Chapter 5
CHAPTER
Sabine
Sabine had woken that morning as an unweighed woman with a modest future.
Now, she was Registry property. The canal was choppy, the waves battering at the gondola so that every jolt seemed to drive the truth deeper into her bones.
She stared through the fogged window, watching nothing, as the skiff carried her from the Imperial Crown toward the Gilt Quarter.
She adjusted the neckline of her dress for the twentieth time, the fabric itchy against her mark. Finally, threads be damned with propriety, she unfastened the first three buttons of her collar, pushing the fabric away from the searing patch of skin, allowing it to breathe.
The gondola slowed before the quay. Sabine paid the gondolier with carefully counted coins, the weight of her diminished purse a physical reminder of the impossible task to come.
How was she to break the news to her sister? Bear the heartbreak of having failed in the one task she’d promised her dying parents she’d fulfill, worked her entire life for?
Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t see the man in a long blue velvet cloak sweeping past her, didn’t move out of the way quickly enough before he clipped her shoulder.
Instead of an apology, his fingers pressed a folded paper into her palm.
The hood of his cloak hung low over his head, so she could not make out his features, but there was no mistaking that his face pointed to her chest, especially when his thin and long fingers hovered above the air near her collarbone.
“The Registry will tell you many things about that mark,” he said. “Believe only this: you should trust none of them.”
Sabine jerked back from the man. “Who are you?”
He didn’t answer. He simply tapped the paper she clutched, then vanished into the crowd, as if the city itself had swallowed him up.
Sabine should have left it alone. She should have dropped the paper and hurried home, but curiosity was a habit she could never break, so she unfolded the slip and read it while she walked to her townhouse.
It was a pamphlet of sorts, though Sabine couldn’t tell if it was meant to be political or doctrinal, or maybe a bit of both.
We will return the flame to the people, we will break the chains of blood. Beneath it were scrambled words, a soup of meaningless locution. “What in the threads…”
She barely had time to make sense of it before the townhouse door snapped open, Liora’s bright face appearing in the gap. Sabine stuffed the pamphlet into her skirt pocket.
“You’re back! How was the Weighing? Did your pupil faint? One of my classmates fainted our cycle, and she didn’t live it down all of finishing school, though I can’t imagine why anyone—” When she registered Sabine’s expression, Liora’s breathless greeting faltered. “What happened?”
“Let us discuss it inside.” Sabine moved past her into the narrow entrance hall, empty and echoing except for the ghostly outlines where paintings had once hung.
Liora followed like an anxious shadow, golden curls bouncing.
A fresh bundle of wildflowers stood arranged at the center of the small parlor in a chipped porcelain vase, perfuming the air.
No doubt, her sister’s work. Despite the room’s obvious economy—furniture arranged to disguise worn patches, corners strategically shadowed to hide water stains—Liora maintained a stubborn insistence on beauty.
“You’re frightening me,” Liora said, voice small. “Did something happen to your charge?”
Sabine took off her gloves, slow and careful, as if she could buy herself a breath of peace. She could not. How could one explain the universe cracking open beneath one’s skin?
“She is perfectly well. She manifested Light affinity, exactly as her mother hoped.” Sabine set her gloves on the side table, arranging them in a perfect line. “The disruption concerned me, not her.”
Liora frowned. “You? But you weren’t being Weighed.”
“No.” Sabine’s fingers drifted unconsciously to her collarbone. “Yet it seems the Registry had other plans.”
She drew a deep breath and tried to smile. “Come, let us get a bite to eat first. I’m famished.”
In the kitchen, Ellie was already bustling, arms full of groceries that looked bruised and tired. A pang of guilt gnawed at Sabine’s gut.
In the prime of their valenhold, Ellie had joined their family as a young widow, barely older than Liora was today, to be Sabine’s lady’s maid; now she was all things—a cook, a housekeeper, a shield against the world.
Sabine knew she could have left, found a better position, and never looked back, especially after Sabine had to dismiss her brother, who’d worked for them as a valet. But Ellie hadn’t.
“My lady!” Ellie abandoned the groceries to hover at Sabine’s side. “You look awfully pale. Would you like me to make you some tea? I can bring it to the parlor.”
