Tatiana smiled like the blade of a knife. “You will see, Grace. Love leads to pain, but if you are careful with the way you wield it … you can use it to wound, as well.”

The very next morning Grace awoke to find that her mother had packed her a trunk in the night, and that they were leaving that afternoon for Paris. She didn’t want to go, for Jesse couldn’t accompany them. It was too risky, Tatiana said, to attempt to move his body, and previous experiments had indicated he could not travel far from it. Grace was horrified that she wouldn’t have a chance to say goodbye or explain where they were going, so Tatiana allowed her to leave him a note. Grace wrote it in a shaky hand, with her mother watching, and left it on her bedside table for Jesse to find. And then she was whisked away to Paris.

In that glittering city, Grace was dressed in fine gowns and brought to mundane balls. She was swept from ballroom to ballroom, introduced to bejeweled strangers who complimented her roundly. “What a beautiful child!” they would exclaim. “How enchanting she is—like a princess from a fairy tale.”

The change in her life staggered her. In a short time, she went from speaking to no one but her mother and her spectral brother in a dark, silent house, to chatting with sons of Europe’s noble families. Grace learned that it was best to say little and appear to be transported to ecstasy by whatever it was these stuffy adults and boring boys had to say. In any event, her mother had made it clear that they were here for practice. And so Grace practiced.

When she tried her power on grown men, they thought she was a delightful curiosity, like a beautiful vase or a rare flower. They wanted to give her gifts—toys, dolls, jewelry, and even ponies. Grace found using her power on boys her own age more annoying, and yet Tatiana insisted she do so. The problem was not that the boys didn’t like her—it was that they liked her too much. They invariably hoped to kiss her or propose marriage—preposterous, when they were only children and marriage wouldn’t even be possible for years at least. They seemed desperate to do whatever they could to make her love them back. In an effort to steer them away from kisses, Grace asked for gifts, and she reliably received them.

The youngest son of a German duke gave her the necklace, a family heirloom, off his own neck; the third younger brother of the Austro-Hungarian emperor sent her home one night in a carriage and four horses that were hers to keep.

Despite the attention, Grace felt staggeringly alone without Jesse. She began to feel the poison of loneliness cutting into her, as it had hollowed out her mother. These boys would do anything for her, but none of them knew who she truly was. Only Jesse knew that. Grace went to bed every night feeling desperately lonesome, without Jesse to sit with her until she fell asleep.

And so her requests grew stranger. She asked the nephew of a Czech viscount for one of the two horses attached to his carriage, and he gallantly untethered it for her before awkwardly riding off with only his left horse. She took to eccentric dietary habits that changed at every event: a tall glass of cold milk for her meal, or fifty of one kind of canape. And this way she learned more than her own power. She learned how power worked within the halls of the upper classes. It was not enough to be able to cloud men’s minds—she had to understand which of those men had the power to produce what she desired.

For once, Grace had a way of earning her mother’s approval, however unethical the method. During their time in Paris, Tatiana was often in great spirits, finally pleased with Grace. She would smile at Grace in the carriage as they returned home from a particularly successful night. “You are your mother’s blade,” she would say, “cutting these arrogant boys down to size.”

And Grace would smile back, agreeing. “I am my mother’s blade indeed.”

11

CROWNS AND POUNDS AND GUINEAS

When I was one-and-twenty

I heard a wise man say,

“Give crowns and pounds and guineas

But not your heart away;

Give pearls away and rubies

But keep your fancy free.”

But I was one-and-twenty,

No use to talk to me.

—A. E. Housman

Cordelia rose the next day to find that it had snowed during the night, wiping the world clean. The streets of London sparkled, not yet turned to churning mud by carriage wheels. Roofs and chimneys were wreathed in white, and snow sifted gently down from the boughs of the bare trees along Curzon Street.

She shivered her way out of bed and into her dressing gown. Cortana hung by its gilded hooks on the wall of her room, the scabbard gleaming, the hilt like a wand of gold. She slipped past it on her way into the bathroom, trying to concentrate on how pleasant it was to be able to wash her face in hot water instead of needing to break through a layer of ice in the washstand jug on her night table—and not on the fact that her sword seemed to be staring at her, posing a question.

After they’d left the sailcloth factory the previous day, it had been decided that there was no way around it: the adults would need to be told about the factory, the bloody cloak. Concealing the information would only interfere with the investigation into the murders. Cordelia had pled a headache, hoping to simply return home and not bother the others, but desperate for some time alone to think about Cortana. It had worked only somewhat. James had insisted on returning with her to Curzon Street, where he had gone straight to Risa for headache remedies. Risa had fussed over Cordelia half the evening until she hid under the covers of her bed and pretended to be asleep.

Now, having pinned her hair into a twist, she slipped a burgundy wool dress over her chemise and petticoats and took Cortana down from the wall. Sliding it from its scabbard, she gazed at the weapon. It bore a pattern of leaves and runes on the hilt—Cortana was unusual in having no runes upon its blade, only words: I am Cortana, of the same steel and temper as Joyeuse and Durendal.

She lifted the blade, half expecting another shot of pain through her arm. She spun, slicing at the air—spun again, a double feint, step back, blade raised.

There was no pain this time. But there was an odd sensation, a feeling of wrongness. She was used to Cortana fitting perfectly in her hand, as if shaped to be hers. She had always felt a whispered communion with the sword, especially when heading into a fight, as if they were telling each other that they would win together.

She felt only silence now. Dispirited, she hung the sword back on the wall. “Ugh,” she muttered to herself, lacing up her low boots. “It’s a sword, not a pet hedgehog. Have sense.”

After making her way downstairs, she found the dining room empty. She went out into the hall, where she saw Risa carrying a tray with a silver coffee service on it and looking extremely put-upon.

“All your friends are in the drawing room, and the circus boy spent the night sleeping on the piano bench,” she said, in Persian. “Really, Layla, this is most improper.”

Cordelia hurried along the hall to find the drawing room door flung open. Inside, a fire was roaring in the grate. Lucie sat in a velvet armchair, and sprawled on the rug were the Merry Thieves—James with his long legs stretched in front of him, Thomas spooning porridge from a bowl, Christopher munching blissfully on a lemon tart, and Matthew sunk into a massive pile of cushions.

James looked up as she came in, his golden eyes sleepy. “Daisy,” he said, waving an empty coffee cup in her direction. “Please don’t blame me—these young roustabouts appeared at an unseemly hour and refused to leave without infesting our house.”