RUNE’S FINGERTIPS PRICKLED WITH annoyance.
Yes, Alex had warned her away from his brother. Yes, Rune had flat-out disregarded his warning. But she had expected a scolding from him, not a direct attempt at sabotage.
She would have to nip his meddling right in the bud—as soon as she’d won over Gideon.
How am I going to do that?
She’d been expecting to leave the party with Bart or Noah tonight. Gideon was a very different type of suitor. Not only did he hunt witches for a living, there was also a good chance he suspected Rune of being one. It might even be why he was here tonight.
She wondered about his change of heart—was his irritation in the opera box actually due to fatigue? Or had something come to light about Rune that he needed to investigate himself?
She simply couldn’t trust him.
Rune thought about Verity’s mimic spider, Henry, pretending to be weak in order to catch predators in its web.
Verity’s right. She needed to be like Henry.
Rune had invited her greatest predator into the heart of her home. Now she had to ensnare him here so she could finish him the way she’d finished so many others before: by plying him with wine from the cup she had enchanted. Truth Teller would compel him to tell the truth without realizing he was being compelled.
As Gideon Sharpe’s long-legged stride caught up to Rune, she remembered the scene from the ballroom. It surprised her that he didn’t know how to dance, since Alex was such a proficient dancer.
But that’s because I taught him, thought Rune. Clearly no one had taught Gideon.
She wouldn’t have asked him to dance if she’d known he didn’t know how. Humiliating him like that, in front of all her friends, would not win him over. And from the rigid line of his shoulders and the stiffness in his step beside her, she could tell his guard was still up.
If she was going to ensnare him, she needed to first put him at ease.
“I apologize for my guests. You’re a novelty here, you must know that.
They couldn’t help but stare.”
He scanned their surroundings, taking in everything from the pale blue floor tiles to the white marble columns lining this hall. “Is that a nice way of saying I lack pedigree?”
“Not at all!” She forced a laugh, settling into her persona. “Just look at your suit.”
“It was my father’s,” he said, defensive.
Rune’s footsteps slowed. He thinks I’m making fun of him.
How was she botching this so badly?
“Wait …” She frowned, realizing what he’d said. “It was your father’s suit, or your father made it?”
“Both.”
Rune stopped walking altogether. Gideon was several yards ahead.
Realizing she was no longer at his side, he turned to face her.
“Gideon. You’re wearing a vintage suit made by the Sharpe Duet, and you think my guests are laughing at your pedigree?”
He cocked his head. “Yes?”
She stared at him. He really doesn’t know.
Nan and her friends owned nothing made by the Sharpe Duet, but not for lack of trying. Until now, Rune had never even seen one of their garments up close.
“A collector would pay tens of thousands of dollars for that jacket alone,” she told him. “Because it’s so rare.”
“Because my parents are dead, you mean.”
Rune winced. Technically, yes. That they were no longer alive to make more garments increased the value of those currently in existence. But the Sharpes’ designs had been rare before they died. Once the Sister Queens employed them, Sun and Levi Sharpe tailored for the Rosebloods alone, ensuring few originals were ever made.
Surely he knew this?
“What I’m trying to say is, if my guests are staring at you, it’s because you’re Gideon Sharpe, a living legend. A hero who risked his life leading revolutionaries into the palace and single-handedly killing two witch queens.”
She didn’t fake the awe in her voice. Rune might despise him for what he’d done, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t impressed by the courage it had required.
“They’re staring at you because you’re at the same party they are.
You’re not exactly known for accepting invitations.”
“I lack basic manners, you mean.” He nodded, as if understanding. “I don’t see how that’s different from lacking in pedigree, though.”
She growled a little. He seemed to be intentionally misunderstanding
her.
To her surprise, Gideon smiled. If you could call the slight twitch at the
corner of his mouth a smile.
Is he … teasing me?
A furious heat rushed up her neck. Has he been teasing me this whole time?
Seeing her blush, the corner of Gideon’s mouth did curve upward, staying that way for several seconds.
Rune looked away, trying to focus. Remember the plan. Lure him in.
“If you attended more of my parties,” she said, continuing forward to rejoin him, “I could ensure you knew how to dance to any song when a girl asks you.”
“Are you offering to give me lessons?” The question caught her off guard.
Am I?
Rune had taught his brother. Alex was an eager pupil, happy to let her lead. She doubted Gideon would subject himself to such a thing.
“I …”
“A girl like you has better things to do with her time, surely.”
She didn’t. Not during the day, which was full of dreary social calls: picnics and luncheons and carriage rides, all so she could wring gossip from her friends like drops of water from a wet towel, desperately hoping it might help her save one more witch.
But he didn’t really seem interested.
“You don’t have to deflect,” she said. “You can simply say you don’t want to dance with me.”
He glanced sharply toward her. “That’s not …”
This time, he stopped walking. When Rune turned to face him, she found his jaw clenched. He rubbed a hand over it.
