Chapter 1: The Tea Was Too Hot

The first thing I knew was heat.

It was in my fingertips, coming through porcelain so thin I could see the shadow of my own thumb through it. The second thing was the smell: bergamot, and something floral under it, violets maybe, sweet enough to make my back teeth hurt. The third thing was that my arm was up. Straight up, elbow locked, wrist already turning, and the cup at the end of it was over somebody's head.

A golden head. Hair pinned in a low, smooth coil with a white ribbon threaded through it. Perfectly still.

Steam touched the inside of my wrist.

Around us a whole garden had stopped breathing: eight or nine young women in silks the colours of sugared almonds, fans frozen halfway to their faces, a girl in yellow with both hands clapped over her mouth. Behind a hedge a fountain went on chattering to itself, the only thing in the place with no sense of occasion.

What, I thought, the actual hell.

I had been in the office kitchen. I was sure of that. I'd had a tub of yesterday's soup going round in the microwave and my phone propped against the kettle, and I'd been rereading a scene from the trashy romance-fantasy I was getting through on my lunch breaks, because the comments under it were having a war. The microwave had beeped. I'd reached for it.

Now my hand was full of tea and my wrist was tipping on its own.

I didn't decide to tilt it. The tilt was already happening, slow and practised, as if the arm belonged to someone who had done this before and enjoyed it very much. I watched the amber line of tea creep up to the lip of the cup.

I knew this scene.

Chapter three of Thorns for the Saint. Garden party at Vauclair House. The villainess, Lady Seraphine Vauclair, pours a cup of scalding tea over the head of her brand-new fiancée, Saint Elodie, in front of half the court's daughters, and the Saint sits there with tea running into her collar and says, Thank you, my lady. I was cold. Everybody falls a little in love with her and hates Seraphine forever. Two hundred and twenty-six chapters later they take Seraphine out onto the palace steps and cut her head off, and the comment section throws a party.

I'd read it four times. The comments were arguing about whether the Saint was a saint or just dead inside.

My wrist turned another fraction.

No. No no no. Absolutely not.

I yanked.

It was like pulling a drawer that sticks: a stupid, total effort, and then everything gives at once. The cup jerked back towards me and the tea didn't go on the Saint. It slopped over the rim, down my wrist and straight into my sleeve.

I made a noise like a kettle. The cup left my hand and burst on the flagstones between my shoes, and the girl in yellow let out a very small, very correct scream, as if someone had once taught her how.

Then the Saint stood up.

She didn't hurry. She did it the way people get up from kneeling in church: unfold, straighten, smooth the skirt. She was taller than I'd pictured. The book had said slight and pale a great deal. It had not said she would be able to look me dead level in the eye, or that her eyes would be the grey-green of a pond in shade, calm all the way down to wherever the bottom was.

"Your hand, my lady," she said.

Her voice was soft. Not weak. Soft the way a closed door is soft.

"It's fine."

It was not fine. My wrist had gone a shiny, furious red, and the lace at the cuff had glued itself to the skin.

She took it anyway.

Her fingers closed round my forearm just below the elbow, cool and dry, and she turned my hand over the way a jeweller turns a ring under a lamp. I let her. Without looking, she reached past me, picked up the jug of iced lemon water from the table and poured it over the burn in a thin, careful stream.

The cold hit like a slap. I hissed through my teeth.

"Hold still," she said. "Please."

She put the please last, as if she'd remembered it on the way.

Lemon water ran off my fingertips onto the broken cup. I could feel every fan in the garden turned towards us, and, very precisely, the shape of her thumb on the soft inside of my arm, pressing just hard enough to keep my hand under the stream, and the fact that she hadn't blinked once since she stood up.

"Seraphine," somebody breathed behind me. "Did you just... miss?"

I'm sorry, I thought at the Saint, as hard as I could. I'm not her. I'm Tessa. I'm twenty-nine. I process invoices for a freight company and I have a soup going cold in a microwave in a world that has microwaves, and I would really, really prefer not to be beheaded.

