I Accidentally Caught a Falling Goddess - The Scent of Rosewater

The room smelled of crushed lavender buds, sweet almond cold-cream, and the cloying, heavy distillation of damask rosewater that aristocrats used to mask the stink of unwashed horse-hair mattresses. It was four times larger than the entire ground floor of the Frankland tenement, carpeted in thick crimson wool that swallowed the sound of boots, crowded with carved walnut wardrobes, low velvet armchairs, and a fourposter bed draped in heavy white damask.

Annabel unknotted the sleeves of Corin’s blue uniform coat from her hips, tossing the heavy wool over the screen with a shudder of pure relief.

“My linen shift is on the chest,” Corin whispered, his back pressed flat against the floral wallpaper, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the gilded ceiling moldings. “Give it back so I can get over the wall.”

“It’s covered in horse sweat and soot,” she snapped under her breath, rummaging frantically through a brass-bound cedar chest for a fresh nightgown. “I threw it behind the wash-stand. Put on your coat and wait until—”

A heavy, deliberate double-knock sounded against the thick oak panels of the hallway door.

Annabel froze, half-tangled in six yards of white cambric, one arm shoved through an eyelet sleeve, her bare shoulders mottled with soot and goosebumps.

“Annabel?” a woman’s voice called from the corridor—smooth, unhurried, carrying that cool, effortless timbre of high provincial authority that came from forty years of having servants curtsy before breakfast. “The gatekeeper mentioned your carriage returned without the team grooms, and young Fenwick’s boy left a rather frantic message with the steward. Are you decent, child?”

“Mother,” Annabel squeaked, her voice cracking before she could drop it into a proper register. She shoved Corin with both hands, driving him violently backward into the narrow space between the dressing table and a six-foot cedar wardrobe. “Get inside! Don’t breathe! Don’t even swallow!”

Corin didn’t argue. He hauled the double louvered doors open, ducked his head beneath three tiers of silk petticoats and fur-lined winter mantles, and pulled the slatted oak panels shut until only a quarter-inch seam of yellow candlelight showed through the join.

The wardrobe smelled powerfully of camphor blocks, dried orris-root, and decades of stale perfume trapped in heavy velvet. A silk fringe brushed his bruised right ear, making the torn cartilage throb with a sharp, sickening needle-pulse. He clamped his teeth together, hooked his fingers into the shelf above his head, and held his breath.

Outside in the bedchamber, the iron latch clicked.

Countess Logres stepped into the room, the hem of her dark grey damask gown rustling softly over the carpet. She was a tall, handsome woman in her late forties, her silver-streaked chestnut hair pinned in an elaborate coronet, a brass candlestick held loosely in her right hand.

“Why are the curtains open to the terrace?” the Countess asked, her sharp gaze sweeping over the rumpled bed and the heap of scorched green velvet bunched beneath the folding screen. “The lake wind is blowing directly onto the hearth.”

“The room was stuffy, Mother,” Annabel answered, standing in the center of the carpet in a clean, high-collared nightgown of bleached linen, her arms folded tightly across her midriff to hide the bramble-scratches on her wrists. She had pulled a knitted lace sleeping cap low over her forehead, tucking the singed red hair completely out of sight. “I had a headache after the tactical lecture.”

The Countess set the candlestick on the dressing table, three inches from where Corin’s left eye was pressed against the louvered slats.

“Young Fenwick was in the vestibule an hour ago,” the older woman said, picking up a silver-backed hairbrush and turning it over in her manicured fingers. “He looked like an unmade bed, his coat was torn at the elbow, and he insisted you had been abducted by an apprentice from the lower dyeworks. Your father had to threaten him with a night in the guardhouse to get him to stop shouting in the portico.”

Inside the dark wardrobe, Corin felt a sudden, sharp pinch on the meat of his left tricep.

Annabel had backed up against the wardrobe doors, her right hand reaching behind her hips through the half-inch gap in the slats, her fingernails digging through his linen sleeve into his muscle with savage, vindictive warning.

Corin didn’t flinch. He reached down, caught her index finger with his thumb, and bent it backward half an inch until she let out a tiny, stifled gasp.

“Alec is an idiot,” Annabel said aloud, her voice tightening as she pulled her hand away from the wardrobe. “He lost his head because a horse slipped on the mud road. I took a hired cab from the North Gate to avoid his incessant bickering.”

