by Anya Allyn
The man with the white hair visibly trembled. “Glory to the greatness of our Monseigneur.”
The others, except for Henry, echoed the man’s words in a low chant.
Henry extended his arm and made a swooping circle over the globe of the astronomical clock. The dark blue light and revolving stars and planets disappeared. “Francoeur, go fetch the girls. We can’t have them freezing to death now that we’ve taken the trouble to bring them here.”
Molly clutched my arm. I glanced at her in alarm. We hastened back down the corridors toward the stairwell. There was nowhere else to go. As we reached the top landing, a figure appeared—Francoeur, the butler.
“I see that you two found your way out of your room. Your presence has been requested in the Great Hall.” Dust lined the creases of his suit, his lined skin holding a grayish pallor. He had to be a ghost and not human. A silent, mocking acknowledgement entered his anemic blue eyes—he knew that I knew what he was and he didn’t care in the slightest.
Molly and I followed him back along the dim corridors. Turning our heads anxiously left and right as we walked, we looked for somewhere to run to, somewhere that didn’t stop in a dead end. There was no point hiding in a room—we’d too easily be found.
Francoeur’s thin shoulders pinched together. “Oh, and I wouldn’t imagine it would do you much good in trying to make your escape. Leaving here is an impossibility.”
Molly and I exchanged taut glances. The butler continued on to the oak doors we’d seen before. They opened as he approached, exposing an elaborately-decorated hall filled with people. A rush of warm air enveloped me.
Craning their necks, the people stared our way—the men dressed in suits and the women dressed in something of a cross between antique clothing and something you might find in a 1920s boudoir.
The fires of eight enormous fireplaces roared on either side of the room, rows of tall, arched windows letting in the dark indigo moonlight. Chained black panthers slept just out of reach of the people. Monkeys swung and played on trapezes high above.
I gasped at the sight of the statue in the midst of the hall—a massive statue of a tree reaching from floor to soaring ceiling—a mirrored tree made of a glassy black stone.
“I see you are impressed with the speculum nemus,” said the butler. “It is carved of obsidian, from deep in the heart of a cooled volcano.”
A woman sauntered up to us, a glass of wine entwined in her fingers, her blonde hair in a tight knot. She wore a tail jacket over a corseted leotard, striped stockings on her long legs. One look at her icy eyes told me who she was—Henry’s girlfriend, Audette.
“Francoeur, just why we need these two here is beyond me,” said Audette. ”Can’t we keep them in a… oh, I don’t know… the oubliette or something?”
Laughter crackled behind her. Viola raised her wine glass, swaying slightly and very drunk. “Here’s to Cassandra! And Molandah! Or Calliope or Molly or Missouri, or whatever their names are. Long may they live! And hush, Audette, we can’t keep them in a dungeon—the more the merrier! Let’s party!”
A tiny monkey sat on Viola’s shoulder, blinking at us. “Oh and this is Maypole.” She reached up to hold the monkey's paw between her thumb and forefinger. “I called him that ’cos he goes ’round and ’round my neck like I’m a stuffing maypole.”
Viola turned to rest her head on her boyfriend’s chest—Clarkson— her skimpy dress exposing the tattoo of a mirrored tree on her slender back.
In my mind, I saw Viola all the times I’d seen her before—at the beach, at her parent’s wedding, at the restaurant, at her house—she’d always worn something that covered her back. It had never occurred to me that she’d been concealing something.
Mr. and Mrs. Batiste strolled forward to stand next to their daughter, as casually as if none of the things that had happened tonight had really happened. “Thank you, Francoeur,” said Mrs. Batiste.
The old man bowed curtly.
“Where are we?” Molly demanded. “Where have you brought us?”
Zach’s father smiled. “That’s a fair enough question. You are in a home owned by my family for the past six hundred years. It is one of the châteaux nestled on the edge of a forbidding cliff on the French coastline. If you were to be a little more pedestrian, you might call it a castle. The families of the Batistes have lived at the castle since the fourteenth century.”
