The King's Flower

🌸Chapter7:WOMENWITH SHARP TEETH

Ava's POV

It started with the glove.

She didn't notice it at first — that was the elegant thing about it, the part that told her this had been done before by people who knew exactly how to do it. The glove was simply gone. She had worn a pair to the morning gathering, set them on the side table when she sat down, and when she rose to leave one was where she had left it and one was not.

She looked. Quietly, without making a scene, the way she did everything. Under the chair. Around the table. Along the floor nearby.

Nothing.

She walked out with one glove and the feeling of something watching her do it, and she did not give whoever was watching the satisfaction of looking back to find them.

The rumour arrived two days later, carried to her by Mira with the expression of someone who had been holding something unpleasant at arm's length for as long as she could manage.

"I need to tell you something," Mira said, closing the chamber door behind her with the careful quietness of someone who had checked the corridor first.

Ava set down her embroidery. "Tell me."

"There is a story going around the lower court." Mira sat down on the edge of the chair across from her, which she did when something was serious — the formal sitting, the both-feet-on-the-floor sitting. "About you. About why you're here."

"What kind of story."

Mira's jaw tightened. "The kind that is technically possible to have arrived at by accident and absolutely did not."

Ava looked at her steadily. "Tell me exactly what it says."

The story was this: that Ava had not been brought to the palace as a debt collected but had arranged it herself — had cultivated the connection deliberately, had used her father's position to insert herself into the crown's orbit, was here by design rather than circumstance. That she was ambitious in the specific way the court found most distasteful in a woman with no title and no family name worth speaking of. That she had set her sights on something she had no business setting her sights on and the court would do well to remember what happened to women who confused proximity to power with power itself.

Ava listened to all of it.

Then she picked up her embroidery again.

"Ava —" Mira started.

"Who is saying it."

"It's — it's moving through the ladies' circles. I can't pin a single source."

"But you have a suspicion."

Mira's silence was its own answer.

"Don't," Ava said.

"I haven't done anything —"

"You're thinking about doing something. I can see it from here." She kept her eyes on the embroidery. Her hands were steady. She had made them steady before she picked it up, the same way she made her face steady before she walked into rooms — a small private act of will, invisible from the outside. "Leave it."

"She started it —"

"I know she started it." A pause. One stitch. Another. "Reacting is what she wants. A reaction confirms that it landed. A reaction gives her something to work with."

"So we just — do nothing?"

"We do exactly what we were doing before." Ava looked up then, briefly, at Mira's flushed and furious face. "Which is survive. And let her wonder why it isn't working."

The cold shoulders began the following week.

This was less elegant than the glove or the rumour — blunter, more direct, the kind of cruelty that required less coordination and more simple willingness. She would enter a room and conversations would complete themselves and not restart in her direction. She would move toward a cluster of ladies and the cluster would redistribute without appearing to, so that she arrived at a space where a group had been rather than a group itself. She would be looked at and looked through in the same motion, the particular social skill of making a person feel both visible and entirely irrelevant.

She navigated it.

She had navigated worse. This was performance — skilled, coordinated performance, but performance nonetheless. It required an audience and it required her to feel it and to show that she felt it and she was, as it turned out, reasonably good at not showing things.

Lady Voss watched from her east window with the expression of someone attending a play she had seen many times before.

"You're doing well," she said one afternoon, when Ava had seated herself nearby after a particularly thorough episode of the redistribution.

"I don't feel like I'm doing well," Ava said honestly.

"Feeling it and showing it are different things. You are showing very little." A pause. "Seraphine expected more by now. You can tell because she is starting to put actual effort in, which she finds distasteful. She prefers things that work without effort."

Ava looked across the room at the woman in question — always silk, always perfect, always surrounded, always with that smile that had no warmth in it. "Why does she —" She stopped. Started again. "What did I do."

"Nothing," Lady Voss said simply. "You are here. That is sufficient."

"That's not a reason."

"It is the only reason she needs." The old woman looked at her with those sharp, tired, entirely clear eyes. "You are young and you are here and he —" she paused, very deliberately, "— noticed. That is all. That was always going to be all."

Ava sat with this for a moment.

She thought about the east corridor. About warm food with no note. About a hand at the small of her back that had arrived and departed without making her owe anything.

"She had him," she said. Not a question.

"She had him," Lady Voss confirmed. "And she let him go in a way that was not, in fact, letting go." A pause. "That is all I will say on the matter for now. There is more to know. You are not ready to know it yet."

Ava looked at her. "How will I know when I'm ready?"

Lady Voss picked up her tea. "You'll ask me a different question," she said.

The ruined dress came last.

It was coordinated, which she understood in retrospect — the glove, the rumour, the cold shoulders had all been preparation, all been designed to accumulate, to make her feel the smallness of her position so thoroughly that when the final thing arrived it would simply confirm what she already believed about herself.

She was in the corridor outside the formal dining room, one hour before the dinner she had been required to attend, when a woman she didn't recognise passed her with a tray and the glass of red wine on that tray connected with the front of her dress in a way that was entirely, perfectly, catastrophically an accident.

The woman apologised. Beautifully. Elaborately. With the practiced horror of someone who had prepared the apology before the event.

Ava stood in the corridor and looked down at the ruin of the blue dress and breathed.

One breath. Two. The counting kind, the careful kind.

Then she turned around and walked back to her chambers.

Mira fixed it in ten minutes flat.

She didn't ask questions and she didn't say I told you so and she didn't waste time on fury, though Ava could see it in her hands — in the slightly too-sharp movements, the jaw set at an angle that was doing a great deal of work. She pulled things from the wardrobe with the efficient ferocity of someone winning a battle on behalf of someone else, found a dress the colour of deep gold, had Ava's hair redone in eight minutes, stood back and assessed with the critical eye of a general reviewing a deployment.

"Go," she said.

"Mira —"

"You look better than you did before. That is not an accident. Go."

Ava went.

She walked into the formal dining room with the gold dress and the steady face and the breathing that she had counted all the way down the corridor and made smooth before she touched the door.

Edward was already at the head of the table.

He looked up when she entered — she felt it before she saw it, which was a thing she had started to notice, the particular quality of his attention, the way it arrived before she could see where it was coming from. His eyes found her across the room and stayed there for a moment.

Just a moment.

Then he looked back at his documents.

But the moment had happened. She knew it and he knew it and — she became aware, slowly, with the particular awareness of someone learning to read a room — the court knew it too.

Seraphine, at the far end of the table, was looking at the gold dress with an expression that she had not quite managed to make into nothing.

Ava sat down. Unfolded her napkin. Picked up her glass.

She did not look at Seraphine.

She did not look at Edward.

She looked at the table, and the candles, and the wine, and the elaborate centerpiece of flowers that someone had spent hours arranging, and she thought: you are still here. Still deciding. Still standing.

One day at a time. One dress at a time. One room at a time.

That was enough.

Later, when the dinner was over and the corridors were quiet and she was back in her chambers with Mira helping her out of the gold dress and cataloguing the evening in a running commentary that required very little input from Ava, she thought about what Lady Voss had said.

You are here. He noticed. That is all.

She pressed her mother's hairpin between her palms and stared at the ceiling.

She thought: I need to understand what I have walked into.

She thought: I need to understand him.

She thought: be careful, Ava.

She thought: I know.

End of Chapter Seven