“I have a counteroffer: you could accompany me to an actual party.” He glanced back in the ballroom’s direction. “There will be no ball gowns. No hired musicians. No songs with ridiculous steps …”
He trailed off, studying Rune in the flickering light of the gas lamps throughout the hall. Remembering himself, he shook his head. “A girl like you wouldn’t be caught dead dancing with riffraff in disreputable locales.”
The idea of it thrilled her, actually. Though it definitely shouldn’t.
“Who says I’ll get caught? Name the date, and I’ll be there.”
The frown creasing his forehead deepened. “Careful, Miss Winters, or I might call your bluff.”
“Are you so sure I’m bluffing?”
Again, his mouth twitched. As if he wanted to smile. It felt like victory.
Rune let the subject drop and led him up another grand staircase to the third floor, where two double doors led into the second-largest room of the house.
“This is Alex’s favorite room.”
Gideon followed her into the dark expanse, which carried the faint smell of stale tea and old books. In front of them, windows stretched from the
floor to the ceiling three stories above. The panes faced Nan’s gardens and, beyond that, the cliffs leading down to the sea. In the distant water, the moon’s reflection was a white candle flame flickering in and out of the waves.
Rune lit the gaslights, illuminating the room, and watched Gideon walk a slow circle, taking in the walls of shelves lined with books, the balconies on the second and third level, the spiral staircase rising to the top of it all.
“Any spell books in here?” he asked. Rune’s heart tumbled over itself.
After the New Dawn, the Good Commander declared all objects used for witchcraft to be contraband. Finding a spell book in a citizen’s possession was enough to accuse them of sympathizing with witches.
“Feel free to look,” she said, hiding her panic behind a smile. She’d hidden all of her spell books in the casting room. “I won’t stop you.”
Gideon seemed about to say more when a large silhouette near the window caught his eye.
“Is that …?”
It was a grand piano. Alex had his own piano now, but he still preferred this one. He often spent all day here, practicing on it.
“No wonder Alex spent so much time here.”
Alex had been coming to Wintersea House nearly every day since he was eleven years old to play piano. Rune had hated her lessons, hated practicing, hated even the sight of those black and white keys. But Nan refused to let her quit. Alex was not only desperate to play, he was actually good at it. It was a shame that his family couldn’t afford to give him lessons. So Rune blackmailed her tutor into giving Alex hers, and by the time Nan found out, months had already passed.
Gideon strode over to the instrument, walking around it before coming to stand on the other side of the bench, facing the keys.
“Do you play?” she asked.
“Not at all.” He pressed down on a single ivory key. The E note rang, smooth and clear, through the room. “My brother is the musical one.”
Rune nodded. No one played as beautifully as Alex. Even Nan had come round to him in the end, wooed by his raw talent.
“The day his acceptance letter came from the Royal Conservatory, he hid it from our parents.” Gideon pressed down on another key—A this time
—and the note hummed from deep in the piano’s heart. Rune frowned. Alex had never told her that. “Why?”
“Our family could barely afford rent, never mind that kind of tuition. He didn’t want them to feel ashamed.”
If Alex had come to Rune, she would have convinced Nan to lend him the money—or figured out a way to pay it herself. The Royal Conservatory was a prestigious school on the mainland. Their music program was so competitive, the school accepted only a handful of students each year.
But Alex had studied at the Conservatory. For a few years, anyway.
When the revolution struck, he left the program and never went back.
Intrigued, she sat down on the bench next to where Gideon stood behind it. “If your family couldn’t pay the tuition, where did he get the money?”
Gideon pressed down on the next key—the middle C—moving further along the keyboard, closer to Rune. The progression of notes he’d chosen formed a minor triad, resulting in a melancholic sound. It was a sadness Rune felt in her chest.
“We got lucky.” His voice hardened on that word: lucky. “My parents’ fashions began catching the attention of the aristocracy.”
Another key; another sorrowful note. This one was so close to Rune, his sleeve brushed her bare shoulder as he reached to play it.
“The eldest witch queens, Analise and Elowyn, were so taken by my mother’s designs, they wanted them for themselves.”
Gideon stepped directly behind Rune and the shadow of him spread up her back. Startled by the move, she froze, her pulse thrumming. With one hand still on the key to her left, Gideon reached around Rune with his free hand, pressing down on the keys to her right—F, then F-sharp—caging her in.
The hair on her nape rose. There couldn’t be more than an inch of space
between them now. Rune’s senses heightened as she wondered if the mimic spider ever underestimated its much larger prey and was sometimes caught in its own web instead.
If she survived this encounter unscathed, she’d ask Verity.
Gideon’s voice was beside her ear. When he spoke, his breath rushed against her cheek. “Analise offered my mother a position as royal seamstress, with my father and me assisting. The yearly stipend was more than enough to send Alex away to school.”