What came out of my mouth, in a voice that wasn't mine at all, lower and lazier, a voice that had obviously been raised on silk and contempt, was:

"The tea was too hot."

Nobody said anything.

"For her," I added. "I was checking."

The girl in yellow made a sound into her hands. The Saint looked up from my wrist for the first time. Something moved at the very corner of her mouth and was gone again, like a fish turning under the surface.

"How thoughtful," she said.

· · ·

My maid was called Pim, and she talked the way milk boils over.

"—and Lady Corinne'll have it round the Upper Ward by supper, she's got a mouth like a town crier and half the sense, and you, my lady, you, of all people — hold still, it'll blister—"

I held still. I was at a dressing table in a bedroom the size of my entire flat, with Pim painting honey onto my burn with a goose feather, looking in the mirror.

Seraphine Vauclair looked back.

The book had called her beautiful in the way of a drawn blade. I'd thought that was a bit much. It wasn't. She had black hair sliding loose from about forty pins, a long pale face, and a mouth that sat naturally in an expression of mild disgust, as if someone nearby had just admitted to enjoying mime. Her brows looked like they'd been drawn on by somebody who meant it. According to Pim, who had already mentioned it twice in the course of other sentences, she had turned twenty-four at the start of the month and thrown her own birthday cake at a viscount.

I raised one eyebrow, experimentally.

The face in the mirror looked like it was about to have a footman dismissed.

Brilliant, I thought. Resting execution face.

"Pim," I said. "Remind me why I'm engaged to the Saint."

The feather stopped.

"My lady?"

"Humour me. I hit my head."

"You burned your hand."

"Then I hit my head. On the inside." I waved the good hand at her. "Go on. From the top."

She gave me a look as if I'd asked what a door was for. Then, being Pim, she told me at speed.

Elodie had been a dyer's girl from the river towns, until the Temple of the Dawn found the mark on her at nineteen: a small white starburst at the base of her throat that lit when she laid hands on the sick. Raised to Saint last spring, at twenty-five. And under a law nobody had bothered with in a century, a living Saint had to be bound into one of the great houses within the year, that the Light not stand apart from the realm. The King had picked the house. The King had picked Vauclair, because the Duke had too many soldiers and not enough reasons to love the crown, and nothing ties a man to a throne like a holy daughter-in-law.

"And His Grace has only got you," Pim finished. "So."

"So," I said.

"And you stood up in the Chapel—" her voice dropped "—in front of everyone, and said you'd sooner marry the Duke's prize boar, and you put the decree in the brazier."

"That sounds like me," I said faintly.

It did. The Seraphine I'd read spent most of a book being vile to the Saint in creative ways. The tea. The gown that went into the dye vat by "accident". The rumour about the Saint and the stable master. And through all of it Elodie smiled her serene little smile and forgave her, and Crown Prince Lucan watched from various balconies, brooding, falling in love with all that forgiveness.

Then came the Lantern Ball. In front of the King, a small glass bottle slipped out of Seraphine's sleeve and broke on the ballroom floor, and it was poison, and everybody knew exactly whose cup it had been meant for.

Engagement voided. Seraphine in chains. Three days later, the steps.

The Saint married the Prince in the epilogue. I'd skimmed that. I'd skimmed most of the middle, if I was honest: a hundred and forty chapters of border treaties and the Prince staring meaningfully at rivers. I'd jumped to the end because the comments said the execution was unhinged. It had been. I remembered it better than my own phone number.

What I did not remember was the date.

"Pim. When's the Lantern Ball?"

"After the harvest, same as always." She brightened. "Are you going after all? You said you'd sooner—"

"—marry the boar, yes. I've been reconsidering the boar."

Pim gave me the door look again and went back to my wrist.

I made a plan, because that is what I do when the floor falls out. I once rebuilt a whole quarter's accounts after a colleague deleted the shared drive, armed with backups and spite. This was just a bigger drive.

One: do not touch tea. Two: do not touch poison, obviously, but also do not own poison, and if I already owned poison, find out where I'd put it. Three: be nice to the Saint. Relentlessly, boringly nice. Four: get out of the engagement without my head ending up in a basket. Let her marry her prince. Wave from a balcony of my own.

