The Royal Physician's Hall smelled of camphor and cold stone.
Clara had expected something clinical and intimidating. What she found was worse — a room full of noble ladies all pretending very hard that nothing unusual was happening, seated on wooden benches in their finest morning dresses, hands folded, eyes forward, performing composure for one another with the dedication of people who had been raised to never let anything show.
She found a seat near the far wall and did the same.
A palace maid called names in alphabetical order. Each girl disappeared behind a heavy curtain and emerged a few minutes later, returning to her seat with an expression carefully wiped clean. Nobody spoke about what happened behind the curtain. Nobody needed to.
When Clara's name was called, she rose, smoothed her skirt, and followed.
Behind the curtain was a small white room divided by a hanging veil — sheer enough to see silhouettes, thick enough to obscure details. On her side, two palace maids waited with the particular blankness of women performing a duty they had been told not to discuss. On the other side, three physicians sat at a table with papers and pens.
"Name," said a voice.
"Clara Peri. Ward of House Peri."
The scratch of a pen. "Age."
"Twenty."
"Any unusual abilities. Hereditary or otherwise."
The room was very still. Clara thought of Angelica's voice carrying across the garden — they say the gift passes through blood — and kept her own voice level.
"I have been said to have some sensitivity," she said carefully, "to things others do not perceive."
More writing. A longer pause than the question warranted.
"Remove your hair."
A maid unpinned Clara's chestnut hair and held it away from her neck. The silhouettes on the other side of the veil leaned forward. Clara stared at the white wall and breathed slowly and thought of absolutely nothing.
"No mark," said a voice. Then, quieter: "Note the age and reported ability. No third sign."
Her hair was pinned back.
"You may go."
Anthony was waiting at the palace gate.
He stood outside the iron railings with his hat in his hands, scanning the faces of each lady who came through. When he saw Clara, his whole expression shifted — the tension in his jaw released, his shoulders dropped, and he gave her the kind of look that people give when they have been worried and are trying not to show how much.
"No mark," she said, before he could ask.
"Good." He let out a slow breath. "That's good."
He fell into step beside her naturally, the way he had been doing it for years rather than weeks, and Martha followed at a respectful distance behind them. The morning was cold but bright, the kind of November day that offered light without warmth, and the city was busy around them in the ordinary way of a city that had decided to continue functioning despite everything.
They turned without discussion away from the direct route home and into the covered market on Fenwick Street — a long arcade of stalls selling everything from winter vegetables to secondhand books to hot chestnuts in paper cones. Clara had loved it since childhood. It smelled of roasting nuts and damp wool and something sweet she had never identified.
"Here," Anthony said, stopping at a chestnut stall. He bought two paper cones without asking and handed her one, and they walked slowly through the arcade with warm paper in their cold hands, and for a few minutes neither of them said anything about ravens or physicians or covenants.
"You have ink on your glove," Clara said.
Anthony looked down at his left hand. A small dark smudge on the thumb. "I was writing letters this morning." He paused. "Trying to think of something useful to do, mostly."
"And did you?"
"Not particularly." He glanced at her sideways. "I find thinking is easier when I am not worried."
Clara looked down at her chestnuts. "You did not need to worry."
"No," he agreed pleasantly. "And yet."
She smiled despite herself — a small, real thing. He saw it and looked away, but not before she caught the expression on his face, which was quiet and warm and entirely unguarded.
They walked to the end of the arcade and back again, and he bought her a small paper twist of sugared almonds from a stall near the exit because she had looked at them for two seconds longer than necessary, and he did it without comment, the way people do things they have been paying close enough attention to know are wanted.
At the street corner where their routes divided, he stopped.
"I'll call on you tomorrow," he said. "If I may."
"You may," she said.
He gave her a short bow — proper, correct — and then looked at her for one moment longer than the bow required, as though there was something else he intended to say and had decided against. Then he put his hat back on and walked away, and Clara stood on the corner with her sugared almonds and watched him go and told herself very firmly not to make anything of it.
Martha appeared at her elbow.
"He bought you chestnuts," Martha observed.
"He was being polite."
Martha said nothing, which communicated everything.
The house was quiet when they returned.
Her aunt was out paying calls at Hentley's. Her step-sisters were at their lessons. Her uncle was in his study with the door closed. The entrance hall felt emptier than usual — that particular hollow quality a house gets in the middle of the day when everyone has somewhere else to be.
Clara went upstairs to change her gloves and was halfway down the corridor when she stopped.
There was someone at the far end of the hall.
Not Martha — Martha was downstairs. Not a housemaid — the figure was wrong for that, standing too still, too close to the wall, with a quality to its stillness that Clara recognised the way she recognised cold air before rain. It was the stillness of something that existed slightly apart from the ordinary world.
She looked properly.
A woman. Or the shape of one — the silhouette of a woman in a dress, Clara could not quite determine the colour of, standing at the very end of the corridor where it turned toward the old servants' staircase. The edges of her were soft and extremely blurred.
