How could there only be one lens?

Malou couldn’t keep the bile down anymore, and she retched beside the attendants' gate onto clean stone setts until her stomach was empty and her mouth burned with acid.

One lens? One half of the Teir? Brosch had died to protect one worthless half of the Teir?

The Teir itself was a supercomputer nanochip powered by magic that no one could explain encased inside a pair of contact lenses, capable of predicting the future based on algorithmically processing patterns in history. However, the Teir was created to work when one user wore both contacts. They must have decided to split the Teir to keep it safe. The other lens had to be at Tousieux then. There was no other explanation.

She closed the box, hooked it back onto her chatelaine, and grabbed the key she’d stolen to the attendant's gate. The automatic street sweepers would clean away her vomit in a few hours. Her fingers fumbled getting the key to fit into the lock. Only when she had the gate closed behind her did she remember to ask Laure to disable the Valois Manor’s security cams. She swore.

“Did the cams already catch me?” she whispered, voice tense and trembling.

“You were standing outside of the gate for approximately five minutes and seventeen seconds,” Laure said. “It would be impossibly hard not to catch you.”

Malou swore again, this time a little louder than she’d meant but not enough for the fair-haired guard on duty in the gatehouse to notice. “Delete it.”

“That won’t do a thing for you if someone already saw it.”

Sometimes Malou didn’t care much for Laure’s invulnerable logic.

“If it comes up, I’ll deal with it. Just make sure the evidence is gone.”

Not wanting to waste any more time, she dropped the keys at the door as Laure assured her the evidence was long, long gone. She needn’t worry about that side of things, Laure reminded her.

She retraced her footsteps back to her bedroom, moving quietly through the garden, the laundry room, and up the attendants' stairs. At the top, she paused and took off her headwrap.

“Laure, is the Teir still synchronizing?”

“I used slowly as a euphemism,” Laure said, then gave an exaggerated sigh. “You would likely need to keep wearing the lenses for a full day to reach 1% at the current rate. I'm not certain why synchronization is taking so long.”

A problem for later then. Malou placed her hand over the Teir’s box in her pocket. She closed her eyes, letting its magic burn her palm as she imagined it smaller, much smaller. So small that it’d seem like there was nothing at the end of the chain until she imagined it back in its original size. When her hand was flat against her thigh, she released a long breath.

What if she could’ve done that to Brosch or herself? What if she could’ve made sure they could both fit? She didn’t know the rules of this magic her father barely taught her to use. All you must remember about using magic, he’d said, is that you must do no harm. Promise me?

She should’ve asked him more questions. She should’ve practiced more when he was alive. She should’ve practiced more after he’d died. If she had done even one of those things, Brosch might still be alive.

Malou opened the stairway door to the hall. “Elodie’s still in my room?”

“Yes. Awake.”

From her chatelaine, she found a breath freshener and dissolved the peppermint sheet on the back of her tongue. Elodie was sipping tea in one of the armchairs by the windows when Malou opened the door. On the side table beside Elodie, a steaming cup and a plate of biscuits were waiting for her.

Elodie welcomed her with a big smile. “I told them you were out on a walk,” she said, kicking her feet back and forth as she took another dainty sip of tea.

Really it wasn’t the business of any of the attendants if Malou had left or where she’d gone, but Elodie looked positively delighted to have covered for her while she was away.

Malou returned the smile as best as she could, but she hated that her cousin had to lie at all. The girl was only thirteen. She still had time to be innocent and naïve and positively clueless.

“I’ll imagine that was clever,” Malou told her.

“It was clever,” Elodie said back, matter of fact.

Perhaps Zeynel thought the same of Malou, thought she was still a little girl. Maybe that was why he hadn’t told her someone was after the Teir or that there might be a possibility her father hadn’t died in an accident. Except Malou wasn’t a little girl.

“We can agree to disagree,” Malou said. Crossing the room, she stripped off her gloves and jacket, tried to strip off the vision of Brosch’s dead body in her mind. She laid both over the armrest as she took a seat beside Elodie. “What gave you the thought to do that though?”

Elodie passed over Malou’s cup, Samouvean black tea catching a shimmer of the sunrise. “I didn’t want them to spread rumors about you as they do about Dorian, of course.”

Not exactly rumors, but Malou wasn’t going to correct her. “No, certainly wouldn’t want that,” she said. The tea was bitter, and she was glad for it. “How considerate, dear cousin. I’ll have to find a way to repay you. Perhaps—”

“A visit.” Elodie stilled her swinging legs and dipped her head. She was being shy.

Malou gave a soft laugh, then moved her cup to the side table and gestured for her cousin to come over. Once the girl was in her lap, she held her tight. Elodie was more of a little sister to her than a cousin—someone she wanted to guide, to protect. Maybe because it seemed like Elodie was the only one who loved her without any strings attached.

“I’ll visit, then. I’ll come to see you as much as you want after exams. I’ll even stay until the new year. How does that sound? We’ll have sleepovers every night. And when I go back to Tousieux, I’ll call you every night. You’ll get sick of my face.”