The Countess paused, her keen eyes dropping to the hearth where a pair of small riding boots sat caked in grey shale and dead hemlock needles.

“And your hair, child?” the mother asked softly. “I smell scorched pitch.”

“A lamp flared in the library,” Annabel lied without missing a beat, smoothing the front of her nightgown with flat, steady palms. “The wick was bad. Master Linck trimmed the ends with his pocket shears so the soot wouldn’t ruin my collars.”

The Countess stared at her daughter for a long, quiet minute. The silence stretched so thin Corin could hear the wax dripping down the side of the brass candlestick on the table.

“You are eighteen, Annabel,” the Countess said at last, setting the silver brush down with a soft click. “The winter season begins in three weeks. The sons of the High Council will be at the Governor’s ball, and your father expects you to dance with young Lord Vane before the second supper. If you continue to play at street-skirmishes with boys who have ink under their fingernails, he will find a convent in the lowlands that takes rebellious daughters for twenty gold sovereigns a year. Do we understand each other?”

“Yes, Mother,” Annabel whispered, keeping her chin dropped.

“Lock the terrace doors,” the Countess said, turning toward the hallway. “The city watch is nervous tonight. Some nonsense about a heretic incursion near the Grand Cloister.”

She walked out, pulling the heavy oak door shut until the latch dropped into its brass socket with a clean, final thud.

The room went completely still.

Corin pushed the louvered doors open, stepped out from between two velvet riding cloaks, and dragged a long, ragged lungful of fresh air into his chest, coughing softly into the crook of his elbow to clear the camphor dust from his throat.

Annabel was still standing by the dressing table, her shoulders slumped, her knuckles white where she gripped the edge of the walnut wood.

She turned around slowly. In the candlelight, stripped of her heavy velvet skirts and haughty sneer, she looked small, thin, and impossibly tired.

“My shift,” Corin said quietly.

She reached behind the porcelain wash-basin, picked up his rolled linen under-shirt, and threw it at his chest. It was dry, though it still smelled of Master Sona’s oak-gall vats.

“Take it and get out,” she whispered, her green eyes dark, refusing to look at his face. “If you fall off the wall and break your neck, don’t land on the boxwood hedges. My father paid forty silver groats to have them imported from the south.”

Corin pulled the linen over his head, smoothed the coarse fabric down over his ribs, and picked up his navy cadet coat from the stool. He walked to the French doors, turned the bronze latch, and stepped out onto the freezing stone of the balcony.

The sleet had stopped, leaving the slate roofs of Skan-Tor gleaming like wet fish-scales under the pale, cold moon.

He looked back through the glass.

Annabel was standing by the candle, watching him through the diamond-shaped panes, her fingers toyed with the lace ribbons of her nightcap. She didn’t wave. She didn’t mouth an insult. She simply watched until he vaulted over the carved stone balustrade, caught the wisteria trellis with one hand, and dropped silently into the dark loam of the garden below.

Chalk dust hung over the third tier of Classroom 3-B like a pale, dry fog, settling on the worn oak desks and the dark navy shoulders of eighty first-year cadets.

Corin sat in his usual corner against the north wall, a fresh, thick square of bleached linen pinned over his right ear with two brass bodkins. The ear was swollen to twice its normal size, throbbing with a dull, heavy heat that made turning his head to the right feel like pulling a rusty hinge, but beneath the bandage, the wound had dried into a hard, dark scab that no longer seeped into his collar.

Beside him, Judith Runcorn was leaning her cheek on her fist, staring at his ear with an expression of intense, deeply suspicious curiosity.

“That wasn’t a dog, Frankland,” Judith said for the fourth time since the morning muster bell, tapping the point of her iron stylus against his desk blotter. “A stray dog bites with the premolars; it tears the skin in a ragged triangle. That bandage has two neat rows of flat incisor marks spaced half an inch apart. Something with human teeth chewed on your earlobe like an apple-slice.”

Corin kept his eyes fixed on the blackboard at the bottom of the amphitheater, where Instructor Brittany Toners was drawing the force-vectors for an unarmored high-parry. “I told you, Judith. I went down into the cellar behind the dye-vats to fetch an iron spigot, and I caught the ear on a rusty hoop.”

“Hoops don’t leave bite marks, you liar,” she snorted, blowing a strand of violet hair out of her eyes. “And they don’t smell like damask rosewater and almond pomade. You were with a girl last night.”

