Chapter 390: The table 5

He was silent for so long that Kiara thought he had not heard.

Then he sat down again, slowly, as if the question weighed more than the tea tray, and rubbed his thumb along the edge of the armrest.

"No," he said.

Kiara looked up.

"I have asked myself that same question more times than I can count. I have gone back through every memory, searching for it." He shook his head.

"She was never that kind of person, Kiara. Not once in all the years I knew her. Not when the other noblewomen whispered behind their fans because she wore her hair loose at supper. Not when I said the cruellest things to her on the night she told me what she was."

A faint, pained smile crossed his face.

"She heard every word, and then the next morning she poured me tea."

He looked at the lamp.

"Your mother only ever knew how to forgive. She smiled when it was hard to smile, and she loved when it would have been far easier not to. There was no anger in her. I have looked, and I have never found a trace of it."

The handkerchief had gone still in Kiara’s hands.

She tried to picture it.

Her mother in the square, bruised and bleeding. The stones. The fire.

She had held that image in her mind so many times that it had worn a groove there, and every time she had filled the face with fury, with the rage that Kiara herself carried, the kind that burned.

But her father was right.

Her mother had not looked furious. She had looked calm.

Accepting.

Kiara had spent years telling herself that this calm was just fear. Now, for the first time, she wondered if it had been something else.

"I see," she said quietly.

"Do you?" he asked, not unkindly.

"I don’t know." She gave him a crooked smile. "Ask me tomorrow."

He studied her a moment longer, and she saw that he wanted to ask what she meant. He did not.

Instead he stood, gathered the cooled tea and the empty cups onto the tray, and paused at the door with the light of the corridor behind him.

"Sleep tonight," he said. "Whatever it is you are carrying, it will keep until morning."

"I’ll try."

"And Kiara?"

"Yes?"

"Score your full marks. But if you do not, I will not mind in the least." His eyes crinkled.

"Your mother could never multiply eight with nine, and she was the cleverest woman I have ever met."

The door clicked shut.

Kiara sat alone in the chair, with the handkerchief in her lap and the taste of rose tea still on her tongue.

She turned her right hand over and looked at her palm. The skin was plain and unmarked. No light. No glow. Nothing that anyone would think twice about.

But she could feel it there, underneath, patient and waiting, the same warmth that had answered her anger so many times before. It had always felt like power.

Tonight, for the first time, it felt like a question.

Kiara did not know what she would do when the sun came up the next morning.

She only knew that her mother had never once been angry, and that she, Kiara, had been angry enough for both of them for as long as she could remember.

__

The princess’s dressing room was bigger than most houses in the lower quarter.

It sat behind a pair of white doors at the end of her private corridor, a long hall of mirrors and cedar, lined on both sides with tall wardrobes whose brass handles had been polished bright.

Gowns hung in rows along the walls, sorted by colour, then by season, then by a system that only one person in the palace understood.

Silk, velvet, brocade and lace hung side by side in the dim lamplight.

Shoes sat on glass shelves in neat pairs.

At the far end, beneath a high arched window that looked out over the sleeping city, stood a round dais with a three-panel mirror, and in front of that mirror, Aurora stood with her hands on her hips.

"No," she said.

The gown in front of her, a pale blue thing with a long train and a neckline cut to the navel, had cost more than a small farm. She looked at it with open disappointment.

"Too sweet. I would look like a cake." She flicked her fingers, and the dress slid off its hanger and landed in a heap on the growing pile by the dais. "Next."

She was wearing, at that moment, very little.

The lingerie was black lace, edged in thin silver thread, and it fit her perfectly.

The bra was cut low, framing the soft curve of her full chest, and the matching panties rode high on her hips, held in place by fine straps that ran down to the garter clasps at the tops of her thighs.

Her long silver hair had been let out of its braid and hung loose down her back, pale against her bare shoulders.

She was humming, a light, tuneless song, and every few seconds she tilted her head at the mirror to study a different angle.

The side door banged open.

"I’m here," Kuri announced, in the tone of someone who would rather have been anywhere else.

She came down the length of the hall with her arms crossed and her short black hair sticking out at odd angles.

She had come in through the hidden passage under the east wing, which meant she still had dust on her knees and a smear of cobweb on one shoulder.

The black top and shorts she wore hung a little crooked, as if she had pulled them on in the dark. She stopped three paces from the dais and glared at the floor.

"You’re late," said Aurora, without turning around.

"By two minutes."

"By two minutes and eleven seconds." Aurora met her eyes in the mirror and smiled, bright and warm and entirely unbothered.

"I forgive you. Come and hold this.