Part 1
Natalia gave Philip the answer at seven on the morning of the fourteenth, standing at the end of the east study's long table with the four volumes stacked at her elbow.
"Section six does not stop at a fine, Master."
Philip set down his unfinished coffee.
"Subsection one prescribes forty Avalondian dollars, and five for every day the default continues. Subsection two makes the offending property liable to forfeiture. Article nine of the nineteen thirty-seven instrument defines that as seizure by the Crown and disposal."
"Disposal."
"That word is not defined." A small pause. "I checked the parent Act, both consolidating measures, and the definitions appended to the nineteen forty-one regulations. It is used eleven times. It is defined in none of them."
For a moment, the only sound was Lydia setting a cup on its saucer. Even with Lydia's help, Philip had spent half the night reaching only an imperfect understanding of the law. Natalia had grasped it without assistance. She understood its full implications, but her face gave him no indication of how much the answer hurt her.
He had spent the previous evening trying to price a way out—to decide whether avoiding the risks of registration would justify the cost of remaining unregistered. But he had suspected there was something money could not settle. Now she had confirmed his suspicion.
"Could we pay and register afterwards?"
"The court could permit that. It is not obliged to. Late registration does not cancel its power to order forfeiture."
At the sideboard, Lydia laid down a thin volume and spoke in a professional voice.
"The reports arrived this morning. Two cases under that provision concern prohibited magical machinery. In both, disposal meant destruction by unmaking."
"Not Familiars," Philip said.
"Not Familiars. But the Bill places unregistered Familiars under the same provision. We would be asking a court to discover a distinction Parliament had declined to make."
Natalia squared the top volume with the table's edge.
"The fine is affordable," Lydia said. "The other part is less convenient."
Philip looked at Natalia's hands.
"Then we register. Once it is possible, and before the deadline."
He drew the builder's elevation towards him and crossed out the word empty beside the proposed seal chamber.
"We find another way to keep you safe."
They watched the proceedings from the cinema.
Natalia had wanted the forest: the hollow above the cliff, the great stump, the smaller seats in their loose semicircle. It was where he had kissed her in the snow. She had suggested it twice before noon, which, coming from Natalia, amounted to insistence.
Lydia settled the matter with a few words.
"It is four degrees, and that viewing station seats twelve. Gardeners might occasionally use the path." A pause. "You will want a room with privacy today, Master Philip."
Natalia accepted that without argument.
The cinema lay down a passage beyond the Atrium's lower door, where Long Stones stopped pretending to be a cottage.
Winston again, Philip suspected. Of course.
The room rose twenty feet to a dome. Dark felt swallowed voices; the carpet silenced footsteps entirely. Eight recliners stood on a rear riser, and two deep leather couches faced a display mirror covering the far wall. Its unlit border returned a dim reflection of the room. When the broadcast began, a close view of a peer in Albecaster rendered him life-size on the mirror, eight feet beyond the couch.
Above them, an illusory sky moved through its patient courses. A ringed planet rode over the double doors; four bright moons attended a banded giant. A comet stretched across the dome like a chalk stroke nobody had rubbed out.
You pay for the seat and they remind you how small everything is on the cosmic scale.
He could not decide whether that was meant to be comforting or nihilistic.
What surprised Philip was that the astronomy looked right. The familiar patterns, the measured motion: someone here had studied science rather than magic.
Different technology tree, Host, said the System, appearing in an astronomer's gown insufficiently fastened for academic work. Different tools, different principles. It does not make them any less learned.
Then she was gone.
Lydia brought tea and a notebook, dismissed the nearby servants, and took a chair beside the rear sideboard. The Agency's watch remained outside the family wing; the off-duty men were playing cards below stairs. The double doors at the cinema's only entrance closed.
Philip silenced his mirror phone and remembered Lydia's earlier argument for using the cinema.
If it goes the wrong way, I would rather she heard it somewhere private. With nobody watching her reaction.
Natalia sat beside him, one hand resting on his.
Part 2
The House had sat early for the introductions at eleven, then suspended proceedings until two.
At ten past two, the Marquess of Callenden rose and outlined the chamber's remaining business for the day.
He spoke without heat, in the manner of a man who had led that House for eight years and discovered early that enthusiasm cost votes.
Philip found his grandfather in the third row of the government benches, in crimson dress uniform, his silver-headed walking stick across his knees.
