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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: The Boy in the Cellar
Seraphine woke at noon, and the first thing she said was, "You did not name her."Kael looked up from the chair beside the bed. He had not slept. He had not, he realized, moved from that chair in six hours, and his neck had set like iron. Across the room, the bride lay curled on the rug with her head on her arm, sleeping the shallow, restless sleep of someone who had forgotten how."Who told you?""She did, in the dark, after you came home. She talked until her voice gave out." Seraphine's eyes were open and clear. The black lines had faded from her throat as though they had been chalk wiped from a slate. The wound at her ribs had closed in the night to a small silver scar. She looked pale, and exhausted, and appallingly alive. "You walked into that hall. You had one accusation. And you did not name the woman in blue.""She was a seamstress.""You could not have known.""I did not know. I only knew that I could not do it." He rubbed his eyes. "I find I am not very good at killing peop
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: One Accusation
Kael walked across the nave of the cathedral with the bride at his elbow and two hundred borrowed faces turning to watch, and when he reached the southern pillar, he stopped an arm's length from the woman in blue.He still could not see her face. It was still a bright, warm smear, like a thumbprint on glass."Who are you?" he said."A face may not lie," said the woman, in a voice that was not his mother's at all. It was small and cracked, and it shook. "So I will tell you the truth. I am Hannah Marsh. I sew shirts in the cloth hall on Tanner's Row.""They came to my house three days ago." Hannah Marsh's hands were trembling. The thin black-bladed dagger in her palm shivered with them. "They took my boy. He is six. They said I might have him back at dawn if I stood in this hall and wore a lady's face and held this knife where you could see it." Tears ran down a face he could not see. "I only wanted my son."Kael looked down at the dagger.It was not steel. Up close, it was only paper,
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: The Masquerade of Borrowed Faces
The Great Hall of the Cathedral had been made into a hall of faces.Kael stood on the threshold at the stroke of midnight, with the bride at his side in a gown of borrowed gray, and for a long moment he could not make himself go in. Two hundred people filled the vast nave beneath the blazing chandeliers, and not one of them wore a mask. They did not need to. Every face in the hall belonged to someone else.Tall mirrors lined the walls. Candle flames doubled and redoubled in them. Guests drifted between the pillars, laughing, murmuring, lifting glasses of pale wine, and each one wore a countenance Kael almost knew. Two women had both borrowed the face of the same long-dead queen."Do not look at them too long," murmured the bride. She had taken his arm and was holding it with both hands. "They want you to look.""I know.""Think very quietly, Kael.""I am trying."Cassian and Lucan came toward them down the long aisle, arm in arm, wearing their own faces, which was the cruelest joke of
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: An Invitation from Envy
By noon, Seraphine could no longer stand.Kael carried her up the east stair himself, past the white-faced servants and the knights who stepped silently out of his way, and laid her on his own bed with the black lines glistening along her throat like cracks in porcelain. The court physician came and went with his bag and his useless herbs. He said the word fever. He said it twice and would not meet Kael's eyes.The bride sat at the head of the bed with her sister's hand in both of hers. She did not weep. She had the look of a woman holding a door shut against a storm."It will reach her heart at dawn," she said."Not if I find him.""Kael." She said it gently. "We do not even know who we are looking for."He stood at the window, because if he stood anywhere else, he thought he might break something. Isolde's knights were drawn up in the courtyard below. Across the city, the red sky had thickened to the color of a bruise. Somewhere out there, in the crowded streets of Valmere, a man wh
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: The Price of a Promise
They searched the palace for three hours, and it was Seraphine who found him.She did not find him with her eyes. She found him with the thorn. Kael felt it too, a thin, steady tug at his wrist, like a fishhook set in the skin, and when he turned in the long gallery where Isolde's knights were tearing down tapestries, Seraphine was already standing very still with her hand pressed to her side and her head tilted, listening."Blood calls to blood," she said. "The man carried yours. It knows where he is.""Where?""Down."She led them through the servants' passage and out a small iron door that Kael had not used in twelve years. A narrow gravel path ran between hedges gone brown and wild. At the end of it, behind a crumbling wall, lay a garden.He stopped.It was the east garden. The old kitchen plot, abandoned for years, grown over with nettles and bindweed. A rotting bench. A broken sundial. And at the far end, spreading its bare gnarled limbs against the red sky, a pear tree he had c
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: The Lien
Seraphine's blood was black.Kael saw it at dawn, when the gray light crept through the shutters and fell across the great chair where she had slept sitting up. The bandage at her ribs had soaked through in the night. The stain was not red. It was the color of ink, and it had crept up the black silk of her gown in a slow, branching pattern, like frost on a window."It is nothing," she said, before he could speak."It is not nothing.""I have had worse.""You have not," said the bride, from the bed, in a small flat voice. She had pushed back her own sleeve. Along the inside of her left arm, delicate as the roots of a plant, ran a network of faint black veins. "I have the same. It started at midnight."Kael knelt in front of the chair. "Let me see.""Kael—""Seraphine." He kept his voice very gentle. "Please."She looked at him for a long moment. Then, stiffly, she unfastened her gown at the side and let him lift the bandage.The wound had not closed. It had not healed at all. It lay op
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