Ophelia felt the soft thud of the sand on her back and, winded by her fall, gazed vacantly at the blurred image of two strings of bunting across the clouds. When the drizzle made her eyes smart, she realized she’d lost her glasses. She came back to her senses on hearing the cries of pain above the brass band of the costumed parade.
She rolled on to her side, but saw nothing around her but unidentifiable silhouettes. It seemed to her that one of them was appearing and disappearing at will, in a blaze of red, while dealing some devastating blows.
Ophelia felt around in the sand for her glasses; it was the scarf, affected by her panic, that found them for her and placed them back on her nose. As soon as she recovered her sight, she looked first for Thorn. He was standing tall, impassive as a bronze statue, still clutching his briefcase. It was unlikely to be him who had cried out. He appeared to be neither wounded nor even out of breath.
“Stay down,” he advised her in a firm voice. Ophelia then realized that three of the brothers were also lying on the sand and groaning, while the fourth, with a knee on the ground, was pressing his sleeve under his nose to stem a stream of blood. Their fine blond fringes were all messed up.
The Chronicler looked as shocked as Ophelia. And for a good reason: she was being restrained by a woman holding a dagger to her throat. Ophelia felt totally confused when she recognized the disgraced woman in the red coat, her eyes glinting with stony coldness beneath her black fur hat. So, it was this Invisible who had left the brothers in such a state? Which side was she on, in the end?
Thorn seemed to know the answer. “I would suggest that we leave it at that,” he said simply, as though bringing an administrative meeting to a close. The Chronicler pursed her lips, white with rage, but stiffened as she felt the Invisible’s dagger stroking the quivering skin of her neck. The spectacle of these two women entwined, the one pink and feminine, the other red and warrior-like, could have been a carefully choreographed circus act.
“V-very well,” the Chronicler finally muttered, mustering a resigned smile. “Let’s leave it at that, cousin.”
The fourth brother, who was silently wiping his nose, immediately jumped up like a spring and aimed his studded fist at Thorn. Stuck on the sand, Ophelia opened her mouth but not a sound had a chance to come out: the Chronicler brother’s head was thrown violently backwards, and the rest of his body followed, as if he had just received a brutal blow right in the face. Thorn, however, hadn’t lifted a finger, or let go of his briefcase. He had merely shot a piercing look at his aggressor. It was the first time Ophelia was seeing him use his claws; she was struck by his obvious reluctance to resort to them.
“Ready to sacrifice your sister to appropriate my memory,” Thorn said, looking disdainfully at the body writhing in pain at his feet. “And you wonder why your clan is doomed to disappear? It’s pathetic.”
At a sign from him, the red-coated woman released the Chronicler, and made her brothers stand up, one by one. Her manner matched her eyes: hard and cold as an uncut diamond.
After a final venomous look for Thorn, the Chronicler left with a brisk swish of her dress, her parasol on her shoulder and her brothers limping pitifully behind her. They were all soon swallowed up by the multicolored tide of the costumed parade.
“Return to your post,” ordered Thorn. “We shouldn’t see them again any time soon.”
“Yes, sir.” As the woman in the red coat replied, she clicked the heels of her boots together, and then discreetly withdrew. On her first step, she was there, by her second, she’d disappeared. It had all happened so quickly that Ophelia, dazed, hadn’t even had time to stand up.
“You should have told me that she was working in your service. I took her for an enemy. I assume it was her, your ‘source’?”
“I employed that Invisible to keep an eye on you. Her clan is among those whose case I will soon be pleading. I obtained an exceptional dispensation so she could come and go in town entirely legally.”
Ophelia reflected that if those disgraced clans did get their noble entitlements back, it would mean fun times ahead at the court. In the meantime, they would make very good hunters.
“She’s been protecting me for weeks,” she said, vainly searching for the Invisible, “and we haven’t even been introduced. What’s her name?”
“Vladislava,” Thorn replied, seeming to find the question most peculiar.
“She’s efficient, but she doesn’t pass unnoticed. For an Invisible, I mean.”
“She doesn’t need to. Her presence by your side is intended to be a deterrent.”
“I don’t quite understand what just happened,” Ophelia murmured, her voice strained. “Your cousins . . . they were after your memory?”
Thorn’s mouth puckered in annoyance. “The Chroniclers can appropriate and absorb memories. Some of them are even capable of falsifying them.”
“You included?”
