Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
“Yes, my own reaction was quite similar,” Eliot acknowledged, nodding.
“Yet, how could I afford not to indulge her? Not even our own father had dared question the nature of my sister’s death—and now here was a coconspirator, just when I needed her most.” There was a bitterness to his narration, like the tang of sugar gone tart in one’s mouth, which became more pronounced the longer he spoke.
“Sybil said that during the course of the prior year’s competition, Ophelia had grown…
distracted,” Eliot continued. “Though victory was all but hers, she paid Noé little attention and fewer affections, keeping primarily to herself. Several times, she went so far as to arrive late to an event, or miss it altogether, claiming a lack of sleep.”
He sighed. “Apparently, Sybil attempted to confront her about whatever was keeping her up at night, but Ophelia would tell her nothing—only that she had more important affairs to attend to. Once, she heard her leaving her room after the rest of the girls had fallen asleep, though by the time Sybil went to follow her, my sister was gone.”
“Could she have been meeting with someone?” The question came before I could stop it, my fury momentarily forgotten. I thought of the candle waiting in my bedroom, the identity of the person behind it still unknown.
“Perhaps,” Eliot conceded. “The way Sybil phrased it, though, it didn’t sound like Ophelia was searching out someone—more some thing .
Evidence of some hidden truth or secret.
” He hesitated. “I’ve told you before about the nature of her Wit: She had an almost-prophetic sense of intuition, which frequently got her into trouble.
” He huffed a laugh, the ghost of a smile on his lips.
“The…guesses she would make, often completely unprompted, and in public—accusations of affairs, of second families and hidden children…It made her an unpopular party guest, to say the least. Personally…” He shook his head tersely, his amusement fading.
“Well, I’ve always wondered if she made a discovery she shouldn’t have last summer. ”
A chill gripped me, my mind returning to the first time I’d lit the candle in my bedroom, its wick blown out just as a final response drifted through. Ophelia Lear killed herself with her questions.
“The bargain Sybil offered me was simple,” Eliot said. “I was to share whatever information on my sister I had, and in return, Sybil would try to follow any leads on her death that I dug up for her. A mutually beneficial exchange, as she put it.”
Bargain…mutually beneficial. It was as though I were peering into a room I’d visited before; I recognized the contours of the deal Eliot was describing. Had fitted them to myself not so very long ago.
My eyes went to Sybil’s coin, thrown like rubbish to the floor. In Eliot’s mind, had there been any difference between the other maiden and me? Or were we only a pair of puppets, stitched from separate cloth but made for the same functions, holding all the same emptiness within?
“So, she was to be your informant,” I said, my voice flat. “But if you had her already, why recruit me?”
Eliot’s throat bobbed. I tensed in anticipation of an apology, yet when his answer came, there was no pity in it. I suppose he knew me too well to offer any.
“I’d already been scouting you for several weeks—ever since my friend first told me the story of his mother and his drinking problem,” he said.
“It seemed a shame to waste good work. Not to mention, I hardly trusted Sybil. I felt it would be prudent to have a fail-safe.” A muscle jumped in his neck, the only sign that the admission bothered him.
“Her claims of friendship with my sister aside, I hadn’t forgotten that she, too, had been at Fortblanche the night Ophelia died—that beyond my partner, she was a suspect as well.
But a third, independent party, investigating both her and the rest of the maidens…
They could offer an objective eye. Act as a watchdog of sorts, keeping tabs on Sybil for me without their even realizing it.
If they brought me evidence that contradicted her story, I’d have known to doubt her allegiance. ”
“She’d spy for you, and I’d spy on her,” I said. Strangely, his confession provoked no wrath in me; instead, I felt curiously distant from myself, as if I were watching our interaction from a ship far offshore. “How cleverly you placed your little dolls.”
Eliot’s nostrils flared. “As I said, my purpose was not to hurt you,” he rebutted.
