There’s a second of hesitation before Mrs. Nattermore drops her arm and the blade along with it. She crosses the room to stand with Diedre and Cliona, folding her arms over her chest.
“Any other terms?” Cliona asks.
Daphne holds her gaze and decides to press her luck. She thinks about the seal she’s meant to steal from the king without his noticing. The impossible task her mother set her. But maybe not impossible—not if she has a little assistance.
“Stardust. I’d like some,” Daphne says.
“Why not ask the king? He has plenty.”
“If I ask the king, he’ll ask questions. You won’t,” Daphne tells her.
The girl purses her lips before she nods. “Done.”
“You do not make deals, Cliona. Your father does,” Mrs. Nattermore says—another tidbit for Daphne to file away. She suspected Cliona’s father is involved, but from the sound of it, he’s their leader.
“When my father isn’t present, I act in his stead,” Cliona counters. “I’ll explain the situation. If he disagrees with me, we can address it then, but for now, this is the best course of action. She’s right—she’s valuable alive and a risk dead.”
“And if she tells the king about this the second she’s back in the castle?” Diedre asks. “It’s what I would do, if I were her.”
“Well, let’s hope she’s smarter than you are,” Cliona says, her eyes meeting Daphne’s. “After all, we have our spies in the castle as well—including me. And she doesn’t know where they are. The king’s guards with their sharp swords, the chefs preparing her food, the royal empyrea who could make her life torture with the right wish. It could be anyone.”
Daphne swallows but forces herself to hold Cliona’s gaze. “We’re understood,” she says before smiling. “You see? There’s no reason we can’t get along.”
Cliona takes the dagger from Mrs. Nattermore and cuts the rope tying Daphne to the chair.
“We’ve got appointments with the goldsmith and the cobbler. We can’t have anyone getting suspicious, can we?”
Daphne gets to her feet, rubbing at her arms where the rope left red indents behind.
“Cliona,” Mrs. Nattermore says when they approach the stairs. “If this goes poorly, your father will be very disappointed.”
Mild as the words are, Daphne sees a real glint of fear in Cliona’s eyes, the first time she’s truly looked unnerved.
“It won’t,” she says through clenched teeth. She places a fist over her heart. “For Friv.”
“For Friv,” Mrs. Nattermore and Diedre echo, repeating the motion.
* * *
—
The rest of their shopping passes in a blur. As Daphne tries on dozens of necklaces and earrings and heeled slippers, she watches Cliona out of the corner of her eye. The spoiled socialite facade is back in place, but now Daphne can’t look at her without also seeing the cold-eyed girl from the basement, examining a musket with a shrewd and determined gaze.
She should have seen it sooner, should have noticed that Cliona wasn’t what she seemed. But then, Cliona didn’t see her for what she was either—there is some comfort in that. And Daphne was able to seed rumors about the king’s merging Friv and Bessemia—she thought she’d need the seal before she could manage that, but a whisper can travel even farther than a proclamation, and faster, too. A broken country is a vulnerable one, the empress likes to say. If Friv is fighting itself, it will be easier for Bessemia to overpower.
When they arrive back at the castle and pass their horses off to the stable hand, Cliona loops her arm through Daphne’s, just as she did earlier, but this time the gesture feels more menacing. Daphne scans Cliona’s hands for some kind of hidden weapon—a poisoned ring, a dagger the width of a quill—but there is nothing.
“There will be a missive in a few days,” Cliona tells her. “Follow the instructions and you’ll have your stardust.”
“Instructions?” Daphne asks, dread pooling in her stomach.
At that, Cliona’s smile sharpens into something else entirely. “You wanted to join our game, Princess. Let’s see you play.”
Even in Bessemia, Beatriz heard rumors of the beauty of the Cellarian sea garden, a swath of shoreline along the southern coast of the country, just outside the palace walls. At high tide, there is nothing to see, just the sandy beach and rolling waves—a sight still new to Beatriz, true, but nothing compared to what it becomes when the tide goes out.
It’s like the sea is a blanket, pulled back to reveal bright thatches of plants that look more like a child’s painting than any flowers Beatriz has ever seen. From far away, the shore looks like a jewel box, brimming with gemstones of every color and shape, but as she walks closer, it becomes all the more extraordinary. Some of the flowers have tendrils that reach out, licking at the sand in long, languid motions; others pick up and move at their leisure, sprouting spiky claws that snap at anyone who gets too close.
Beatriz’s favorites, though, are the clusters of red blooms that unfurl slowly as time passes, each petal rolling down to reveal a vivid violet center. It isn’t until she walks past the third one, though, that she notices the two black dots that seem to follow her every movement.
The flowers have eyes.
In Bessemia, her mother’s gardens were the stuff of legend, carefully curated arrangements of the most beautiful flowers from all over the world. It was, Beatriz often thought as a child, like walking through a marzipan wonderland, beautiful and colorful and surreal, but static. Not sentient. Not like this.
She isn’t the only one walking through the garden this afternoon, her satin slippers held aloft in one hand and her bare feet sinking slightly in the damp sand. There are many other courtiers she recognizes vaguely from the palace, couples walking arm in arm, laughing and splashing and enjoying the bright, warm day. It makes her miss her sisters more than ever—Sophronia would be fascinated by the garden, Daphne by the people. Beatriz tries to think of how she will describe it next time she writes to them but comes up short. It is utterly indescribable.
She casts an idle gaze around, scanning the faces of the others wandering through the sea garden, looking for one face in particular. She’s seen sketches of Lord Savelle by her mother’s spies but has yet to see anyone who matches them. She assumed he would be at the wedding, but she didn’t see him there, either.
Not that you paid much attention to anything but the contents of your wineglass, a voice in her mind chides. It sounds like Daphne. Beatriz flinches. She knows she should be further along in her assignment by now, and she’s already had to confess her failures in a letter to her mother. But she won’t dwell on past mistakes—far better to fix them today. One of her servants mentioned, after a few carefully chosen, artfully blasé questions, that Lord Savelle enjoys strolling through the sea garden, so this seemed the best place to arrange their introduction.