Liljan clears her throat, then parts the curtain and takes a step inside. “You two,” she says deviously. “Finally.”
“Where in prune’s name are you, Marit Olsen?” Nina hollers from inside the house. “Why isn’t Eve’s dress done yet? Mrs. Vestergaard is going to have my hide, and I’m going to have yours!”
Liljan shrugs apologetically at me. “I bought you as much time as I could.”
I pull away from Jakob, not used to feeling his warm body this close to mine.
“Are you sure you have to go?” he says.
“Are you sure you do?” I ask.
“Yes. Because I’m going to find you a cure if it’s the last thing I do,” he whispers into my ear. He straightens the collar of his shirt where I pulled it askew. Then he plucks one of the wisteria bursts and hands it to me.
I’m practically floating when I turn and follow Liljan. I twirl the wisteria stem between my fingers and wonder at what powerful magic humans have—perhaps the most powerful kind of all. That we can set other hearts to bloom and burst the way Brock does to the flowers.
Chapter Thirty
The next day feels bittersweet. It means an ending for me and hopefully a beginning for Eve.
I peek through the open ballroom doors so I can see what the space will look like for the king.
Five crystal chandeliers hang in a crisp row from the vaulted ceiling. The wooden floors gleam like a lake of honey, and the walls are gilded with golden vines that intricately intertwine with green living ones. I can hear the running of a fountain somewhere, beyond the cushion of lush moss that surrounds the carved wooden stage. Fragrant oranges drip off white-blossomed trees like heavy raindrops. Brock brings in still more greenery, his hands dark with dirt, his arms bursting with frilled scarlet poppies that open to look like the Danish flag. What would take months, perhaps years, to transform has been done in a matter of weeks due to magic.
Eve dances in the midst of it, already in her costume. We fashioned glittering glass pieces that look like gemstones to wrap around her calves on satin laces and catch the light when she moves.
At the far wall, almost out of sight, Peder paces in front of a rich mahogany table. When he moves, I glimpse what he’s guarding—a map of Denmark, its land and sea and smattering of islands made entirely from multicolored jewels. Philip, dressed in elegant finery, stoops to inspect the map. The red ring on his finger is gone now.
This time, the stone there is a deep emerald green.
When he catches me looking at him, he stops talking and holds my gaze for a beat too long.
It sends a dank shiver down my spine and I turn away.
To my right, Declan leans toward the massive glass windows, looking up at the clouds. “Snow’s coming,” he mutters under his breath.
The king is set to arrive at four, and the performance will begin at half past. High-ranking miners will be in the audience to assist with Philip’s ceremonial presentation of gifts, and then they will all retire for dinner together. I’ve made the servants new uniforms just for this occasion. The ones who will be visible and serving, such as Jakob, Nina, Liljan, and Brock, will wear the highest quality black fabric that sheens when it catches the light.
I make the rounds, delivering the uniforms to their rooms.
“Nervous?” Liljan asks, taking her livery and pulling it over her head.
I nod. “You?”
She shakes her head, reaching to fasten the little pearled buttons at her neck.
“I know it’s just a uniform, but it is gorgeous,” I say.
“I don’t look like a penguin?”
“No!” I snort, helping her with an intricate braid. “What’s a stunningly beautiful bird?”
In the mirror’s reflection, with her straw-blond hair, she looks a lot like Ingrid.
“A flamingo,” she says.
“I say phoenix.”
“I’ll try not to burst into flame.”
“Or drop a mess on anyone.”
“If I do, I’ll aim for Nina.”
I giggle.
“Good luck,” she says, and gives me a kiss on the cheek.
I weave down the stairs, carrying the final uniform to Malthe’s room. I raise my hand to knock, but there are lowered voices coming from within the bedroom. I hesitate. And then I hear a voice I recognize.
“I don’t have to tell you how big tonight is,” Philip says quietly. “This has to go off without a hitch.”
I hold my breath and lean closer.
“Are you going to tell her tonight?” Malthe asks. “All of it?”
There’s a pause, long enough for me to wonder if they have stopped talking.
Tell her tonight, I think. There are only two hers they could be referring to.
My stomach knots. Helene?
Or do they mean Eve?
“I don’t know what is going to happen this evening,” Philip finally murmurs. “Are you ready for anything?”
I carefully press my ear flat up to the door. And then there is a sound.
It might easily be nothing more than a trunk lock clicking shut.
Or it could be the cock of a pistol.
I freeze.
Surely Philip wouldn’t try anything dangerous tonight, not with the king of Denmark coming. Not with his heavily armed royal guards crawling through every room in the house.
Still, I feel a wave of nausea. Unease.
I hang the uniform on the doorknob and step backwards, as quietly as I can. My foot causes the stair to creak. I’m not sure exactly what I overheard. Perhaps I should go and find Helene. But what would I say? I don’t want to falsely alarm her—or worse, do anything to upset Eve right before she performs the biggest dance of her life. I hurry to my room, looking for Liljan, but she isn’t there. I find Jakob’s attic still and empty. On his desk are four glass vials, meant for samples of my blood.