“My sister—my only sibling—was killed, Lovett, by a person whose identity I may never know. The actions I took, I took in the hope of bringing her justice. Any casualties as a result of them were ones I was willing to bear.” His brow furrowed, his lips parting as if readying another retort—but when his eyes locked with mine, a wind seemed to go out of him.
“I told you when we met that neither of us is a good person,” he said softly. “Can you honestly pretend that, had our situations been reversed, you would have behaved any differently?”
I gazed at him through the quiet—at the proud path of his jawline I’d traced with my fingers in the dark, the handsome contours of his face, which I’d attributed first to Victor Greaves, then Eliot Lear, and now…
Now no one at all. I did not know him, despite how he’d fooled me. I never would; I never had.
“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t have. But I am a liar and a thief, and good or not, I suppose I believed you better than me.”
I did not look away as hurt unfurled across his expression. Instead, I waited only for a moment before continuing in an even, commanding tone.
“How did she die?”
At first, I wondered if Eliot had heard me: He remained still, his eyes lit coals, searing into mine.
Then a minute passed, and he shuddered into motion, raising a thumb to swipe distractedly at his mouth.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “After the second trial, Sybil ignored my next summons—I’d assumed she’d put together that she was not the only maiden I was conspiring with.
I thought I’d heard the last of her, but then yesterday she called for me before the ball. ”
“And?” I asked—impatiently, like a child leaning in to hear a secret. “What did she want?”
Eliot winced. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I meant to track her down during the party, but time…got away from me.” He glanced at me, reluctant and guilty. “I was otherwise occupied, if you’d care to remember.”
You have destroyed me. I bristled at the echo of his speech. Of course I remembered; I could not forget. “Why come to me when she needed you?”
“Because ever since we passed through Fortblanche’s gates, you have ruled me, Lovett.
” Eliot’s irritation flashed in tandem with mine, as if the pair of us were kindling and spark—our anger stoked by one another.
“You have been my king, and despite my every attempt to wrest control back, I cannot depose you. Believe me when I say if I could have resisted you, I would have. A girl is dead because of my weakness, and stillI—”
He faltered again, his eyes, which had been holding mine with a steady, dark hypnotism, darting away. I realized when they did that I’d forgotten to inhale since he’d begun his speech; my lungs were burning, sweet and pink like a blaze of flowers.
And still I—
It startled me, how badly I wanted him to finish that sentence.
Neither of us spoke for a minute. Finally, he looked back at me. “Do you have nothing to say?”
His question was terse—desperate—and it took everything in me not to flinch at it. But Sybil’s coin was still waiting on the floor, a physical reminder of his betrayal, and it grounded me.
“Only that I am sorry to hear you treated Sybil with as little respect as you have me,” I replied.
He reared back as if slapped. “You know nothing of how I’ve treated you.”
It was as if his rebuttal loosened a dam within me—all my rage came flooding back, a vicious, relieving tide.
“I should warn you now, I have written my brother, Markham, with news of our involvement, and your relationship with Sybil,” I said, fisting my hands at my sides.
“If you attempt to prevent me from leaving our conversation safely, he will ensure word of it reaches the papers.”
My voice was firm, assertive—my bluff was good, even if it was untrue. I expected Eliot to balk at it, then went cold when instead, my words seemed to sober him. He chuckled, humorless and blunt.
“I told you the first time we met that you are a bad liar.” His eyes flashed as he shifted to face me fully. “You have not written Markham.”
His denial unsteadied me—so certain, as if our exchange were a lesson, and I’d answered incorrectly. “I have—”
“You have not, and if you had, he is the last person who would come to your aid, seeing as the two of you haven’t spoken in months—ever since you used your Wit to steal from him.
” Eliot swiped my protest aside, and immediately, my thoughts withered.
“Did you think I wouldn’t do my research before our meeting at the Diplomat?
” he asked, the question hushed with a deadly, careful quiet, pinning me like a needle through my collarbone.
“Who else could have told me where to find you?”
My heart fluttered limply. Like a surge of groundwater, images pushed into my mind, bursting from where I’d buried them: my brother’s florid complexion, his cheeks splotched with red as though fevered; the cheap wooden box in his hand, its interior bare, its lid hanging open on its hinges.
