Her mother’s private sitting room smelled of rosewater and consequence.
Isadora had always thought that.
Even as a child, padding in on small feet for some minor correction or another, she had noticed how the room held a particular quality of air — heavier than elsewhere in the palace, more considered, as though the very atmosphere had absorbed years of important conversations and was now faintly saturated with them.
The furniture was pale cream and gold.
The windows looked out over the formal gardens.
Everything was beautiful, and everything was deliberate, because her mother did not own a single thing by accident.
She sat now in the chair across from Sarafinn’s writing desk, folded her hands in her lap and waited.
Her mother was not yet looking at her.
She was finishing something at her desk, a letter, or the appearance of a letter, because Sarafinn was also the kind of woman who understood the strategic value of making someone wait.
Isadora had inherited that particular quality directly and completely, which meant she recognised it without being immune to it.
She waited.
She kept her face pleasant and her posture correct, and internally she catalogued the exits.
Old habit.
She catalogued the exits everywhere.
Breakfast rooms.
Ballrooms.
Her mother’s sitting rooms.
It was the kind of instinct that, once developed, proved difficult to switch off.
There were two doors and three windows.
The windows were latched but not locked.
She was on the second floor.
Theoretically irrelevant information.
Probably.
Her mother set down her pen.
“I received a report,” Sarafinn said.
Her voice was even.
It was always even.
Isadora’s mother did not raise her voice.
She had never needed to.
Volume was a tool for people who lacked precision, and Sarafinn had never lacked precision in her life.
“A report,” Isadora repeated.
Pleasantly.
“From Lord Ashwell. He has contacts in the lower city.” Her mother folded her hands on the desk.
“He mentioned something rather interesting. He said that a woman matching a particular description has been seen, on multiple occasions, in parts of the city that an omega princess has no business visiting. At hours that an omega princess has no business being awake.” A pause.
“He said she moved like someone trained.”
The room was very quiet.
“That is interesting,” Isadora said.
“He included a description.” Her mother reached into the desk drawer and produced a folded piece of paper, which she set on the desk between them but did not push forward.
“The eyes, specifically. He was quite specific about the eyes.”
Pale grey.
The colour of winter water.
Too still.
Too watchful.
There were, Isadora reflected, a finite number of people in Varenthia with eyes that colour.
The number was, in fact, one.
This was the kind of statistical situation that made maintaining deniability somewhat structurally challenging.
She said nothing.
“I have known,” her mother said quietly, “for longer than you think.”
That landed differently than Isadora had expected.
She kept her face still, but something shifted behind it, some internal architecture adjusting to accommodate a new and unwelcome piece of information.
“How long?” she said.
It came out more evenly than she felt.
“Two years.” Her mother’s gaze was steady.
Not angry, which was somehow worse than angry.
Anger was navigable.
This was something else, something measured and sad and resolute all at once.
“I chose not to act. I told myself you were careful. That it would pass, that whatever need drove you to it would exhaust itself eventually, and you would come home.” A breath.
“You did not come home.”
“I was always home by breakfast.”
“Isadora.”
She stopped.
Her mother rose from the desk.
She did not pace, pacing suggested agitation, and Sarafinn did not perform agitation.
She simply moved to the window and stood with her back straight and her hands clasped, looking out over the gardens with an expression that Isadora could not fully read from this angle.
“Lord Fenwick was found this morning,” her mother said.
The air in the room changed quality again.
“Was he,” Isadora said.
“He was. Along with a ledger. And a collection of correspondences that have apparently sent half the city’s officials into a very productive panic.” A pause.
“The children’s families are being notified as we speak.”
Isadora said nothing.
She watched her mother’s reflection in the window glass.
“I am not unaware,” Sarafinn said carefully, “of what Lord Fenwick was. I am not unaware of what those children were facing.” Another pause, longer this time.
“I am also their queen. Which means I am aware that there were lawful mechanisms by which that situation could have been addressed.”
