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Claire looks around the room as the maids busy themselves with her things, feeling a fool, feeling too bereft even to weep. Why is she so disappointed? Why would she expect him to say farewell? She had a dream, she thinks, but she cannot remember it now. She presses her fingers so deeply into the sheets that they would bruise if they were flesh; she allows the servants to dress her without comment or complaint. She wears the white muslin gown she arrived in, now clean and smelling faintly of dried flowers. She sits before the mirror and watches as the maids heat the irons for her hair at the fire, blinking at herself. Grey eyes, brown hair. Claire Marchand’s grey eyes, which are not blue enough to be fair, nor dark enough for allure. Claire Marchand’s brown hair, which the nuns at the abbey had once compared favourably to the tilled soil: they said it spoke of good country health and an honest temperament.

She will bid this morning. She will bid, and she will win, and she will say farewell to Claire and Leander both.

The Château is merciful. The Château is cruel, and it punishes her with her own victory.

Claire feels that lump in her throat again, that heat in her chest: the anger is back. She spent five years forgetting what fury felt like, and now she realises that it is glorious. It is far more nourishing, far more motivating, than sadness ever was. She will not let it end like this, with silence and secrets left between them. She will not let Leander martyr himself for the sake of a wish that Claire knows, even now, is not worthy of the sacrifice.

Claire stands from her chair. She takes Saliha’s hairpin from the desk and puts it into her pouch.

‘Your coiffure, mademoiselle,’ one of the maids says warningly. ‘It is not yet finished.’

Claire ignores her. Hair loose and uncurled, she leaves the room.

He is not in his chambers—or, if he is, he will not reply to Claire’s rap on the door.

He is not in the dining hall. Claire stands in the centre of the space and spins in a circle to survey the room. Her footsteps echo on the marble as she leaves, and she swears, as she closes the door, that she can hear faint, high laughter.

He is not in the gallery, with its tall windows and paintings of seascapes. In the half dark of the twilight, without the fog of the previous day, the view from these windows is arrestingly beautiful: the shadows of distant mountains pierce violet sky, and the moon dies its slow death, pale and fading. When Claire turns round to look at the paintings, she sees that all the ships are gone. They have been swallowed by the waves, their only remains the occasional mast peeking out of the water, or the desperate hands of sailors as they drown. The longer she remains in the room, the louder and louder their screams become, until they are deafening, and Claire must run away with her hands clapped over her ears.

He is not by the fountain or elsewhere in the gardens, and when Claire goes to the hedge maze, she finds it closed to her. The honeysuckle arch is gone, and the hedge that borders the labyrinth now rings it as an impenetrable fence. If Leander is within, Claire cannot reach him—and so there is no choice but to look elsewhere.

She goes to the other side of the gardens, to a familiar gate, beyond which unspools a thin path leading into the alpine forest. It is still dark, and Claire can see only a few feet ahead into the woods, illuminated by the lights of the Château; she has no lantern to guide her, and she briefly considers turning back to fetch one. But then she pictures Leander at the bridge, the rushing waters beneath—and she is running forward, into the fading night.

As Claire runs, the wind picks up. The forest shudders around her, weeping droplets of dew that scatter over her shoulders, seeping into the pale fabric of her dress. This place is so green with spring, so breathing and alive. The air in the Château itself is dried flowers and the tang of uncorked wines, but here it is rot and growth, upturned soil, the squirming worms and the questing fingers of the roots. In the darkness, Claire trips over one of these roots, and her hands skid over mud and moss. When she stands, her palms sting enough that she knows that she is bleeding. But there is a sweetness to this pain, a clarity to it. And as she tears further into the forest, the cold breeze plays over the shredded skin, as if to remind her of the urgency of her journey.

The forest feels unfamiliar now, and Claire does not recall the route Leander took. And yet, without reason, she still arrives where she wishes to be. Here is the stream, where he held her hand—she stumbles a little now on her leap, splashing water on her skirts. Here is the disappearance of the path, the furrows of past footsteps in the earth; and here, finally, is the clearing and the bridge.

The water roars. Over its percussion a pair of birds sing sporadically, warming their voices in preparation for the dawn chorus. The bridge stands impassively in its perfect arch. Where grass meets stone, Claire can see the browning flesh of the mushrooms Leander had crushed beneath his feet. The stars reflect crystalline in the river.

No one is here.

Claire leans against one of the pines, willing, demanding that she not cry. To cry here will be to accept defeat; it cannot be countenanced. Instead, she breathes slowly, pressing one of her bloodied palms to the trunk of the tree, firmer and firmer, until the pain of it drowns out all else.

She shifts, and she feels a weight in her pouch. Her fan. She reaches for it instinctively, to use it to shield her face, a habit so entrenched that even here, without an audience, Claire feels it necessary. She unfolds it and holds it up. The hole stitched there by the Auctioneer is perfectly at eye level. Through it, she sees the bridge and the water. She sees her own hand against the tree. And beneath it—beneath—

The tree has a door. Within her palm, she can now see that the wood has formed a knob, protruding from the trunk as a door handle would. Her fingers are already curled around it. Claire tries to turn it.

There is a click, and a section of the tree swings into itself, making a threshold and an entryway. Claire recognises the room beyond.

She puts her fan down, and she steps through.

The birdcages are all empty, their filigreed doors left open on their hinges. Beyond them, the small window of the room emits a weak, blue light: the very earliest moments of dawn. It is the only illumination there, and the Auctioneer is so in shadow that, for a moment, Claire does not notice him.

Then she does notice him, because he is carrying a little cloth bag full of seeds, each one glowing when he pulls it out like a shard of sunlight. He is walking from empty cage to empty cage, scattering these seeds inside.

‘You will not find him,’ the Auctioneer says without looking at her.

‘Why?’ Claire asks.

‘She has hidden him away.’

‘But that is not fair,’ Claire says. ‘He is a guest, also. He has a right to bid.’

‘He traded away that right.’

‘How? Explain it to me.’

The Auctioneer sighs. He finishes scattering the seeds and folds the empty bag into his pocket.