Chapter Forty-Four #2
He worked his jaw. “Ophelia didn’t believe my claims of ignorance.
She ran down into the tunnels to get away from me.
I followed, but we got separated underground.
Came up in different parts of the house.
Next I heard of her, she’d fallen.” His eyes cut back to me, furtive and clouded. “You know the rest,” he said briskly.
Her body hitting the waves. The grief I’d heard in Eliot’s voice the first day we’d met. Death, like a milky fog over Fortblanche. I did know.
“Even if all you say is true,” I replied after a moment. “Ophelia was not the last girl to die in your halls. What about Sybil?”
And was Eliot aware—of any of it? It was the question I wanted to ask, and the single one which my fear prevented me from voicing. Noé claimed his father had kept the truth of their kind from him until after Ophelia’s death. Had Eliot’s done the same?
I will never let you go to the cloisters. His promise to me. But would he have let me be bound?
Noé winced, drawing me back to him. “I don’t know how Sybil found out about the door—from Ophelia, I’m assuming, though they were never close,” he replied.
“When your first message came through my candle, I thought it was her. Tried to warn her—you—against poking around, but evidently, my notes didn’t reach her.
” He chewed at his lip. “Her death has posed an issue for Father. He doesn’t know who killed her, you see.
She was already dead when she was found in the tunnels the night of the Midway Ball—strangled—and the key she’d stolen was missing… ”
He blew another huff of breath through his nostrils.
“I’ve never seen him so furious as he was when he realized it had vanished from this office, just before the ball,” Noé said.
“Best we can figure, Sybil was waiting until she’d discovered the path to the door before taking it—clever of her, to do it all in one go. ”
He hesitated. “Ophelia’s knowledge died with her, but that key undoes the lock on all his secrets. He’ll go to great lengths to get it back, I’m sure.”
So, Sybil had been murdered—and by a culprit who remained unknown. I was not sure if I could trust an Alaire’s words, but still, I tucked the revelation away to examine later. Another one was niggling at me.
“She truly just fell, then?” I asked. “Ophelia?”
Noé’s smirk was like a reflex. It curled at his mouth but did not reach his eyes.
“Too anticlimactic?” he responded. “I’m sorry I can’t give you a murderer to unmask for Lear.
But no, no one pushed her, if that’s what you’re implying.
Ophelia fell from the White Terrace of her own accord.
I’ve always wondered, though…” He hesitated, his fingers drumming contemplatively against the side of his leg.
“Well,” he started again a moment later, “you’ve felt the effects of my father’s magic yourself.
He is far from omnipotent, but if he is around someone in a heightened mental state—someone who is distressed, or especially joyful—he can sense their emotions even if he is not focusing directly on them, as another might feel a tremor in the earth.
I’ve always wondered if he picked up on Ophelia’s anxiety after we’d fought that night.
If, once he’d pawed through her mind and discovered what lay there, he felt inclined to give her a little mental… push.”
He sighed.
“It is one of the things I’m hoping to find out for certain, if you marry me.”
My pulse was so shallow, I could barely feel it, like the tickle of a feather behind my lungs. “Excuse me?”
Noé’s expression was inscrutable. “I told you I meant what I said this morning, Miss Tamerlane,” he said lowly. “You’ve bested Clio Lavoie—you have won the competition. Will you marry me?”
Rage burned in me. I backed away from him as if physically repulsed, pressing myself more firmly against the wall. “You,” I spat, “are the last man in the nation I would marry.”
If the viciousness of my rejection struck Noé, he did not show it.
“You mistake me, Miss Tamerlane,” he replied levelly.
“I am not asking for your affection. Consider it this way: You and Eliot had a deal, did you not?” He smirked at my arched brow.
“When my father looked into your mind during his trial, he gleaned only your true name—but while I may not know the details of your arrangement, I do know my friend. Eliot has always admired a good bargain.”
Bile rose up my gullet at his remark. A good bargain —I hated the way he made it sound. So clinical, as if everything between Eliot and me had only been a…transaction.
As if it had not mattered at all.
When I gave no reply, Noé continued on. “This could be the same. I told you one of the first times we spoke that I have always found Eliot’s methods of rebellion to be self-serving.
He advertises his disagreement with us Weavers’ methods of conducting ourselves so blatantly that his own father keeps the truth of what we are from him for fear of his reaction,” Noé said.
“He sent you in here for justice, but I desire something greater than that. I wish for revenge.”
His gaze was focused; peeling away from the windows, he took a single step forward.
“Marry me, and we can finish what Ophelia started. I despise my father—I would work with you to bring him down, if you let me. Would break my seal, as soon as we were wed.” Another pace, he drew nearer, the distance shrinking between us.
“You may despise me all you wish, Miss Tamerlane, but I believe that in your core, you recognize that you and I are the same. Neither of us is the type to be satisfied until a mystery is pulled out by its root—until every part of it is seen and exposed.”
I seethed at his comparison, my disgust reaching to my toes. “I am nothing—”
“And yet you came here, to me, when your Wit would have allowed you to reunite with your beloved,” Noé interjected hotly, and my rebuttal died on my tongue.
Collecting himself, he paused his advance.
“You came because you wished for answers,” he went on, his tone soft—almost empathetic. I rankled at the sound of it. “I understand. It is what I would have done, too.”
He cleared his throat, glancing toward the door.
“My father will be back soon,” he stated.
“If you leave now, you still have a chance of escaping Fortblanche before he can find you.
Perhaps you may even reunite with Eliot, and he can whisk you away somewhere upcoast. My father will search for you, of course—he will never stop searching—but I would do my best to deter his efforts.
For a while, at least, you would besafe.
“Or,” Noé said, and the promise of the word made my stomach flip, “you can claim your victory and wed me. Stay here, in the rats’ nest—but you would have power. You would have an ally. And you would have a chance to unravel my father the way he does his victims: from within.”
Extending his hand out, he grinned, wicked and bright.
“The choice is yours. What do you say?”