Unfortunately for Antoinette, she had little choice but to answer the guards’ questions about this incident.

Unfortunately for the guard, she wasn’t going to make it easy.

“If I’m not reporting any crime,” Antoinette said to the mustachioed guard who was practically begging her to give information, “then I don’t need to say anything.”

She managed to look pretty intimidating, even if she was drenched to the skin and wrapped in a tattered blanket from some random do-gooder’s house, mascara smeared on her cheeks. Her scowl was in full force.

Rémi started, “You’re not, but–”

Antoinette lifted a hand to quiet him. She hadn’t thrown me any warning expressions. Maybe she knew that if she didn’t want to talk about it, then I wouldn’t.

It wasn’t as if getting widespread attention on this would help me. If anything, it might encourage our mystery attackers more. Honestly, I wanted to leave the whole situation in the dust and get on with Antoinette’s storyline. It’d just gotten a whole lot more scary.

Of course, if I really wanted that…then I wouldn’t be here in Altolia, would I?

Rémi stepped between her and the guardsman. “This isn’t going to disappear if you don’t say anything. And you don’t actually think it should disappear, do you?”

“I do, as a matter of fact!”

“Yeah, right. The Delphine self-preservation instinct is stronger than that.” Rémi ran a hand through his drying hair. “We’re way beyond you being able to pretend this was just some student getting their revenge on you. You’ll have to–”

“You have to stop telling me what I believe and what I should say, Fontaine. Or else I may start talking about something else.”

As far as I knew, this was the first time Antoinette had threatened any of the guys with the secrets they handed over to her. Cue a weird, twisting feeling in my chest. Rémi frowned at her.

I wondered how bad that secret was. It seemed typical of Rémi to hand over something far too earnest, maybe thinking she wouldn’t actually use it. He was definitely not the cynic of the group.

Rémi lifted his chin at me. “Okay, then, what about you? We can say Antoinette’s some anonymous third party.”

“...Well…”

“Sheesh, why are both of you so secretive?”

Before I could retort, Antoinette made her escape. She spun on a heel and marched off into the woods that surrounded the path we were all stuck on.

I turned to follow her, but all I got was my shoulder crashing into Rémi’s. He’d been trying the exact same thing as me.

He stepped back and tilted his head towards Antoinette, letting me go after her.

Although my river-drenched skirts tried to trip me up by clinging to every single bramble and bush on the way, I caught up to Antoinette’s long stride in seconds. She spun to me. “What?”

I pointed past her, further into the greenery. “They can still hear us from here. Let’s go a little further.”

We did, until the sound of the guardsmen and townsfolk doing their investigating was nothing but a low murmur. Though the incident was over half an hour in the past by now, I was still a little shaken. I’d never been in so much as a car crash before. I was grateful when we finally stopped in a little glen, its edges roughly cut back and with a small rusty bench in the center, like it was a spot for picnics overlooking the river.

Antoinette faced me. “I know what you’re going to say.”

“Do you?”

“You clearly won’t speak to the guard about my involvement. So, you’ll tell me this, ensuring you have my trust. Then you’ll want something in exchange, even if you won’t admit it.”

“...Will I?”

“You want to know why I don’t want us to speak. Because you seem to always need to know why.”

At least she didn’t seem mad about it. She was observing me, head slightly tilted, a frustrated sort of intrigue on her face, like I’d presented her with an annoying riddle.

Why, it occurred to me all of a sudden, was not an answer many people got about her. Maybe not anyone. What had I done to earn this?

“You’ve got my number,” I said. “So, why?”

Stolen novel; please report.

She was the one who pretty much proposed spilling the truth, and yet she was hesitating. I mimed locking my lips and throwing away the key. She set into a hip, looking past me.

“I wish this time it didn’t happen to you two, as well.”

A sigh.

“I do wish this could be solved. I want to know what it’s actually about–me, or you? Something else? Are they trying to get to someone else through us? If I…” It was like the thoughts were stirring up all kinds of storms inside her: she sighed for the second time, third time. It was cute, lifting a lock of damp hair off her forehead.

She continued, “People targeting the Delphines is not uncommon. There’s so much about Aconitum that you don’t know… Ugh, that even I don’t know. So much so, that strangers think they’ve learned the worst of it when they’ve only scratched the surface, or they put all the wrong clues together and end up with pure fabrications. It’s a mess.

“Once people learned about me through my singing on stage, I would get the strangest letters. Accusations would land right in the lap of a young girl, telling her all sorts of things that had happened to total strangers, begging her to cajole her father into helping them learn more or take revenge.”

She perched on the arm rest of the bench. From the few times I’d seen Antoinette vulnerable, she tended to fold after her big, puffed-up show of emotion. I saw now that when she’d told me about her mother all those weeks ago, she was still firmly behind her wall, anger wrapping up her story.