“Actually, Ellie, we would like a bite.” Sabine was already reaching for the food Ellie had set on the table. “Anything good in here?”
Day-old bread, tomatoes bruised and sinking in on themselves, potatoes just starting to sprout.
“I was going to make a stew for dinner…” Ellie offered, like she needed to defend her purchases.
“Do we still have that marmalade you made last week?” “In the cupboard, my lady.”
Sabine busied herself with the stove, using a match to light the gas hearth.
Ellie fussed about, shifting her weight from foot to foot, as if unsure how to deal with her employer seizing the kitchen.
Sabine covered the bottom of an old, blackened pan with an inch of olive oil before tearing off chunks of the bread and rolling the crumb into small balls.
She fried them in the oil until they turned crisp and golden, then set them on a plate.
She then dug through the shelves for a knife and the jar, sliced each breadcrumb ball in half, and spread it with jam, reassembled it, then rolled it in sugar.
It was a quick and cheap semblance of a doranelle, and it reminded Sabine of prowling the valenhold’s festivals with her mother in search of street food.
Sabine handed out a piece each to Liora and Ellie, then grabbed one for herself.
They ate in silence, the three of them clustered at the table, pretending for a moment that nothing had changed.
“So then, will you tell me what happened at the Registry?” Liora asked around a bite of bread.
Ellie stiffened. “Something happened at the Registry?”
Sabine took a deep breath. “A small accident with the High Binder.”
Simultaneously, her sister leaned forward, ready to receive some juicy gossip, while Ellie recoiled like the name alone was a curse. Sabine told them everything: her pupil’s success, her mark flaring to life, the High Binder singling her out to Weigh her in private.
“You? Creation affinity?” Liora interrupted, looking at her own hands as if they had somehow deeply disappointed her. “Imagine how easy marrying would be with an affinity so rare…”
Sabine did not wish to imagine it. She’d spent her entire adult life knowing she would never marry, never wield magic because of it. She’d been happy, or at least satisfied, with her chosen profession, with the life that awaited her.
Now, she had to rewrite her entire future to include this rare affinity and this pre-determined blood vow that would awaken it. Her skin rose in shivers as she remembered Lord Vaelros’s fingers wrapped around her elbow, his unyielding hardness directed at her.
She would not allow the Registry to bind her to the Empire’s deadliest weapon. If it were the last thing she did, Sabine would find a way to escape this match.
She fisted her hands. “You’re not grasping the implications of this. The Registry expects me to participate in the Season, and you know as well as I that it is not cheap.”
Liora flinched, but only for a moment. “It’s not all bleak. You know how many would kill to bond with Creation? If you make a good match, that could change things. For both of us.”
Ellie moved about the kitchen, quieter than usual, her gaze fixed on some distant point. She lingered by the door, as if Registry officials might burst in at any moment.
“Lili. Listen.” Sabine’s own voice sounded unfamiliar, scraped raw by the exhaustion of the day.
“We can’t afford to debut two of us this Season.
Not with the gowns, the dowries, the gondola rentals, and the cost of organizing two blood vows.
Even if we sold everything worth pawning, it wouldn’t cover half of it. ”
Liora’s fingers tightened around the edge of her plate. “So I have to wait until next cycle. Again. Bine, do you know how many girls are presented at twenty? None. That’s basically a dowager by Gilt standards. It’s not fair. I’ve done everything right.”
The words between them hung sharp enough to cut.
Sabine could have reminded her sister that she herself was six-and-twenty, about to debut a relic, but she didn’t think it’d help.
“It isn’t fair, but the Registry’s made it clear.
They’ll have all eyes on me, and we’ll be lucky if I’m not made a spectacle. ”
Liora dabbed her lips with her napkin. “Maybe… maybe it doesn’t have to be a disaster. Your affinity will draw suitors from every province. If you make a good match, maybe even someone with a royal title… I could debut next year with twice the prospects. Three times.”
The logic was brittle, but Liora clung to it with the tenacity of someone drowning.
Sabine admired the quick recalibration, the way her sister found it in herself to remain hopeful that the Empire would somehow provide for them.
As though it hadn’t abandoned them to their own devices once already, when they needed it the most.