“The lawful mechanisms,” Isadora said, “were taking considerably longer than the children could afford.”
Her mother turned from the window.
“No,” she said.
“I know that. I am not standing here to tell you that what you did was wrong, Isadora. I am standing here because I am your mother and you have been climbing out of palace windows in the dark for four years and every morning I have sat across from you at breakfast and watched you and I am…..” She stopped.
Collected herself.
Set something back in the locked room behind her eyes.
“I am done watching.”
The word landed in Isadora’s chest like a stone dropped into still water.
She felt the ripples move out from it before she fully understood what she was feeling.
“Done watching,” she repeated.
“You turn twenty-one in three days.” Her mother returned to her chair.
Sat.
Folded her hands again.
The composure was back, fully assembled, every piece in its correct position.
“You are of age. It is past time you were matched. I have been lenient about this for too long.”
“Lenient,” Isadora said.
“You have been lenient.”
“I have. Considerably.” Her mother’s voice was precise now.
Decided.
This was the voice she used in councils and courts.
The voice that ended debates.
“I am giving you a choice, which is more than tradition requires of me.”
“How generous.”
Her mother looked at her steadily.
“The choice is this. You attend the masquerade ball on the evening of your birthday. You participate in the selection. You allow me to find you a match.” A beat.
“Or I present Lord Ashwell’s report to the council. Formally. Officially. With my own testimony attached.”
The room was very quiet.
Isadora understood, then, the full shape of what was happening.
Not just a conversation.
Not just a maternal correction.
Her mother had built a structure around her while she wasn’t looking, had set the walls in place one quiet brick at a time, and was now simply showing her what she had built.
It was, objectively, an excellent strategy.
She could almost admire it.
She did not admire it.
“You would have your own daughter brought before the council,” she said.
“I would do whatever is necessary to keep my daughter alive.” Her mother’s voice did not waver.
“Because the alternative, the path you are currently on — ends one way. You know that. I know you know that. You are not careless and you are not naive and you understand exactly what the odds are and you go out anyway, every time, and I….” Another stop.
Another collection.
“I will not bury you, Isadora. I will not. Not for this.”
The words sat in the space between them.
Isadora looked at her mother.
At the composed, certain face she had known her entire life.
In the locked room behind her eyes, which was not entirely locked anymore , something was showing through, something that looked very much like fear, and Isadora had almost never seen her mother afraid of anything.
It did not make her feel better.
It made her feel considerably worse.
“The masquerade ball,” she said finally.
“Three nights from now. I am sending summons today, nationwide. Every family will present their alpha. The selection will be made.” Her mother paused.
“I am not asking you to be happy about it, Isadora. I am asking you to be present.”
“And my other…..” She stopped.
Started again.
“And the work.”
“Ceases.” Her mother’s voice was gentle and absolute.
“Entirely. Immediately.”
The word immediately was doing a great deal of work in that sentence.
It was, Isadora thought distantly, doing so much work it ought to be compensated.
She looked at her hands in her lap.
Her bare hands, gloves off, the stain on the cuff of her left sleeve reduced to the shadow of a shadow that Esther’s tincture had nearly erased.
Her hands looked perfectly ordinary.
That had always struck her as one of the more reliable injustices of her situation.
“Fine,” she said.
Her mother blinked.
Just once, just slightly.
“Fine.”
“I will attend the ball.” She raised her eyes.
“I want it noted that I am doing so under protest.”
“Noted.”
“And that your approach to this conversation, while strategically admirable, was also extremely unfair.”
Something crossed her mother’s face.
Something that might, in a different woman, have been the beginning of a smile.
“Also noted,” she said quietly.
Isadora stood.
Smoothed her skirt.
Walked to the door with her spine straight and her expression composed and her hands perfectly still at her sides.
She had learned that from her mother, too.
All of it.
The composure and the stillness and the ability to walk away from something that had just rearranged your entire interior without letting it show on your face.
She paused at the door.
“The children,” she said, without turning.
