Over her shoulder, beyond a thick wall of firs, were the doors to the school.
I shuddered. “Well, is this where you abandon me?”
With any luck, she wouldn’t walk me to the door, which could complicate things. It was tradition for new students to explore the garden, but I was certainly not traditional.
“You’re so dramatic for such a lucky girl.” My mother pulled me into a tight hug, the warmth of her arms a mantle of comfort I hadn’t received or wanted in a long, long time. I didn’t know what to do. We fought too much, too viciously. Her nimble fingers tucked a rose behind my ear. “We are at a turning point in our history. Stay safe and study hard. Make me proud, Emilie.”
I couldn’t promise that.
“I have only ever wanted to help people.” I hugged her back, but the gesture felt empty and awkward. “You understand that, don’t you?”
She pulled away, nodded, and her face fell back into the expressionless mask I knew too well. “You will write to me regularly, and Vivienne will tell me if you attempt to run away.”
“I will not attempt to run away,” I said. I would succeed.
“Good,” said my mother. “If you go straight, this path will lead you to the doors. You have an hour before you are officially late. Don’t be, but do feel free to take a few moments to reflect. This garden is a work of art—Vivienne created it herself without the help of magic. There are, of course, guards at every entrance, whether you see them or not. Don’t get in trouble before school even begins.”
She studied me for a moment, tense, and said, “I love you.”
She didn’t, but I had known it for so long that the lie didn’t sting. It was an old bruise, too yellowed and familiar to hurt.
“I love you too.”
I did. What a terrible wound it was, loving her despite her lack of interest in me. I had cauterized it ages ago.
Proper ladies of Demeine did not cry.
They endured.
She didn’t look back, and then, she was gone.
I wandered to the cherry trees. My eyes burned, tears pooling. It wasn’t fair; she left me here so easily, without even a second thought. It wasn’t fair how much it hurt, and worse, she would have chided me for my tears. I grasped a tree branch and ripped it free. Bark dusted my arm.
“What did that tree ever do to you?” a sharp voice asked.
The girl stepped over a thicket of blackberries, cheap dress snagging, and stopped before me. She didn’t frown, but she paused before giving the worst curtsy I had ever seen.
“Sorry, Madame,” she said.
I laughed. “I am a terrible noble, but at the very least, I must teach you how to curtsy.”
Given my past, Mademoiselle Gardinier would be lenient with “my” manners. I hoped.
Mine were doomed; I hadn’t even asked for this girl’s name.
“Who are you, exactly?” I asked.
“Annette Boucher of Vaser,” she said. “They let me in like you said.” She tapped the wooden leaf pin on her shoulder. “The guard said Mademoiselle Charron can use this to scry whoever’s wearing it, so be sure to give it back when you leave.”
“Annette Boucher,” I said slowly, the old Deme word a comfort. If I used her family name, I would be one of dozens and harder to find. “Thank you for doing this. Again, if you are caught, I will protect you and make sure you are not punished.”
One of her eyebrows twitched. “Thank you, Madame.”
She didn’t believe me at all.
Well, I could only remedy that by proving it.
“Now,” I said, clapping my hands. “We will change clothes, you will go up to school, I’ll wait long enough to make sure you’re not arrested immediately, and then I shall send your family what you bought today, yes?”
“Yes, or else they’ll think I stole it. Shouldn’t cost much to send, and you can take the money I have.” She pulled out a small purse and handed it to me. “Can I send you money to Delest?”
“You can and you will.” I weighed her coin purse—hardly enough to do anything with—in my hand. She had embroidered a crooked moon on either side. Or it was one very rotund cat. I couldn’t tell. “If you do not, I will be caught swiftly, and I doubt I’ll have time to send you a warning.”
If she robbed me outright? Well, there was nothing gained without taking a risk.
“You don’t mind me asking,” she said, fiddling with the silver trinket around her neck. “Why do you want to do this? You’ve got everything.”
“I don’t want everything.” I clawed at the lace scratching my neck. “I want one thing, and that is to be a physician.”
“Here.” She gestured for me to turn around, and her fingers skimmed the back of my neck, my necklaces bunching up as she lifted them free. She hung them from a tree branch. “You sure our clothes will fit?”
“There’s only one way to find out, and you cannot walk into the school in what you have,” I said.
She nodded. “Where do we start?”
“Help me remove this overdress, and then we may deal with this new contraption from Vertgana my mother insists is a corset.”
She had imported it from the nation to our north as soon as she heard it was in fashion. It was wasted on me.
“You don’t want to keep it?” she asked. The overdress she helped me pull over my head and hung from another branch. Her fingers lingered on the gauzy fabric. “How can you not want this?”
“I don’t like the way it makes me look or the way it feels. It makes me feel as if I’m lying about who I am.” Admittedly, the corset was much more supportive than the stays I normally wore under my clothes, but the pinch of it along my ribs made my skin crawl. “I have never been the lady my mother wishes me to be, tastes in clothes included.”
