Chapter Twenty-Six
It sat, burning, on the desktop, a glazed white circle like the full egg of the moon, snipped from the sky and laid down in front of me. For a minute, I was motionless, entranced by its clear, pale light, its unwavering stare like a summoning.
A summoning. The thought snapped me free; I jerked back to my body, hastily tapping the coin thrice more.
Immediately, the metal silenced, its glow cutting off like a curtain pulled closed.
The magesilk embedded into it, which for a second had blinked awake, returned to its slumber; once again, the coin became simply a coin, bronzed and ugly, as if it had been scraped from the seam of somebody’s pocket.
My mind felt sluggish, my breaths wheezing and overloud to my own ears. Hesitantly, I picked up the now-cool coin, tilting my hand this way and that as I observed it. No , I chastised myself as I studied its pocked surface, its familiar coloring, not a coin .
This was Eliot’s coin. His calling card, of exactly the same kind that he had bestowed upon me less than a week prior. Only, I’d already established that it was not his, and it was not mine, which meant…
The revelation was a rusted knife, sawing jaggedly into my stomach. Which meant there must be a second set. Which meant he had deceived me.
I was not the only person Eliot had been corresponding with since entering Fortblanche—the existence of this third token proved that much.
Had his father’s artisans forged another pair, in addition to the one he’d split with me?
Could it be that this entire time, through every midnight call and whispered admission, every argument…
there had been another girl, lurking like a reflection in my mirror, obvious and yet, until this moment, entirely overlooked by me?
Sybil.
As if beckoned, a vision of her swam forth: Sybil, standing in the corridor after I’d confronted her following the second trial, her blue eyes fixed sympathetically on me.
Weavers are wolves, Miss Lovett. Hadn’t I thought it odd, how sorry she’d sounded when she’d said that?
As if, in that moment, I was no longer her rival, her opponent.
As if, instead, she viewed me as a creature to be pitied.
I did not give myself time to consider the implications of that thought.
Closing my fist around the coin, I picked the book by Matthieu Pender back up from where I’d laid it down on the desk.
Then, with both items secured, I departed Sybil’s quarters for my own.
The gallery corridor was still empty when I reentered it, the rest of the maidens presumably caught up at breakfast, which was just as well—were I to be sighted, I doubted I could have composed myself enough to evade their suspicions.
Emotion lashed inside me, blazingly hot, like steam.
I could not make myself care when my door slammed shut behind me. Shakily, I lowered myself onto my bed, setting aside the book and withdrawing first my own coin from the waistband of my dress, then the second one. Heart racing, I held them both in front of me.
The two coins gazed back like a pair of amber eyes, identical down to the talons inscribed on both of them, as if they had been hammered from the same metal bar.
Defeated, I dropped them onto the bed, curling back against my pillows.
Dammit. I wove my fingers through my hair in frustration, tugging off my caul and tossing it to the side.
Dammit, dammit, dammit. Now that I truly considered it, I couldn’t recall Eliot ever stating that I was the sole silkwitch he was conspiring with—the only girl in the Vainglory to whom he was lending his aid.
The exclusivity of our partnership had been hinted at, yes, many times—it had been implied, in the way damp socks and an umbrella implied a fall of rain—but, I realized upon reflection, never had the words been spoken aloud. How had I failed to notice that before?
How had I allowed him to fool me so easily?
I wound a lock of hair around my pinkie so tightly that the tip of my finger turned white.
If my assumptions were correct, and Eliot had been working with both Sybil and me since the start of the Vainglory, perhaps I was not the first one to discover his treachery.
Sybil had seen Eliot and me conversing in the hallway after the second trial.
Whatever the nature of her relationship with him, she must have realized then that there was some sort of connection between the two of us as well.
Had she interrogated Eliot about it later that afternoon, the same way she’d tried to do to me when she’d asked whether he and I were involved? Had he reacted badly to her questions?
A flash of fear, blistering like oil snarling against a hot pan. Was he the reason she was dead?
Abruptly, my thoughts wiped clean as a wink of light caught my eye. Resting on the duvet in front of me, Sybil’s coin—previously identical to my own—had begun to shine, its dingy surface cracking with white like a beacon.
Eliot was calling back.
Panicked, I closed my fist around the object, hiding its glow from view—though I could still feel it, warm and pulsing like a live mouse wriggling in my grasp.
From what Eliot had told me when we’d first exchanged tokens, the coins only alerted their keepers to their counterpart’s summons.
He’d said nothing about their ability to track locations; then again, neither had he mentioned the possibility of a second pair.
I rose from the bed, unfurling my fingers just enough to allow a sliver of light to paint luminous crescents along my nails.
If I knew Eliot at all—and there was a strong argument to be made that I did not—he would be persistent in his calls, now that he’d realized Sybil’s token was active.
Would refuse to rest until he discovered who had found it and what they planned to do.
Lucky for Eliot, I was not as cruel a partner as he. I would give him his answer soon enough.
I squeezed the coin one final time, clenching it so hard, its metal ridge dug into my flesh like a row of baby teeth. Then, my course decided, I headed for the turret.