Swallowing, Rune kept her voice light as she said, “That’s when your family went to live at the palace?”
“All of us except Alex, yes.” He fell silent for a long moment. Beneath his breath, he said: “He escaped what the rest of us could not.”
What does that mean?
Alex rarely spoke about his family. What Rune knew, she knew from other people’s gossip: shortly before the revolution, a terrible sickness stole his little sister’s life. Not long after, his parents drowned in an unfortunate swimming accident, orphaning him and Gideon.
But several pieces of the story were missing. It started when the queens employed the Sharpes. Somewhere in the middle, three members of their family died. And by the end, Gideon and Alex had slain all three queens in their sleep.
What connected these things?
Rune had met the youngest queen, Cressida, only once, at one of her seasonal parties. The witch queen had reminded Rune of an elegant swan, poised and aloof. She had porcelain skin, the bluest eyes, and hair like ivory. She spoke only half a dozen words to Rune before floating off to join her sisters.
Cressida had a reputation for being shy, and she rarely left Thornwood Hall, her summer home. Some people attributed this to pride, saying Cressida thought herself better than everyone else.
She’s a queen, Rune had thought at the time. She is better than us.
One of the more vicious rumors, Rune remembered now, had been about Cressida’s lowborn lover. She never brought him with her to public gatherings or appearances, as if she were ashamed of the dalliance. Rune would hear it whispered about at parties, but few people knew the young man’s name, never mind what he looked like. So it could have easily been a lie intended to undermine the girl.
And now, two years after Cressida and her sisters were slain, along with the witches on their council, the boy who led those revolutionaries into the palace stood directly behind Rune, his breath in her hair, his fingers on the keys of her piano.
Why did you kill them? she wanted to ask. Why do you hate us?
But Rune already knew the answer. Gideon hated witches for the same reason everyone else did. Rune was well versed in her society’s hatred. They made no secret of it.
We are vermin to them, Nan told her right before the revolution, when things were already turning. Even before they murdered the queens, riots spilled through the streets. Witches were dragged from their houses and beaten—or worse. The Roseblood sisters sent their army to put the perpetrators down like dogs, but it only made things worse. They see us as a contamination of what is natural and good. They fear our magic the way they fear disease.
The queens were never given a proper burial, and to this day, no one knew where the bodies lay. People had different theories, of course: they’d been burned in a pit, or dumped in the sea, or chopped into pieces to prevent resurrection.
No one knew for sure.
Since their deaths, and the birth of the New Republic, the Good Commander had been stripping the magic from every captured witch by purging her of its source: stringing them by the ankles like animals, slitting their throats, and leaving them to hang until every drop of blood drained from their bodies.
Rune shuddered.
As if in response, Gideon withdrew his hands from the piano keys and stepped back. The absence of him was like a too-heavy coat slipping from her shoulders, allowing her to breathe. He turned toward the thousands of book spines filling the walls, illuminated by the incandescent lighting.
“Do you mind if I look around?”
Relieved by the distance between them, she waved her hand. “Go ahead.”
If he had lived at the palace, he’d lived among witches, which meant he knew how to spot the signs of her kind. Spell books were an obvious giveaway, but there were none in the library. Casting marks were another tell, but the only spell cast recently enough to leave marks was in Nan’s casting room, where Rune had enchanted the cup she’d given to Lizbeth.
There’s nothing to find, she thought, watching the witch hunter.
Perhaps she should use the cup now. Gideon appeared at ease, and the sooner she learned where the Blood Guard were keeping Seraphine, the sooner she could rescue the woman before they transferred her.
After several moments of watching him browse, she said, “Reading can be so tedious, don’t you think? Sometimes I get exhausted just looking at all these books.”
Gideon, who was currently perusing her collection of operas and plays, either didn’t hear her or was ignoring her. The light illuminated his fingers as he traced the titles on the weathered spines. When he arrived at Rune’s favorite play—about a mysterious hero who risks his own life to rescue aristocrats in danger—Gideon slid the book off the shelf and opened it to the first page.
Rune clenched her jaw, annoyed that he’d chosen it. She didn’t want him holding something she loved in his hands. They were the same hands he used to strip witches out of their clothes. To search them for scars. To give them over to be purged.
“For a girl who hates reading, you own a lot of books.”
“They were my grandmother’s. Nan was obsessed with books.” Rune tapped her fingertips against the piano bench, itching to tell him to put her book back and never touch it again. She counted to ten, lost her patience, and said instead, “Would you like to see a witch’s bedroom, Citizen Sharpe?”
To her great relief, he closed the book and returned it to the shelf. When he turned to face her, his eyes were deep wells.
“I’d like nothing more, Miss Winters.”
Rising from the bench, Rune tugged the bellpull, letting Lizbeth know she was ready to put the last part of her plan into action.