Unlike her dress, mine was laced in the back—surely to keep me from getting out of it—and she took such care with undoing the ribbon that it took far longer to untie than it had to lace up.
“Like your parents assumed wrong at birth?” she asked.
A curious turn of phrase I hadn’t heard before.
“I can’t say my dislike for what my mother prefers has been since birth, but it’s certainly been for a while.” I mopped up the cooling sweat on my shoulders with my handkerchief.
“Never mind.” She shook her head and went back to unlacing the corset.
“I know it’s wasteful,” I said softly, “but I hate it all—partly because I think I am supposed to love it and partly from my own dislike. I do not like the way I look in dresses; I do not like the chafing of them against my legs; and I do not like the way every part of this outfit constrains me. It is as if I am experiencing everything at once, my senses overloading, and it is unbearable. I don’t feel right in them.”
They were my mother’s domain. She adored clothes, her own closet still limited since we had sold some old dresses to pay off my father’s debts right after his death. I didn’t love the midnight arts as she did, and all of the clothes and jewelry she wanted me to wear only reminded me of my failures. Dressing how she wanted was like wearing my wrongness for all to see. If they looked at me, they would know I wasn’t meant for their world.
“I do not belong.” I pulled the rings from my fingers and rubbed the pink welts they left behind. “Wearing things like this only increases that feeling of wrongness in me. They are a reminder of what is expected and what I am not.” I laughed and forced myself to smile. It was no good wallowing. “And I do hate being wrong.”
Annette hummed, taking great care not to brush my skin as she peeled the last of the corset free. “That makes sense. Not belonging. I don’t either.”
She adored everything I hated and was already practically the perfect lady of Demeine. My mother would have loved Annette.
“You enjoy the midnight arts, don’t you?” I asked.
“It’s the only thing I enjoy,” she whispered. “Do you ever feel like magic is the only thing that understands you, even though it’s not real?”
Magic couldn’t think or feel, but it existed, and it wanted me.
“I know exactly what you mean, and yes, I do feel that.” I stepped out of the gown and underdress, and Annette gathered them up as if they were the most precious things she had ever seen. “I feel broken. The world tells me I should want these things, but I don’t.”
Standing in a stranger’s garden in nothing but a shift made it easier to say.
“If I go to this school, if I study the midnight arts, if I stay here and witness day in and day out the very things that make me feel broken for not wanting them, I fear it will kill me. I have felt out of place, unwanted, unimportant for so long with my mother, that I want something for me. Being forced to attend this school makes me feel like I’m not a person.”
Annette’s warm hand touched my shoulder. “As if when Lord Sun and Mistress Moon were weaving the world and all its people into creation, they dropped a stitch while making you?”
“Yes.” I laughed and wiped the cosmetics from my face. “I think more than a few.”
She pulled off her own dress and stays, and the simplicity of her clothes made me smile. The fabric was itchy and the dress slightly too tight, but I needed no help. Most importantly, my mother would have hated it. I kept my hose and gave her my shoes.
“I can’t believe you’re giving this away,” she said, tracing the silver lines of my dress’s bodice from pearl to crystal to pearl.
I undid the too-tight braids slicking back my hair. “I know I am lucky to have been born into my station, but you will appreciate that dress far more than me. You’ll be wearing the jewelry too. They’re heirlooms.”
She picked up her own cheap necklace and compared the little moon charm to the sapphire collar that had been my great-grandmother’s, and the silver glittered in her eyes. “I could buy a house or twenty with these.”
“Please do not. My mother would murder us both,” I said. “Speaking of, though, how are your mathematics?”
She hummed, gaze stuck on one of the mirrored necklaces my mother had hoped I would use for scrying.
“Annette,” I said sharply. “This is important. Mademoiselle Gardinier is expecting me to be atrociously behaved, but she will catch on to our charade if you do not have the requisite knowledge, like mathematics, history, or reading. Your penmanship, as well, will—”
“I was reading a poster when we met,” she said. “How do you folks always discount us, even when proof you’re wrong is right there?”
I winced, flushing, and nodded. “You’re right. I’m sorry. That was instinct, and a terrible instinct at that.”
Her top lip twitched, as if she were about to sneer, but her face remained impassive. She was such a good stoic lady of Demeine already.
“Pedigree is more important than artistry or wealth anyway. You’re the sole heir to one of the twelve families of the sword. If anyone ever questions you, simply remind them of your name.”
She stared at me, shocked, and I took her by the shoulders.
“Enjoy your months of astronomy, embroidery, and whatever else they teach you.” I plucked an orange from a nearby tree and dug my nails into its skin. “Madame des Marais, comtesse de Côte Verte.”
She could be the perfect lady, the pristine calm of Demeine my mother had always wanted from me, and I could be the avalanche lurking underneath.
Four
Annette
I was fixing to get hanged. Emilie might be able to pass for some merchant’s runaway girl, but I didn’t belong here. Even my hands looked out of place as I lifted the overdress from the branch.
