The city had changed overnight.
Clara noticed it the moment Edmund pulled the carriage into the main street the following morning — the way people moved differently, in clusters rather than alone, heads bent together, voices low. A group of women outside a bakery spoke with their hands pressed to their mouths. Two men in a doorway stopped talking entirely when the carriage passed.
The raven's visit had spread through the city the way bad news always does. Quickly. Completely. Leaving no corner untouched.
Inside the carriage, her uncle sat with his hands folded on his knees and said nothing. He had said very little since last night. Clara watched the street and did not ask questions she already knew he couldn't answer.
What she learned about the court's panic, she learned in pieces.
The first piece came from Martha, who had it from a kitchen maid, who had a maid cousin in the palace household. The noble lords had convened before breakfast — all seven houses summoned to the King's council chamber before most of the city was awake.
The seven houses. Clara could recite them the way she could recite scripture — by repetition and long familiarity. Ashworth. Calloway. Vey. Dunmore. Hartley. Beaumont. And Peri, the smallest of the seven, always sat at the far end of whatever table was arranged.
"They argued for three hours," Martha told her, pressing the seams of Clara's afternoon dress with short, efficient strokes. "About the last sacrifice. Whether she arrived. Nobody knows for certain — the girl was sent across the sea, and that was the end of it. No word came back."
"No word ever comes back," Clara said.
Martha set the iron down and looked at her. "The King has ordered every house to compile a list. Girls of marriageable age. Eighteen to twenty." She paused. "With any unusual abilities. Or markings."
The word settled in the room between them.
Clara touched her mother's ruby without meaning to.
"There is also," Martha continued, picking the iron back up, "to be a full inspection. Any girl who meets even one of the three signs is to be examined by the royal physician." She did not look up. "Your uncle knows."
"I know he knows."
"He told your aunt last night that you have no birthmark. That you never had." A pause. "She agreed."
This surprised Clara. She turned to look at Martha properly.
"She said it plainly," Martha said. "Whatever else she is, she was plain about that."
Clara sat with this for a moment.
"Thank you," she said quietly.
Martha made the small sound that meant of course and went back to pressing the seams.
The Hartley garden tea was the social event of the week under ordinary circumstances.
Under the latest circumstances, it was something else entirely — forty noble ladies gathered on manicured lawns, speaking in bright, careful voices about everything except the only thing anyone was thinking about. The anxiety moved beneath the surface of every conversation like water under ice, present and pressurised, waiting.
Clara arrived with her aunt, who had spent the carriage ride explaining that she would have preferred to remain home but that leaving a young woman unaccompanied in the current climate was inadvisable. She said this as though it were a logistical observation rather than a form of care, which was, Clara had long decided, simply how her aunt expressed the things she could not bring herself to say directly.
The gardens were beautiful. Late autumn had stripped most of the trees but left the hedgerows intact, and someone had arranged low tables near the pond with white tablecloths and small vases of the last autumn roses. Ladies in their best afternoon dresses clustered in careful groups. Mothers watched their daughters. Daughters watched each other.
Princess Angelica presided near the centre of it all in deep burgundy silk, her ladies arranged around her like a painting composed for maximum effect. She was laughing at something when Clara arrived — a bright, musical laugh — and her eyes moved to Clara's entrance with the smoothness of someone who had been watching the gate all along.
The laugh continued. Nothing in her expression changed.
Clara found a seat beside the pond and accepted a cup of tea from a passing maid. She was perfectly content to observe quietly until the afternoon was over.
She was not permitted to be content for long.
"Miss Peri." Lord Evander Ashworth dropped into the chair beside her with the ease of someone who considered all chairs equally his. "Hartley's garden parties are considerably more interesting when you attend."
"I suspect that says more about Hartley's garden parties than about me."
He grinned. Lord Calloway's son appeared on her other side moments later, followed by young Lord Beaumont, who was seventeen and trying very hard not to show that he was nervous about it. The three of them arranged themselves around her with the cheerful territorial instinct of young men who had not yet learned subtlety.