“I won’t.” Elodie hooked her feet around Malou’s calves. “That’s impossible. I like your face too much and, just generally, you.”

“Nothing is impossible. You’ll get sick of my sheet-hogging soon enough. You always do. You’ll get sick of my too-loud laughter, too. Then you’ll bore of my stories. You’ll tire of my advice. You’ll grow immune to my teasing.”

“I get too hot at night now, anyway,” Elodie countered, “and I love your laugh. I’ve heard your stories ten times over and I still love hearing them. Your advice, too, is much better than what I’m offered by my friends. They’re all worried about their next fête, their next chèque from mommy or daddy they can spend on some frivolous or absurd thing or another. They just tell me not to worry. And then there’s your teasing—well. I grew immune to that a while ago, but I can pretend?”

“Yes, do pretend. You don’t want to damage the precious ego of your older cousin.”

A knock on the door interrupted Elodie’s laugh. “Come in, come in,” she called, and her team of tailors and make-up artists and hairstylists took over Malou’s room. Reluctantly, Malou had to release her cousin and let the girl return to her room to be readied for the funeral.

For the first time in her life, Malou didn’t mind the half-dozen hands all over her at once. Coaxing her out of her clothes. Slipping her into a quick, perfumed bath. Twisting her curls into a style even Leonore would’ve found regal enough. Layering make-up on her face. Dressing her up. Every moment of the process reminded her of the day of her father’s funeral. This time, though, she didn’t watch the door for her mother to lend a hand. Leonore hadn’t come then, she hadn’t come since, and she wouldn’t come now.

The stylist’s final addition was a bothersome white veil. Malou hoped it would conceal the muscle surely jumping in her jaw and the vein throbbing at her left temple. Then Malou was guided to Elodie’s room, where she met with the younger girl.

Malou escorted her cousin downstairs, Elodie’s white-gloved hand tucked under her arm. They joined the family under white lace parasols and white-feathered hats, followed their new head of house outside through the garden parterre to the hunting forest. The matron of the Valois family was the only one without a funeral veil. As was tradition.

All fifty guests who cared enough to watch dirt bury the former senator’s corpse were already seated in perfectly arranged aisles facing the marble headstones at the edge of the woods. They watched the family file into the empty row in the back while her grandmother continued to the front to stand at her first husband’s grave, his mechanical Great Dane at her side.

Malou remembered that long walk, the gazes of pity from a mourning crowd. Swallowing hard, Malou took Elodie’s hand. Elodie laced Malou’s fingers with her own, just as Malou’s mother had at her father’s funeral.

A calm settled over the thin crowd when her grandmother began her eulogy in that raw, passionate voice of hers that rose, fell, and sounded like a song. Malou didn’t hear a word she said. She watched the breeze blowing against the bare branches of the trees behind the headstones, fighting images of what her grandfather’s dead body would look like lying in that marble coffin.

Then she was remembering Tousieux’s forest cemetery, where a crop of twenty-three evergreen trees had strings of white beads draped around the boughs. A vase of ashes nestled into a hollow that’d been dug into each tree, except her father’s tree had no vase, only a pocket watch because there had been no body.

Malou hadn’t listened to her mother either, that day. She hadn’t wanted to remember her father reading her stories from the newspaper to put her to sleep, hadn’t wanted to remember him teaching her how to cook, hadn’t wanted to remember how he’d looked at her, how he’d smiled at her, how he’d hugged her, how he’d loved her.

She hated her father’s funeral, and her father would’ve hated it as well. Would’ve hated that his friends and family had even spent time grieving over his passing. Would’ve hated that she’d spent the entire time crying. Would’ve hated that Gavriel had cried the entire time, too.

After Leonore had finished her eulogy and had taken Malou into the forest to say a final goodbye in private, Malou hadn’t been able to bring herself to say a single word. Saying something would’ve felt like admitting her father would be gone forever, and she hadn’t been ready for that reality yet. She still wasn’t ready for it.

Maybe that was why it was so important for her to find out if her father had been murdered by the same people who’d taken Brosch’s life if there had been more to his death than just some accident. There was no one to blame for an accident, after all, and she needed someone to blame other than herself.

She needed to be back on campus. She needed to return the other half of the Teir. She needed to ask Zeynel why Professor Brosch had been in possession of it in the first place and why he’d sent her to retrieve it—if he’d known Professor Brosch would die if he sent her.

Brosch’s lifeless expression flashed into her mind. She also needed to find out if Professor Brosch’s death had anything to do with the other professors who’d disappeared in the last four years. She needed to know if her father could be counted among them.

There was so much she needed to know, it was almost overwhelming. Almost. It was just enough to make her blood run a little hotter, to make her a little more desperate. She’d find out what she needed to know no matter what lines she had to cross.

Her grandmother finished and gave her spouse's grave one last, low bow. When she straightened and turned back to her audience, Malou expected her face to be tear-streaked. Instead, she walked down the aisle, head held high, and claimed her seat in the back without her eyes even glistening. Her spouse's Great Dane sat at her side and rested his chin on her shoulder.

