“Can I help you, miss?” Elizabeth said loudly.
She pulled her sister up and off the villain. Chloe winked and melted into the crowd.
Mr. Bunyan scrambled to his feet and raced on, casting a triumphant look over his shoulder at Elizabeth, who trailed farther and farther behind as she pretended to chase him.
She gave up the act as soon as he disappeared from sight.
Overhead, a large brown hawk swooped down from the bright blue sky. The raptor had found them.
Chloe held up her palm as the bird dived toward her. The hawk’s claws raked gently across her skin, scooping up a slender brass key. The trained raptor soared back into the sky, racing over the trees and across the road to a distant rooftop, where their brother Graham crouched, waiting.
He caught the key and bounded across the skyline, vanishing into the distance.
Elizabeth and her sister made their way toward Jacob’s waiting carriage.
Chloe turned her head toward Elizabeth. “I must return to my baby. Come with me? We’ve got lemon ices.”
Reflexively, Elizabeth took a cautionary step back. “Absolutely not. You know I’ll have nothing to do with babies.”
“Then you’re letting the others have a head start at being ‘favorite aunt,’” Chloe warned.
“Pah.” Elizabeth smiled her cobra smile. “I’ll be his favorite aunt once he’s big enough to hold a sword.”
2
Elizabeth startled awake in pitch blackness. Without making a sound, she kept perfectly still as she took careful inventory of her body.
First her toes. Her feet were sweltering. It was the beginning of May and she was draped with a blanket, but other than a bit hot, her feet were fine. Calves… would do. Knees… good. Thighs… normal. Hips…
Ah, there it was. The familiar ache she dreaded every time she was forced to give chase. Flinging herself into a full-blown tackle hadn’t been the gentlest of maneuvers. It would have been easier to launch her sword through the thief’s chest. If it weren’t for a certain sibling’s stuffy rules about not murdering ruffians in front of bystanders.
Elizabeth’s back… Yes, her back definitely still felt that last tackle, but at least the muscles weren’t spasming. Maybe her daily stretches had been helping, or maybe she’d just been lucky this time. There wasn’t always a clear cause-and-effect to these things. Intermittent, debilitating flare-ups had plagued her since birth. Elizabeth’s body would, on its own timetable and sometimes without warning, shut down for days or weeks at a time, and cause extraordinary pain.
She could trust her sword, and she could trust her siblings, but she couldn’t trust her own damn body.
Elizabeth was never one hundred percent perfect, but today, she was all right. Her joints were swollen the way they always were. Hermuscles ached the way they always did. This was a sixty-percent day. As usual, background pain was her constant companion, but at a level tolerable enough to allow for the swinging of blades and the vanquishing of enemies.
“Bad” days were terrible, and “good” days were… well, not terrific in terms of the discomfort that never went away, butgreatin terms of mobility. Eighty percent days were positively marvelous. Especially when there was a mission afoot.
Nonetheless, today she would make do with sixty and no mission. Elizabeth rolled out of bed gingerly and performed her customary hour of morning stretches with great care. She preferred to tempt fate on the battlefield, not by twisting the wrong way when dawn had barely broken.
“Nevershow weakness,” she reminded her looking glass.
The message had been drummed into her as a child. Or shaken into her. And worse. She was no longer with that family, but she carried the hard lessons they’d taught her deep in her bones. It was one of the reasons she loved swords. A blade-wielding madwoman was visibly strong, capable of defending herself and others. And sometimes, first impressions were the only chance you got.
Flare-ups made her vulnerable. After a spate of heroics, her body required rest to fully recover. Only her immediate family had ever seen her in repose on a sofa. Clients and enemies alike believed her to be an indefatigable sword-wielding machine, which was how she liked it.
The other reason she liked swords was because they could be hidden inside swordsticks. Hers doubled as canes, which made them practical as well as deadly. Being underestimated was often a tactical advantage. And sometimes, her body simply needed support.
Elizabeth hurried down the stairs to breakfast. A swift speed made possible by the excellent craftsmanship of the even marble stairs andsmooth wooden banister, and because the gods had blessed her with a greater-than-fifty-percent day.
She burst into the breakfast room with a smile. Not her attacking-cobra smile, but anI’m-ready-for-kippers-and-eggssmile. Which might have been the same smile.
“Good morning,” said Marjorie, who was already at the table. She had a piece of buttered toast in one hand, and a splotch of blue paint on her nose.
Elizabeth cast her gaze toward Marjorie’s husband to see if he, too, was speckled with paint. Answer: not yet. Adrian looked as though he had just woken up, and that his fondest wish was to go right back to bed—with his wife.
How the breakfast table had changed! Twenty-one years ago, an eccentric Balcovian nobleman called Baron Vanderbean had adopted six children between the ages of eight and eleven from various walks of life. They had called him Bean, and he became the father they’d never had.