I sat beside her.

“Every time, it was apparently me causing the trouble. I was the one at fault for reading the letter, or listening to the protester who caught me on the road, or becoming friends with the damn…heir to whatever competitor who was coached to trick me. How stupid!” She met my eye, intending to share her annoyance with me; I nodded emphatically. “It was always my fault! Obviously, it was easier to be angry at me than the people he couldn’t discipline, or else our name would earn more negative attention.”

“But it’s a serious crime this time. Why not report it?”

“Oh, because!” she said with all the tongue-tied irritation of the night of the Samhain Formal. “Because it’ll be my fault for allowing someone to get close enough to poison me! And if I let any authorities in to investigate? I may as well be throwing open the doors to the estate and handing over our files, obviously!”

Oh, so Aconitum had secret-secrets. I wondered how deep they truly ran, how complicated they were, how messy they were, when we could lay out all the details instead of skim over them in a cutscene.

“And how,” she continued, in a full-force rant now, “could I run the company if I let myself get screwed over so seriously–if I have to run for help! It’s so stupid, but I don’t want to tell him. I simply don’t. Maybe that makes me a child, but I don’t, I don’t!” She dropped her forehead onto her fists and groaned between her teeth. “Damn it all.”

I chewed the inside of my lip. I was not the friend to go to for help with escaping complicated emotional cesspits. I mean, so far, Antoinette had actually taken the reins of that, like when she encouraged Etienne and Louis. I preferred to sit at a keyboard and edit my genuinity. I worried my unhelpfulness would sound like I didn’t care.

“You're right. This is a mess,” I said weakly. Yeah, not my best. “You're not being childish. I can't imagine all that pressure, and I think you're best at deciding what your own limits are. That said…if you don't want to deal with this officially, then what will you do?”

“I don't know,” she said into her hands. “I suppose we can try to solve it ourselves.”

“What, both of us?”

She looked up, surprisingly earnest. “Well, of course us, Chloé.”

I blushed.

Before I could say anything else, Rémi came into the glen. “Sorry,” he said, sounding like he was in a rush. “I managed to convince them to let us go for now. They’re insisting on taking evidence from the scene, but they’ll write to us later for statements. At school.” He scratched the back of his head, clearly noticing he interrupted something. “I’m sorry. Let’s get out of here before they change their minds.”

Antoinette hopped to her feet right away. She used a balled up edge of her soaking sleeve to wipe away her smeared makeup. She said, “Thank you, Chloé,” right before I could say the exact same.

Then she added, “You owe me an explanation too, you know,” before falling into step with Rémi.

I knew exactly what about.

We were hustled back into town where the new carriage, hosted by the city blacksmiths, would pick up the three of us and Rémi’s footman (“They're going to try to finagle a brand deal out of us,” Rémi and Antoinette agreed). We drew stares from every corner–it seemed like half of the town had followed us out to the river, and the rest of them were waiting to ogle from their own windows. I may as well have fallen right flat on my face and been tarred and feathered for how embarrassed I felt and how fixated they were on me.

It was a blessing when we could finally duck behind the open doors of a big, brash carriage. Rémi was helped in first, politeness be damned, and then the footman helped up Antoinette. I was feeling deceptively protected in that corner, when–

“Marie? Marie Gagnon?”

I never really believed the figurative language about blood going cold–and still didn’t, because I felt my blood go caustic and hot in my veins.

It was the footman, probably Rémi’s age, who’d helped Antoinette board and was now frozen in his observation of me. He was just…just a guy. Short black hair in an anachronistically shaggy style, so dark that it glinted purple in this light, yellow…eyes…

I frantically tore through my memories of the game, every NPC and every CG art and every scrap art from the art book and–

I knew where I recognised him from.

The freaking mirror.

He had Marie's–now my–hair, and eyes, and that hard-to-describe face-iness where you just know… There was no way he wasn't a Gagnon.

But who?!

“Sorry–sorry, no,” I stammered. “I don't know who you mean.”

“Are you kidding me? Marie, you didn't–”

I hopped into the carriage. “That isn't my name.”

“I know you,” he said, so very sure.

Maybe it was whatever dregs of Marie were still inside my head. Maybe it was the weird empty feeling of that estate. Maybe it was how I wasn't sure how to proceed with my initial plan, considering all that happened.

But I hesitated.

Until Antoinette reached across me and pulled the door shut, snapping, “What an awful pick-up line!”

We sat in silence. He didn’t knock on the door. Didn’t call out that name again. My head hurt.

Rémi said, alarmed, “What the hell was that about?”

It was my turn to drop my face into my hands.