Next came a corset of whalebone and thick coutille followed by an overskirt and bodice of white silk brocade figured in gold and pink with the fleur d’or pattern, which is popular in my sisters’ homeland. The corset made my waist seem as thin and fragile as the stem of a wineglass, and it pushed my breasts up to somewhere just beneath my chin, offering them temptingly, like fresh buns on display in a baker’s case.
Sylvie and Dulcie pinned the edges of the overskirt aside with glass broaches to match the glass gems on the shoes. Sylvie brought out a frothy little collar of starched pink silk, this dyed also with Last Blush, and pinned it round my shoulders with two more broaches. The collar framed my face and neck, but did nothing to hide the vast expanse of powdered décolletage laid bare by the low-cut bodice.
“Loosen the ties so I can pull this bodice up,” I complained. “I can see my nipples over the top.”
“Rouge for those, my dear,” Minette offered me the little pot wrought of glass and gold. “Last Blush pink to match your skirt. Apply it to your lips and cheeks, as well. The color enflames men’s passions.”
“It’s poison!” I protested.
“Only a little,” Sylvie said. “For beauty. Like belladonna. You’ve heard the Whore’s Remedy, haven’t you?”
“Is it like the Witch’s Bargain?”
“You always think of witchery,” Dulcie laughed. “The Whore’s Remedy is this,” she took up the rouge pot and recited, “One pinch for your beauty, two teaspoons for his sleep, a cup to solve your problems and make his widow weep.”
I laughed. “And I thought witches were cruel.”
“We all do what we must to survive.” Minette tilted my chin up. “Hold your eyes open, dear, while I apply the belladonna.”
The candlelight seemed very bright after she put the drops in my eyes, but fortunately my sisters had finished their ministrations, and all that remained was for me to see was my reflection. Dulcie drew the scarf away from the silver-backed looking glass.
I did not know the woman who faced me. Her hair was powdered until it seemed a very pale rose, and piled high in soft waves upon her head. Her face was pale, too, except for her limpid black eyes, the red slash of Last Blush upon her lips, and the round, false flush of girlish pink against her white cheeks. Her breasts, powdered pale and revealed to tops of her rouged nipples, proclaimed her no girl, while the white silk gown stretched over wide panniers beneath her narrow waist made her seem to float above the ground, like a specter.
I looked like a ghost, a dead woman wreathed in white mist.
“You’re beautiful!” Dulcie cried.
“No offense to you, Sister,” Sylvie said, “but I never suspected you hid such beauty beneath your shapeless woolens and your cloak of ash.”
I looked at my white face in the mirror. I did not think it beautiful at all.
* * *
We caused a stir when we entered the ballroom. The other women in attendance (whores, barefaced but for their paint, and ladies masked to preserve their reputations) wore passable imitations of the d’Oran style, but none had quite mastered the combination of delicacy and grandiosity that distinguished the high style of Terre d’Or from garish imitation. We must have seemed like pale ghosts floating on clouds of ruffles and lace, crowned by misty swirls of powdered curls. We must have seemed beautiful, for the men came running and the women’s whispers turned ugly.
“My lovely little cabbages! My darling pumpkins!” I recognized Dulcie’s gentleman, the Grand Duke. Though we’d not had a real war since before the Prince’s birth, the Prince’s younger cousin wore a military uniform of dark blue, bedecked with red ribbons and gold medals. He held out his arms, as though he meant for us to approach him.
“The Grand Duke seems over-fond of vegetables.” I whispered to Dulcie behind the cover of my lace fan.
“Ember! You’ve a filthy mind. ‘My little cabbage’ happens to be an endearment in Terre d’Or.” Dulcie whispered back, her face the very picture of affronted innocence. A moment later, she broke into a fit of giggles.
“Who is this lovely?” The Grand Duke asked, inclining his head to me.
“Our sister, your Grace. The one whom the Prince asked us to bring.”
I opened my mouth to greet him, but Dulcie prattled on. “She is a mute.”
I snapped my jaw shut.
When the Grand Duke turned away to greet a passing acquaintance, I grabbed Dulcie’s shoulder and hissed, “Why’d you say I was mute?”
“It was a favor, Sister. They only ever talk about themselves, and now you’ve no need to pretend you were listening by answering.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
The Grand Duke turned back to us and offered his arm to Dulcie. “Come dance with me.” She took his arm and he began to lead her to the edge of the ballroom.
“The dancing is the other way.”
“Come dance with me outside in the shadows,” he cajoled.
“But I’ve barely seen the ball.”
The Grand Duke smiled. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
Dulcie blew us a kiss and let herself be led away.
After some minutes, Minette and I found ourselves amid a growing circle of gallants. Many of them talked at me, telling me tales of their prowess. They puffed up, proud as kings, when I smiled. Their breathing quickened when I blinked my dark, drugged eyes at them.
