Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Vivienne's Smile

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

She arrived at noon.

I was standing under the white pavilion at the edge of the orchid lawn when the last carriage of the Welcoming came down the drive, and even before the footman opened the door I felt the cold begin to walk up between my shoulder blades, the way it had the night I'd seen the silver flame and known what it was for.

Vivienne Marlowe, in this life, was twenty-two.

I had not seen her at twenty-two in the past life. By the time I had learned her name she had been twenty-five, already laced into Damien's household, already the unspoken second mistress of Crescent Fang. By twenty-six she had been the woman who whispered in my ear at my coronation, thank you for keeping him warm.

She stepped down from the carriage on the arm of a small, neat northern noble I did not know.

The dress was sea-green silk. The cloak was silver fox. The hair was up in a coil so precise it looked carved. And on her left wrist, against the inside of the white kid glove she had not yet drawn back on, glittered a thin sapphire bracelet, six stones in a row, the third stone slightly larger than the others.

I had described that bracelet to a midwife in a back room in Ironclaw, two years from now, while we washed blood off her arms. The midwife had wept. She had been a rogue's widow. Her husband had been killed by Crimson Hunt outriders and the bracelet — her bracelet, given to her by a grandmother dead a hundred years — had been cut off her wrist before they buried him.

I knew where it had ended up. I had seen it on Vivienne's arm at a hundred dinners. I had not, in my soft past life, ever known until now to ask.

I knew now.

I let the cold finish climbing my spine. I let it settle into the back of my skull where my smile lived. Then I picked up a fresh flute of wine I had no intention of drinking, and I walked.

"Mother." I caught Eleanor's elbow on the way past. "Who is the lady in green?"

"Marlowe's daughter." Mother's voice was all polite interest. "A second cousin to the Pinewood line, on a tour. Her mother and I correspond in the spring. Be kind, darling, she is said to be shy."

"I shall be very kind," I said.

Lyra, two steps behind me, had picked up the scent of trouble like a hound. "Sis. What are you doing."

"Saying hello."

"You said hello to Damien Cross by curtsying at him from the height of his ankle bones. I am terrified to see what you do when you are kind."

"Stay close," I murmured. "Take notes. There will be a quiz."

I crossed the orchid lawn at a slow, social pace, smiling at the Bluemoon ladies as I passed, pausing to admire a hat. By the time I reached the small group around Vivienne the bracelet was no longer on her bare wrist; she had drawn the glove on. Of course she had. Vivienne had never, in her life, worn a piece of jewellery she had not first considered the angle of.

"Forgive me." I came to a graceful halt three feet from her. "I haven't yet had the pleasure. Selene Hartwell."

"Lady Hartwell." She turned. The eyes were wide-set and grey-green, lashes very dark, mouth small. The face was beautiful enough that I felt a brief, distant ache for the past-life version of me who would have wanted to be friends with her. "Vivienne Marlowe. The honour is entirely mine."

"Welcome to Silvercrest." I let my smile reach my eyes. The trick was always the eyes. "I'm so glad you made the journey. The road from Pinewood is rough this time of year."

"It is." Her smile was perfect. "But I would have walked it on my hands to be received by your mother. She is a legend."

"She'll be sorry to have missed you for a moment longer," I said. "May I steal you for the orangery? I'm told you are interested in flowers."

I was not told that. I had no idea whether she was. Vivienne, in the past life, had cared for nothing in the world that did not fit on a balance sheet. But the question was a polite, ordinary one — a hostess's question. To refuse it would have been the rudest thing she could do in the first thirty seconds of arriving on Silvercrest land.

"I should be delighted," she said.

"This way."

I walked her, slow and chatting, off the orchid lawn and along the gravel toward the orangery. Lyra, like a small loyal shadow, kept three paces behind. Vivienne's escort was abandoned to my mother. I did not hurry. I asked her about Pinewood. I asked her about the road. I admired her cloak. I steered the conversation, gentle and unforced, exactly to the place I wanted it.

"Your bracelet," I said, easily, as if I had only just noticed. "I couldn't help admiring it earlier. The setting is so old."

"Oh." She lifted her gloved wrist as if surprised. The little half-laugh was perfect. "Family piece. I rarely wear it. My grandmother's, on my mother's side."

"Six stones?"

"Yes."

"With the third one slightly larger?"

The smallest pause.

"Yes."