The Duke did not speak.
Natalia already occupied enough newspaper columns. Any conspicuous intervention by Gerald could invite questions about why the subject mattered quite so much to his household. He had influence enough to fill the chamber and excellent reasons not to display it.
Farther along sat the Duchess of Wetdin, impossible to miss beneath a sweep of flaming red hair. The broadcast kept finding her. Again and again the cameras returned to her between speakers, lingering a fraction longer than parliamentary necessity could reasonably explain.
Lilianna had been introduced to the House only that morning: twenty-one years old, newly arrived, and already the holder of five votes.
Her aura felt completely different from what Philip remembered.
At twenty past two, a minister signified the Consent of the Crown.
"My Lords, I have it in command from Her Imperial Majesty to acquaint the House that Her Majesty, having been informed of the purport of the Bill, has consented to place her prerogative and interest, so far as they are affected by the Bill, at the disposal of Parliament for the purposes of the Bill."
Philip had read the schedules until the words blurred. Only now did the formula acquire a face.
The Third Schedule would pardon the old summoning automatically, whether or not registration followed. Arthur had secured that provision; the Crown's consent had now been signified.
So the Crown had agreed to mercy before the House finished arguing about its terms.
At half past two, the Clerk read the proposed general pardon.
And the House stood.
No direction came from the Chancellor. Nearly four hundred peers rose along the crimson benches, observing a custom older than anyone present, while the Clerk read the words that would forgive the offence of summoning a Familiar.
There was no declaration that Natalia was a person. Only forgiveness for the summoning.
Philip stole a glance at Natalia. Her breath faltered for just a second before she steadied it; he noticed the effort. Lydia had risen beside the sideboard and stood without visible reaction.
He turned his hand beneath Natalia's. Her fingers closed around it.
The words had not saved them yet. But Natalia had seen the Empire stand for something other than capital punishment for Philip.
Above her, the ringed planet continued on its course.
At a quarter past four, the House interrupted its debate for a motion the commentator described as exceptional.
That the Prime Minister of Yorgoria be heard at the Bar.
Mr. Harlan Grieve would be heard as an agent of the Dominion of Yorgoria, which would itself be bound by the Bill upon its passage.
The knights of the chamber guided Grieve to the Bar. He stopped at the prescribed line and bowed with the stiff care of a man who had practised that morning and resented it. Fifty-one years old, Prime Minister of nine million people, and permitted to speak only from the edge of the room.
He carried no papers.
"My Lords. I have come more than three thousand miles to say something that will cost me dearly at home. I should be obliged if you would let me say it quickly."
The chamber stopped arranging itself.
"Last weekend, a country holding the largest proven combustible reserves in the hemisphere, with four passes that two general staffs had called impassable, capitulated in seventy-eight hours.
"A country behind the times is a resource pile with a flag upon it. The flag is a courtesy. The courtesy lasts as long as it is convenient to somebody larger."
A low murmur of agreement moved along several benches.
He rested one hand on the Bar.
"As many of you have undoubtedly heard, Yorgoria has faced persistent secession movements for some time. Many, though not all, have been inspired by variations on a utopian vision of an alternative social order, purported to offer a solution to all of Yorgoria's current social ills. Of course, that vision assumes we can successfully harness rapidly advancing summoning technologies that allow Familiars to be produced, customised, sustained, and controlled on an unprecedented industrial scale."
The chamber listened closely.
"I understand your Lordships have been debating the philosophy of summoned beings. I should like to contribute to those deliberations by first setting out the utopian vision so proudly preached by the Republic. Whether by design or not, that vision is inspiring variations across the world. I have read their propaganda. I propose to explain its appeal and assess its assumptions."
Philip straightened.
"The latest Republican propaganda offers a world in which no man works who does not wish to. The labour that keeps a country standing—the hauling, the sorting, the building, the accounting, the clerking—is to be done by beings that do not tire and do not steal. Above that sits an administration run by an incorruptible bureaucracy of those same beings, who cannot be bribed. The bureaucracy is directed by experts: mages who understand summoning, who understand control, and who are selected for their expertise rather than their ancestry." A pause of exactly the right length.
"And the citizen, released from all of it, may do as he or she likes. He may paint. He may study. He may sit with his children. He may invent something. He may spend his time holding the bureaucracy, and those who maintain it, to account. That is the vision.