It was probably nothing, what I overheard. Just my imagination leaping to conclusions and being overly suspicious, especially where Philip is concerned.
I return to my workroom and pick up the last gown I’ll probably ever make for Eve. I have only the final touches left, maybe a quarter of an hour’s worth of work—enough time to finish for the dinner tonight. But my foot is tapping, and I feel tighter and jumpier than usual. That conversation has unnerved me.
We all just have to get through tonight, I tell myself—and then I accidentally stick my finger with the needle.
A small droplet of blood beads, and I watch in slow motion as it falls onto Eve’s dress.
Blood.
There is blood on Eve’s lace.
I swear and quickly dab at the spot, but I manage only to make it worse. I take a breath. Liljan can fix this. I just have to find Liljan, and she’ll make it look as if this never happened. But then I am hit with a strange thought. An advanced case of Firn that exists in a living body has to be fairly rare. It’s possible that my blood is actually more valuable than the dress it fell on. I promised Jakob he could study the Firn in this state, to help him find a cure. I bite my lip. If I really did overhear something important between Philip and Malthe—if there’s a chance that anything will go terribly wrong tonight—I might actually use my magic. If I am brave enough, if it means protecting Eve. But then I’d fill my blood with Firn and lose this opportunity.
I stand.
Maybe, just to be safe, Jakob should take my blood now.
I find him in Brock’s room, wearing the suit I made and measured to fit him like a glove. The cut is perfect, and he’s devastating in it. His lip curls into a suggestive smile when he sees me, and for a moment, my stomach dips. I gesture for him to follow me.
“What are we doing up here?” he asks, grinning when I lead him to the attic.
I close the door behind us. “Actually,” I tell him, “I want you to take that blood sample now.”
His smile fades as I unbutton my cuffs. “Are you sure?” he asks.
“I have a strange feeling about tonight,” I
say. I have that same twinge of anticipation I had at the Mill the day Eve was adopted. That foreboding sense that something is going to happen. “You should do it now. Just . . . in case.”
“All right,” he says cautiously. He takes one of my wrists in his hand. Finds a fleam with a sharp-looking blade, then swoops to brush his lips over my skin. My heartbeat spikes, and there is a trilling feeling left by his fingertips. “I’m going to breathe the vein. This will hurt a little,” he says apologetically. I blink and look away, forcing my eyes to the tome on gemstones. I hid it here last night to keep it safe from Nina’s prying, and now I look again at the image of the small reddish stone Jakob thought resembled Philip’s.
Proustite.
The caption says: The unique design that gives proustite its unusual color and value is the very same thing that leads to its destruction.
That’s funny, I think as Jakob finishes. Proustite sounds so much like magic. The thing that makes it valuable is the very same thing that destroys it.
Jakob puts gentle pressure on my arm and then bandages it, and his eyebrows quirk with such adorably intense concentration as he fastens the pin that I pull him to me and kiss him, and he makes a pleasant sound of surprise. Behind us, the door opens and I hear an exaggerated throat clearing. “Is this going to happen every time I find you?” Liljan asks, rolling her eyes. “Mrs. Vestergaard is looking for you,” she says to Jakob. “And—” She pauses. “Did you know Dr. Holm was planning to come today?”
Jakob peers out the portal window. “No. What is he doing here?”
Outside, people are starting to arrive. Their carriages stream down the drive, through the falling snow.
“Marit, here. Eat this,” Jakob says, digging out a biscuit from a stash within a wicker basket. “Do you feel all right? I can get you some water.”
“No, you go ahead,” I say.
He pauses to give me a sweet smile at the door.
“Jakob?” I ask. “Just be careful tonight.”
“You too,” he says. And then he’s gone.
I finish carefully rolling my sleeve down my arm. There’s a thought brushing up against the back of my mind. I look again at the book in front of me. Hesitate, and shut it.
I pick up a glass vial of my blood—my blood that is valuable, because of the Firn in it.
As the blood swirls and settles, the light catches it. Out of the corner of my eye, the vial almost seems to shimmer.
Those miners were murdered.
To cover something up.
I stop short. I’ve watched the way Eve’s crystal grows in its glass jar, binding itself together. That crystal has built up steadily over time. Like love and hate do. Like the jewels in the mines do.
Like the Firn has inside of me.
The mines are costing Danish lives, my father wrote. He desperately wanted the king to see the mines with his own eyes, he said, or more people would die.
Hanne’s voice echoes in my head. Other servants and workmen, just like Ivy, have gone missing.
They were all servants.
Servants with magic.
Realization is opening inside me like a hundred flowers in the night.
With trembling hands, I open the vial and drip a few droplets of blood onto a piece of glass, like I’ve seen Jakob do before. It takes much longer than it should, because my fingers are clumsy.
Perhaps I was closer than I realized when I guessed there was a massive web of deception around the Vestergaard mines.
But perhaps the truth is actually even more horrible than I dared imagine.
I push the sample under the microscope, and when the image sharpens, I gasp.
My blood flows crimson around tiny splinters of crystal, as if someone took a sledgehammer to my father’s stone and shattered it into a million glittering little pieces.
