Chapter 4: Ask Me on the Eighteenth

I read it three times. Then a fourth, as if the words might have rearranged themselves into something about mint.

You put it in my tea last time.

Not you'll. Not you were going to. Put. Past tense, with a full stop after it, the way Elodie wrote everything.

I drank it anyway.

The candle on the floor leaned in a draught I couldn't feel. Down in the courtyard the watchman called midnight, and I knelt there with a dead beetle and a bottle of widow's lace in my lap and did the sum.

In the book, the bottle never reached a cup. It fell out of a sleeve and broke on a ballroom floor. I'd read that scene four times. I could have recited it. But the woman who'd tied this bow hadn't read the book. She'd been in it, and in her version Seraphine had got the bottle all the way into a cup, and Saint Elodie had looked down into that cup and known, and lifted it anyway.

So the book was one version. Possibly there were others. Possibly I'd read the one where things went well.

No colour, no taste, no smell, Master Fennick had said. Takes them in their sleep.

I'd skimmed a hundred and forty chapters of rivers. She had died.

I tucked the note into my sleeve, then took it straight out again, because things in sleeves in this house had a habit of ending up on ballroom floors. I held it in my fist instead. I picked up the bottle. I picked up the candle.

Then I went to ask her. Properly. Without a cart.

· · ·

The gallery at midnight was a different room. The windows had gone black, and the polished floor gave my candle back to me from underneath, so I seemed to be walking on a second, upside-down flame. The painted dukes had turned into faces floating over collars. None of them approved of my nightgown.

The east wing smelled of beeswax and cold stone. Her door was the last one.

I knocked twice. Evenly spaced. I hadn't meant to copy her. My knuckles just did it.

The door opened before the second tap had finished.

She was dressed. Not for bed: the plain grey from the soup kitchen, sleeves still pushed to the elbow, her hair in a single plait over one shoulder. Behind her a lamp burned on a little table pulled up to the window. A kettle sat on a spirit stove, steaming quietly, and beside it there were two cups.

Two.

"I saw your candle in the tower," she said. "Come in, my lady. Your feet are bare."

Her room was half the size of mine and had almost nothing in it. A bed with the cover pulled tight, not slept in. A Temple cord of knotted white wool hanging off the bedpost. One chair, which she gave me, and a stool, which she took. From the window, across the roofs, I could see the dark slot of the west tower, where I'd been kneeling ten minutes ago in front of a dead woman's sewing box.

She could see the window seat from here. She'd been sitting here, watching it.

I put the bottle on the table between the cups. The white ribbon lay over the red wax like something asleep.

Elodie looked at it. She didn't touch it.

"Did it hurt?" I said.

It wasn't what I'd planned to ask. I'd planned how and when and what the hell. That was what came out.

Her eyes came up to mine, and for one second the pond wasn't still at all.

"No," she said. "You'd chosen well."

"I'd—"

"You stayed until I was asleep."

I opened my mouth. There was nothing in it.

The kettle ticked on the flame. She poured, neatly, a cup for her and a cup for me, the steam going up in two straight lines in the still air. In the lamplight I saw what I'd never noticed by day: the creases of her knuckles and the skin round her nails were faintly blue, a stain gone so deep it would never wash out. A dyer's girl from the river towns. The Temple had made her holy and hadn't been able to do a thing about her hands.

She pushed my cup an inch towards me.

I didn't pick it up. Risk One. She noticed, and something touched the corner of her mouth and went away again.

"How many times," I said.

"This is the fifth garden party."

"Five."

"You poured the tea four times." She turned her cup a quarter turn on its saucer. "The first time I said thank you, I was cold, because I thought it was a game and I could win it by being kind. The second time I said nothing at all. The third time I moved my chair. You poured it anyway. You got my shoulder."

"And this time I poured it on myself."

"Yes." Her eyes went to my bandage. "That was new."

"And at the end. Every time—"

"The steps."

She said it the way you'd give the name of a street.

"Even the time you..." My mouth wouldn't do died. "The time with the tea."

"Even then. After." She lifted her cup and drank, and I watched her throat move, the white starburst at the base of it, and felt sick in a place that had nothing to do with my stomach. "Nobody needs a bottle to break on the floor, my lady, when they have a Saint who doesn't wake up."

"Why did you drink it?"

She set the cup down. For the first time she picked up the bottle, turned it so the lamp shone green through it, and tugged the loose end of the bow. Not hard enough to undo it.

"Ask me on the eighteenth," she said.

"That's after the ball."

"Yes."

"You think there's going to be an eighteenth."

"I've never seen one," said Elodie. "I'd like to."

I took the bottle out of her hand.

Then I put it back, and folded her fingers round it one at a time, the way you'd make a child hold on to a coin. Her hand was cold. Mine wasn't. Apparently we'd done this in every possible order.

"You keep it," I said.

"My lady—"

"It's been in my box five times. It's been in my sleeve. It's been in your tea. Let's see what it does in your pocket."

She looked down at our hands. Her knuckles had gone pale under the blue.

