Then he was pulling me roughly around the corner and into the cave.
It wasn’t, of course, the actual cave, the cave that mattered. That was beyond an uneven hole where the rock had collapsed, the hole they were working to plug. This was a mere antechamber, roughly circular, like a bubble in the rock, scattered with weapons, tools, and chunks of stone which they were using to block the way through.
Stefan Von Strahden was inside, lit by the soft glow of an oil lamp. He had just enough dignity to look down, shamefaced, when my eyes fell upon him. I had known as much, but I still felt a strange and sapping misery that was about far more than this one disappointing man.
“You turned on everything you believed,” I said. “Everyone.”
“We aren’t all born onto estates like Willinghouse,” he said, mustering a little defiance, so that his normally open, welcoming face—a face I had instantly liked—looked petulant. “You of all people should know that.”
“I do,” I said. “And that’s why I know that excuse isn’t good enough.”
“You’re dazzled by him,” said Von Strahden, who looked sick and sweaty. “By his elegance and good looks and money.”
“And you are dazzled by my sister,” I said, managing a thin and hopeless smile. “We all were.”
“I didn’t know you were sisters,” he said, as if that made a difference. He sounded weary and a little defeated, even sad. “Not till a few days ago. Vestris never … I didn’t know.”
I turned to face her. She was staring at him, her face hard and unreadable.
“You were a steeplejack?” I said. “Before you became … whatever you are now?”
Her face flashed with anger for a second, and I braced myself for her to slash the pistol across my face, but she recovered her composure and framed a smile, though I saw the sweat glistening on her forehead. Like Van Strahden, she looked greenish, unwell, and there was a spot above her left ear where the scalp showed through her hair.
“That was a long time ago,” she said. “I have moved up in the world, and not by climbing chimneys.”
“Climbing into people’s beds—” I began, but did not finish.
The inevitable blow made the chamber spin, and I went down for a moment. I tasted blood in my mouth, and the raging throb of my already battered cheek, but I felt only vindication and a strange, savage joy.
“All my life I have looked up to you,” I said from the ground. “Everyone back home does. But now that I know you for what you are, I pity you.”
“Home?” snapped Vestris. “You think that stinking shanty was home to someone like me? I’m above it. I always was, and in your heart, you think that you are too.”
I blinked, trying to keep the truth of her remark from my face, but she saw it anyway and smiled.
“What a strange and self-deluding person you are!” she said. “You thought you could be a mother to Rahvey’s brat? You thought you could escape your past by working as an aristocrat’s hired help? Poor, sad little Ang. I once thought us so similar. It’s really rather disappointing.”
“We were,” I said, unable to keep the sadness out of my voice. “Once, when it was just Papa and the three of us—you, me, and Rahvey. We were similar. Did you forget?”
She made to hit me again, and I flinched away. “As for pity,” said Vestris, as if I hadn’t spoken, “save it for those who need it. Yourself, of course. And your apprentice, Tanish.”
She read the flicker of puzzled anxiety in my eyes.
“Oh, you won’t have heard!” she said. “I’m so sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Your little friend died this morning.”
No.
I said nothing as they got on with their work. I felt the cool stone beneath my hands, heard the breathing of my enemies, and saw the brutal cascade of images in my head, things I had done, things I had failed to do, but I said nothing. There was nothing left to say. My eyes had flooded, and though I fought to keep them open, I blinked at last, and tears ran down my face.
I’m not sure how long I stayed there like that, but after a while, as if bored by my silence, the woman who had been my sister spoke again.
“You want to see, little Anglet?” she said. “You might as well. It is, after all, what you will die for.”
I looked up at that, searching her face for a glimmer of doubt or remorse, but there was nothing. I knew she had tried to kill me at the opera house, but I was still surprised. She was implacable, determined, and it was as if I had never seen her before, or if in pursuit of what she most wanted, she had gone through some appalling transformation, a nightmare butterfly. The Vestris who had read to me when Papa could not was gone.
“No,” I said.
“Ah”—she smiled—“a little spirit yet. But there are times when you should do as you are told.”
“You’re going to kill me anyway,” I said.
“True,” she said. “but I haven’t decided what to do about Rahvey’s brat.”