Chapter 3 The Setup

Linnet's pov

The accusation came at half past five on the evening I was meant to leave, barely ninety minutes before the transport arrived, and I was kneeling beside my open suitcase with my grandmother's healer's kit in my hands when my bedroom door swung wide without a knock.

Seraphine stood on the threshold with her fingers pressed to her lips and her eyes already swimming, and behind her loomed Corvin, tall and furious and breathing hard through his nose.

"Linnet," Seraphine whispered, and her voice trembled like a plucked string. "I am so sorry to bother you. Mother's emerald brooch has vanished from the jewelry box, and I remembered you were near it yesterday when I asked for help with my gown. You did not want to help me, so I thought perhaps..."

She trailed off with a small, wounded sniffle, as though the very idea pained her.

I rose slowly and set the healer's kit on the bed. "You think I stole it."

"We think nothing yet," Corvin snapped. "But you have been strange for two days, and Sera has never lost a single thing in her life. Move aside. We are searching your room."

"You will do no such thing."

He ignored me completely and strode across the floorboards, and when I stepped in front of him he simply set a hand on my shoulder and moved me aside like a chair in his way. Seraphine slipped in behind him with her head bowed and drifted toward the coat that hung beside the wardrobe.

Mother and Father appeared in the corridor, drawn by the noise, and I turned to them with open, desperate relief.

"Please, tell him to stop. He is tearing through my things."

Father folded his arms. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."

"You are all letting him do this?" My voice cracked. "I am leaving in ninety minutes. I have a transport coming and a place waiting somewhere else entirely. Why on earth would I steal from Sera?"

"Jealousy does strange things to people," Mother said sadly, and she would not meet my eyes. "If you simply return it, darling, we will not pursue the matter. We will let it go for the sake of the family."

For the sake of the family. I nearly laughed, because they had just decided I was a thief and then praised themselves for forgiving me in advance.

Corvin dragged my sweaters from the wardrobe and shook them out roughly, while Seraphine drifted closer to my coat with her tearstained face turned carefully away. And I, who had spent a lifetime learning to read the small signals of frightened and manipulative people, did what my grandmother had trained me to do in a sickroom full of liars.

I watched her hands.

It happened in less than a heartbeat. Her slender fingers slid inside the sleeve of her own shawl and emerged with a flash of green and gold, and then those same fingers dipped smoothly into the pocket of my coat and came out empty.

My body moved before my mind had finished the thought. I crossed the room in three strides and seized her wrist, and my grip was far stronger than my family had ever bothered to notice.

"Don't," I said, in a voice like cold iron. "Do not move."

Seraphine gasped as though I had struck her. "Linnet, you are hurting me!"

"I watched you," I said, turning to the others without letting go. "I watched her slip the brooch into my coat. It is in the left pocket. Check it, Corvin, and then check her sleeve for a thread from the clasp."

He hesitated for the length of a single breath, and then he reached into the coat and drew out the emerald brooch, glinting in the lamplight like a cruel little eye.

"It was in your pocket," he said grimly, rounding on me. "Exactly where Sera said."

"Because she put it there!"

"Let go of her," Father thundered.

"You are not listening!" I released Seraphine at last and pressed my shaking hands against my ribs. "I am telling you what I saw with my own eyes. She planned this from the beginning, and every one of you walked straight into it because you wanted to."

"That is a terrible thing to say about a girl who has suffered so much," Mother said faintly.

"She is shifting the blame, Mother," Corvin said, and he did not lower his voice. "Thieves always do."

I stared at him, and the last soft thing in my chest curdled. "I am your sister."

"Then act like it."

He turned to my desk, and his hand landed on the brown envelope that lay beside my passport, my enlistment papers. He tugged the first page free and glanced at the crest stamped across its top, and his lip curled.

"The Northfang emblem," he said flatly. "You even packed the paperwork to make it look convincing. Pretending to leave, pretending to be wronged. You really will do anything for attention."

He flicked the pages across the room, and they fluttered to the floor like wounded birds.

"Please read them," I said, and I hated the tremble in my voice. "Just read the second page, Corvin. It is not what you think."

"I need to read nothing." He scoffed. "Father, make her apologize."

"Apologize to your sister, Linnet," Father said heavily. "Say it properly, and let us put this unpleasantness behind us."

"I did nothing wrong."

"Then why won't you say sorry?" Seraphine whispered through her tears. Then she leaned close, so close that only I could hear, and her breath brushed my ear. "You were always going to lose, big sister. You just took longer than the others."

She drew back with a tiny, delighted curve at the corner of her mouth, and my blood ran cold.

Corvin crossed to the bed and lifted the stack of leather bound notebooks I had tied with string, my three months of Moonvale preparation, my grandmother's remedies, my notes on herbs and pulse points and bone setting, my entire future in my own tidy handwriting.

"Put those down," I said, and for the first time my voice rose into something close to a scream.

"These can count as compensation." He pressed the notebooks into Seraphine's arms. "Sera lost her peace tonight, and she may as well gain something useful from it."

"They are mine!"

"They are family property, and you are family." He looked at me with unhidden contempt. "Stop making a scene."

Seraphine hugged the notebooks to her chest and lowered her head with perfect, quivering humility. "Thank you, Linnet. I promise to take good care of them."

My phone buzzed against my hip.

I drew it out with numb fingers, and the message glowing on the screen was blessedly short.

Transport arriving in ten minutes. Be at the gate.

Something went very still inside me, so still I could hear the clock ticking on the far wall. I looked at my notebooks in my sister's arms, and at my papers scattered across the floor, and at four faces arranged before me like a portrait of a perfect and loving family.

I knew I could not win this room. I also knew, with a certainty that startled me, that I no longer needed to.

So I bent down and gathered my enlistment papers one page at a time, smoothing each crease with my thumb, and slid them back into the envelope. Then I closed my suitcase with a sharp click while I straightened to my full height, and for the first time in my life I looked each of them in the eye and held it.

"Now," I said softly, "please move."