The Royal Physician's Hall smelled of camphor and cold stone.
Clara had expected something clinical and intimidating. What she found was worse — a room full of noble ladies all pretending very hard that nothing unusual was happening, seated on wooden benches in their finest morning dresses, hands folded, eyes forward, performing composure for one another with the dedication of people who had been raised to never let anything show.
She found a seat near the far wall and did the same.
A palace maid called names in alphabetical order. Each girl disappeared behind a heavy curtain and emerged a few minutes later, returning to her seat with an expression carefully wiped clean. Nobody spoke about what happened behind the curtain. Nobody needed to.
When Clara's name was called, she rose, smoothed her skirt, and followed.
Behind the curtain was a small white room divided by a hanging veil — sheer enough to see silhouettes, thick enough to obscure details. On her side, two palace maids waited with the particular blankness of women performing a duty they had been told not to discuss. On the other side, three physicians sat at a table with papers and pens.
"Name," said a voice.
"Clara Peri. Ward of House Peri."
The scratch of a pen. "Age."
"Twenty."
"Any unusual abilities. Hereditary or otherwise."
The room was very still. Clara thought of Angelica's voice carrying across the garden — they say the gift passes through blood — and kept her own voice level.
"I have been said to have some sensitivity," she said carefully, "to things others do not perceive."
More writing. A longer pause than the question warranted.
"Remove your hair."
A maid unpinned Clara's chestnut hair and held it away from her neck. The silhouettes on the other side of the veil leaned forward. Clara stared at the white wall and breathed slowly and thought of absolutely nothing.
"No mark," said a voice. Then, quieter: "Note the age and reported ability. No third sign."
Her hair was pinned back.
"You may go."
Anthony was waiting at the palace gate.
He stood outside the iron railings with his hat in his hands, scanning the faces of each lady who came through. When he saw Clara, his whole expression shifted — the tension in his jaw released, his shoulders dropped, and he gave her the kind of look that people give when they have been worried and are trying not to show how much.
"No mark," she said, before he could ask.
"Good." He let out a slow breath. "That's good."
He fell into step beside her naturally, the way he had been doing it for years rather than weeks, and Martha followed at a respectful distance behind them. The morning was cold but bright, the kind of November day that offered light without warmth, and the city was busy around them in the ordinary way of a city that had decided to continue functioning despite everything.
They turned without discussion away from the direct route home and into the covered market on Fenwick Street — a long arcade of stalls selling everything from winter vegetables to secondhand books to hot chestnuts in paper cones. Clara had loved it since childhood. It smelled of roasting nuts and damp wool and something sweet she had never identified.
"Here," Anthony said, stopping at a chestnut stall. He bought two paper cones without asking and handed her one, and they walked slowly through the arcade with warm paper in their cold hands, and for a few minutes neither of them said anything about ravens or physicians or covenants.
"You have ink on your glove," Clara said.
Anthony looked down at his left hand. A small dark smudge on the thumb. "I was writing letters this morning." He paused. "Trying to think of something useful to do, mostly."
"And did you?"
"Not particularly." He glanced at her sideways. "I find thinking is easier when I am not worried."
Clara looked down at her chestnuts. "You did not need to worry."
"No," he agreed pleasantly. "And yet."
She smiled despite herself — a small, real thing. He saw it and looked away, but not before she caught the expression on his face, which was quiet and warm and entirely unguarded.
They walked to the end of the arcade and back again, and he bought her a small paper twist of sugared almonds from a stall near the exit because she had looked at them for two seconds longer than necessary, and he did it without comment, the way people do things they have been paying close enough attention to know are wanted.
At the street corner where their routes divided, he stopped.
"I'll call on you tomorrow," he said. "If I may."
"You may," she said.
He gave her a short bow — proper, correct — and then looked at her for one moment longer than the bow required, as though there was something else he intended to say and had decided against. Then he put his hat back on and walked away, and Clara stood on the corner with her sugared almonds and watched him go and told herself very firmly not to make anything of it.
Martha appeared at her elbow.
"He bought you chestnuts," Martha observed.
"He was being polite."
Martha said nothing, which communicated everything.
The house was quiet when they returned.
Her aunt was out paying calls at Hentley's. Her step-sisters were at their lessons. Her uncle was in his study with the door closed. The entrance hall felt emptier than usual — that particular hollow quality a house gets in the middle of the day when everyone has somewhere else to be.
Clara went upstairs to change her gloves and was halfway down the corridor when she stopped.
There was someone at the far end of the hall.
Not Martha — Martha was downstairs. Not a housemaid — the figure was wrong for that, standing too still, too close to the wall, with a quality to its stillness that Clara recognised the way she recognised cold air before rain. It was the stillness of something that existed slightly apart from the ordinary world.
She looked properly.
A woman. Or the shape of one — the silhouette of a woman in a dress, Clara could not quite determine the colour of, standing at the very end of the corridor where it turned toward the old servants' staircase. The edges of her were soft and extremely blurred.
She had no face.
Not a void where a face should be — simply nothing defined. A suggestion of features that never resolved into specifics. And yet Clara knew, with the immediate and unargued certainty of someone who had spent her entire life navigating the language of the dead, exactly who this was.
She knew the way she knew her mother's hairbrush on the dressing table. The way she knew the weight of the ruby at her throat. Not from memory — she had no memory. From something older than memory.
"Mama," she said quietly.
The silhouette turned and moved toward the servants' staircase.