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Marriage is impossible for me. It will always be impossible.He said stiffly, “House Aurelian has given much to me. I wish to repay that debt before I think about marriage.”
“Ah.” She tucked a curl of hair behind her ear. “You don’t want to tell me.”
“It would be odd for me to confide in you, Antonetta,” Kel said. “We hardly know each other now.” She blinked; looked away. He said, “I remember the girl I was friends with when we were children. Who was bold and sharp and clever. I miss that girl. What happened to her?”
“You don’t know?” She raised her chin. “That girl had no future on the Hill.”
“She could have made a place for herself,” said Kel, “if she was brave enough.”
Antonetta sucked in a breath. “Perhaps you’re right. But how lucky for me that bravery, like cleverness, is not much valued in women. Since I lack both.”
“Antonetta—”
Kel thought for a moment he had spoken, said her name. But it was Conor, calling, gesturing for her to come over. Saying that they needed an objective observer to judge the winner of the contest.
For the second time, Antonetta stepped away from Kel and went back to the other side of the tower. Charlon threw an arm around her shoulder as she came close, the sort of gesture that might have been intended as friendly, if it had not been Charlon making it. Antonetta, leaning away from Charlon, had turned her attention to Conor, was smiling as she spoke to him. That brilliant false smile that no one but Kel seemed to notice was false.
He remembered the first time he’d seen it, that smile. At the ball her mother had thrown for her debut into the society of the Hill. He had gone with Conor, as Kel Anjuman, and at first he had looked around for Antonetta eagerly, not seeing her in the room.
It had been Conor who tapped him on the shoulder, directinghis attention to a young woman speaking to Artal Gremont. A young woman in a dress of ornately patterned silk, edged everywhere with lace, whose curled blond hair was tied up in dozens of ribbons. Slim gold chains circled her wrists and ankles, and diamond baubles hung from her ears. She seemed to sparkle like something hard and bright, metal or glass.
“That’s her,” Conor said. “Antonetta.”
Kel had felt his stomach drop.
Somehow he had imagined that once she saw them all—and they were all there: Conor and Kel and Joss—she would come back to them, rejoin their group of friends. Complain about her mother. But though she greeted them all with smiles, with fluttering lashes and breathless giggles, there was nothing there of the old camaraderie that they had shared.
At last he had found a moment to speak to her alone, behind a statue bearing a tray of lemon ices. “Antonetta,” he’d said. He felt sick with how pretty she was. It was the first time he had really noticed the fine-grained softness of a girl’s skin, the color and shape of someone else’s mouth. She had become someone new: someone thrilling, someone horrifying in her distance, her difference. “We’ve missed you.”
She’d smiled at him. That brilliant smile he’d later come to hate. “I’m right here.”
“Will you come back?” he’d said. “To the Mitat? Will your mother let you?”
Her smile did not change. “I am a little old for those kinds of games now. We all are.” She patted his shoulder. “I know my mother spoke to you. She was right. We are not of the same class. It is one thing to play in the dirt as children, but we are too old to close our eyes to reality. Besides.” She tossed her hair. “Different things are important to me now.”
Kel could hardly breathe. “What kind of—things?”
“It’s no concern of yours,” she said breezily. “We must bothgrow up. You, especially, ought to make something of yourself, Kellian.”
And she was gone. He watched her for the rest of the night—giggling, flirting, smiling. Clearly untroubled. Just as she was now, as she laid a hand on Falconet’s shoulder, laughing as if he had just made the best joke in the world.
Perhaps it was better that she had changed,Kel thought. The old Antonetta could hurt him. The person she had become all those years ago could not. She could not be a gap in his armor, a place of weakness. That was all to the good. He knew the limits of what was available to him, he thought; he had learned them painfully through the years. How could he blame Antonetta for knowing the same?
—
In the dream, a man was toiling up a long and winding path cut into the side of the cliffs above Castellane. Dark water crashed in the harbor below, exploding into pale foam whitened by the moonlight.
The man wore long robes, made colorless by the night, and a sharp wind whipped at his face. Lin could taste the salt, sharp as blood in his mouth. Could feel the hatred in his heart—cold and bitter and brutal. A hatred that stole away breath, that felt like a vise gripping the chest, crushing and destructive.
The man reached the high point of the cliff path. He looked down at the steep fall below. At the sea, coalescing into a terrifying whirlpool, spinning and vertiginous. If one fell into such a whirlpool, one would be sucked down into darkness before one was even able to scream.
From a pocket in his robes the man drew a book. Pages fluttered in the wind as he raised it over his head and threw it. It hovered for a moment, white as a gull, before plunging downward. It struck the whirlpool, where the waters spun it like a dancer before drawing it down and down…
The man stood watching, shaking with rage. “Be thou forever cursed,” he hissed, over the sound of the sea. “Be thou loathed in the eyes of the most holy forevermore.”
Lin sat bolt upright, gasping, a firestorm exploding behind herclosed lids. Opening her eyes, she saw not a churning black sea, but her own bedroom in her own house, lit dimly by the blue glow of dawn.
She willed herself to slow her breathing. She had not had such a dream—so vivid and unpleasant—for many years. Not since the death of her parents, when she had dreamed each night of their bodies abandoned on the Great Road, picked over by crows until only parchment bone was left.