“I don’t practice it, but I do know how to protect myself from such intrusions. Playing with others’ memories is not only reprehensible, it’s also a threat to mental stability.”
Ophelia noticed that Thorn had allowed himself a moment’s thought to choose his words. He was making a concerted effort to watch the costumed parade, with its brass-band music filling the air, as if this popular spectacle was a mass of problems all of its own.
“Right, let me put it another way,” said Ophelia, fiddling with her glasses. “My real question was: have you effectively inherited your mother’s memories, and are those memories really worth killing one another over?”
Thorn swatted a mosquito on his neck with an impatient slap. “I promised you the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” he grumbled, “on the one condition that it directly concerns you. You already know much more than you should.”
Ophelia had got used to seeing Thorn as an ambitious and calculating man, but she had to bow before the evidence: he was undoubtedly the least corrupt official of the entire magistrature. Maybe he had his reasons—deep and tortuous reasons—for defending the cause of the disgraced, but, from what Ophelia could deduce, their dossier was more of a poisoned chalice. Thorn was risking his life to represent people who weren’t part of his family, had no influence in high places, and would increase the number of his already considerable enemies. Did he think that, if he was successful, and once their position at court was secure, the rehabilitated disgraced would remember his help and do the same for him? If Ophelia wasn’t naïve enough to believe that, he was certainly even less so.
No, quite clearly, however much she considered the question from every angle, this strength that constantly electrified Thorn’s large body looked for all the world like a sense of duty.
Ophelia rubbed her arms against each other, chilled by the wind, the drizzle, and a cold feeling from within. Her anger, in leaving her, had given way to a strange melancholy. “That cousin can’t know you very well to see me as your weakness. The truth is that you never rely on anyone.”
Thorn immediately lost interest in the costumed parade and lowered his bird-of-prey look at Ophelia.
“You want to solve every problem on your own,” she continued in a choked voice, “even if it means using people like chess pieces, even if it means making yourself hated by the whole world.”
“And you, do you still hate me?”
“I don’t think so. Not anymore.”
“Good,” Thorn grunted between his teeth. “Because I’ve never made such an effort not to be hated by someone.”
Ophelia had barely listened to him, but it wasn’t intentional. On the other side of the costumed parade, beyond the sprays of confetti and streamers, Hector had embarked on climbing a large metal structure. Fox was gesticulating most disapprovingly at him.
“It’s time we went back,” Ophelia said, anxiously. “We’ve already missed the midday boat; my mother will have the worst reception in store for us.”
She breathed a sigh of relief when Hector landed on the sand after a final somersault. Then she noticed that Thorn was also watching him with great concentration, as though finally seeing this young brother-in-law in the flesh, and no longer as an abstract genealogical concept. His grey eyes were glittering strangely under the changing light of the sky, in a curious mix of rancor and curiosity.
“These little family tiffs,” he said in a distant voice, “I really know nothing about them.”
At that moment, Ophelia knew why he had put off coming to Opal Sands for so long. Thorn’s daily life was made up of hypocrisy, fraud, blackmail, and treachery; around a family such as Ophelia’s, he lost his bearings. Spurred by an uncontrollable impulse, Ophelia tugged on Thorn’s big, black sleeve. “Come back with us.”
If she was the first to be surprised by her own familiarity, it didn’t compare to the reaction of Thorn, who lost all his composure. He suddenly seemed very awkward, with his briefcase dangling from his arm, and his other hand, prompted by an entrenched habit, groping in the lining of his coat for the fob watch that wasn’t there, and for a good reason: it was in Ophelia’s pocket.
“Now? But I have . . . I must go . . . My appointments.”
Ophelia bit the inside of her mouth. It really was only at the Carnival Caravan that she would ever witness Thorn stammering like this, with confetti, blown by the wind, in his tousled hair.
“Stay at least for lunch,” she suggested. “See it as a diplomatic duty, if your professional conscience really has to be eased.”
Thorn’s lips once again convulsed in that way that Ophelia couldn’t quite interpret. When he finally pulled his hand out of his coat, it was obviously not his watch he was clutching, but a bunch of keys. “As it’s a diplomatic duty,” he said, stiffly, “I presume that I can use the Treasury’s master key. There’s a Compass Rose at the customs post at the entrance to Asgard. Go and get your brother.”
Satisfied, Ophelia agreed to do so.
“I promise you it won’t be as awful as you think it will be.”