Page 13 of The False Vow

On the other…I knew all too well what happened to silkwitches once they wed Weavers. And while I had never met Cyril, picturing the waifish, wide-eyed girl I’d befriended during the Vainglory bound to him—her Wit stripped away to nothing, the mirrors she’d once relied on closing to her one by one, like doors shutting—it undid something inside me.

I supposed that was why I’d sent her the note.

Initially, I’d meant my missive only as a warning. During the competition, I’d once summoned Marie-Louise by pressing a piece of paper up against a looking glass, so I’d employed the same tactic, writing out what I’d learned from Noé about the truth of the Weavers and passing it to her via the standing mirror from my old room. I’d held nothing back; a small part of me had protested it was dangerous, revealing such a consequential secret to a girl whose acquaintance I’d made so recently, but I’d fought the hesitation down.

I’d betrayed Eliot so that I might stand a chance of taking down the Weaver King. I would not betray my own kind.

Back in the present, I stiffened as the surface of my looking glass suddenly dimmed. In the center of the mirror, a small black mark had appeared: circular, about the size of a coin, and charred-looking, as though someone had held a candle too close to the glass’s opposite side.

As I watched, the blemish expanded. It burned rapidly outward, advancing with an uneven, liquid quickness like flame through paper until eventually the entire looking glass had been rendered opaque. Blackened, as thoroughly as bread left in the oven.

Then there was a flicker—a shiver in the depths of the mirror, like an eye stirring beneath its lid—and the darkness vanished as abruptly as it had risen. When the glass cleared again, I was no longer alone.

Marie-Louise stood gazing out of my bedroom window, her face turned away from me so that only her back was displayed in the mirror’s reflection. She was dressed formally, in a gray satin gown with a large bow cinched around her middle, her white-blond hair gathered in a netted silver caul. I flinched when I saw her but did not scream. It was a vast improvement from the first time she’d visited, when I’d discovered her staring out of the depths of my mirror once I’d pulled the coverings off in the morning to dress.

If I turned and glanced away from the looking glass, toward the spot where she stood in its reflection, I knew from experience that I would not find her. The Owl existed only within the mirror itself—thrown, like light is thrown, from the far place she occupied to the corner of my bedroom. Only a few months ago, I would have thought such a feat impossible for a girl of our kind, the magic too big for a mere silkwitch; now I knew that the ability was no more than an extrapolation of her Wit, such as that which Noé had described to me at the end of the Vainglory. Mirror traveling, she called it. Apparently, it had taken Marie-Louise only a few weeks to discover the skill after I’d revealed the truth about our gifts to her, a fact which never failed to make me feel inadequate.

I quieted my thoughts as, in the reflection, Marie-Louise turned. Her eyes found me over the curve of her shoulder, as large as ever, her gaze curious and unblinking like a fish surfacing from the deep. “I heard you knocking,” she said.

She avoided all niceties. It was one of the qualities which I enjoyed most about her.

“Yes,” I answered. Appraising her outfit, the meticulous arrangement of her hair, I added, “You look quite pretty. I do hope I’m not interrupting anything?”

The Owl’s stare drifted. “Cyril has requested that I accompany him on an excursion tonight,” she replied. “We are to visit the estate of his family friend. It seems they have a hall of mirrors on the premises, which he thinks I will enjoy.”

She spoke with a dreamy nonchalance, as though she were merely repeating a story which she’d heard secondhand. At her words, I smiled in spite of myself. According to Noé, the de Lesseps Weavers were a notoriously reclusive bunch. I’d been concerned over the idea of the Owl shut up in her fiancé’s drafty country house and was glad to hear he’d arranged for her to have some fun.

“And will you?” I asked.

She tilted her head, considering. “I suppose it shall depend on what I see.”

By her tone, I understood that she was referring to the contents of the mirrors, rather than the hall itself. The remark reminded me of my original purpose in summoning her. “Well, I will endeavor not to keep you for long,” I said. “I called only to ask you a question.”

The Owl blinked guilelessly at me. “A question?”

I nodded. “During the Vainglory, you told me that you saw a figure in my room the evening of the Midway Ball, prior to Miss Dabos’s death. I wish to know whether you observed anything else curious that night.”

The inquiry intrigued her, as I’d guessed it would. “I was apart from my mirrors for most of that evening,” she answered a moment later. “I noticed the disturbance in your chamber only in passing, through one of the looking glasses in the Alaires’ ballroom. It was likely that I should have missed it altogether, but I was paying special attention to you.”

My brow creased. “Why?”

The Owl’s lips pursed. “Because I found you fascinating,” she replied, as though it were obvious.

A shiver went down my back at her words. It was uncomfortable, realizing that all the while I’d been investigating Ophelia Lear’s murder, the very subjects I’d been studying had been, in turn, observing me. Relatively speaking, the Owl was a friendly force; even if she had spied on me in secret, how closely had my enemies been watching?

I set the unpleasant question aside for now. “And after Miss Dabos had passed?” I asked. “The party broke up once she was discovered to be missing. Did you see anything later that night, after we’d all returned to our rooms?”

In the mirror, Marie-Louise shook her head. “Miss Dabos had gone somewhere I could not reach,” she said. “I searched my mirrors for signs of her when the Alaires first started looking, but I could not find her.”

The tunnels. I knew the destination Marie-Louise spoke of, of which she herself was ignorant. Sybil, Clio Lavoie, and I were the only maidens aware of the tunnels’ existence, aside from Ophelia Lear. Sybil because she, like me, had been searching for the moonless door which Eliot’s sister had found the year prior; Clio because Dorian Drake had taken her in to hunt for the missing key after it had vanished, and our final trial had been conducted there. Noé and Bastian were familiar with the passages, too, naturally, as were Dorian and Eliot.

Was Sybil’s killer one of us? Or had another individual slipped beneath Fortblanche the night of her murder, as invisible to those of us aboveground as a worm buried in the earth?

“Have you discovered a new mystery?”

I blanched. Marie-Louise appeared curious, in that childlike way of hers, as if she were concerned not so much with the consequences of an issue, but more enthused by the prospect of a puzzle to solve.

It made me uneasy. I couldn’t forget that as helpful as the Owl was, she was a suspect in Sybil’s death, too. If I wanted to solve the murder Bastian had tasked me with before my wedding day, I needed to tread carefully. “I fear one has been thrust upon me,” I replied. Settling my hands in my lap, I asked, “And you are certain there is nothing else you noticed during the ball? Perhaps even something inconsequential which struck you as being out of place?”