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The next time she saw Madame Samira, they were in Paris.
She hadn't really wanted to go, but in the end there hadn't been much of a choice. At least Ligia hadn't had much of one; Wiktor had likely had too much, and that was why they'd had to leave Warsaw. As usual, being the dependable one, the one with a brain in her head and a good head on her shoulders, had done exceedingly little to shield her from her brother's nonsense. Fortunately, she still loved him more than she resented him, even as she entered yet another tedious soirée with her mother.
And there, at the hostess's table, was Madame Samira. She looked at Ligia, and Ligia looked at her, and for a moment their thoughts were so clear that it was almost as if Ligia had charge of a salutor herself, or at least like the fake clairvoyant was a little less fake.
Samira obviously wondered two things. 1) would Ligia expose her as a thaumaturge? The answer was no, but only because she'd been so terribly bored since her arrival in Paris that she was rather looking forward to what might happen. And 2) would Ligia's perpetually delightful brother be joining them that evening? Ligia shook her head at her, just once; Wiktor was...oh, who knew where Wiktor was. Eating dinner with a duke or flirting with dancers at the Moulin Rouge. Solving a crime he had no business solving. Making friends with local criminals. It was rather hard to say.
But Ligia shook her head and, for a second, Samira smiled faintly. Then she turned away as if that second had never occurred at all.
"Do you two know each other?" Ligia's mother asked her.
"Not at all," Ligia replied.
It was almost true, after all. It was very nearly true. It just wasn't true for very much longer.
---
The next time she saw Madame Samira, it was on the bank of the Seine.
Ligia was reading at a table just outside a café. She was alone; she hadn't started out alone, but her brother had such a longstanding habit of running off at the oddest of moments that she'd brought along a book just in case, and the inevitable had happened. Then the chair her brother had vacated was pulled back from the table. She looked up as Samira sat down.
"I heard you had left Warsaw," Samira said.
"I hadn't heard you had," Ligia replied.
"Of course you hadn't. You left first."
Ligia sighed. "I suppose so," she said. She looked down at her book and then sighed again. She slid a bookmark into it, a scrap of embroidery that she definitely hadn't embroidered herself, and then closed it with a snap.
"What do you want?" she asked.
"Introduce me to your friends," Samira replied.
"I don't have any friends here."
"To your mother's friends, then."
"And why should I do that?"
Samira shrugged. She looked out over the Seine and from the look on her face, Ligia could almost guess what she was thinking: it was beautiful here, but it wasn't home. But then Samira looked at her again. She was beautiful, too.
"I'll make sure you're entertained," Samira said. "Is that enough?"
And actually, it was.
---
The next time she saw Madame Samira, it was at yet another soirée.
She had very casually mentioned the absolutely marvellous clairvoyant when several of her mother's friends had visited the house, and her hints had not been neglected: one of the friends had looked up this clairvoyant and, after a surprisingly accurate reading or two, had engaged her for a party. Ligia invited herself along with her mother, who was suspicious of her motives but pleased to see she was taking an interest in society. She really wasn't, but she didn't mind pretending for an evening.
True to her word, Samira did entertain her: she told her all the ladies' secrets, in whispers on the balcony while the two of them were out of sight, her breath by her ear making her shiver right down to her toes. And then, when she peered into the crystal ball and made her cryptic allusions, Ligia watched the ladies blush and knew precisely why. Perhaps it wasn't quite the scene that her brother had produced back in Warsaw, but she still had to admit she wasn't disappointed.
"So, did I pass your test?" Samira asked, as they walked together late that night. Samira had thrown stones at her window, like a lovestruck teen, and Ligia had slipped out of the house in a pair of rather scandalous trousers.
"Was it a test?" Ligia replied.
"Isn't everything?"
She supposed that wasn't exactly untrue.
If her mother had known she was out so late, she would have been furious, never mind the trousers - it didn't matter that she had long since ceased to be a child. She decided she didn't care very much about that, though; she talked with Samira till dawn. It was exhilarating.
---
"Have you ever used thaumaturgy on me?" Ligia asked, after a party two months later.
"Your brother would know," Samira replied, though Ligia supposed by that point she knew she was Sara. She'd told her her name with something close to a scowl on her face, like she'd regretted telling her the truth already.
"I suppose that would be inconvenient," Ligia replied.
"I don't like him," Sara said. "He'd come looking for me. It would be very inconvenient."
"And you do like me?" Ligia asked. Sara didn't say yes, but she made that face again - the one that said she regretted the entire conversation. "You know, coming from a misanthrope like you, that's oddly touching."
She didn't respond, but she almost smiled while still making that face. It was an interesting look. She preferred it to the calm and collected Madame Samira. She liked knowing who she was.
Ligia definitely smiled. Perhaps she had one friend in Paris after all. Something like a friend, at least.
---
At the next soirée, Sara told Ligia she'd been asked to find something. A pocket watch, expensive and stolen, the trail of which she couldn't follow with thaumaturgy.
"Do you think you can help?" she asked.
"With a stolen watch?" Ligia replied. She almost said no - she didn't care if the countess had been careless and her lover he absconded with her husband's watch. But she shrugged as she smoked and said, "I'll think about it." And four days later, she watched Madame Samira hand the watch to the countess. Discreetly, but not too discreetly; some of the other ladies saw. That was how they got their next commission.
Ligia's mother would not have been pleased with the amount of time she now seemed to spend in shady shops in iffy alleys, but Ligia didn't tell her and if she suspected what the situation was, she wilfully turned a blind eye. Ligia had always been an inconvenient daughter, and as she traced stolen jewellery and lost letters, she found she didn't mind that. Samira distracted the ladies with her parlour tricks and Ligia hunted their dear departed trinkets and ill-advised correspondence. It was actually quite satisfying; they made quite the team, and Sara even split the rewards. Frankly, whether she needed the money or not, Ligia would have insisted on it.
Of course, however, the clairvoyant bubble had to burst. The ladies found out she was a thaumaturge, not actually a psychic.
"You'd have seen this coming if you weren't such a terrible fake," Ligia told her, as they sat together in a café by the river. They were both sipping coffee. They'd each paid for their own, as they always did, though they tended to drink it together.
"I did see this coming," Sara replied. "That's why I have somewhere to go already."
Ligia's stomach sank, and she supposed she understood the reaction. "Where might that be?" she asked. She aimed for casual. She didn't quite make it.
"London."
"Do you speak English?"
"Well enough." Sara paused for a moment. "Do you?" she asked.
They looked at each other over their coffee cups. It was raining outside. Their umbrellas were still dripping. And something about the look on Sara's face - not the grimace this time, not the look of preemptive regret - made Ligia's heart beat faster.
"Why would that matter?" she asked her.
"You're clever," Sara told her. She slipped one hand on top of Ligia's, beside her coffee cup. "You can work it out."
She worked it out. She laughed, but she didn't say no. She doubted Sara needed to be a clairvoyant to know the answer was yes.
---
It didn't take long for them to get to London. It didn't take long for them to settle in, or to found their odd detective business. And when they stayed out together till all hours of the day and night, chasing down lost things and then sometimes lost people, finding people's secrets with Sara's gift and Ligia's wit, Ligia's mother would have been so bitterly disappointed in her.
But Sara wrapped her arms around her waist, and she found she didn't care at all.