Princess Angelica sat at the royal table in pale gold silk, a jewelled fan moving slowly in one hand. She was looking toward Clara's table with an expression that showed nothing — pleasantly composed, perfectly empty. But as Evander walked away, Angelica's fan stilled for just a moment. One finger pressed harder against the ivory handle.
Then a lord said something to her, and her attention turned like a lamp pointed elsewhere.
Clara reached for her water glass and did not look back.
Lord Anthony Vey arrived after the second course.
Clara became aware of him the way one becomes aware of a shift in a room's temperature — not all at once, but gradually, as the energy around her changed. He was tall, dark-haired, with the kind of face that made people nearby straighten slightly without knowing why. He moved through the hall with an ease that was neither arrogant nor unearned, stopping to speak with each table in turn, and when he reached Clara's table he looked at her with an expression of genuine interest that she had not been prepared for.
"Miss Peri," he said. "Would you honour me with a dance?"
Behind her, she heard Evander make a sound of profound personal injury.
She danced with Anthony Vey.
He was a good dancer — attentive, easy to follow — and he talked without performing, which she found she appreciated more than she expected. He asked about her, actually asked, in the way of someone listening for the answer rather than waiting to speak again. She gave careful, honest replies and watched his expression and decided she liked him, cautiously, in the way she liked most things — at a distance first, with room to revise.
At the royal table, she did not look directly, but she was aware — the way she was always aware of things at the edges of her vision — that Princess Angelica was watching.
The fan had stopped moving entirely.
The dance ended. Anthony escorted her back toward her table and bowed over her hand, and that was when Angelica appeared.
She moved through the crowd the way beautiful, powerful people move — the crowd adjusting itself around her without being asked. Her smile was warm and practiced and reached precisely nowhere near her eyes.
"Miss Peri," she said, in a voice designed to carry just far enough. "What a charming dress. It's so — earnest." Her gaze moved slowly from the green fabric to Clara's face. "I always think it takes a particular kind of courage to attend these events when one has so little to recommend oneself beyond a pretty face. Though I suppose when that is all one has —"
Clara held her gaze steadily. She had learned, long ago, not to flinch at things that were meant to make her flinch. She drew breath to answer —
The windows shattered.
Not violently. The glass dissolved inward — each pane breaking into fine silver particles that caught the candlelight as they fell, slowly, almost beautifully, like the world was exhaling. Through the open frames, a cold flooded the hall that had nothing to do with November. It was deeper and perhaps older than the weather itself.
The hall went silent.
In the space where the window had been, a raven that cast a shadow over the entire hall flew inside.
It was wrong before Clara could explain why — too still, shadows gathering around it more thickly than shadows should. With each step it grew until it stood the height of a two man, black wings trailing smoke at the edges.
Everything in that glorious hall gradually came to a still. But Clara felt it before anyone else did — a cold pressure against her sternum, sharp and directed, the same dark energy she had learned to recognise in the spirit world. Her hand moved without thinking to her mother's ruby.
When the raven opened its beak, the voice that came out was low and even and utterly without hollow like the sound at the bottom of a deep well.
"The hundred-year covenant is due. The Demon King will receive his sacrifice before the full moon rises. Any failure to comply will be answered in kind."
The wings spread once — slow, enormous, deliberate.
Its eyes found Clara's.
She did not know how. Hundreds of people stood between them. She was nobody in a green dress at a middle table. But the raven looked directly at her — held her gaze for three full seconds, long enough that the cold against her sternum sharpened into something that felt almost like recognition — and then it dissolved instantly like a bright red flame coming to an end.
The hall erupted.
Princess Angelica had gone very still beside her, the practised warmth entirely gone from her face, replaced with something that looked, for just a moment, like genuine fear.
Clara stood in the wreckage of the celebration with her hand pressed flat against her mother's ruby on her neck, and thought about white roses floating on dark water.
Something is coming. For you.
She remembered the housemaid's words, but this time they were clearer.