"You gave it to me last time too," she said quietly. "In a cup."

"Well. This time I'm giving it to you in your hand. Which I'd argue is progress."

Two seconds. Three.

Then she laughed. Not the serene smile, not the book's radiant anything. A short, startled breath out through her nose, as if somebody had stepped on it, and afterwards she put her free hand over her mouth as though she'd dropped a hymnbook in church.

I had made the Saint snort. I wanted that on record.

She took her hand back, and the bottle with it, slid it into the pocket of the grey dress, and stood. The closed-door voice returned. "Go to bed, my lady. The gallery's cold."

At the door I looked back. She was standing by the window with her palm pressed flat over the pocket.

"Goodnight, Seraphine," she said.

It was my name. It was the right name; it was embroidered on my pillowcases. I carried it the whole length of the gallery, past every painted duke, and it didn't get any lighter.

You stayed until I was asleep. Five times this woman had sat across a table from someone with my face. All week I'd been catching her looking. The thumb on my jaw. Look at me. The hand on my pulse in the rain.

I didn't know which of us she'd been looking at.

· · ·

At breakfast I picked up my plate and walked it down the table.

Twenty-two places is a long way when a footman is watching you do it. I passed the salt, a silver centrepiece shaped like a swan, a bowl of quinces nobody had ever eaten, and sat down in the chair at Elodie's right hand and put my melon next to her porridge.

The footman poured water into a glass that wasn't there.

"That's the Bishop's chair, my lady," said Elodie, not looking up.

"Is the Bishop coming?"

"Not since you put a frog in his soup."

"Then he won't mind."

She ate a spoonful of porridge. I opened the diary to the back pages, turned it round and slid it across to her, under the rim of her bowl where the footman couldn't see.

She read PROJECT: KEEP HEAD from the top. I watched her reach Risk Two. Her spoon stopped.

"Throw the river in a bigger river," she read, very softly.

"It's a figure of speech."

"I did try the river," she said. "The second time. I found it in the box and walked it down to the Old Bridge myself and dropped it in the deepest part." She turned a page back, then forward again. "On the night of the ball it was in your sleeve. Same seal. Not a crack in it."

The melon turned to wet paper in my mouth.

"So it comes back."

"Things come back," said Elodie. "Tea. Carts. The Prince on balconies." She found the stub of pencil I'd tucked into the spine. "Not always in the same order."

"Is that why you left it there? With the ribbon on?"

"You put your seal on it so you'd know if anyone had been at it." She bent over the page. "I thought I'd borrow the idea."

She wrote. Small, upright letters, every t crossed exactly in the middle, under my scrawl:

Risk 4. Lady Seraphine keeps offering me to the Prince.
Mitigation: stop.

She turned the diary back to me and went on with her porridge as if she'd written a shopping list.

I looked at the page. I looked at her. The ear nearest me had gone pink along the top.

"Noted," I said.

In the doorway the steward cleared his throat. Master Orrin's compliments, the gallery would be ready at six, and he wished to remind Lady Seraphine, with the very greatest respect, that it was now the thirteenth.

"Four days, my lady," said Pim behind my chair, helpfully, in case I'd lost the ability to count.

· · ·

Master Orrin had a cold. He stayed long enough to light the lantern, lower it onto our fingers and sneeze on my ancestors, and then he went off to bed, pointing his cane at me from the door like a man reading out a will.

"Gently, Lady Seraphine. Four days."

Then it was just us, and the lamps down the gallery, and the floor showing us back to ourselves upside down.

Palm to palm. Her hand cool, mine not. The ribbon looped over our joined fingers, and the little paper lantern hanging between us, the flame standing straight up inside it.

Turn. Change. Turn.

I didn't look at my feet. I'd stopped needing to. This body knew the Walk. It had probably danced it for her four times already, beautifully, the same body that had poured tea on her and poisoned her and sat beside her bed until she fell asleep. I let it. I looked at Elodie, and Elodie looked at me, and somewhere in the third circle I understood that I could not do four more days of this with somebody else's name in her mouth.

You don't fix a risk by not looking at it.

"There's something that isn't on the list," I said.

"There's a great deal that isn't on the list."

"Elodie." We came round face to face again. Our hands stayed together. The lantern hung between us and lit her from below, gold along her jaw, gold on the mark at her throat. "Whoever you've been looking at all week. The one who poured. The one who stayed." My voice did something stupid. I let it. "That isn't me. I'm not her. I'm not Seraphine. My name's Tes—"

Elodie kissed me.

She did it the way she did everything: no hurry, and no doubt. Our palms stayed pressed together at shoulder height, the ribbon pulled taut across our fingers, and she leaned in round the lantern and put her mouth on mine. Her lips were cool and tasted faintly of tea I hadn't drunk. My feet, which had known the way a moment ago, forgot it entirely. Her free hand came up to the side of my neck, to the place she always found, and pressed there, lightly, as if telling the rest of my sentence to stay where it was.

Between our faces, the lantern didn't move.