Chapter 26 — What Seraphine Would Not Say

I found Seraphine in the music room that evening, her fingers moving over the strings of the old lute our mother had once played, a piece I half-remembered from childhood, half-forgotten, melancholy in a way that did not match the bright, easy face she usually showed the world.

I stood in the doorway a long moment before she noticed me, and in that unguarded moment I saw something in her I had rarely seen in either life: stillness without performance. Her shoulders were bowed, very slightly, the way a person's shoulders bow when they believe themselves unwatched.

"You've been avoiding me," she said, without looking up, the moment the last note faded.

"I've been busy."

"You've been avoiding me," Seraphine said again, setting the lute aside and finally meeting my eyes, "since before the attack. I noticed, you know. I notice more than you think I do."

I sat across from her, choosing my next words with the same care I had chosen them for Edric Vane that morning, though it cost me more, somehow, to be careful with my own sister.

"I saw you," I said finally, "in the orchard. With a man I didn't recognize."

Seraphine went very still, the same particular stillness I had noticed once already today, though hers had none of Vane's practiced warmth beneath it. Hers was fear, plain and unhidden, and something else beneath the fear I could not immediately name.

"How much did you hear?"

"Enough to know you have terms with someone. Enough to know one of those terms is my safety." I held her gaze, refusing to let the old, easy affection soften my voice more than I could afford. "I'd like to know the rest."

For a long moment I thought she would deny it, the way she had denied everything in my first life, smoothly and without hesitation, until denial had become as natural to her as breathing. Instead her composure cracked, all at once, and when she spoke her voice had lost every trace of its usual bright performance.

"I can't tell you," she said. "Not because I don't want to. Because telling you would put you in more danger than staying silent does, and I have spent three years making certain of that, Liora, long before you ever noticed me sneaking off to an orchard wall."

"Three years?"

Something flickered across her face — the realization, perhaps, that she had said more than she intended. "A figure of speech."

"It wasn't."

Seraphine's hands twisted together in her lap, and for a moment she looked younger than I had ever seen her, younger than the girl who had tucked my hair behind my ear on the first morning of my second life, frightened in a way that had nothing to do with performance.

"There are things in this family," she said slowly, "that I was told before you were old enough to be told anything at all. Things about Mother. Things about what she was, and what that means for both of us, whether either of us wanted it or not." Her eyes lifted to mine, wet now, unguarded. "I have spent years trying to keep you out of the parts of it that could hurt you. I am not the villain you seem to think I've become, Liora, even if I understand why you might have reason to wonder."

"I don't think that," I said, though the words felt uncertain even as I spoke them, caught between the sister I remembered loving and the sister who had stood behind Kael in the snow, wearing our mother's necklace, while I bled into the cold.

"You do," Seraphine said, not unkindly. "I can see it in the way you look at me now. I don't entirely blame you for it. I only wish you'd trust me enough to ask instead of watching me from doorways."

I had no answer for that, because some part of me — the part that had died once already, alone, believing my sister had chosen everyone but me — did not know how to trust the warmth in her voice without also remembering the necklace at her throat, and the whole silent, unmoving crescent of family behind Kael, watching a knife find me and doing nothing at all to stop it.

"Then tell me something," I said finally. "Anything. One true thing, freely given, instead of one more thing I have to overhear."

Seraphine was quiet for a long moment, and when she finally spoke, her voice had gone very soft.

"The man in the orchard," she said, "isn't my enemy, Liora. He's the reason you're still alive. I would tell you his name if I thought it would keep you safer. I don't. Not yet." She reached for my hand, and I let her take it, though every careful instinct I had built screamed against the softness of allowing it. "That's the truest thing I have to give you tonight. I hope, someday, it will be enough."

"Why won't you trust me with the rest?"

"Because trust isn't the same as safety," Seraphine said, and for the first time in either of my lives, I heard something in her voice that sounded almost like envy — not of my position, or my prospects, both of which had always paled beside her own, but of some simpler thing I couldn't immediately name. "You've had the luxury of being underestimated your whole life, Liora. No one watches the quiet daughter. No one wonders what she knows, or who she's spoken to, or what she might do if pushed too far. I have never once had that luxury. Everything I do, everything I say, is weighed and measured and reported to someone before the words have finished leaving my mouth. If I tell you what I know, I don't just risk you. I risk everyone who's trusted me to carry it safely this far."

"That sounds like a cage."

"It is one," Seraphine said simply. "I built parts of it myself, and other people built the rest, and most days I couldn't tell you anymore which walls are mine and which were given to me before I was old enough to refuse them." She withdrew her hand, gently, and reached instead for the lute she had set aside, running her thumb once along its strings without playing. "I know you don't fully trust me. I understand why. I only ask that you remember, whatever you eventually learn about me, that I have spent three years trying to keep the worst of it away from you, even when it cost me things I couldn't explain."

I left the music room with more questions than I had carried into it, and one new certainty I turned over long into the night: whatever cage Seraphine lived inside, she had not built all of its walls herself, and someone else, somewhere close, still held the key to at least a few of them.