"How clever." I paused at a tall hedge of late roses; I bent and brushed the back of one petal with a fingertip, breathing in. "I once knew a woman who had a bracelet exactly like that. Her grandmother's, too. She was in Ironclaw — south of the river. A widow, very brave. She had lost her husband in a rogue raid and the family pieces had been taken with him, off his body — you know how rogues are."

"Rogues are very wicked," Vivienne agreed. There was just a little less air in her voice now.

"The Crimson Hunt particularly," I said softly, "in those years. A great deal of plundering of pack widows. A great many small jewelleries that travelled north on a black market route the Lycan Court has been chasing for two years now, and not catching."

"How dreadful."

"Yes." I turned to her. I let the smile stay exactly as warm as it had been one minute ago. "I write to her sometimes. The widow. Her name is Halia Voss. She would so dearly love to know if any of her grandmother's pieces have come back to the world. Especially the bracelet. She was very specific about the third stone."

Vivienne's gloved hand had drifted, without her quite knowing it, to her left wrist. Her fingers closed lightly over the bracelet through the kid leather. The colour was draining out of her face from the cheekbones down, the way fresh ink draws back from a blotter. Her mouth opened. It closed.

"Lady Hartwell."

"Mm?"

"I — I think you may be mistaken."

"I am sometimes," I said pleasantly. "But I am very rarely mistaken about a stone I have held in my own hand."

Lyra, at my shoulder, made a tiny choked sound she covered with a cough.

"You have held —"

"I had the chance, last winter," I murmured, "to inspect a portrait Halia keeps of her grandmother. Such a clear painter. The artist did the third stone in a half-finger of paint thicker than the others, because the goldsmith had set it slightly proud. I noticed. I have a memory for such things."

I had no portrait. There was no last winter. There was, perhaps, a Halia Voss; in the past life I had only ever heard her name twice, both times from servants. I would write to find her this week. I would write a great many letters this week.

Vivienne knew none of that.

What Vivienne knew was that a girl of seventeen, in the second hour of a country Welcoming, had walked her into an orangery and described, with frightening accuracy, a piece of jewellery that should not be on her wrist. She knew Halia Voss's name. She knew the third stone. She knew, with the particular instinct of a small predator suddenly aware of a larger one in the next field, that something here was wrong, and she had no map of it.

She did the only thing she could do. She rallied.

"How interesting." Her smile came back. It was thinner now; her lips had lost a little blood. "I shall write to my mother and ask her about it. Perhaps the piece travelled longer than we knew. I shouldn't like to wear something that didn't sit well on my wrist."

"I shouldn't like that for you either," I said softly. "It is such a pretty thing. The lady I borrowed mine from would love to see it again. Perhaps I'll send her your address — would you like that?"

"That won't be necessary," she said. Quickly. Too quickly.

"Of course not." I smiled. "Forgive me. I am entirely forward this morning. The journey must be tiring you. Shall we find you a chair?"

"I — yes." Her lashes flickered. "Yes. A chair."

I led her back across the orchid lawn at the same slow pace I had brought her in. I deposited her, charmingly, into the care of Mother and the small northern escort. I curtsied, exactly the right depth, and removed myself.

I felt her eyes on my back the entire walk to the pavilion.

I also felt another pair of eyes, from the far side of the lawn, where Damien Cross had been standing in conversation with Lord Brennan and three of my father's older council members. He was not in conversation now. He was looking at me. His face had gone entirely smooth.

He had watched Vivienne walk in.

He had watched me walk her into a hedge.

He had watched her walk out of it three shades paler.

Lyra caught up to me in the shade of the pavilion. She did not say anything for a long moment. Then she leaned her shoulder, lightly, against mine. The lemon-ice smear was gone from her sleeve.

"Sis."

"Mm."

"What just happened."

"I introduced myself," I said.

"You introduced yourself."

"To both of them," I clarified.

Lyra was quiet a long time. Across the lawn, Vivienne Marlowe was pretending, very prettily, to admire my mother's herbaceous border, while she stripped the right glove off her hand to fan herself and very, very deliberately did not lift the left.

"Sis."

"Mm."

"I do not understand what is happening today."

"I know."

"But I want you to know," she said, lower, "that I am with you. Whatever this is."

I closed my eyes for one breath. The sun was warm on my eyelids. Inside my chest, where I had been a smouldering ruin yesterday, something small and bright was beginning, instead, to burn. Not silver. Not pyre. A clean, narrow, useful flame.

"I know that too," I said, and I opened my eyes, and I lifted my untouched flute of wine, and I tipped its rim, very lightly, in the direction of Damien's smooth face on the far side of the orchid lawn.

The afternoon was just beginning.