The revelation hits me like a fist coming through a glass window.
Hell’s bells.
The answer to my father’s riddle was right in front of me.
No—it was inside me, all along.
Every jewel that built the Vestergaards’ massive fortune—every one that glitters from the heads and necks of Danish royals across Europe, that Philip wears in his rings—was made with magic.
Or rather . . . made of magic.
The jewels aren’t glass, like I feared.
They are Firn.
Chapter Thirty-One
Philip
The Day of the Salon: January 30, 1867
Vestergaard Manor
The snow is beginning to fall hard and fast as the chimes ring through the house.
I straighten my cuff links, each one set with a gemstone, and answer the door.
Dr. Holm is standing outside, the snow collecting around his boots.
“Philip,” he says. “You’re looking much better.”
I smile. My oldest friend. From that first night in the morgue, to how far we’ve come tonight.
“Welcome back, Tønnes,” I say, and step aside to let him in.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Marit
The Day of the Salon: January 30, 1867
Vestergaard Manor
For a long moment I close my eyes and let the realization crash over me. The horror of what this means is like a growing dark wave, and I take a few deep breaths so I won’t faint. The snow falling outside has kicked up and is blowing sideways with a shrill wind. I fumble to cap the vial again and quickly snake down the stairs, through the corridors.
The house swirls with servants, frenetic as the snow falling outside.
“Has it turned to a blizzard?” Dorit asks, looking out the window in disbelief. The kitchen around her is set with glistening pastries and golden brown birds, steaming copper pots and explosions of flour.
The king is coming.
The miners are coming.
The chimes ring out from the front door, and the clock strikes half past three.
No, I realize.
The miners are already here.
“Move,” Nina tells me briskly. She, too, glances at the flurrying snow. “Lara, bring out every candle you can find and make sure there are stacked cords of firewood near every fireplace.”
Out of habit, I reach for my father’s stone in my pocket and then flinch back when I realize what I’ve been touching all along.
“Where’s Jakob?” I ask. When no one answers, I turn and run through the underground corridor.
I silently open the door to the upstairs.
The plush rug sinks beneath my feet like crimson-colored moss.
Beyond the enormous ballroom windows, the world is swirling with white. A fire burns bright and hot in the marble fireplace, and there are flickering flames lit in the sconces and the candelabra set on the table. Inside the ballroom, it is a warm oasis, a Garden of Eden blooming right in the middle of a blizzard.
I wait in the shadows. Across the room, Liljan is fussing over Eve’s costume, fixing a blossom to the fluttering edges of her skirt and dyeing it to match the glacial blue. The miners mill around in the space between us, dressed in brimmed silk hats and the finest doeskin pantaloons. The room buzzes with a nervous energy.
They all keep stealing glances at the empty chair.
The one left for our king.
“Snow is coming down thick out there,” one of the miners says. Gemstones flash on his timepiece, and when he sheds his coat, a peek inside reveals several more jewels, glinting in a rainbow of colors. The sight of them makes my stomach turn to lead. “Can’t see a meter in front of you,” he says, smiling as he hands his coat to Signe.
When he turns, I glimpse the scarred skin on his cheek. It is in the shape of a fishhook.
My heart squeezes like a fist.
I crouch and pretend to examine a curtain hem, then tuck myself into a hidden space among the fern fronds. Jakob is here, standing next to Dr. Holm.
What are we going to do? I think. If we try to flee, the only place we can go is out into the snow. We can’t all fit
into the carriages, and if there’s any chance of this secret getting out, the miners will kill us on the spot. I picture Ivy lying dead in the snow.
Ivy, and all those other magical servants who went missing over the years. A chill snakes down my spine. We’re worth much more dead to these miners than we are alive.
Philip tightens his tie and clears his throat. “Helene?” he says. He’s dressed in a fitted dark tailcoat and white cravat, his hair oiled and slicked back. At his call, Helene turns around slowly. “I’d like a private word before the king gets here,” Philip says.
Jakob shakes hands with Dr. Holm and excuses himself. I whisper his name when he passes, but he doesn’t hear. I press myself farther into the shadows. I’m not leaving Eve alone with all of them. Even from across the room, I hear her nerves in her anxious giggle. She sways a little, as if she’s lightheaded.
“Are you all right?” Liljan asks her, reaching an arm out to steady her.
“Eve,” Helene says. “If you wish to change your mind, it’s all right. You don’t have to do this.”
“I’m fine,” Eve says, brushing away their concern. “I think I’d like some water.”
Liljan says, “I’ll take her, ma’am.”
Helene hesitates. “Go on,” she says. “Have her eat a handful of nuts and dates to settle her nerves.”
In that moment, I want nothing more than to make a run for it. To grab Eve and plunge out into the blizzard—perhaps even confront the king on the road as he rides in. The realization dawns on me that his guards probably wouldn’t let me within five meters of his carriage. Would they even listen?
I stay put, my unease mounting.
“Helene, perhaps your guard would like to give us a moment to discuss sensitive business?” Philip asks.
Peder looks to Helene questioningly.
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