They paid me fulsome compliments, noting the fineness of my skin and the delicacy of my form. They said beauty such as mine must be protected from the vicissitudes of the world. One offered me a carriage, promising that my feet would never tread on cobbles again. Another offered me a house and servants so I would never need share my home with any but the man who loved my beauty more than a flower loves the sun. A third, who was not so rich as the others, offered me his heart on a silver platter and his affection for eternity.
The poor fool. I almost took him up on it. He could keep his affection, but oh, how the Fire would have loved his heart! I smiled and he sighed, thinking I favored him.
“I say, is something on fire?” One of them asked. The air smelled of smoke.
Hastily, I turned my thoughts to matters other than the power I might harvest from a freely given heart. I turned my eyes back to the men, wondering what other false promises they would spin for me. They had fallen silent and begun to back away, bowing as they went.
Rian stood among the fading crowd, watching me with dark and hungry eyes. I blinked and he wavered like a dream. Like a nightmare. The man before me was too perfect to be my Rian. His dark hair was neatly combed, his jaw clean-shaven. His hawkish nose had never been broken. He wore the Prince’s finery.
It was the Prince, draped in the image of my lover. It wasn’t until I saw the Prince that I realized how well and truly I loved Rian. The Prince’s curse would make him seem perfect in the eyes of any who saw him. And to make the Prince perfect in my eyes, his curse had made him appear as a better-groomed version of my estranged lover.
“Ember.” He said my name. I heard it echo in my soul. He held his hand out to me, and my body went to him, though my heart and mind screamed against it. The phantom of my missing finger felt hot as smoldering coals. I looked down at my left hand. The wooden finger in my glove was black and burnt.
He took my right hand, and drew me into the figures of a dance. I didn’t know how to dance, but my body moved for him, perfect and without misstep. There came places in the dance where he should have given my hand to other partners, but he didn’t let me go. He kept me in his arms, eating me with his eyes as we moved together.
He drew his finger along my jaw, and it came away white with paint and powder. “I don’t like you this way,” he said. They were the first words he’s spoken since my name.
“They tell me I am beautiful. I thought men liked beauty.”
“This isn’t beauty, it’s lead paint and artifice.”
“What do you like, then? Only tell me, and I shall strive to please you.”
; His expression soured at my words. “I dislike your powdered curls and your affectation of a malleable will. I like your hair red, and your eyes burning with the strength to look away from me. I like you as you truly are. I always have.”
His hands roamed my body as he herded me from the ballroom onto a lamplit terrace overlooking the gardens. He fell on me like a starving man at a banquet, kissing me before we even got outside, rubbing away my paint and powder with his hard lips and rough cheeks.
He shoved me against the ivy-covered wall outside the ballroom. The leaves caught in my hair, and I wondered if the tickling scamper of legs across my skin came from the ivy’s insect tenants, or the effects of his Charm. He ran his hands over me, my face my neck, my shoulders, my arms. His lips followed where his hands went, careless of the cloying taste of lead upon my skin.
“When you fled, I was so worried,” he murmured. “I love you.”
“Love!” I almost screamed. Where once I had felt shame in my attraction for him, I now felt rage at it. I didn’t have it in me to play the docile fool. I could not let his curse dictate my emotions. “What do you know of love? I’m here because you threatened my sisters’ lives. How is that an act of love?”
“I didn’t mean it. It wasn’t a binding promise.”
“You only meant to make me think it was.” I slapped him. “You used your curse to make me fuck you. And you don’t care if I’m in misery to have betrayed the man I truly love. How is that love? It seems like cruelty to me.”
“Ember, be calm. Listen.” He tried to still me with soft words and gentle hands on my shoulders but I pushed him off. For all I hated him, my body still thrilled to his touch. I needed to get away.
I charged down the steps of the terrace and into the shadowed gardens. He caught up to me just before I reached the edge of the lamplight. He grabbed my shoulders. “Ember, wait. Listen. There’s something I need to tell you.”
I didn’t care to listen to him again. My anger flared as fire in the air around me, and he drew back clutching the side of his face as though he’d been burned. His face appeared unharmed. It still bore that hideous, perfect version of my beloved Rian’s features.
“Go to hell.” I turned and fled into the darkness.
As soon as I left the lamplight, my moonlight pendant began to glow. I heard the Prince’s footsteps behind me. I whirled to face him and screamed at what I saw illuminated by my little vial of moonlight.
It was Rian—my Rian, with his broken nose and messy hair—clad in the Prince’s velvet coat and breeches, with a fresh burn marring his cheek and sorrow welling in his dark eyes.
“No.” I shook my head and staggered away from him. “What game have you been playing with me?”
“No games. I love you. Please come back. I wanted you to love me as I am, and not as the curse makes me seem. I shouldn’t have touched you that day in my bedchamber, but I was dreaming of you. I spoke your name, and then you were there, cloaked in a bland illusion.