It was a good plan. It had numbers.

In the mirror, Seraphine's face looked at me as if it had never heard anything so pathetic in its life.

· · ·

The Saint came at dusk.

I hadn't known she lived in the house. It was in the decree, Pim said, lighting candles: the Saint was to reside under Vauclair's roof from the day of betrothal, so the two houses might grow used to one another. Elodie had the east wing. I had the west. Between us there was a long gallery full of my ancestors, every one of them painted looking down a nose identical to mine.

Two taps on the door, evenly spaced. Not Pim's knock, which sounded like someone being chased.

Pim opened the door and made the tiniest strangled sound, curtsied so fast she nearly sat down, and fled.

Saint Elodie stood in my doorway holding a small earthenware pot and a roll of linen.

She'd changed into something plain and white, high at the throat. Her hair was down, nearly to her waist, pale as wheat, and with it loose she looked younger and somehow less like a person you could argue with. The starburst at her collarbone showed above the neckline: a faint white mark, like a scratch on glass.

"I've brought something for the burn," she said. "If you'll allow it, my lady."

The Seraphine in the book would have thrown the pot at her head. I knew that because she does, in chapter nine.

"Yes," I said. "Thank you. Please come in."

The Saint's eyebrows rose by perhaps the width of a hair.

She sat on the low stool by my chair as if she'd done it before, unwrapped Pim's towel and wiped the honey off with a damp cloth, gently, all the way round. Her head was bent. From where I sat I could see the parting in her hair and the tops of her lashes, and I could smell her, which I hadn't expected: not violets, not incense. Clean linen and something green, like a stem snapped in half.

I'd spent all afternoon on a speech. It had three supporting points.

"I'm sorry," I said.

Her hands kept moving.

"For the tea. And for..." I flapped the hand she wasn't holding. "The other things."

"Which other things, my lady?"

She said it mildly, the way you'd ask somebody which bread they wanted. She didn't look up.

My mouth went dry. The gown. The dye vat. The stable master. Which of those had already happened? I'd skimmed. I'd skimmed. If I named something the original Seraphine hadn't done yet, I'd be confessing to it in advance.

"All of them," I said. "Generally. As a category."

"As a category," she repeated, and I could have sworn there was something in her voice, the faintest ripple, but her face stayed exactly as calm as before.

She scooped salve out of the pot with two fingers. It was cold and smelled sharply of mint. When she smoothed it over the burn I flinched, and her other hand tightened round my forearm, not hard, just enough to say stay. Then she began to wind the linen, round and round, flat and neat, her fingertips brushing the inside of my wrist with every turn.

My pulse was right there under the bandage, being ridiculous. I was fairly sure she could feel it.

It's the burn, I told myself. Burns make your pulse go. That's medicine.

"Saint Elodie," I said. "If you wanted to petition the King to dissolve this, the engagement, I mean, I wouldn't fight it. I'd sign whatever. I'd tell him it was all my fault, which, to be fair, it mostly is."

Her hands stopped.

The candle by the mirror popped and ran.

"No," she said.

Just that. Soft. The closed-door voice.

"No, you don't want to? Or no, you don't think he'd—"

"No." She started winding again. "I don't think so. Thank you, my lady."

That was all I got. The book's Elodie had wanted out. The book's Elodie had wept about it, beautifully, in chapter twelve, on a bench by a fountain, while the Prince watched from — I was nearly positive — a balcony.

She tied the linen off with a small flat knot and rested two fingers on top of it, a moment longer than any knot needs.

"You didn't pour it," she said.

"No."

"You always pour it."

There was nothing in her face. Pond water. Shade.

I made myself breathe. Always as in Seraphine is always cruel. Her whole personality. That was all she meant. That was obviously all she meant.

The Saint rose, smoothed her skirt and picked up the pot. At the door she turned. The candlelight caught the mark at her throat and for a moment it looked like a thin line of something burning.

"Please be more careful with yourself this time, my lady," she said, as sweetly as anyone has ever said anything. "I would so much rather not watch."