His wife gazed at him with bright eyes. “The château is known as Le Château sur la Falaise Solitaire. The castle on the lonely cliff. You’ll find out how it got its name soon enough.”
Stilling myself, I tried to grasp my surroundings. A castle… in France....
I glared at them with hate. “What have you done with my father? And where is my mother?”
Mr. Batiste ran a finger along his temple. “They’re both at the house. In any case, they are not your real mother and father, so you cannot rightfully mourn their loss.”
“They are still part of me. I know they are.”
“I see that you already knew that you came from a world an entire universe away. How did you find out?” He fixed an intent gaze on me.
“Maybe I won’t tell you,” I spat. ”Maybe I’ll keep my own secrets.”
I noticed Henry sitting on a plush chair, casually smoking a cigar, as though he hadn’t just been in a room with an astronomical clock discussing travel between universes. A grin slid into his eyes and mouth. “Keeping secrets? Congratulations, you’re one of us.”
“I’ll never be one of you,” I told him emphatically.
“So you keep telling me, ad nauseam.” Henry puffed on his cigar—or pretended to. His lips didn’t touch the cigar. He blew out spiraling smoke rings that overtook each other. “It does become a bore when you blindly adhere to some self-imposed set of morals. You know, morals are in the mind of the beholder. Spend a little time, make your own conclusions. Most people spend their lives searching the branches for what only appears in the roots—that’s from Rumi, a thirteenth century Persian poet.”
Audette tottered over on her high heels and flung herself on his lap, arms around his neck. “I love it when you quote thirteen century Persian poets.”
“Sweetheart, you don’t know a Persian poet from a Persian rug,” Henry remarked.
She pouted, and then planted a long wet kiss on his neck.
Henry gazed at us over the top of Audette’s blonde head. “Enjoy the castle. She’s a grand old lady.” A vague bitterness visited his eyes. “If only my heritage had not been stripped from me by Tobias, I would have spent my childhood here, and not grown up as a relative pauper.”
I glanced about, half-expecting to see a ghostly version of Jessamine’s grandfather leaning against a fireplace mantle somewhere.
Henry raised his eyebrows. “Oh, you won’t find him here. Good old Uncle Tobias ran away from the castle when he was sixteen, and he took his brainless younger brother with him. His brother was of course my father.”
Molly pressed her lips together tightly. “Perhaps Tobias had good reason to run away from here.”
“Some people are just not born with good sense. What did Tobias end up with? A circus empire.” He gave a humorless laugh. “He was born Tobias Tibault Batiste—heir to a legacy beyond anything the universes have ever known. Yet he threw it all away—changed his name to Fiveash and erased his past. And my father… my father being little more than a simpleton, became a drunkard and roustabout.”
He eyed an elderly man sitting a short distance away, who was loudly recounting past adventures to anyone who would listen. The man looked somewhat like Tobias, but with the reddened cheeks and nose of a lifelong alcoholic.
A gloom settled into Henry’s expression and he waved us away. “Why don’t you two go and fix yourselves up for supper? I’m sure we can find something better than those dreary frocks.”
Audette turned her head, looking at us as though we were some kind of insects. “I put the clothing in their closet, Henry. It’s good en
ough for them. I don’t see why they need to dress in anything different.”
“Because I can’t bear to look at them, that’s why,” said Henry. “They look like peasants.” He clapped his hands. ”Lilith—please take the girls to the wardrobe and fetch them something decent to wear.”
A slight blonde girl moved from her position on the other side of the hall. She wore a baby doll dress and red-and-white striped stockings. Keeping her arms stiffly next to her body, she stole a look at us and then turned her head away quickly.
“Isn’t that your friend?” whispered Molly.
I gasped. “Lacey….”
“Oh yes, quite right…” Henry stretched his fingers. "Her name is Lacey. It was Jessamine who renamed her as Lilith. Jessamine has a penchant for renaming people, odd little creature that she is. Well, speaking of odd creatures, we needed to take Lacey out of the insane asylum—she was starting to say too much.”
