Chapter 14 #2
Sabine’s cheeks went warm again, and she hated herself for it.
She forced out a laugh, certain that people were staring.
Lord Vaelros signaled the merchant, who named a price that made the Gilt girls at the counter gasp.
Without so much as a blink, Lord Vaelros paid—no haggling, no accounting for the absurdity of the sum.
They moved away from the stall. Sabine touched the pin in her hair and groaned. “You’re overplaying it. The point is to appear plausible. Not to bankrupt yourself on market trinkets.”
He stopped her just shy of a knot of onlookers and leaned in as if to murmur some private adoration.
Instead, he said, “You underestimate the appetite these people have for spectacle.” He brushed his thumb along the edge of the pin in her hair until it caught the light, then drew it in a single line down her cheek.
“Isn’t this exactly what you want them to see? ”
His tone was infuriatingly mild, but his touch was not. His thumb glided down to trace the line of her cheek. “Let them talk. Let them say you’ve ensnared the Emperor’s Hand, that his wealth is at your disposal.”
The words were simple, but Sabine felt them like a thumb pressed to a bruise.
She had never wanted to be seen as an ornament on someone else’s arm.
Yet here she was, shining with someone else’s diamonds, her face arranged to please a crowd.
And she couldn’t shy away from it, because once again, he was right.
The Registry may have decreed their match, but the Gilt needed to believe Sabine was poised to gain much more from it than she truly did.
They needed to be convinced that, as Lady Vaelros, she would have her husband’s ear and his purse, the ability to influence society if not by her proximity to the Emperor, then with her immense wealth.
All of it disgusted Sabine. But it was for Liora’s sake, and for her sister, she would do anything. Even sell herself to the Gilt’s gossip-hungry stares.
The crowd parted with smooth efficiency for an oncoming trio.
The matchmaker emerged first, a woman whose age sat somewhere between fifty and ageless, her face emotionless beneath a hat elaborate enough to house a small bird.
Her ornate fan, ivory staves with gold leaf at the tips, hung open at her side like a weapon held at ease.
Beside her came the Duchess of Marethine in burgundy velvet, and behind them, a young man who could only be Lord Blackwell.
He was of average height and build, with an angular brow and a neatly parted spill of ink-black hair.
Despite his impeccable grooming, Sabine would’ve never picked him out of a crowd; nothing about his appearance was remarkable.
If one had to describe him, it would be a man expertly crafted for the background of a portrait, never the subject.
“Lord Vaelros,” the matchmaker said. “Miss Almarien. How fortuitous.”
Nothing about this encounter was fortuitous, and they all knew it.
The woman’s gaze dissected them, traveling up and down their frames, before settling on the pin in her hair. “Lovely jewel, Miss Almarien. Is it one of Lady Delarine’s?”
Sabine’s fingers instinctively reached for the hairpin. “No, it is—”
“A gift,” Lord Vaelros interjected. “She was drawn to it, and I find myself more and more incapable of denying her wishes.”
It was an obvious lie. What he could not deny were his Emperor’s orders, not Sabine’s wishes. But the words hung in the air, gilded and irrefutable, and they rang true even to Sabine, who knew better.
“I’ve heard such encouraging accounts from those who observed your pairing at the Symphony Ball.” The matchmaker tilted her fan. “The Registry must be pleased with such a compatible match. When might we expect a formal announcement?”
The question landed with the weight of a thrown stone. Sabine’s pulse kicked up, but before she could formulate a response, Lord Vaelros spoke.
“These matters progress according to their own rhythm, Madame. Though I confess myself fortunate in the Registry’s discernment.” His gaze found Sabine’s, held it with an intensity that could pass for affection. “Miss Almarien possesses a remarkable intellect. Our conversations are never dull.”
Silence, brief but meaningful, and then the matchmaker’s fan shifted.
Sabine became aware, distantly, that she had stopped breathing at a normal rate.
She corrected it. She turned to the matchmaker with what she trusted was a look of modest deflection, the kind that said the compliment was generous, but the truth was more complicated.
It was the correct look. She was fairly certain she wore it convincingly.
She was less certain of anything in the two seconds before she produced it.
“You are too kind, my lord,” she told Lord Vaelros, and was relieved to hear her own voice come out smooth.
The matchmaker, meanwhile, had already moved on, stepping from one subject to the next with the efficiency of someone who billed by the hour and charged accordingly.
“Your sister debuted this Season as well, didn’t she? Miss Liora Almarien?” She posed it as a question, but she already knew the answer.
Something tightened in Sabine’s chest. She took the shape of the conversation and turned it carefully in her mind, looking at all its surfaces.
The Duchess of Marethine had not moved. Her son stood behind her with the mild attentiveness of someone who had been told to be present and was managing it gamely.
He was, Sabine noted now, of reasonable age and bearing, and the Blackwell estate—
Oh . She understood.
“Yes,” Sabine said, and let warmth fill her words in earnest, because she did not have to manufacture this particular warmth.
“Liora is truly remarkable. Her musical abilities are astounding. She performs with a sensibility that most people spend a lifetime developing.” She paused, as if the next detail were only an afterthought. “She wields Water.”
The matchmaker’s fan did not move, but her gaze did—a brief flicker toward the Duchess.
Sabine pressed forward, carefully. “And of course, with Creation in the bloodline—” She let the pause do its work. “—one can only imagine what the next generation might produce.”
The Duchess of Marethine did not smile. She was, Sabine suspected, a woman who found smiling an unnecessary excess. But something loosened in her expression, the way a knot loosened when the right thread was pulled.
The matchmaker asked three more questions: about Liora’s aptitude for social management, about whether she had yet formed any particular attachments, and about the nature of the Almarien estate’s current holdings.
Each one Sabine answered with the same calibrated care, offering what served and holding back what didn’t, threading the needle between honesty and advocacy with everything she’d learned in a decade of navigating rooms where the wrong answer cost more than the question was worth.
At last, the Duchess signaled their leave with a small incline of her head.
Courtesies were exchanged, farewells spoken, and the group moved on through the market’s tide.
Sabine watched them go. She tracked the matchmaker as the woman separated herself from the Blackwells.
Near the edge of the bridge, where the market thinned into a stretch of open railing over the canal, a boy waited with the particular stillness of someone paid to be unnoticed.
The boy was perhaps fourteen, his clothes too large and his posture too carefully casual.
A gossip sheet runner—Sabine had seen enough of them in Ilvarenne to recognize the breed.
The matchmaker moved with practiced subtlety, passing something small and folded to the boy along with what looked like several coins. The exchange took less than ten seconds, executed with the smooth efficiency of frequent repetition.
The boy pocketed both items and vanished into the crowd. Sabine’s breath caught, lodged somewhere between her throat and chest. Her fingers found Lord Vaelros’s forearm and tightened, nails biting through the fabric of his coat.
“What—” he started.
“The matchmaker.” Sabine couldn’t look away from where the woman had been, though she had already melted back toward her original group. “She just paid a gossip runner.”
Sabine stood very still and let herself feel the fragile, precarious thing that had just taken root. Not hope, exactly. She was too careful for hope.
Something one step before it.