She had no face.
Not a void where a face should be — simply nothing defined. A suggestion of features that never resolved into specifics. And yet Clara knew, with the immediate and unargued certainty of someone who had spent her entire life navigating the language of the dead, exactly who this was.
She knew the way she knew her mother's hairbrush on the dressing table. The way she knew the weight of the ruby at her throat. Not from memory — she had no memory. From something older than memory.
"Mama," she said quietly.
The silhouette turned and moved toward the servants' staircase.
Clara followed.
Up the narrow servants' stairs, past the third floor, up a second short flight she just discovered — and then a low door at the top that she had always assumed was storage.
The silhouette passed through it without opening it.
Clara tried the handle. Unlocked. She pushed it open and ducked inside.
The attic ran the length of the house — long and low-ceilinged, lit by two small windows at either end through which the pale November light came in at flat angles, illuminating dust that moved slowly in the disturbed air. It smelled of cedar and old paper and something faintly floral that had survived years of disuse.
The silhouette stood in the centre of the room and then, very quietly, dissolved — not dramatically, not all at once, but the way early morning fog dissolves when the light finds it. There one moment. Then simply not.
Clara stood in the silence and looked around.
The attic was full.
Trunks — three of them, large, leather-bound, with brass clasps that had gone green with age. A wardrobe pushed against the slanted wall with its door slightly open, a sleeve of something dark trailing from it. Furniture draped in dusty white sheets. A rocking chair. A mirror almost the size of the wall.
And against the far window — a painting.
She crossed to it without meaning to, drawn the way she was always drawn to the things that proved the dead had belonged to someone. It was a portrait, formal and careful, in a gilt frame that had dulled with age. A man and a woman, seated, with the slightly stiff quality of people who had been asked to hold still for too long.
Her father had her uncle's jaw — broader, kinder. Her mother —
Clara looked at her mother's face for the first time in her conscious memory.
Eveline Peri had chestnut hair and warm ivory skin and eyes that were caught somewhere between brown and green, as though they had not quite decided. Clara had her mother's face. She had always known this abstractly, from her aunt's comments, from the particular way her uncle sometimes looked at her when he thought she wasn't watching.
She understood it now, standing in front of a painting in an attic she had never known existed.
Then she looked around properly.
One of the medium trunks first opened with some effort — inside, folded with the care of someone who had expected to return to them, her mother's dresses. Colours she recognised somehow, the way one recognises things from dreams. Beneath the dresses, her father's books, his pipe, a pair of leather gloves worn through at the right thumb.
A smaller trunk held papers — property documents, she saw, with Clara's name written in a formal legal hand. Land. A small estate in the eastern counties, held in trust until she was of age.
She had land. She had never known.
She filed this away carefully and kept looking.
In the corner, half-hidden behind the rocking chair, a wooden horse. Small, painted, the red worn off one side where small hands had held it too many times. She picked it up and held it for a moment and set it down very carefully.
As she removed another white sheet, shw found a small dark wood dresser with three drawers. The first held jewellery wrapped in cloth: a pearl bracelet, a cameo brooch, earrings she could imagine her mother wearing with the portrait dress. The second held folded handkerchiefs with an embroidered E in the corner.
The third drawer held a book.
Small. Cloth-covered. Dark green, with no title on the cover. Clara opened it.
On the first page, in handwriting that was careful and slightly uneven, as though the writer had been concentrating very hard:
This diary belongs to Eveline Peri, née Ashford. Written in her own hand, in the year of our Lord 1843.
Clara turned to the second page.
I have decided to write down the things I see. The transparent ones. The ones that look almost like people but are not quite — standing in corners, following me down streets, appearing at windows. I have never told anyone about them. Mother said it was an imagination. Father said it was nerves. But they are neither of those things, and I think if I write them down, they will feel less like something happening to me and more like something I can understand.
I do not know what I am yet. But I intend to find out.
Clara sat down on the attic floor with her mother's diary in her hands and read the same two paragraphs three times.
A rushed knock came at the attic door.
"Miss Clara?" Edmund's voice, slightly out of breath. "Mr. Vey is here. He says it is urgent."
She closed the diary carefully.
She held it against her chest all the way down the stairs.
Anthony was in the entrance hall, hat still on, with the look of a man who had walked quickly from somewhere and not stopped to compose himself on the way. When he saw Clara on the stairs he came forward immediately.
"The Princess," he said without preamble. "She presented last night. Privately, before everyone else." His voice was steady but his eyes were not. "Clara — Angelica has the birthmark. Behind her left ear. The physicians confirmed it. She has the age, she has the mark." He looked at her. "She is the true sacrifice."
Clara stood on the bottom stair with her mother's diary pressed against her chest and her mother's ruby at her throat and thought about a faceless silhouette leading her through a door she had never opened.
"She is the King's daughter," she said quietly.
"Yes," Anthony said. "She is."
They looked at each other in the entrance hall while the house ticked quietly around them, and neither of them said what they were both thinking.
They did not need to.