Page 35 of The False Vow

My fiancé did not slow. “To speak with my father.”

Alarm pulsed, a clenching fist in my chest. “Why?”

He whirled to face me. “Why?”

His expression was one of furious incredulity—his forehead creased, his eyes silvered coins, made bright by the force of his wrath. Their mean glint made my rib cage tighten. I had far less time to rein him in than I’d thought.

“Confronting your father is a fool’s move.” Maneuvering around the armchair, I crossed to him, all too aware of the gathering still limping on below us. “Bastian will not revoke his offer simply because you ask it of him. If you speak to him now, all you will do is reveal our knowledge of his plot. That he thinks us ignorant of his scheming is our sole advantage over him.” Drawing a breath, I forced myself to calm. “I’m fine,” I repeated in a stern tone. “Manon didn’t kill me.”

The assurance didn’t pacify him in the way I’d hoped. “She tried.”

“And failed,” I reminded him. “No lasting harm has been done. We can still carry out your plot, just as before.”

Noé scoffed. “My plot depends on you having full use of your limbs. Tamerlane—”

I interrupted him. “Tell him, and I will break off our engagement,” I hissed, and was rewarded when his eyes snapped back my way. “I will turn myself in to the cloisters this very evening. You will as good as have sent me there anyway.”

His gaze narrowed. We were as close as we’d ever been, face-to-face like a single body mirrored, but though I detested his nearness, I did not back away. Rather, I tilted my head up to catch his stare more fully, let him search for my bluff, as I knew he was doing.

He would not find it. I was not lying.

After a minute, he snorted and stepped back. “You are ridiculous,” Noé spat without looking at me. “Willing to risk your life over—what? A strategy?” He ran a palm over his face. “Tamerlane, we’ve been over this. You are to be my wife. You are of no use to me dead.”

I blinked. It was not the response I had expected.

“I am not your wife yet,” I corrected, once I’d swallowed his reply down. The term sat oddly in my stomach, stuck like a bit of undigested gristle. “You realize this engagement is a sham.”

He chuckled—shallow, as if I’d insulted him. “Sisters three,” Noé muttered. “Trust me, my dear, the reality of our ‘engagement’ haunts me nightly.”

Scratching at his earlobe, he turned toward the bookshelves. I tensed, half expecting him to make for the door again, but he only stood in profile to me, his jaw flexed and his head slightly bowed.

“This is your problem, you know,” he started a moment later. The loose collar of his shirt had drooped open farther as we’d been talking, exposing his collarbone. In the dim light of the library, his skin was like cream. “You are so damned clever, you believe all battles may be won with the mind. That to trap an opponent is an elegant undertaking, best achieved through months—perhaps years—of effort.”

He shook his head. “Death is no gentleman soldier,” Noé said. “It will not wait until you are ready to face it—it will strike primally, at the ugliest and least poetic of times. All it takes is a door left open. An intruder. A rock, and all your beautiful plans will fall to nothing.” He sighed. “Thinking yourself immortal is also a fool’s move.”

His eyes were hard, a stern winter-gray. But his voice dipped as he spoke, and I knew I had won.

Just then, a sudden flare of heat pulled my attention to my heel. Inside my slipper, my coin had abruptly turned warm, nuzzling against me like a mouse curled tight in my shoe. Eliot. My pulse skipped. At last, he was calling.

I smiled at Noé, hastening to quell the emotions that rioted through me. “Say nothing to your father. We will consult later.”

He groaned as I passed by him, heading for the exit farther up the walkway. “Now where are you going?”

“Nowhere!” I sang out, a final command, and slipped through the door.

Chapter Fifteen

I felt the turret door open when I was still several corridors away. I’d departed the library without descending to offer my newly dubbed bridesmaids an explanation; dimly, I wondered whether Bastian would question my prolonged absence from the party he’d arranged, or if, having introduced his chosen game pieces to our board, he would be content to sit back and observe the match as it progressed.

I presumed the latter. Despite the speech his son had given me, I knew the Weaver King to be a schemer, like me. He would not stoke a fire if such manual action could be avoided; rather, he would prefer to lay hot coals and watch a blaze spring naturally to life. As if his enemies, despite their most valiant attempts to the contrary, could not do anything but fall.

The entrance to my old meeting place with Eliot was locked when I reached it. Drawing on my Wit, I took the knob in hand, and it bowed to me easily, the door creaking open to reveal the space beyond.

Eliot was kneeling in the center of the room, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together as though examining something on the ground. A fine gray substance drifted from his fingertips as I watched, glinting dully in the air. Cigarette ash.

He did not rise to greet me as I entered. Wiping his hand on his trouser leg, he sat back on his heels. “Has he been in here with you?”

His tone was indifferent, but his phrasing betrayed him. How he avoided speaking Noé’s name, picking around it with the reverence of a person referring to a deity—or a devil. Closing the door behind me, I answered him.