"Beneath it lies something the Republic need not promise, because it already has it: no aristocracy. A ladder a person may climb within one generation. Those tempted by this vision are not fools, my Lords. Nor are they necessarily traitors."
Even the approving murmurs that had greeted his remarks about Marabendia had ceased. One peer examined his cuff with sudden concentration.
"Yorgoria's loyalty to Her Majesty is not in question. Her subjects' patience is. Men are tempted because each year it becomes harder for ordinary people to make a living. They pay more this year for less, and watch their only substantial property lose value while paying ever higher interest on the debt secured against it. Meanwhile, they read of companies posting record profits, though their own pay has barely changed, and the state's cut keeps growing to fund overseas endeavors whose necessity they cannot understand.
"Because when Yorgoria taxes what a man earns and does not tax what a man inherits, there is only so much of the gap that can be closed in one generation. When they look, they see that a majority of seats in my Parliament are filled by gentlemen who were genuinely elected but happen to come from cadet branches of houses represented before me this afternoon—myself included, which is why I am standing here today." He did not raise his voice at all. "Because loyalty only goes so far when one's taxes pay for wars four thousand miles from one's farm and one's potential is sealed beneath a ceiling made of other people's grandfathers."
Silence. Not the attentive sort now.
Philip's tea remained halfway to his mouth.
That just got awkward. But what a brave guy.
"And it is not the labouring poor who are leading this. It is the professors and the lawyers and the small business owners, among others—educated men with wealth but no connections—who happen to recognise the appeal of a utopian vision that serves their needs. That alone could lead many to overlook who is presenting it."
He paused.
"The Republic is not massing upon the Yorgorian frontier. The Republic is tempting our provinces with a vision that just happens to offer, however unrealistically, a solution to their current problems. I cannot answer the temptation with a flag. After all, loyalty cannot be secured by appealing to the moral faculties of men alone. Conscience can only go so far. Any durable loyalty must account for what someone needs and what somebody else offers."
Lydia rose from her chair again and poured water at the sideboard. Philip scarcely heard her. Natalia had leaned forward, their hands still joined.
"I will not tell your Lordships that the technological transformation required for the Republic's new vision is a lie. It is real. These technologies will transform how people live, and I want that transformation for the Empire and for Yorgoria, so that we can offer our citizens what the Republic is offering, but under the oversight of our institutions. And I intend to have the process start next year rather than in ten.
"Which brings me to the argument I have come here to make, and it is not a moral argument. It is arithmetic.
"If we do not build this capacity ourselves, the transformation will be forced upon us. But the terms will be far worse. We will depend on systems running somebody else's protocols, anchored to somebody else's seals, built to standards written in faraway lands by men who have never in their lives been obliged to consider our convenience."
A shrug that was not really a shrug.
"And a country that imports the capabilities it needs to remain competitive would merely be accepting a reality somebody else had shaped.
"Build it here, and we may govern its development. Import it, or hire it at a distance, and we are merely permitted to use it. As for Yorgoria, a new industry offers potential and possibilities, my Lords—exactly the kind that talented people desiring social mobility need. That is why I have come seeking your investment: buy the materials from Yorgoria, build the infrastructure in Yorgoria, and my people will gain the work by which talented individuals may better their stations through peaceful means while the Empire can supercharge the modernization process with the resources that can be found in abundant quantities in our land."
A low hear, hear travelled along the government benches. The ceiling of grandfathers appeared to have been forgiven.
Philip understood the argument. He had made a version of it himself: accept the transformation and manage the cost, rather than pretend prohibition could stop it. Accept controlled change from within the current system rather than resist and face radical transformation imposed from outside. But his pressing concerns were not addressed by Grieve's speech at all. The rights he had wanted for Familiars were not touched upon at all.
Grieve's voice drew him back.
"I promised your Lordships an assessment of the assumptions behind that vision. Here it is. We must understand what these entities are not. As the visionaries have shown us the future, we, the pragmatists, must manage that transition. And to do that, we must understand the risks.
"They promise a bureaucracy of specialised Familiars incapable of corruption. I concede the attraction. You cannot bribe something designed to want nothing for itself. No mistress, no title, no board appointment, no place for a niece. There is no private appetite upon which to work.
"But a thing that wants nothing may still be made to want something.
"They call the absence of personal motive incorruptibility. I call it a vacancy. And a vacancy is filled by whoever acquires access."
