reach out and open one, but I fought the urge back.
Letting my eyes flutter closed, I drew a deep breath and stretched outward with my mind, toward where I knew the first doorway in the row lay to my direct right.
For a few tense seconds, there was only the formless interior dark behind my eyelids, like a furry swath of gray wool—and then, as if emerging from a tide of heavy mist, I saw a shape appear in my mental vision: a rectangular obsidian slab, glowing with a fringe of spectral black light.
Pulse quickening, I shifted my consciousness closer, as if to lay my palm on its surface.
Unlike its real-world counterpart, this door was not formed of solid wood but rather a glistening ebony liquid, more viscous than water and with the wet shimmer of tar.
When my mind brushed against it, a series of sensations enveloped me, wrapping my body from head tofoot.
Warmth calm rest solitude sleep soft heat feathered—
I blinked, opening my eyes, and the rush abated.
Eliot may have thought he had solved me that long afternoon in the Diplomat, but for every piece of information he’d managed to pull free about my blessing, there were parts of myself that still remained solely my own.
It was as if my Wit was a sphere, and I’d drawn him a circle—there were dimensions to me, to what I could do, that he was not yet familiar with.
Bits of the truth I hadn’t lied about, so much as… omitted.
This trick was amongst them—an extension of my Wit, so to speak.
By focusing intently on a door that I wished to open, I’d found that I had the ability to—not see past it, exactly, but rather—sense an impression of the space lying beyond.
Employing the technique successfully required complete stillness and concentration, which meant I rarely relied on it during my thefts. In tonight’s case, though…
I cast my gaze back to the door I’d been mentally examining, running through the emotions that had overcome me when I touched it. Warmth, rest, sleep…
Bedroom. It took less than a minute for me to identify it: The nearest room to me was a bedroom.
With this new knowledge in hand, I shut my eyes again and retreated back into my mind, repeating the visualization process with the door on my direct left, and then the next closest to it, and then the next closest to that one—and so on until I’d categorized all the rooms along the hallway.
Only after I was finished with my sweep did I move from the place where I stood, the soles of my feet clumsy and half numb from resting too long against the chilly stone floor, and select a single door to try: a plain wooden one about a quarter of the way down the passage, which I’d sensed led to a study of some kind.
My heart screamed as I turned the knob, all my practiced calm abandoning me at the thought of Bastian Alaire waiting for me on the other side, ready to crack open my mind like a melon—but when I entered the room, it was empty save for a dust-covered desk and a few overstuffed armchairs.
I rifled through the desk drawers, finding them disappointingly bare, then left the hall and continued onward.
Each time I encountered a new branching pathway, I’d pause, use my Wit to feel for impressions behind the doorways, and then choose a handful that intrigued me to explore.
On a few occasions, I was forced to duck into a room at random to avoid approaching passersby—some of them servants, some guests long since overstaying their welcome—but on the whole, the castle slumbered peacefully around me, unaware or uncaring of my exploration.
Library. Parlor. Guest room. Once I’d finished with the second floor, I found a back staircase and took it down to Fortblanche’s main level, working my way steadily through the central wing of the house.
I did not know what I was looking for, exactly—a mysterious letter, perhaps, tucked in the back of a cabinet and left to molder, or maybe a reticule mistakenly dropped by a drunken partygoer, containing valuable truths within—but regardless, I found nothing.
Certainly no scandal worth laying in front of Noé, a revelation of such magnitude that it would shock Bastian’s heir out of the perpetual disinterest he’d shown at my presentation and make him pay attention to me.
Keep me in the race, above my competitors.
Drawing room. Billiards room. Another parlor…
My breath caught. My eyes were closed, my attention fixed on the ebony outline of the shadow door I was studying—but there, lingering at the edge of my consciousness like a wary interloper, I noticed…
something else. A shifting patch of slick blackness like an inkblot, lacking any sort of border or shape, just a slow bleed of darkness like paint running into water.
Another door?