Lady Maribel announced it at breakfast on a Tuesday, with the tone of someone delivering information rather than proposing a discussion.

"The Veylen Fog Season Gala is in four days," she said. "We will be attending."

Rowan, who had been pouring himself a second cup of tea, completed the action without otherwise reacting. Seraphine looked up from her notes. Cassian, who was reading something at the end of the table, did not look up, which was itself a reaction.

"We have declined for two consecutive years," Lady Maribel continued, addressing the table in general and Cassian specifically. "The Veylen family hold the mortgage notes on the lower nursery tract and the eastern cliff easement. Continued absence from their social obligations will be interpreted as financial distress, which will affect the terms of those notes at their next renewal in the spring." She set down her cup with the finality of a case made. "We will be attending."

Cassian looked up from his reading. He and Lady Maribel engaged in a brief exchange of expressions that contained, Seraphine estimated, an entire conversation that she was not privy to and did not require access to. Then he looked at Seraphine.

"You'll attend as a professional representative of the restoration project," he said. "Your presence legitimizes the continued investment in the conservatory's renovation and demonstrates that the work is proceeding."

She looked at him steadily. "Was I consulted about this?"

A pause. The specific pause of a man who had not considered that consultation was required and was now reconsidering whether that oversight was significant.

"No," he said.

"Will I be in the future?"

A longer pause. "Yes."

"Then I'll attend," she said.

She said this with the equanimity of someone who had, independently of his invitation and its methodology, already identified multiple reasons to want to go to a social event that would likely be attended by the regional elite of Elyndor. Halewick had connections here — she had found his name in the correspondence files she had been given access to after Cassian handed over the key, his affiliation with two of the major Elyndorian research foundations. People who funded research programs attended events like the Veylen gala. She intended to be useful in ways that went beyond representing the restoration project.

Rowan, she noticed, was not included in the invitation. This was correct — he was contracted labor rather than a social companion — but she registered that it would mean attending without his particular brand of social ease, which she relied on more than she generally admitted.

Isolde helped her prepare on the evening of the gala. The process was quieter than Seraphine expected — Isolde had the gift of understanding when someone needed silence rather than conversation, and she was silent while she worked, her hands efficient and gentle, pinning the last of Seraphine's hair while Seraphine looked at the window rather than the mirror.

"Miss Evelise wore this color once," Isolde said finally — she could not always maintain the silence all the way to the end, Seraphine had learned, when something was pressing against it. "At the Veylen gala three years ago. It was the last time she went somewhere like this."

Seraphine looked at her reflection. The color was dark green — not a choice she would have made for herself, but Isolde had suggested it and Seraphine trusted Isolde's instincts. "What was she like that evening?"

Isolde was quiet for a moment, working a pin into position with the focus of someone doing something precise. "She was — determined," she said. "Not happy-determined. The other kind. Like she had decided something and was going to do it regardless of what it cost her." A pause. "I thought at the time she was going to end the engagement. But that wasn't it."

"What was it?"

"I think she was going to confront Dr. Halewick." Isolde stepped back and looked at the completed arrangement with her head slightly tilted. "He was there that evening. They spoke privately for some time. After that she came home and went straight to her room and didn't come to dinner."

Seraphine looked at her reflection — the dark green, the careful hair, the face that was her own but felt, tonight, like the face of someone going into a space that required performance.

"Did she ever tell you what they spoke about?"

"No. She was different after that, though. More careful. She started writing things down — notes, I think, records of something. She said once that she wanted there to be evidence." Isolde smoothed the last of the fabric with a gesture that was more gentle than functional. "And then three weeks later she was gone."

In the carriage, the three of them sat in the particular silence of people sharing an enclosed space with complicated things between them. Lady Maribel looked out her window with the composure of someone who had attended more events she had not wanted to attend than she could count. Cassian looked at his hands, which were in his lap, still.

Seraphine sat across from him and thought about Evelise at the last gala, determined in the costly way, going to confront the man who was doing something she had documented and he had then burned.

"Will Halewick be there?" she said, quietly enough that the carriage noise covered it from Maribel.

Cassian looked up. "Possibly."

"If he is — do you want me to pretend I don't know what I know?"

He looked at her for a moment with the grey eyes that were better at receiving information than concealing responses to it. "No. But don't let him know how much you know." A pause. "He is — persuasive. He has a way of making people feel that whatever he wants is aligned with what they want. It's not a performance. He genuinely believes it."

"I know the type," she said. "My father wrote about him in his private notes. He wrote: *V.H. is the most dangerous kind of person — someone who is wrong and completely convinced he is right.*"

Something moved in Cassian's expression — the response of a man hearing a specific truth land in a specific place. "Yes," he said. "That's accurate."

The carriage arrived at Veylen House, which was large in the manner of houses that had been added to over several generations without a unifying aesthetic principle — wings and towers and porticos accreted around an original core, the whole lit for the evening with hundreds of lamps that made it look almost warm from the outside.

Cassian descended first and assisted Lady Maribel. Then he turned and offered his hand to Seraphine — a formal gesture, the correct social performance — and she placed her hand in his and stepped down, and there was in the moment of contact the same brief awareness she had been accumulating across each of their previous moments of proximity: the exactness of his grip, the deliberateness of the hold, the way he released her hand at the appropriate social moment and not before.

The entrance hall was everything she had expected — a great many people, a great many candles, the particular sound of a room in which everyone was performing some version of themselves for strategic reasons. She moved through it with Cassian slightly ahead, clearing a path with the social weight of his name, and she registered the way the room responded to his presence — not warmly, exactly, but with a kind of attentiveness that contained respect and history and a complicated layer of rumor that had not resolved into narrative.

She registered, also, the moment when a man on the far side of the room saw her.

He was perhaps fifty, with silver-blond hair and the kind of face that remained pleasant even when it was thinking unpleasant things — the face of someone who had learned very early that pleasantness was more useful than any other expression and had cultivated it until it had become genuine. His eyes were very light, the kind of blue that registered as grey in some lights. He was looking at her with the expression of a man who had been informed of her existence and was now verifying the information.

Beside her, she felt Cassian's posture change by a fraction — not stiffening, but recalibrating, the physical equivalent of the moment before a conversation that required care.

*That's him,* he said, his voice very low and very even beside her. *Don't look away first.*

She held the man's gaze across the crowded room.

He smiled.

She smiled back, with the precision of someone who understood what the smile was for.

The gala had begun.