Lacey stepped self-consciously toward one of the doorways without looking at us again. Molly and I trailed her from the Great Hall. Behind a large gathering of people, a group of teenagers sat playing and watching a game of chess. Aisha had her hands in her lap, staring down at the board as Emerson and Parker made their moves. Zach sat apart from them. He stole a despairing glance at me, and then turned to stare fixedly at the night beyond the window.
Cold air closed over us as we followed Lacey into a corridor.
I stopped her, grasping her arm. “Lacey—how long have you been here?”
Her thin face drew down, her mouth small. Her eyes were lined with thick kohl, making her face seem even paler than usual. “I can’t talk to you.”
“Don’t you at least owe us that much?” said Molly.
“I can’t even if I wanted to,” she told us. "There are eyes and ears everywhere here. Everything you say and do in the castle can be seen and heard by someone.” She pointed ahead. “The wardrobe is this way.”
We climbed a set of stone, spiral stairs to another floor. What Lacey had called the wardrobe ended up being a massive room with racks upon racks of clothing, accessories and footwear. Lacey pulled out a couple of thin, glittery dresses with corset bodices.
“Not these,” Molly protested.
“It’s either these or the kind of thing that Audette wears,” she said rigidly. “And I’m sure you don’t want to wear what she does.” She gazed down at herself. “Do you think I like showing off my skinny legs in this dress? This is what they tell me to wear.”
Reluctantly, we swapped the plain dresses for the glittery ones. Lacey helped us arrange our hair up in clips with silly baubles on them. We applied the makeup she handed us without question. We were used to it. It was almost strange not to slather your face in goop every day.
I laced the ties at the back of Molly’s dress. She wriggled uncomfortably as she looked down at the tight-fitting curves and exposed bust line. Since living with Mom and me, her body had filled out. She’d lost that half-starved look. I’d been secretly envious of her new curves. Even before my time in the dollhouse, I hadn’t had many curves to boast of.
Molly’s hair had half-dried, falling into long red waves. In the gold dress she wore, she looked amazing. At the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but think that Molly should be wearing something like this to go out on her first date. Instead, she was trapped here in a medieval castle belonging to this insane family.
I attempted to pull up the neckline of my dress. It was the most revealing dress I’d ever worn. I knew my mother would half-faint if she saw her sixteen-year-old daughter in this. She’d cried when I turned sixteen last year—saying she’d lost too much of my fifteenth year. A sharp pang in my chest made me catch my breath. The mother I’d grown up with might not even be alive.
Lacey stood with her fists balled, staring into the long rectangular mirror. A strange darkness crept into her eyes—like black, rolling mist—until I couldn’t see her eyes at all.
“Lacey….” I hadn’t meant to call her name out loud.
She turned slightly in my direction. The black mist drifted inwards, back into her eyes and disappeared. “Yes?”
“Your eyes…”
Molly stared over at me, frowning. “Cassie, are you okay? What is it?”
Lacey’s eyes had changed back to their own pale blue color.
“But they went black. There was something wrong with your eyes,” I breathed.
Lacey’s face crumpled. “Isn’t it enough that you guys hate me? I’m not a monster.”
“I didn’t say you were a monster.” I glanced at Molly. It was obvious she hadn’t seen what I had.
“It’s what you think,” said Lacey. ”You look at me and you see the person who knew you were in the dollhouse. Especially Missouri. I held the secret of the dollhouse for five long years.”
Molly shot her a sympathetic look. “I know why you did what you did. I don’t hate you.”
“I don’t need your pity,” Lacey said in a flat voice. “I’m just a dead thing. I’ve been a dead thing since I was nine years old, and maybe even before that. Maybe I was never alive. Don’t give me pity, because I’ll just throw it away—just like I threw everything away, including your lives.” She straightened. “We have to get back to the others now.”
“Can’t we stay here and talk for a while?” asked Molly. “Please?”
“We can’t,” said Lacey. “We’ve already taken long enough. They’ll send Francoeur to check on us any minute, and I hate the old bastard.”
