Chapter 7 The Ribbon

I knew that ribbon the way you know your own name, because I had bought it, three winters ago at the Veil Market with the last copper from a season of gutting fish, and Sera had cried because no one had ever given her anything that was only for being lovely.

It hung from my uncle's glove now, blue gone grey in the cold light, and the sight of it did something to me that the altar had not and the mirrors had not and the burned bride had not. It made me calm. The wide, terrible calm my mother used to fall into right before she ended a thing.

"Where is she," I said.

"Safe." Aldric stepped into the gallery, and the fog came with him, curling along the floor between the portraits, and not one of the dead brides turned to look at him the way they had turned to me. They turned away. The whole gallery leaned back from him like reeds from a cold wind, and I marked that, I marked it hard. They knew him. They were afraid of him. "Safe and warm and bolted in, exactly as you told her to be. I do so admire how you mother her, Mara. You always did the work I should have, and you never once asked to be paid for it."

"You have his mark on your collar," I said. "The one cut into the altar. The one scratched behind a murdered girl." I did not move toward the ribbon. Moving toward the bait is how you end up in the snare. "How long."

He had the grace, or the theater, to look almost sorrowful. "You found Maren. Of course you did. You were always going to be the one who could read her. That is rather the entire point of you." He glanced at the warm gold canvas, at the burned mouth frozen mid-word, and a flicker of irritation crossed his reasonable face, there and gone. "A century early on the speaking, though. You are stronger than the ledgers promised. That is going to be inconvenient for everyone, yourself most of all."

Beside me Lucien had gone very still, and the cold pouring off him now was not his weariness. It was something older, something with teeth. "You walked into my house," he said, and his voice had dropped into a register that made the candle-flame shrink. "Across my water. Through my wards. No living man crosses my threshold uninvited."

"No ordinary living man." Aldric inclined his head, almost courteous. "But I hold the other half of your contract, keeper. The Vane half. The half your masters signed with my family's blood when this city was young, the half that says who feeds your Gate and when and which daughter. You have never read it, have you. You only ever held the leash they put on you. You never thought to ask who held the other end." He smiled, and it was gentle, and it was the worst thing I had ever seen. "I am not in your house, Lucien. You are in mine. You always have been."

The mark at my wrist throbbed, and I felt Lucien's flinch through it, through the taut line that bound us, the small private earthquake of a man learning that the cage he had served inside for a hundred years had a name, and the name was sitting in my family's parlor telling me bedtime stories.

"The name, Maren," I said quietly, not taking my eyes off my uncle. "Finish it."

The burned bride's mouth moved. A sound began.

Aldric's gloved hand closed, and the blue ribbon crushed in his fist, and Maren's portrait went dark and silent all at once, the gold light snuffed, the warmth gone, the word dying in her painted throat for the second time in a hundred years. He had not crossed the room. He had not touched her. He had simply willed it, the way you pinch out a candle, and I understood with a cold drop of my stomach that whatever Lucien was the warden of, my uncle had learned to use it too.

"Names go last," Aldric said, almost kindly, echoing Cassia without knowing it, or knowing it exactly. "You will have mine soon enough, child. You will have all of it. The what and the why and the truly unforgivable how, and you will hate me with your whole considerable heart, and then, because you are a Vane and we are nothing if not practical, you will help me anyway. Because I have your sister, and the Gate has you, and there is a path through all of this where Sera lives and a path where she does not, and only one of us currently knows which is which."

He let the crushed ribbon fall. It drifted down through the cold and landed on the floor between us, a small blue thing in all that grey.

"Come home and ask me properly," he said, "and I will tell you what your mother found before she vanished. Stay here playing at marriage with the Devil, and the next ribbon I bring you will not be from her hair."

He stepped back into the fog at the threshold. The brides on the walls trembled in their frames.

"You cannot leave," Lucien said. "The water will not carry you twice in one night."

"It carries whomever I tell it to." Aldric was already half mist. "That is what neither of you understands yet. The dead do not belong to the keeper of the Gate." His pale eyes found me, and for one instant the warmth dropped clean off his face and left only the hunger underneath. "They belong to whoever the bloodline says they belong to. Tonight that is still me. Sleep well, Mara. Reach for the ribbon. It will not bite."

The fog folded him away, and the iron door swung shut on its own with a sound like a coffin closing, and Lucien and I stood alone in the cold gallery with a dead girl's silenced mouth and a blue ribbon lying on the stone.

I crossed and picked it up. It was still warm.

Not from the cold flame. Not from my uncle's glove.

From a living wrist. Sera had been wearing it within the hour.