“It was too long to go a month without you. I was impatient. I wanted you, and took you though you didn’t know me. Twice, I tried to tell you, but you ran away each time.”
“You deceived me.” I felt sick to think of all my agony over the past month. I had betrayed my lover…with my lover. Oh what a little fool I was. What rare joke of fate was this? The man I loved and the man I hated were one in the same.
“I never lied to you. Not once. From the day we met, you knew my name was Adrian Juste. You knew I lived at the palace. You knew I spent my days with horses and hounds.”
“You lied by omission.”
“I spent years looking for you, the red-haired girl dressed in russet silk. The one with dark eyes and no name. It was as if you disappeared. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you again.”
“You will have to bear it now.”
He reached for me. I held up my hand.
“Altus”
I spoke the word for “halt” in the language of the Old Ones, the tongue of curses and enchantments. It was like licking the edge of a razor blade to say it. Blood poured over my chin as I looked at the frozen figure of my lover. His eyes watched me, but the rest of his body did not move so much as a hairsbreadth. His hand remained outstretched to touch me.
“I will not be another conquest of your curse,” I whispered. “The spell will fade when my blood dries.”
I kissed his cheek. My lips left their print in blood on his jaw. The blood was drying, even as I turned away.
I ran into the gardens, but the tall heels of the shoes Minette had given me kept sinking into the damp earth. I kicked them off, and made much better time for having rid myself of them. I found a fountain on my way to the front gates of the palace, and rinsed the blood from my lips before continuing on.
The guard at the gate came running when he saw me. “Mistress, where is your coach?”
“Perhaps it turned into a pumpkin,” I laughed.
The guard looked at me as though he thought I was mad. I smiled at him and confirmed it. My tongue had not stopped bleeding, and my teeth were red with blood.
He backed away. I walked past him, out through the gates and into the night.
9. The Happily
You are thinking I was either callous or stupid to leave my sisters unprotected though the Prince had twice used threats against them to bring me to him. Believe me, I’d no doubt he would try a third time, and I was not ignorant of their vulnerability. If you insist on finding some sort of lesson in my tales, it must be this: few situations are what they appear to be. Yes, I left the city, but I did not flee the Prince. I left because I needed time and distance to craft my spells of retribution.
I went into the Dark Forest again, and headed east. I was better prepared this time, for I’d returned home to scrub the paint from my face, exchange my finery for sturdy woolens, and retrieve three strands of Rian’s—the Prince’s—dark hair from my pillow.
After three days travel, I made camp again within the ring of pagan standing stones, and built a bonfire there. By firelight, I sewed a little doll of burlap and stuffed it with ash. I put the Prince’s hairs inside before I stitched it closed.
I’d tried to snare a hare or some other small forest creature to use as fuel for my spell, but growing up amidst the crowds and cacophony of city streets has left me loud and clumsy in the relative quiet of nature. I did not catch so much as a mouse. Lacking lesser lives to spend in my spells, I made a fist around my knife’s blade and used my own blood to
I was, perhaps, too careful in the likeness I drew of Rian’s face, for once I’d finished it I could only hold the doll and weep. I’d sketched the bump in his nose, the crooked tilt of his smile, the way shadows fell across his deep-set eyes.
I remembered the burn I’d left on his cheek when we argued in the gardens. Even now, though I meant to curse him, I hated that I had hurt him. I stroked the doll’s opposite cheek. It felt as warm and rough as Rian’s unshaven jaw.
The miles between us dissolved. I felt his face beneath my fingertip, his breath against my still-bleeding palm. From his bed in the palace, the Prince said my name, his voice rough with sleep and desire. He sounded as close as when Rian and I had lain in my narrow bed, sharing the same pillow.
He spoke in the same yearning whisper he’d used so many nights in the cookshed after the first frantic coupling was behind us and we lazed sticky, naked and replete, entwined in damp, twisted sheets. He spoke in the whisper that had once roused me to his kisses and made me ready for him though I was yet half asleep.
Memories assaulted me, wrestled with me, and won. I relived the rough, exquisite urgency of his hands on me in the darkness. I trembled in remembrance of the hazy, sleep-muddled fever of my response. And I hated him anew when my mind recalled the acid burn of guilt I’d felt upon waking from all those passionate nightmares in which my lover and the Prince were one man instead of two.
Anger chased away my memories of pleasure. I unclenched my hands and let the doll
fall to the dirt at my feet. As if from a great distance, I heard Rian shout, “No! Please!” He sounded broken and desperate, like a gambler who has risked everything and lost.
The pain in his voice made me hurt for him. For all that I hated him—and hated how he’d hurt me—I could not douse my love, nor smother it, nor starve it. For me, love was not a Fire. It was a thing outside of magic. It was a power beyond my control.
Had I loved Rian less, or hated the Prince more, I might have had the strength to wreak a witch’s vengeance on my former lover. But as it was, I yearned and wept and worried for him—this man whom I would have tortured, if only I could have made myself enjoy it.
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