Corin’s left shoulder hitched, but he didn’t look at her. “I was in my garret sleeping off a broken collarbone.”

“My uncle said you walked out of the Fourth Nave before midnight,” she muttered, leaning closer, her voice dropping into a sharp whisper. “He said you were whole. He also said that if I asked you about the First Blade, he’d lock my fencing foils in the parish armory for three terms. What did you do to that heretic on the high terrace, Corin?”

“I swung a sword,” Corin said flatly. “The storm blew over. That’s all.”

Before Judith could dig her elbow into his ribs again, the heavy oak doors at the bottom of the amphitheater swung open with a sharp, resonant creak.

A sudden, dead hush fell across the ninety-odd students in the tiers.

Annabel Logres walked into the classroom.

She was wearing her dark green evocation coat, tailored tight across her ribs with silver falcon clasps, but her long, thick copper curls were completely gone. In their place was a severe, razor-straight bob that had been chopped clean at the level of her jawline, exposing her pale, slender neck and the small silver pearls in her earlobes. The cut was uneven near the left nape where the Thunderclap had burned closest to the scalp, but she carried her head so high, her chin tilted at such a fierce, unyielding angle, that nobody in the room dared to laugh.

She walked past the front rows without looking left or right, her velvet skirts swishing against the wooden risers.

Cassio Vane leaned out from the second bench, smirking behind his hand. “New style for the winter season, Lady Annabel? Did your hairdresser use a broadaxe?”

Annabel didn’t even slow her pace.

She reached down as she passed his desk, picked up his heavy glass inkpot, and tipped it directly onto his open sheepskin notebook, letting two ounces of black iron-gall ink saturate his tactical charts before setting the pot down with a sharp clack.

“Say another word, Cassio,” she said, her voice clear, sweet, and entirely lethal, “and I’ll have my father’s bailiff audit your family’s grain receipts for the third quarter.”

The boy went pale, stammering apologies as he frantically tried to mop up the black puddle with his silk handkerchief.

Annabel climbed the stone stairs toward the top tier.

As she passed Corin’s desk on her way to the evocation benches near the eastern windows, her green eyes flickered toward his bandaged right ear. A tiny, almost imperceptible twitch touched the corner of her mouth—a mixture of fierce amusement and something sharp and unnamable— before she returned her gaze to the blackboard.

Her hand dropped casually against the edge of his desk blotter.

A small, flat tin of imported northern calendula salve—the expensive kind sold in silver cases on the High Promenade to soothe burn-scabs and torn skin—slid off her palm, coming to rest neatly between Corin’s inkpot and his lead stylus.

She didn’t look back as she took her seat three benches away.

Judith looked at the silver tin, then looked at Corin’s bandaged ear, her eyebrows rising until they vanished into her violet bangs.

“Well, well, well,” Judith murmured, her mouth splitting into a wide, wicked grin that showed all her back teeth. “A rusty iron hoop in the cellar, was it? And does the hoop usually send three-groat burn-salve with an earl’s crest on the lid?”

“Shut up, Judith,” Corin muttered, sliding the silver tin into his coat pocket with his left hand.

“Cadets!” Instructor Brittany’s voice cracked across the room like a drawn bowstring, cutting through the murmurs in the tiers.

The master laid her chalk down, turned her back to the board, and looked up at the ninety-seven students with eyes like grey flint.

“The theoretical lectures for the first quarter are concluded,” Brittany announced, her voice ringing off the high plaster ceiling. “This afternoon at one o’clock, Class 3-B will assemble in the Grand Yard for the unarmored wooden stave tournament. You will be paired by lot. No aetheric projection above the initiate baseline. No armor. Four-foot ash staves, blunt ends, striking targets limited to the torso, shoulders, and outer thighs.”

She picked up a rolled sheet of parchment from the podium.

“The winner of each bout earns ten tactical points toward his quarterly standing. The loser will spend the next three weeks cleaning rust off the chain-mail shirts in the lower armory.”

From the second row, Alec Fenwick turned around slowly on his bench.

His right arm was still strapped tight against his ribs in an embroidered silk sling, but his pale grey eyes locked onto Corin’s face with a cold, venomous intensity that left no doubt as to what he intended to ask the proctors when the lots were drawn.

Corin met the boy’s glare without blinking, his left hand resting flat against the cool grain of his desk, the small silver tin heavy in his pocket.

The bell for noon began to swing in the high tower, its deep bronze clatter shaking the chalk dust from the rafters.