Ivy Valentine: The Serpent's Kiss by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Ivy-Valentine-The-Serpent-s-Kiss-1242694871

Ivy Valentine: The Serpent's Kiss ANIMATION

Ivory Marionette

A child's laughter stopped mid-air outside the Corbeau Salon; the cut was not sound but expectation, and Ivy noticed it as if it left a fingerprint on the night. She was leaning against the marble balustrade, a silhouette that looked like something expensive made dangerous — velvet spilling like dark water, a parasol hiding a whip of metal. Her hair was the sort of pale that could be described as alabaster or moonbone; people argued about it at banquets and duels and over the beds of the men who thought they possessed such things. Ivy did not care which word they used. She only cared that the laughter had halted.

"You are staring at silence, my dear," said a voice behind her that sounded as if it polished blades for sport. Raphael Sorel stepped from the shadow of a pillar with the limping grace of a man who had learned to charm his wounds. He wore arrogance like a coat — tailored, warm, a little too snug for humility.

"It is rude to eavesdrop on ghosts," Ivy replied, not turning. Her hands were clasped at her waist; a silver ornament winked there — a key, a serpent, something older than fashion. "They may find you boring and leave."

Raphael smiled with the hint of a blade. "Only if you do not make conversation first."

They watched as servants in powdered masks ferried a casket through the salon, passing under chandeliers that spilled liquid light. The city, for all its civilized pretenses, had been learning a new grammar of death; nobles were found dead upon their chairs, upon their beds, in carriages, their throats slit in shapes that suggested a practiced hand... yet something delicate enough to be called handiwork had accompanied each demise. Dolls: porcelain-faced, with Ivy's narrow chin and rose-lipped mouth, laid at the feet of the dead as if to say apologetically, I am the crime.

"A toy taxidermy," Raphael mused. "Artful enough to impress the police."

Ivy laughed, which was not like anyone else's laugh but like a bell that predicts a storm. "They make the dolls well," she said. "They put my face in places where it must stay silent."

Raphael's eyes narrowed; there was an affection in his expression, an irritation twined with care. "You insist you had nothing to do with them."

"I insist I had many things to do with." Ivy turned then, and the movement was a revelation — an invitation and a warning. "But murder is not on that list."

"You wound me," Raphael murmured. "To be suspected by the public and adored by you — both are injuries."

They were drawn into the current of gossip that flowed faster than any river: which noble had been found with one of the dolls at his knees, the porcelain cheeks stained with the same red as the victim's collar; how the dolls were constructed with locks of hair, with an intensity of devotion that tasted like obsession. Ivy had been many things — assassin, heiress, survivor of curious engines that seamed bone to steel — but immortalized in doll form was a fiction she never asked for.

The first doll to deliver a verdict was discovered at the edge of the mansion of Lord Caron, the philosopher of the court, a man who wrote treatises on will and control and how one might bend others without cruelty. He had been found seated as if in thought, fingers poised over a page, his throat opened in a perfect oval. The servants swore they heard a child's lullaby when they entered his study. A doll lay upon his desk, blue eyes fixed on the ceiling. Its dress was trimmed with lace and a pattern that imitated the vinework of ivy — someone had wanted the pun to be both obvious and obscene.

At Caron's funeral, word spread like spilled wax. Ivy walked among the mourners and felt the gaze of a thousand small carnations of loathing. They whispered that she wielded her beauty like a blade; that she corrupted with a smile; that perhaps the dolls were a natural consequence — the psyche's revenge via fetishized likeness. Ivy moved through accusations like a current through reeds.

"It's kitschy," she told Raphael when he found her beneath a portrait of an ancestor whose eyes were painted too kindly. "Someone has a grotesque sense of humor and the ability to buy silence."

"Whoever commissioned these dolls has an intimacy with your image I find troubling," Raphael said. "Do not they know their craft? To replicate the tilt of your head, the sweep of that—"

"Stop," Ivy said sharply. "You will make me vain, and the
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