“I have never really worn cosmetics, so I think you can get away without them.” She tilted my head up and to the left, healing the little cuts and burns along my cheeks. Solane was a hack, but they did mostly surgery these days, not using their healing arts training unless they had to. Cost an arm and a leg too. I’d never been hurt bad enough to warrant the expense. “There. Try to stay out of the sun for a few days.”
The last of her magic slithered out of my skin, and I shuddered.
“You’ve never been healed by a physician before, have you?” she asked and scrunched up her face. As if that were something I’d lie about. “But your arm? That was such a bad break.”
“Vaser’s got a hack, but they’re retired and healing arts are expensive.” I raised my arm, the little scar mostly gone thanks to Solane’s salves. Beneath the sleeves of Emilie’s dress, no one would notice it. “Wasn’t worth it.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “You weren’t worth a proper physician?”
When she put it like that, it sounded worse than it was.
“I’m not a genius or strong or pretty. I’m just Annette,” I said. “I’ve got nothing but magic.”
We sat on a little stone bench a few paces away, me pulling on the hose and testing out Emilie’s slippers, and her finger-combing my hair so she could put it into place as hers had been. She did it more gently than I’d have thought she would, working out each knot instead of ripping through it. When I was little, Alaine had always brushed my hair.
“There was an accident when I was little,” I said. “There aren’t many artists in Vaser. My siblings and I all are, but we’re it, and I’m the only midnight artist. It’s easier for people to divine big things, like disasters, but I didn’t foresee this.”
“You were a child,” Emilie said. “Children can barely understand what’s right in front of them, much less divinations.”
“We can’t afford not to be perfect.” I shrugged, and she hooked the last pin through my hair to hold it all in place. “I’m not good enough to get out of Vaser on my own. I’m a failure there.”
Life in Vaser was like scrying—I was always outside of everyone else. Always watching. Never taking part.
Emilie stood first. She offered me her hand, the gesture odd. Even without all the clothes and silver, even in my elbow-patched dress, she still looked like a comtesse. I let her help me up, stepping carefully into the slippers, and she settled the overdress over me. It was like wearing winter air, and she laughed when I smiled. Her nimble fingers tucked the waist and shoulders in, so it wouldn’t giveaway how big it was. She curtsied to me.
“You will belong here, Madame Emilie des Marais,” she said. “And if Vaser does not miss you, it’s the one missing out.”
The word madame burned. Only noblewomen had the right to be called that, and folks hardly ever bothered to use mademoiselle with me. It was always you or girl. The title made our half-thought-out plan more real.
I tugged at the sleeves. “I don’t look—”
“Half of looking like a comtesse is acting like a comtesse, so act like you know better than everyone else,” she said.
“Like you?”
“Exactly.” She laughed. “Order new dresses that fit you.”
“That’s too much—”
“Annette,” she said, plucking an orange from a nearby tree. “This is from the Bèidexīng region of the Hé Dynasty. Do you know how much one of these costs import?”
I shook my head. “A lot?”
“This tree costs more than that dress, and my mother has a whole row of them at home,” Emilie said, tucking the orange into my—hers now—bag. “Order new dresses that fit you. My mother won’t even notice the expense, and if she does, she will be thrilled at the thought of me giving in to her tastes.”
The idea of that much money made me itch.
“Now, we will have to communicate.”
I shoved one of her silver cuffs into her hands. “You’re keeping this, and you’re scrying me with it. We have to talk somehow. I don’t mind if you scry me from time to time to make sure I’m not caught, and it’s certainly faster
than letters.”
“Not to imply that’s a bad plan,” she said slowly. “But I can’t scry.”
“Only because you don’t know how.” I gathered magic; it was day and the moonlight mostly gone, but using a tiny bit of Lord Sun’s power wouldn’t ruin scrying. Same power, different source, Solane always said. So long as I didn’t gather as much as most noonday artists did, it would still work. “Focus on what you want to scry, imagine yourself next to what you’re looking for, and want it.”
She frowned but did what I asked.
It was fun bossing a comtesse about.
It took me a painful twenty minutes to get her scrying, but at least she was determined, even if she hated it. I clasped the cuff around her wrist.
“You scry me, I’ll scry you, and we’ll know what’s going on with the other in a pinch,” I said.
She spun the bracelet and couldn’t hide her discomfort. “I have heard the best midnight artists are capable of communicating with scrying silver, though I have never read about how it’s done.”
I’d not either, but scrying was just looking at someone. Only the best could hear what their target was saying, but if you could do that, it couldn’t be hard to communicate. Two people scrying at the same time would be enough.
“Well, let’s hope I get real good.”
Emilie laughed, and I laid my hands on her cheeks. She stilled.
“Let me make you a bit more Annette,” I muttered, and channeled what little magic I could gather across her face and neck. It was easy enough to make her cheeks look sunburned and change the straight edge of her nose to a slightly crooked one. Her teeth, when she smiled, would be yellower. She opened her mouth a few times.
“I think you will get very good,” she said, testing out the magic around her mouth. “How long will this last?”
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