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.
Across the garden, she was aware of Angelica's fan beginning its slow, steady movement.
Anthony Vey arrived twenty minutes into the party.
He came through the garden gate still pulling on his gloves, slightly late in the way of someone whose lateness was habitual rather than deliberate, and when his eyes found Clara's across the lawn he changed direction without hesitation, which caused Lord Evander to make a sound of profound resignation.
"Miss Peri." He gave a short bow. "I hoped you would be here."
"Lord Vey." She smiled. "You seem to have hoped that at the last three events."
"I have." He said it simply, without decoration, in the way of someone who saw no reason to dress a true thing up. He offered his arm. "Would you walk with me? There is something I wanted to show you — the Hartleys have a rather remarkable old willow at the far end of the garden."
She took his arm.
Behind her, she heard Evander say to no one in particular, "I have been trying to interest her in that willow for a year and a half."
The willow was remarkable. It hung over the far corner of the pond like something out of a painting, its long branches trailing the water's surface, moving in the slight breeze. They stood at the edge of the pond and looked at it and talked — about nothing of great consequence, about books and the city and the strange heaviness that had settled over everything since the raven's visit — and Clara found herself thinking that Anthony Vey was one of the rare people who made silence feel comfortable rather than demanding.
"I'll be back in a moment," he said eventually. "I want to find Hartley about something. Will you wait?"
"Of course."
He went, and Martha materialised from a respectful distance and came to stand beside Clara at the pond's edge, and for a few minutes they simply stood together in the quiet, watching the willow move.
It was Martha who saw it first.
"Miss Clara —"
The horse came around the garden's far hedge at a full run — a large grey, eyes white with panic, moving without a rider across the lawn directly toward them. Several ladies screamed. The clusters of people scattered. Clara turned toward the sound and had time to register the size of the animal, the speed, the absolute certainty that there was nowhere to go —
Anthony came from her left.
He moved faster than she would have expected — crossing the distance in seconds, putting himself between Clara and the horse, grabbing its bridle as it reached them with both hands and throwing his weight sideways, turning the animal hard enough that it veered away from the pond and slowed, trembling, into the hedge.
The garden went very still.
Clara stood with her heart slamming against her ribs and looked at Anthony, who was breathing hard, his jacket askew, still holding the bridle of a horse that had nearly killed them both.
"Are you hurt?" he said immediately.
"No." She pressed her hand flat against her sternum. "No, I'm not. Are you?"
"Not remotely." He looked at her for a moment with an expression she couldn't entirely name, and then he let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "I am, however, going to have something to say to whoever left that gate open."
Around them, the garden reassembled itself. People came forward. Questions were asked. Martha appeared at Clara's side and took her arm with a grip that communicated, without a single word, that she had aged several years in the last thirty seconds.
Near the garden's entrance, Clara caught a glimpse of a stable boy being dismissed with a sharp gesture by one of Angelica's ladies. The boy looked confused and frightened in equal measure.
Angelica reached them before the fuss had fully settled.
She moved through the gathered crowd with her hands clasped and her expression arranged into something warm and concerned, and she took Clara's free hand in both of hers with the practised ease of someone who had been performing sincerity for so long it had become a second language.
"Miss Peri, how dreadful. Are you quite all right? You must have been terrified."
"I'm perfectly well, thank you, Your Highness."
"How lucky that Lord Vey was nearby." Angelica's eyes moved to Anthony with a warmth that was entirely different in quality from everything she had directed at Clara. "Anthony, you were so brave. It must be such a comfort," she added, turning back to Clara, "to have someone nearby who cares for you."
Anthony looked at her pleasantly. "I think I am the lucky one," he said. "I have been trying to get Miss Peri's attention for five events running. Today I finally managed it." He smiled at Clara. "Even if the method was not what I would have chosen."
Something moved across Angelica's face. There and gone — a tightening around the eyes, a fraction of a second where the warmth slipped entirely — before the smile returned, smoother than before.
"How charming," she said.
She let go of Clara's hand.
She stepped back, and in the small repositioning of space that followed, the ladies nearby drifted closer in the way that people drift when they sense something interesting is about to happen. Angelica's voice lifted just slightly — not enough to shout, exactly, but enough to carry.
"I do hope nothing more unfortunate finds you, Miss Peri," she said pleasantly. "These are such uncertain times. With the covenant due and the demon world's eye upon us —" she paused, as if the thought had only just occurred to her. "Though I suppose you would know more about such things than most. Your mother was a whisperer, wasn't she? A woman who could speak with the dead?" Another pause. Lighter this time. Almost amused. "They say the gift passes through blood. And now with the sacrifice to be found — a girl of age, with an unusual power —" She let the sentence end without finishing it, which was more effective than finishing it would have been.
The silence that followed was the particular kind that hums.
Clara felt it move through the gathered ladies like a current. Saw the glances exchanged. Heard the shift in the quality of the quiet around her.
She did not move. Did not look down. Held Angelica's gaze with both hands, so to speak, and kept her expression exactly where it was.
"Thank you for your concern, Your Highness," she said.
She set down her teacup. Took Martha's arm. And walked back through the garden toward the gate with her spine straight, her mother's ruby warm against her throat and absolutely nothing showing on her face.
Martha said nothing until they were through the gate and into the street.
Then she said, quietly and with great feeling, "Horrible mouth."
Clara did not answer.
She was thinking about the raven's eyes finding hers across two hundred people.
She was thinking about white roses on dark water.
She was thinking about the three signs — a girl of age, an unusual power, a mark — and how two of those three had just been announced, loudly and publicly, to every noble family in the kingdom.
She was still thinking about it when Edmund brought the carriage, and she was still thinking about it when they arrived home, and she was still thinking about it when Martha finally sat her down in the north-facing bedroom and handed her a cup of tea and said, quietly, "Tell me."
Clara opened her mouth.
A sharp knock came at the front door below.
Then another.
Edmund's voice drifted up from the entrance hall, and then a voice she did not recognise — formal, flat, the voice of a man delivering a message he has delivered many times today and intends to deliver many more times before evening.
"By order of His Majesty the King. All young women of noble houses between the ages of eighteen and twenty are required to present themselves for royal examination. The King's physician will call upon each house in turn. Beginning tonight."
Clara looked at Martha.