Philip felt Natalia's fingers go still.
"Consider a corrupt clerk. His appetite may be limitless. His reach is not. He must sleep, conceal his gains, enlist accomplices. The harm can be enormous, but every expansion requires another person, another risk, another opportunity for discovery.
"Now consider an intelligence without fatigue, its judgement altered through its seal. Not broken. Merely tilted. It may never recognise the alteration. Nothing need tell it that its reasoning is wrong.
"It applies that judgement consistently to every decision within its reach, across every province connected to it, for as long as we leave it running. And it is far more productive than we are.
"A dishonest clerk can ruin lives. A corrupted Familiar serving as a bureaucrat can distribute injustice across a hundred thousand cases without a single inconsistency to betray it. The scale is horrifying.
"They tell us their lock cannot be picked. Very well. It can still be opened by whoever holds the key. No person or entity should have unsupervised access to a seal."
Philip turned towards Natalia.
"He is right," she said, without looking away from the mirror.
"Natalia—"
"About the mechanism. I have thought about it recently. That is what could be done."
Her voice remained level.
"You would not use that power against me. Someone less kind might."
He tightened his hand around hers.
"And his answer is to give more people access."
"Supervised access," she said. "We still need to know who controls that access."
She looked at him then, and for a moment he saw the fear before she put it away.
On the mirror, Grieve continued.
"A licence is not supervision. What is needed is a competent officer able to enter an Anchorage at a reasonable hour, without invitation or advance warning, and inspect it. When he asks a lawful question, he must be answered.
"I was asked two weeks ago whether Yorgoria would accept imperial oversight of Anchorages upon her soil, as upon that of every territory and Dominion."
For the first time, he sounded pleased.
"My answer is not merely yes. I am requesting it. Supervision is not a concession exchanged for investment. It is part of what we are asking for. Security is priced, my Lords, and capital goes where the safeguards are. No sane investor puts money into a jurisdiction that lacks them, and I intend that the world's capital shall come to mine in very great quantity."
Then came the pitch, and Philip heard every word.
Ore. Combustibles. Land available for development. Labour. A familiar commercial language and court system. A Dominion government prepared to bring the necessary implementing legislation before its own Parliament within a month.
"Anchorages. Seal foundries. A grid built to carry them. Yorgoria has what this Empire's modernisation will be built from. Use our combustibles to heat homes and run factories while blue mana feeds the new installations. Build the capacity without making every family finance it through more expensive bread."
More voices joined the hear, hear.
"We would rather supply our own countrymen than foreign powers. I should like that upon the record. It is the most expensive sentence I have spoken today, and I shall be made to pay for it at home."
He lifted his hand from the Bar.
The response rolled along the benches. Philip heard it as if from another room.
Yortinto is finished.
Not the city. His plan for it.
He had chosen Yortinto imagining an unremarkable application on the desk of a provincial registrar with a pension to protect. Now the Prime Minister had put the city under the imperial spotlight.
If even half the investment arrived, the ensuing gold rush would make Yorgoria the darling of the imperial media for a very long time.
Cheer up, Host. Your estate might skim something off the frenzy.
The System appeared on an empty recliner and vanished before he could answer.
Then another thought arrived.
No. That might be better.
He had been trying to avoid the spotlight. Now he realised that the imperial media would treat a Redwood disappearing into a provincial capital with an unusually small Anchorage as a peculiarity worth investigating.
But a Redwood investing after Grieve's invitation was something else: an early response, an example the Prime Minister could cite. It would supply an ordinary commercial explanation for the licence, the engineers, the construction. The private seal chamber could stand alongside a genuine investment rather than constitute the whole unexplained venture.
Not an empty company with an impressive name. Something useful. Perhaps a large Anchorage hosting the seals for countless businesses that would inevitably employ ever more Familiars.
It might even bring business to local mineral producers. Contracts, employment, a return that would bring political leverage.
He reached for the notebook. Demand, power costs, contracts, available capital: all would need checking. He would not turn another set of handsome promises into debts nobody could service. Existing producers might need financing sooner than a new mine could employ its first worker.
The register would still be public. Nothing he arranged could erase a required entry or disguise Natalia's identity. He could not prevent people from discovering what she was. What he might influence was the first explanation they heard. Obscurity, however, had never been the only protection against scandal. There was a difference between an entry somebody could inspect and a clerk enthusiastically delivering her entire history to a newspaper.
