The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 31

Six days.

I had thought it would be like an illness. You have it, it goes through you, you are tired for a while, then one morning you get up and you are a person again. That is what happens with everything else.

It did not go anywhere. It went quiet.

Julian tried three times. The first was in the corridor outside the history room, the second on the stairs, the third at the door of the breakfast hall with people all around us. I did not let any of them start. I turned, or I found something to say to whoever was nearest me, or I simply walked, and by the third time I did not even have to think about it, my feet had learned it.

He stopped trying after that. He did not come at me a fourth time. I have wondered since whether that was manners or whether he had decided something.

Cassian, I did not manage at all. I did not avoid him. I did not need to. I had stopped being able to look at the part of a room he was standing in.

Six days of that and I could not have told you what he had been wearing.

Between them, I got quite good at rooms. Doorways, edges, the second seat from the end.

I learned it fast, the way you learn anything you need.

That first morning I woke to bells.

The early ones, the ones the kitchens go by, that I had never once been awake for in this house.

There was too much light. It was coming from the wrong side of me. For three or four heartbeats I did not know where I was. Then I did. The weight of the blanket was wrong. The smell of the room was wrong.

I got my head up off the pillow.

He was in the chair by the window, head back, arms folded, boots still on. He had not turned it round again. He had not lain down.

There was a blanket over the arm of it that he had not put over himself, and I understood, looking at it, that he had gone to sleep sitting up in a chair in his own room because I was in his bed.

I put my feet on the floor. I got the door open, which took me longer than it should have.

I did not say one word to him.

I have not been able to decide since whether he was asleep.

⸻

"Hold still."

I held still.

The woman had both hands at my waist, taking in the seam a finger's width on either side. It was nothing. It was the flat professional grip of a woman who has done it ten thousand times, who would have taken hold of a table leg the same way.

That is what six days had made of me. Something touches me. I take the reading. The reading tells me nothing.

"Arms."

I put my arms out.

She had four pins in her mouth and was talking around them.

My mother does that.

Every one of them does it, and it will kill one of them one day.

I thought about what I would have to pay her at home, and about how little she was getting here.

"You have lost weight."

I looked down at her.

"Have I?"

"Here." Two fingers at the top of my hip, where the seam stood away.

"And here." Under the arm.

"Since the first fitting. What have you been eating?"

"The same as everyone."

She made the noise women of her age make when they have decided not to argue with you.

A woman I had never spoken to had her hands on me for a quarter of an hour and knew something about my last six days that I did not know myself.

I looked up into the mirror while she pinned.

I have not made a habit of mirrors. There were none at home except the small one my mother kept for her own face.

The first time I saw the whole of myself was in the bathhouse here. I stood in that steam next to those women and went over myself like a product at the market.

The shoulders. The forearms. The three marks on the fingers. The old white line down the left arm.

I made my peace with all of it in a single afternoon. It was mine. It worked. It had kept my mother fed.

I looked at the same body in that glass and could not find one thing in it to trust.

"Hold still. You are shaking."

"I'm cold."

The room was not cold.

Eliza was on the next box in blue, which suited her. She knew it. She kept turning to make the skirt go out.

"You went up so early that night," she said.

Her seamstress told her to be still. She was still for about four seconds.

"I wasn't well."

"You were grey. I have never seen anybody go grey like that," she said comfortably, the way you say a thing you have already told other people.

"I nearly came after you."

"I know."

"Did you get to your room all right?"

There was no answer to that question. There was only how long you take before you give one.

"Yes."

"Because you don't remember me saying goodnight to you, do you."

I looked at her.

She was watching her own skirt in the glass, turning it, entirely easy.

I had most of that night. I had the table. The corridor. The cold. A great deal I would rather not have. But it is not all there.

The holes were not at the end where you would expect them. They were in the middle, and she had just put her hand into one of them.

"No," I said.

"You were further gone than you thought, then."

She laughed. It was a kind laugh. She reached over and squeezed my wrist. I felt that too. I could not tell you what that proved either.

⸻

The afternoons were ours most of the time. Nobody tells us what to do with them, which is the cleverest thing this palace does.

For six days I had gone to my room.

Eliza would not have it. She had my arm before I had the pins out of my hem. She talked the whole way down the stairs about the Cassarians, and about what Isabelle had said about the Cassarians.

I let her, because there is a kind of talk you can walk inside of like weather.

The winter garden was full.

I had not planned to go back here. It is the one room in this place where you cannot choose what people see of you.

Celeste looked up from the far end. She looked a little too long, then went back to what she was saying. Whatever she had been measuring in me since the game room, she took another reading of it.

I got the smell of the lemons and made myself stay with it.

Then the room did the thing a room does, that small change in the noise, and I knew before I turned round.

He came straight down the middle of it.

He did not do anything he normally would. No strolling.

He did not put a hand on the back of anybody's chair on the way.

He did not say the thing to Rosalie that would have made Rosalie laugh, and Rosalie was standing right there with her face already arranged for it.

"Aurelia."

Not Miss Vale. In a room with nine people in it.

"Your Highness."

"Don't."

He looked round the room then, once, the whole of it, the way you look at a field before you cross it.

Then he took me by the arm above the elbow and walked me out through the near door.

He did not do it roughly.

He did it the way you steer somebody through a crowd. It was over before anybody had finished turning their head.

Out in the passage the cold came straight through my sleeves, and there was nobody at all.

He let go of me at once.

"I have been trying to find a way to say this for six days."

"There isn't one."

"There is. It is not a good one."

"Then don't."

"That night," he said. "I should have seen it."

I went.

I got past him and back through the door into the glass.

I do not remember any of the middle of that room. I remember the far end of it being further away than it had ever been.

Nine people were watching. My own hand slipped on the handle because the palm of it was wet.

At the door I looked back.

I had told myself the whole way down the stairs that I would not. I meant it. I turned my head anyway, the way you do.

He had followed me as far as the nearby door and stopped in it. He was standing in the doorway with his hands open at his sides, not coming any further.

And Cassian was by the far wall with a cup he had not drunk out of, looking straight at his brother.