Sabine looked away, studying the grain of the table, the way the lines radiated from a single scar along the edge. She didn’t have the heart to argue.
The silence grew heavy, punctuated only by the anxious tapping of Ellie’s heel against the tile as she busied herself with the tea service.
The scent of bitter leaves hung in the air.
It was all so ordinary, and yet Sabine could feel the world shifting beneath her feet, the axis of their lives creaking toward some inevitable, unthinkable conclusion.
“You’re thinking yourself into a corner again, Bine. I can see the storm behind your eyes,” Liora said at last.
Sabine mustered a smile, thin as rice paper.
For a moment, she considered lying. But Liora would see through that.
“I’m afraid of losing myself. The mark, the blood vows, the endless scrutiny…
It’s all designed to strip away what makes us human.
They want us compliant. Predictable. Less than people. ”
The memory of the cloaked man was an icy finger down her neck.
As if she didn’t have plenty of reason already to be wary of the Registry. Liora rolled her eyes. “That’s dramatic, even for you. Not to mention,
we’re barely scraping by already, so it can’t really get worse.”
Sabine’s hands curled into fists on her lap. “I’d rather be poor and free than gilded and caged.”
“Easy for you to say. Your intelligence affords you the luxury of principles. Marrying is the only route for me to secure my future.”
Sabine flinched. The words hurt more than she expected. “You’re intelligent too, Lili.”
But her sister shook her head. “Not like you. I don’t have a talent for literature or mathematics. Nothing that would allow me a respectable profession, should I ever wish for one. Finishing school taught me the skills to marry well.”
For the first time since Liora had been Weighed at fifteen, Sabine regretted sending her to finishing school instead of completing her studies herself. Maybe then, her sister would have seen herself as smart and capable, not simply as a prize for a titled stranger to pick off a shelf.
Ellie, who had been standing by the sideboard with her back ramrod-straight, cleared her throat.
The sound was so tentative that Sabine almost missed it.
“If I may, Miss Liora, the Registry… it isn’t known for kindness.
I’ve seen what happens to those who resist. It’s worse than you can imagine, miss. The Registry can make life very hard.”
A chill crept up Sabine’s spine, a coldness that had nothing to do with the draft sneaking through the windowpanes.
“Then don’t resist,” Liora said. “The Registry has offered us a golden opportunity to restore our good name, and you both act like obscurity is freedom. You don’t know what it’s like to be nothing. To have no prospects outside of marriage. No future.”
Sabine looked at her sister, really looked, and saw the way her fingers worried the hem of her sleeve. Liora was terrified of disappearing into the gray, undistinguished mass of Velyar’s failed daughters.
For a moment, Sabine’s anger softened into something like pity. Or perhaps it was guilt. “You’re not nothing. You could never be nothing as long as I live. If it came to it, I’d support you as a governess forever, Lili. Gladly.”
Liora looked away, blinking rapidly.
Ellie poured the sisters twin cups of tea with hands that shook just enough to make the liquid shiver against the porcelain. Sabine wrapped her fingers around the cup, letting the heat seep into her skin.
“And I’d gladly pay whatever price the Empire requires,” Liora said. “If it meant we could walk through the Gilt Quarter with our heads high again. If it meant you didn’t have to work as a governess any longer. I want security. Safety. I’m tired of being afraid, Bine. Aren’t you?”
Sabine hesitated, the question ringing in her ears.
When her parents had grown sick, the Fade had not really been known.
In the Gilt’s minds, then, surely—if their magic had forsaken them, they must’ve done something wrong, something outside the Registry’s regulations, to warrant such backlash. The gossips had run wild.
Unsanctioned bond. Secret Gloamreach rituals.
Never mind that their parents’ blood vow was well documented in the Registry’s own archives, or that their valenhold was nowhere near the Gloamreach. The Gilt had believed it all.
And so her parents had died alone, and in shame. The only promise Sabine had made, the only one that mattered to this day, was to care for her sister.
So she took a deep breath and straightened her spine. “You’re right, we have nothing to fear.”
She squeezed Liora’s hand, though the pamphlet in her pocket burned with its own secret heat, quietly contradicting her words. “And we will find a way to succeed, this Season. For us both.”