Of Swans and Ravens 🏳️‍🌈 (wlw) [ON HIATUS]

5: The Thief

"Thief!" Margot dashed through the house, her blood boiling with rage as she flung open the long room door. "Fetch Marino! Fetch Otto!" But the long room was empty, the servants having scattered around the house to clean in the wake of Celine and Rose's departure. Margot would have to catch the intruder alone.

Margot bellowed the word thief as she darted between trees and bushes, yet she knew that the elusive and agile woman was clearly not a thief. She must have been an Aquilan spy. But there was nothing of strategic importance to the Aquilan Empress in this quiet bend of the river near Due Ponti. Unless the spy was Leonian, in Crown Prince Vittorio's employ. But that made even less sense; impending war or not, Adi had done nothing to provoke the Prince's suspicions. Margot's anger throbbed like a wound at the very thought of Adi being watched. The Crown Prince would regret sending one of his accursed spies to surveil her.

Margot scoured the gardens, searching through outhouses and in wooded corners for the elusive woman, to no avail. There was only one place left to search. She stalked to the toolshed on the stable-side edge of the gardens, and threw open the door. A cloaked figure stood inside, lazily coiling the length of thick rope that Marino used for securing fences.

A hurricane of fury blew through Margot's heart: she would incapacitate the woman with that same rope until Otto could summon the town guards.

"What in The Swan's name happened to your face, Lady Marguerite?" said the woman, aghast, from under her cloak.

Margot could see almost nothing of the intruder's face, save the dark lips and pointed chin of an Aquilan woman. Her voice was strong and confident, as if well-used to her every word being heeded. But the words themselves fell on deaf ears as Margot advanced on her, stabbing her in the forearm with a clutch of hairpins.

The woman dropped the rope. "Ow!" It was more of an irritable whine than the cry of agony that Margot had been hoping for. "For The Swan's sake! What did you do that for?"

"Stay away from my sister!" roared Margot, brandishing yet more hairpins in front of the woman's bewildered face. "Otto! Marino! I've caught her!"

The woman sighed, uprooted the bloodied hairpins from her arm, and then stooped onto Margot like a falcon. Margot was unsure how it had happened so quickly, but she found herself spreadeagled on the shed floor with an iron grip around her arm and a keen blade at her neck. Her breath left her body, her heart beating like war drums in her ears.

The woman kicked out a mud-caked boot, launching a flowerpot into the air. It sailed across the shed and hit a rake, which teetered momentarily before falling against the open shed door, slamming it shut with a bang, the rake toppling after it and wedging itself in the door handle like a toothy bolt.

"You're making it exceptionally difficult for me to rescue you, my Lady," whispered the woman into her ear.

"R-rescue me?" whimpered Margot, her body shaking with such vigour under the blade that it almost bit into her neck.

The woman stowed her knife back into the darkness of her cloak and hauled Margot up. "I am here performing my final duty for my employer, Emma of Ventimiglia. Your mother. She died three weeks ago."

Margot shook her head. "My mother died when I was a baby."

"No, my Lady. She was living in Lago Maggiore all this time."

It wasn't true. It couldn't be. The woman was lying. Father had told Margot the story of the glass bead countless times. He'd said that her mother had died when Margot was less than a year old. She snatched a hairpin from the dusty shed floor and thrust it into the woman's other arm, then leapt for the door, attempting to wrestle the door handle free from the jaws of the rake.