Lacey sounded so different, so changed. I was sure I hadn’t imagined the blackness in her eyes.
Her small frame was stiff as she led us back to the Great Hall and through to the dining room.
The table in the dining room was long enough to fit sixty people, and almost all the places were filled. Most of the people had been at the ball. Which were ghosts and which were humans? I wasn’t as good as Molly at telling them apart. As before, Aisha and Zach were the only ones who didn’t look our way. The rest stared with measures of amusement or distaste—or in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Batiste, as though this was just a normal dinner.
A long line of food ran down the center of the table—trays piled high with meats and breads and dark, oily-looking dishes. Molly and I sat at two of the empty places. A man dressed in a suit and tails served us from the trays. Kitchen ladies dressed in frilly black dresses fussed over the various pots and dishes.
My stomach rolled at the sight of the heavy food on my plate. Hesitantly, I broke a piece of bread and took a bite.
“You’ll grow accustomed to such fare,” said Henry from his seat across from me. “Until you crave it. If only I could again partake in feasts such as this.”
“We won’t be here long enough to grow accustomed to it,” said Molly.
Henry placed his chin on one hand in bemusement. “Why? Were you planning on leaving us so soon?”
Audette laughed—a squeaking, simpering laugh that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. Maypole—Viola’s miniature monkey—sat on the table copying Audette’s laugh with a chattering laugh of its own—then scurried over to Viola’s goblet of wine and lapped cautiously at the red liquid.
The bread was dry in my throat. I hadn’t had a drink for hours, and my stomach still felt full of salty water from the bay. None of the flasks held water or anything except for red wine. Thirstily, I grabbed the glass of wine beside my plate and gulped it down. My head grew light. A servant poured me another wine.
I tasted the stew. It wasn’t as bad as it looked—some sort of mix of vegetables. A cook from the kitchen brought out a new pot of stew. With a large ladle she tasted the dish. Shrugging, she took a cask of wine from the table and poured it in, then mixed it around. I glanced over at Molly. Her eyes were heavy.
“Perhaps a sleep might be in order for you girls,” said Mrs. Batiste. “After all, that was quite a business ending up in the bay, as you did.”
“We almost died,” said Molly flatly.
Mrs. Bat
iste tut-tutted. “Yes, it was all terribly dangerous for all concerned. I had my heart in my mouth the whole time you girls were out there. We were so happy to have you brought back to us in one piece.”
“You were just happy to have your prisoners returned,” I accused. My words seemed slurred and slow.
She gave me a dismissive smile, as though I wasn’t aware of what I was saying.
My head grew heavy, my legs feeling as though they were made of lead. If it were possible for your body to float like a balloon and sink like a lead weight at the same time, that was what mine was doing. Arms caught me from behind and lifted me up. I was carried from the hall like a child, my head drifting into sleep.
6. THE FIGURE IN THE TOWER
Ravens flew past the window in a flurry of wings, black against the blotchy first light of morning.
My breaths came quickly as I realized where I was. Not home in my bed. Not anywhere safe.
Everything from the night before flooded into my head like disconnected nightmares. Dread and fear and loss were a rock at the pit of my stomach. I had never felt as alone as I did right now, not even in the dollhouse. I was merely a shadow in this world. I had no anchor, no roots here. I was a leaf tossed about in an endless wind.
What am I now? The sum of two people? Or did I absorb every part of the other me, suffocating her into oblivion? How could I ever atone for such a thing—for the taking of her life?
Molly was already up and sitting at the desk, scribbling on a sheet of paper, her head in her hand. She’d found a way to light the lamps on the desk— the light picking out the details of the carved gargoyles.
Pulling the blankets away, I padded over to the window. The grounds were still blanketed in white fog. It seemed there was nothing beyond the fog—no France, no world—just this castle.
Molly stared up at me as I turned and walked to her, her pale skin given color by the yellow light of a lamp. I’d seen a painting in a book once that looked just like Molly did right now—the Girl in the Pearl earring. Only Molly’s eyes were filled with pain.