“The ones who will be found this morning. Make sure they are placed properly. Not just returned. *Placed.*”
A silence.
“Yes,” her mother said.
“I will see to it.”
Isadora opened the door and walked out.
✦ ✦ ✦
Esther was waiting in the corridor.
Of course Esther was waiting in the corridor.
This was a theme.
“Well?” she said, in a low urgent voice, falling into step beside Isadora with the practiced ease of four years of covert operation.
“We are attending a masquerade ball in three days.”
Esther processed this.
“And the……”
“No.”
A pause.
“No as in….”
“No as in no. Finished. Done. Ceased entirely and immediately.” Isadora kept walking.
“My mother has excellent timing, as it turns out. I will give her that.”
Esther was quiet for a moment.
“Are you all right?”
It was the question beneath all the other questions.
Always.
Isadora considered the corridor ahead of her.
The pale walls, the portraits of her ancestors in their gilded frames, the long straight line of it leading back toward the part of the palace where she was simply the princess and nothing else.
“I will be,” she said.
Which was not the same as yes, but was as close as she could get to it right now.
Esther nodded.
Did not push.
Walked beside her in silence the way she always did, steady and present and asking nothing more than what was given.
“You’ll need a gown,” Esther said eventually.
“I have gowns.”
“You’ll need a *new* gown. It’s your twenty-first birthday masquerade. You cannot wear something you’ve worn before. It’s your mother’s event. She will have thoughts.”
“My mother has thoughts about everything. It is one of her defining characteristics.”
“So do I. My thought is that you need a new gown.” Esther paused.
“And a mask.”
Isadora considered this.
There was something almost funny about it, in a way that she did not expect.
She was being sent to a ball to be matched to a stranger, her second life had just been closed like a door she would not be allowed to open again, and the immediate practical concern was a mask.
“Yes,” she said.
“I suppose I do.”
She had spent twenty-one years wearing one kind or another.
What was one more.
✦ ✦ ✦
Three days was not very long.
It was, however, long enough to send a summons to every corner of Varenthia.
Long enough for the word to travel from the palace couriers to the city gates to the road posts to the villages at the edges of the kingdom, each one receiving the same sealed letter with the royal mark pressed in deep red wax.
*By order of Her Majesty Queen Sarafinn, in honour of the twenty-first birthday of Her Royal Highness Princess Isadora: all families of Varenthia are hereby summoned to present their alpha at the Royal Masquerade on the evening of the third day hence.
Attendance is not optional.
The selection will be made.*
In the city, the letter was discussed over dinner tables and shop counters and in the back rooms of establishments that did not technically have back rooms.
Opinions varied.
The wealthy families began immediately calculating which of their alphas presented best.
The middle families began immediately calculating what to wear.
The poor families received the letter and looked at one another across small rooms and understood, as poor families always understood, that *not optional* meant something different for them than it did for everyone else.
✦ ✦ ✦
On the night of the masquerade, Isadora sat at her dressing table and let Esther work.
The gown was deep midnight blue , nearly black, which her mother had raised an eyebrow at, and Isadora had said nothing, which her mother had understood was as much ground as she was going to give.
The bodice was fitted, the skirt full, the sleeves long.
It was, Esther had declared upon finishing the final alterations, the most beautiful thing she had ever made.
Isadora looked at herself in the glass.
The mask was bone white, fitted precisely to the upper half of her face, decorated along the edges with small dark flowers that Esther had stayed up two nights to finish.
It covered her eyes entirely.
Left her mouth free.
The pale grey eyes it framed looked out from behind it with their usual quality of unsettling stillness.
She looked like a stranger.
She looked, actually, quite dangerous.
She supposed those two things were not always different.
“Ready?” Esther asked, meeting her eyes in the mirror.
Isadora looked at the stranger in the glass for one more moment.
The princess is going to her ball.
The assassin with nowhere left to go.
The woman turned twenty-one in a gown the colour of the night she was no longer allowed to move through.
“No,” she said honestly.
She stood up anyway.