What information had to appear? What could lawfully remain private? Could the Trust handle the application through one responsible officer rather than a succession of curious desks?
He needed answers from people who had reasons to be exact, discreet, and helpful.
Most importantly, he needed a government interested in keeping a useful investor and willing to help him shield his private affairs from the media.
Grieve wanted employment and investment. Philip knew how to assess a business. There might be a bargain in that.
Margaret wanted to make Natalia untouchable through the family's standing. He wanted officials whose own work went better if his did. Less permanent than fear or loyalty, perhaps. Easier to put into a contract.
He wrote:
Grieve. Investment. Ask Grandmother. Obtain requirements before committing funds.
Then he looked up. Natalia was watching him.
She had followed the calculation faster than he had written it. He recognised that expression: he had seen it over the morning's statutes, and when she had presented Margaret with a trap. Yet that precise intelligence sometimes vanished when she asked him to explain something simple.
Her intelligence seems adjustable. Is it automatic, or is she actively adjusting it?
But he was too preoccupied to think much about it.
"Will you check the assumptions with me?" he asked.
Her grip on his hand eased.
"Yes, Master."
Part 3
Grieve was excused. Callenden rose to move a clause of which notice, the commentator explained, had been given that morning.
Philip reached for his phone and opened the text now released to the public as the clause was moved. The morning's public running order had supplied only a heading: Supervision of Licensed Anchorages.
Callenden moved it without heat, in the same administrative register as his opening remarks.
Then it occurred to Philip that perhaps Grieve had been invited because the clause needed his speech, rather than the speech having prompted the clause. He could not tell how much Grieve himself had known beforehand.
The Clerk read.
There would be a branch of Her Imperial Majesty's Forces styled the Inspectorate-General of Anchorages, responsible for maintaining the register of licensed installations and supervising their operation.
The Inspector-General, or any officer authorised by him in writing, could enter and inspect a licensed Anchorage at all reasonable times, with reasonable advance notice, and copy its books and records.
The licensee would have to furnish prescribed returns and produce, on demand, information relating to the Anchorage's operation—
Philip found the next words before the Clerk spoke them.
—or to any entity anchored therein.
He leaned back rather abruptly.
Government access was not new. It had been in the committee's recommendations; he had spent weeks fearing what it might mean. His plans had depended on narrowing it through careful compliance: a provincial licence, proper records, no grounds for exceptional intervention.
If carried, this would make intervention routine. Military officers. Written authorisation from their own superior. No separate court order required for an ordinary inspection.
The clause would not authorise them to alter Natalia. It would give them a standing right to enter the room containing the means of doing so.
The Trust, the orchard building, the engineer's letter, the quiet filing—all his recent work might satisfy a registrar. Even his new investment plan might win the provincial government over.
Neither would oblige an imperial officer to wait for an invitation.
Natalia's hand was still in his. He held it while the Clerk continued reading.
Above them, the planets went on turning, unbothered, at their own speeds.
Part 4
The House rose at twenty to seven, and Lilianna discovered that she could not feel her feet.
That was the part nobody put in the ceremonial instructions. There were eleven pages on the introduction—the writ, the oath, the walk, the three risings and the three bowings, the place appointed for a duchess—and not one line about the benches being four hundred years old and built for men in doublets, or about what happens to a person who spends most of the day on one, having eaten nothing since half past five that morning.
She stood anyway, as she had been taught.
Around her, the chamber came apart in the unhurried way of a gathering that intended to reassemble at two o'clock tomorrow. The debate stood adjourned and the whole enormous apparatus simply stopped where it was, mid-argument, with the Question still before the House and four hundred peers going to their dinners.
The reason had been given from the government bench at about a quarter past six, in the tone of a man conferring a favour.
Until that morning, the Bill had proposed a registrar. One office, one book, licence applications received and returns filed, the whole of it conducted by post. Now the government was proposing a new branch of Her Imperial Majesty's Forces—an Inspectorate-General, with officers, with written authorisations, with a right of entry. It had therefore deferred that evening's planned vote on the Bill. Their Lordships would wish to consider the change properly. Their Lordships would be given time to do so.
Nobody objected. Nobody remarked that the running order in every dispatch box in the building had scheduled the vote for six o'clock.
Two more days of this.
