Chapter Three

Nanny took the folio back. “You may be trying to think of the legal dowry limits in an alliance marriage,” she said, sounding like she was trying to let Mira down gently. “Ordinary marriages have fewer restrictions on personal property since very few people have the same communal finance structures as the Great Houses. Dowry caps are meant to keep aristocrats from using their children’s marriages as a tax shelter or to trade large resources under the Crown’s nose. Any of your personal assets over that limit would have been placed into a trust for your retirement or a divorce, but since you’ve been relinquished from your father’s family, you are now your mother’s sole heir and she was a wealthy woman. So, no matter what happened with that nasty little tick, you will be well provided for.”

“Then you admit there was a nasty little tick for me to be worried about?” Mira asked and suppressed a small smile when Nanny huffed at her this time. “Thank you, Nanny, that was very helpful.”

“I’m pleased, dear,” she cupped Mira’s cheek. “Things might seem frightening now, but I promise that you never have to worry about going hungry or without shelter. Speaking of, would you like to try a little more breakfast?”

Those were very specific reassurances, but Mira still counted the conversation as a success. She’d picked up a few more hints. Violet had been more conversant with alliance dowry law, possibly to the exclusion of anything else, so therefore she must have been expecting to make an alliance marriage. This Fenby family was apparently not one of the Great Houses and that fit with Violet’s anxiety about the match. She no longer knew what to expect.

What had happened to that poor girl? Mira was starting to see the shape of a great disruption in her host body’s recent past. It wasn’t only the failed wedding that had killed Violet, but this most recent upset was the straw that finally broke her. Mira wasn’t looking forward to puzzling out the rest of it–and she was going to have to. Violet’s problems were her problems now.

“Something small,” Mira decided aloud. She still didn’t quite trust her command of her new body just yet, but she needed the fuel. “Eggs, maybe?”

“I’ll order something from the kitchen,” Nanny Byrde replied. “Rest for a while and I’ll be back soon.”

Mira settled obediently back into her cushions and waited until Nanny had gone away and shut the door behind her. Then she (very cautiously) pushed her blankets away and went to stand up. There was a handheld mirror laying face down over on the chest of drawers near her bed and she wanted it.

Now that she knew her depth perception was not to be trusted, Mira used the edge of the bed and other nearby pieces of furniture to guide her. The motion felt natural and graceful enough that the original Violet had probably done something very similar to avoid bumping into things.

Her legs felt a bit wobbly, but that passed quickly as she moved around a bit more. Mira got the mirror and made her way back to bed before she risked getting caught. Once she was settled again, she lifted the mirror up from her lap and looked at her own reflection.

The girl in the mirror was pretty to the point of being doll-like–actually, no. She was exactly doll-like. Mira touched the smooth, poreless expanse of her cheek and found it was firm to the touch with only a slight give. It didn’t just look poreless, she actually had no pores. Peering into that mirror was a bit like looking at a hyper-realistic video game character.

Violet had been a beautiful girl with a heart-shaped face and a rosebud mouth, but her beauty was poised on the edge of the uncanny valley. She was flawless to the point that she had become repellant.

Anna had dressed her pale, silvery blonde hair so that it draped over the left side of her face and when Mira brushed it aside, she saw that all she had for a left eye was a sculpted lid, much like an intaglio doll, albeit mercifully closed. She had a natural brow on her right side, but her eyebrow on this side looked like a hyper-realistic tattoo.

Mira tested the skin around her right eye and cheek. It was softer and more sensitive than the opposite side and even still had a bit of peach fuzz. Something must have happened on her left side. The intaglio eye must have been part of a reconstructive surgery.

Further investigation revealed that Mira’s hairstyle not only concealed an uneven hairline, but also that her left ear was only there for show. She had an outer shell there that was even pierced, but no discernable ear canal. If she snapped her fingers on that side, she only heard it from a distance; presumably from her other ear.

That face, combined with the name ‘Violet’, gave Mira the last piece of the puzzle she’d been trying to assemble since she woke up.

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Her reincarnations did not really happen at random. There was an unseen hand that guided the path of her lives, although she still didn’t know whose even after all this time. However, she always got a clue about the next life she could expect to live in the years immediately before her death and it usually took the form of a popular book or play.