The first person in the first row stood to pay his respects, and her free hand fisted in her lap. It was the senator from Drondaal. His name was Senator Sander de Klijn.

As the senator strode to her grandfather’s grave, he stuffed his hands deep into the pockets of his white knee-length topcoat. His mechanical Drondaalian Elkhound remained sitting stiffly beside his master’s chair. His bow was rushed and sloppy, too.

For a man who’d spent thirty years serving on the parliament with her grandfather Senator de Klijn certainly didn’t pay him the respect he deserved. He could’ve spit and shown as much respect.

When the senator passed the front row on his way to leave, the man who’d been sitting to his right took his turn—another parliament member with equal gaudery. Senator Mertens was the last of them, and not even she cared enough to give him a proper farewell.

Malou wasn’t sure why she hadn’t been expecting these men and women to bring their politics to a funeral. She had Laure make a list of one attendant after another who offered her grandfather their feigned condolences. They dawdled, strolled, meandered their way back to their limousines and hansoms and town cars, back to their manors and mansions and castles. All as if they’d simply left the house for good press.

After the last of them trickled away, the Valois family took turns visiting the grave of their former head of house—some alone, some in pairs, and some in groups of threes or fours. When Dorian stood, Elodie followed him and pulled Malou to the front with them. His arm circled Elodie’s shoulders as though he cared about his younger sister.

Malou turned her gaze away when they approached the glass-covered coffin. Elodie spoke first, but Malou didn’t hear much of what she said to their grandfather’s dead body after her bottom lip started quivering. All Dorian gave was a quick line of appreciation. Malou couldn’t follow his example with anything better, though. Especially not with her mind filled with Brosch’s blood, Brosch’s dead eyes.

After she finished, she moved an arm around Elodie’s waist, hugging her close, and headed them down the aisle. This time, when Dorian circled his arm around Elodie’s shoulders, he tapped Malou’s back to get her attention.

“Did you see them?” Dorian asked, voice husky under his breath. He locked eyes with Malou’s over Elodie’s head. “De Klijn, Mertens…”

“What do you mean?” Elodie asked. “They were upfront, right? I thought perhaps they wouldn’t come because they weren’t at the inauguration—except Senator de Klijn. Niels—his son and daughter didn’t attend, though. Is that what you mean?”

Dorian ignored his sister. “But did you see them, Malou?”

Was this what he’d wanted to talk to her privately about? Yes, she had seen each display their lack of regard for their grandfather. She didn’t, however, want to discuss this around Elodie.

“I have eyes,” she said. “So yes, I did see them. What of it?”

“What of it?” He glanced at Elodie, his lip curling only a little—enough to tell Malou that he was attempting to restrain himself in front of his sister. His arm left Elodie’s shoulder. “They would’ve bid a better farewell to an attendant. Don’t even argue with me about it, either. I know you saw it. You know exactly what I’m talking about. They didn’t do that without purpose.”

Malou held Elodie a little closer and wished she could cover the girl’s ears.

“I’m not arguing with you,” she lied. She even threw him a nonchalant smile that he wouldn’t believe even for a moment. “Our grandfather wasn’t their attendant. He was a colleague whose vote was often cast contrary to theirs. They came. I think that speaks volumes. There was never more that we could’ve expected from them—”

Elodie tugged on the back of Malou’s jacket. When Malou turned to her, the girl was staring toward the forest, where her grandmother was on her knees in front of her spouse’s grave. Then Malou saw a dark-haired family dressed in all black coming toward her grandmother from around the other side of the manor, a mechanical black bear acting as a bodyguard trailing behind them with lumbering, dutiful steps.

Malou didn’t need to see a face to know it was the Crowned Consul and his family—his first wife, his politician brother, and his three children. Only the royal family mourned in black, after all.

Her grandmother didn’t rise to welcome them, but the leader of the Revernais Empire hadn’t seemed to ask her to. Instead, he knelt beside her, doing more for her grandfather than Malou had. Her grandfather had always voiced the most support for the Crowned Consul in the parliament, but he was still the last person Malou had expected to say one last goodbye. Maybe he was as great of a ruler as his people believed.

Dorian scoffed, even as the crowned family each fell to their knees behind the ruler of their country. He went ahead of them to the manor without another glance to his grandfather’s grave.

Malou studied the hunched forms of the Crowned Consul's children. The two eldest were generals in the Crowned Revernais Army. The youngest of them had been named heir when he’d been born, as though his father had recognized some sort of greatness in his third child the moment he held the baby in his arms for the first time. Now that boy was nineteen years old and bowing his royal head to her grandfather under the greying sky. The gentle slant of his shoulders didn’t look like they’d ever be able to bear an empire.

Was that what her shoulders looked like, too?

Elodie nudged Malou. “Dorian probably thinks His Royal Majesty is only here to keep up appearances. I’m glad he came, though.”

The Crowned Consul had to know her grandfather had been murdered, so his visit wasn’t just for show. Surely, Dorian knew that as well. Malou wasn’t sure she was glad he’d attended, though, but wasn’t his presence better than the alternative?