Vivienne found me in the garden.
It was a small, walled square behind the house, with a dry fountain and a single lemon tree in a pot. She came out with a glass of water in her hand, then stopped on the step when she saw my face.
"Elise?"
"Vivi," I said, turning from the tree. "Friends don't lie to each other, do they?"
Her glass shook. "Of course not."
"This morning you asked me if I had received a letter from the palace." I kept my voice very quiet. "You asked before I had told anybody. You came early on my birthday. You were frightened when I said I would accept the prince. And there is a black envelope on your dining table."
She said nothing. The water over her fingers.
"I am not angry," I said. And it was true. "I only want to understand."
For a long time, Vivienne stood with her head bent. Then her knees gave way, and she sat down on the cold step, and the glass rolled away across the stones.
"I'm a ," she said. Her voice was thin, and wet. "I'm the worst friend in the world, Elise. You should hate me."
"Tell me," I said, and sat beside her.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand like a child. "My father borrowed money, years ago. A lot. For a ship that sank. The men who lent it to him were very… polite. They wrote beautiful letters. They said that there was no hurry. But the debt grew and grew. Last winter, a man came to the house at night."
"What man?"
"I don't know his name. He never gave it. He was thin, and quiet, and very kind. He gave Theo a silver coin." She . "And he wore a ring. A black ring, with a bird on it. A ."
A raven. My fingers dug into my skirt.
"What did he want?"
"He said they were old friends of my family, and wished to help. He said that there would be, before the autumn, a very important event, and that he needed my help to make sure it went well." She swallowed. "He told me to be your closest friend. To keep you happy. And to tell him, every few weeks, how you were. What you said. Who you saw."
"You reported on me."
"Only little things! What you wore. If you were happy." She was now, in great ugly . "And then, this year, he told me to ask you about the letter from the palace the moment it came. And to tell him at once. I did not know why. I it. I never knew why."
"And in the other —" I stopped myself just in time. "In the future, Vivi? What if something terrible happened to me? What would you do?"
Vivienne looked at me with wet, red eyes. She did not understand the question. But she answered it anyway, in a whisper, and the answer made my blood go cold.
"I would be so afraid," she said. "I would be so afraid that I would do exactly what he told me. I would stay silent. I would stay away from you. I would say nothing at all, because Theo is sick, Elise, and the man knows our door."
There was no lie in her face.
It was exactly the same that I had met in the prison, in the silence, in the missing visits. I had never known the reason. I had hated her for seven years, in my other life, and not once had I wondered what hung over her head.
The raven. The ring. The thin, quiet man with kind manners.
And in my memory, a gray-bearded face with flat river-stone eyes, bowing to the prince in a palace garden. A black iron ring flashing in the sun.