The tension in his wrist just before he’d hurled it to the floor.
No. I’d discarded that piece of my past, had shoved it deep enough that I was certain it would remain out of Eliot’s reach. He was not supposed to have found it .
He was not supposed to know.
My voice was small. “How?”
Eliot’s mouth twitched, his brow furrowing momentarily with something like pity.
“After my friend told me of his trouble with his mother,” he replied slowly, “I began making inquiries. Started planting rumors about a silkwitch in disguise who spied on society men, hoping one would lead me back to you. I stuck mostly to the city’s lower quarters, establishments I knew Weavers didn’t frequent.
” He swallowed. “Your brother overheard my tales,” Eliot said.
“He assumed I’d been a victim of your schemes—offered me your head or your hand in marriage for fifteen twills. ”
Fifteen twills. It was less than the price of a new pair of slippers, less than a week’s supply of food. The revelation dragged at me like a sudden plummet. My brother had sold me to a stranger for the same cost as a couple mugs of ale.
I did not allow myself to dwell on the matter for long. “I hope you accepted his terms,” I said evenly to Eliot instead. “Certainly, you couldn’t have asked for a better bargain.”
There it was again—the dip of his mouth, the crease in his brow like a blade yanked back from the executioner’s block.
Despite his anger, I realized, he did not wish to hurt me.
His wrath seemed to break around me like a wave, perhaps because of his feelings—whatever they were—toward me, or perhaps because he still saw me as the powerless one between us, the helpless girl he had once shown mercy.
It was a mistake I would enjoy making him regret.
“I gave him three times what he asked,” Eliot answered a moment later. “Told him to consider your debt against him repaid. He’d informed me of the bad blood between you, and if you refused my bargain, I—I wanted you to have somewhere safe to call home.”
I looked to the window, away from the grating chafe of his sympathy.
“Then you are a fool,” I said softly. “Markham despises silkwitches. It was my own money I stole from him—he used to keep both our earnings in his room, locked the door with a Woven talisman he’d bought on the black market to prevent me from entering.
He claimed girls of my kind were naturally crafty; that I couldn’t be trusted, with money or anything else.
” I laughed hollowly. “Not that his defenses worked, of course, but for a while I let him believe otherwise. After my theft , as he termed it, he threw me out. He is employed by the workhouses—that much, I did not lie to you about—but when you and I met, I’d been living in a boardinghouse for over a month.
” I paused. “Though perhaps you are aware of that, too. Perhaps it is what gave you the confidence to approach me—the knowledge that if I turned down your offer, I would have nowhere else to go.”
“Lovett…” Eliot’s voice reached out, his syllables stretching with remorse. “I’m sorry—”
I whirled to face him, stopping him where he stood.
“Here is how I see things, Mr.Lear,” I said.
“As of this second, I consider our agreement voided, and our allegiance dead. If you wish to expose me to Noé, so be it, though I believe we can both agree that I have evidence enough to at least ensure your dismissal from his inner circle alongside me.”
Intentionally, I stepped forward until the air between us was as thin as a shiver, tipped my chin up.
“You told me recently it troubled you, seeing the boy you consider a brother show affection to me,” I murmured, holding his gaze. “Now hear me when I tell you this: I will win the Vainglory. I will make Noé Alaire my husband. And then I will have your brother break you while you bow before me.”
Eliot’s lips were slightly parted, his head angled down to meet mine.
As I spoke, his pupils had dilated, as vast and depthless as the ocean at midnight, and for a dizzying, incredulous second, I thought he might kiss me—felt my own bones wake up at the notion of it, a velvet yearning start to unfurl.
I caught the desire by its neck, snapped it, and tossed it firmly away. Reaching beneath my waistband, I took hold of the coin nestled against my skin. The metal was cool—it would never warm me again.
“Goodbye, Mr.Lear,” I said, opening my hand and letting the token fall from it. I’d turned away before it even hit thefloor.