Page 70 of The False Vow

It was as though a bolt had passed through him. “Now, that question, my dear,” Bastian replied, “relates to my second blade. It falls outside the parameters of our game.” His eyes narrowed. “I would not press too hard on it, or it may cut.”

My neck prickled. The manner in which Bastian was regarding me was dissimilar to any which I’d seen him adopt before: There was no mirth to it, no friendly rivalry, only an icy calculation like the steel gaze of a gun barrel.

Then he exhaled, and his cold fury seemed to rush out of him like ice melt. “I’m aware that I have not made things easy for you, with your fellow bridesmaids. Allow me to even the scales,” he said. “You mentioned a pair of lost gloves just now. Miss Tremblay’s, I believe.”

He smirked when I glanced at him.

“I can’t help you find them, but I do know that when she was dismissed from the Vainglory, Manon Blanc left with a pair which did not belong to her,” Bastian continued. Tilting his head, he inquired, “Will that suffice?”

The gloves. My thoughts focused. Of the leads I’d unearthed, it was by far the least compelling one; with the recent information Nathalie had given me about the veiled lady, I’d all but abandoned it. Still, it was better than nothing. “I suppose,” I replied.

A sudden flare of warmth from my dress pocket prevented me from saying anything else. The monocle. I’d brought it with me on our drive. Had the hands on its clock shifted again?

At that same moment, a presence moved past the bars of the nearest cloister building’s gates. A man. The sight of him startled me: a pale-faced shadow, dressed in a long crimson robe.

He seemed to have been drawn by Bastian’s presence. I made out the word master as he called out to us from his place behind the gate, the rest of his address muffled by the fog.

The Weaver King frowned. “Excuse me. It appears as though Adélard is in after all. I’ll be just a moment.”

I tried to contain my relief as he climbed down from the auto. The cloister gates lifted silently at Bastian’s approach. As soon as they’d shut again, I dug the monocle Nathalie had given me out of my pocket and lifted it to my eye.

The message on the other side of the glass had changed. I read the new missive: The path opens at dusk.

Below the words, where the clock hands had previously been, a glimmering thread now extended—shooting away from the place where I stood, trailing down the road behind me, and disappearing into the distance. When I lowered the monocle, the string disappeared. Clever.

I assumed that thread was my path.

Raising the object back to my vision, I studied it more intently. Along the bottom rim of the monocle, a second sentence had appeared in conjunction with the first. Its letters glittered dully in the sun, winking at me through the lens.

Reading them, I understood what I had to do.

Chapter Thirty

Hours later, I found myself packed into a carriage, Noé seated across from me and a cape fastened over my dress to ward off the evening chill.

We were hurtling through the streets of the capital, having departed Fortblanche a little after sunset as per the instructions on the monocle, which I was currently holding up to my eye. Leaning forward, I pushed myself against the window of our coach, watching as the golden thread raced ahead of us through the lens.

I called to Noé on the opposite side of the compartment: “Right turn up ahead.”

Rapping on the cab window, he relayed my instructions to our driver. “Right turn ahead.”

The carriage swerved accordingly. Message delivered, Noé sat back. Like me, he’d donned additional coverings for our expedition tonight—though his cape was longer than mine, falling almost past his ankles, and topped with a ruffled capelet of navy-blue wool. Paired with his black hair, he seemed all darkness; it wouldn’t have surprised me if I’d glanced up at the sky and seen a flock of crows seething up above us, summoned by the presence of one of their own.

“What’s next?” he asked me.

I lowered the monocle as we whipped around the bend. “Now it appears we go straight for a while.”

Turning the item over in my hand, I rubbed a thumb across its surface, then passed it to Noé. Our fingers brushed as he reached forward to take it, both of our hands ungloved; I felt the chill of his skin down to my bones.

“Are you certain you’ve never seen anything like this before?” I asked.

Frowning, Noé flipped the monocle over in his palm, examining it. “Quite certain,” he replied. “Are you sure it is connected to Sybil’s passing? It looks like one of the ridiculous club invitations Dorian Drake was always toting around, back when the two of us were friendly.”

Lifting the monocle to his face, he leaned toward me. His eye was magnified behind the lens; I started at the sudden enormity of his features, the flutter of his lashes so near, as though we’d shifted much closer together than we truly had.

He smirked. “Hello there.”

I snatched the item back from him, placing it on my lap. “It is connected to Sybil,” I affirmed. “Or, at least, it is connected to the circumstances around her death.” Leaving the monocle where it was, I reached instead for my reticule, tucked on the seat cushion next to me. “Look at this.”