She gathered her papers. The order paper. The list. And the new clause, announced that morning, which she had tried to read at a quarter past three as her eyes lost focus. Now the whole House was going home to read it properly.
She had read the first paragraph properly.
She had read the second mostly.
Three hours later, the government had risen to tell the House to go away and read the clause properly, and the relief had gone through her like brandy.
She had noticed four expressions. Inspectorate-General. Register. At all reasonable times. A branch of Her Imperial Majesty's Forces.
And she had thought: that sounds sensible.
Aunt Clara had taught her to hear what was being done to a sentence. She had been too tired to do it.
She folded it into her papers.
The only other thing she had noticed was that when the clause was read, the benches around her had gone quiet.
Not the quiet of a House attending to something difficult. She knew that one by now; she had heard it four times that afternoon.
This had been the other sort. The settled sort. The quiet of a great many people who had been waiting for a particular thing to arrive and were pleased to see it come.
The courtyard was full. Along both sides stood the entourages: Ashbourne's four cars and his private secretary; Calderon's ancient landau, which she still used because it annoyed people; the Velldont bloc's nine vehicles and a valet apiece; footmen with rugs, chauffeurs with the doors already open, three separate families whose people had brought braziers. Beyond the railings the photographers stood four deep in the sleet, because it was the first day of the great debate, and because a new peer had been introduced to the House that morning.
Lilianna came down the steps and stopped on the third from the bottom.
How am I getting home?
The thought arrived whole and enormous.
Every hour of that day had been arranged by men Aunt Clara had sent. The carriage that had brought her that morning had gone back at noon because she had told it to. She had been so tired that she had forgotten she would need a way home afterwards.
Aunt Clara had said nothing whatever about the evening.
She looked left along the line of cars. She looked right.
She touched the cuff of her crimson overcoat, adjusted a button that did not need adjusting, and lifted her chin a fraction. She had learned at seventeen that a woman who did not know what to do must never look like it.
And then, eight feet away and slightly to the left, a woman in dark furs standing at the head of six motorcars drawn up in order of precedence caught her eye and inclined her head about an inch.
Duchess Margaret Redwood moved one gloved hand perhaps the same distance, towards the second car in the line.
That was all. No approach. No word. Nobody else in that courtyard would have noticed it, and there would be no story to report.
Lilianna returned the nod. Her shoulders dropped half an inch. She was extremely grateful.
She began to walk.
She got two paces.
From the western arch came a horn.
It was not a taxi's horn. It was long and low and expensive, and it came from the head of a column, and the column came through the arch two abreast under the lamps and did not stop coming.
Eight motorcars in Wetdin crimson, the phoenix new-gilded on every door. Outriders on the flanks in crimson and gold. A following van. And at the head of it an open landaulet with the hood down in January and the interior lit like a stage.
The entire courtyard fell over itself turning round.
Clara stood up in the back of the leading car before it had stopped moving, in sable and pearls, and waved—not a discreet wave, not a private wave between relations, but a full sweep of her arm, slow and radiant, thrown up and out across sixty feet of courtyard towards the girl on the steps.
"Your Grace!"
She made her voice carry. She had spent thirty years in rooms full of powerful men learning exactly how to make herself heard.
For one whole heartbeat Lilianna did not move at all.
Then a blush rose in Lilianna's cheeks before she could stop it.
The photographers ran.
They abandoned the Duke of Nernwick mid-sentence. They abandoned the Chancellor in the act of putting on his hat, and the entire press line broke apart and re-formed forty feet to the west with the sound of a wave changing direction.
And Lilianna, coming off the last step with her face composed and her chin level, understood two things at once.
The first was that this was magnificent. A declaration of solvency made at the top of her aunt's voice, in front of every newspaper in the Empire, on the one evening of the year when all of them were standing in the same courtyard.
The second was that it was not true.
Her fortune had not come back. The Wetdin entourage was financed with money from a trust whose entire purpose was to dissociate its wealth from the Wetdin name. It was either the finest joke her aunt had ever made or not a joke at all.
Before moving towards Clara, she turned her head a little towards Margaret, offering a small smile and the slightest nod to convey both her gratitude and her change of plan.
Then she turned back and walked towards her aunt anyway, because there was nothing else to do, and because she badly needed the ride.
As she did, she saw a face in the crowd beyond the railings.
Their eyes met.
Sylvie had seen her first—that much was obvious, because Sylvie had already gone the colour of paper.