Belle Révolte

by Linsey Miller

  Estrel leaned over me. “You’re nervous. It’s upsetting your art. Breathe and try again.”

  I nodded, and I let the chill of the bowl seep into my hands.

  Macé, gaunt and sunburned, the clothes he was wearing a touch too big, and the frown he carried far too deep for his young face, paced along the outside of a tent gilded with gold ribbon.

  “He’s alive,” I said. “He’s alive.”

  “You divining doesn’t make bad things happen.” Estrel sat next to me. “Now, do it again.”

  * * *

  “I have an idea on how to divine Gabriel,” I told Isabelle early one afternoon after we’d woken up.

  “Anything,” she said. “I get nothing when I try. I’ll take anything.”

  “I’m not great at it still,” I said, but Isabelle cut me off.

  “Don’t do that.” She didn’t roll her eyes, but I knew she wanted to. “You’re better than us. We know. You don’t have to pretend you’re not.”

  “It’s because you are spectacular.” Coline threw her head back and gestured as she said it, a perfect mimicry of Estrel’s excited style of talking. “She thinks you’re the next her. New her? How old is she again?”

  “Twenty-four and waxing,” I said. Her birthday was three months away, and I’d no clue what I could give her. “I can’t be her anything since she’s doing it still.”

  Coline dismissed me with a wave of her hand and nasally hum. “She finally has an apprentice, and she’s delighted that someone knows what she’s talking about when she teaches. She and Laurence du Montimer were at university around the same time, and they were the only people who understood the other’s research. I heard he threw a chair at her once during a debate on the validity of the division between the noonday and midnight arts.”

  And I was back to not liking him again, except she agreed with him now. There was no difference. Same power, different amounts.

  “You’re being nice.” Isabelle drifted into the room, arms full of paints but no brushes, and sat on the stool before Coline’s window. “I’ve never heard you be nice on purpose before.”

  Coline pulled a locket from beneath her dress. “It was accidental, I assure you.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll let you live it down eventually.”

  She opened the locket and shook her head. On the inside of the necklace was one small mirror with the sheen of a scrying surface and a lock of black hair knotted with a ragged leather strip. A lover’s token.

  “I store power in this sometimes,” said Coline. “We could start storing it up and that might lessen how worn out the scrying makes you?”

  “No.” I shook my head and helped Isabelle with the tie to her painter’s apron. “It’ll wear down whatever it’s in eventually, and we don’t have time to store enough power to matter.”

  “We could pretend to be hacks. Gabriel and I used to—we would hold hands and see how far we could send an illusion of us walking down the road. Drove our aunt to tears.” Isabelle dipped her fingers into opalescent paint and began to drawn the fringe of an orchid. She channeled power into her paints, letting it shimmer in soft illusions so the petals rustled in an imaginary breeze. “We could each do part of the scrying, so Emilie doesn’t bear all of it.”

  I stared into the strokes of her flowers—flies flecked gold with power gathering on the shores of Segance—and the divining came easily.

  “Isabelle,” I said. “Is there quicksilver in your paints?”

  She hummed. “Lovely color and keeps fungus at bay. So many of these colors tend to rot.”

  “It smells terrible,” said Coline. “Open a window.”

  “You have any plain quicksilver?” I wrenched open the large window right behind Coline, who was doing nothing, and shooed the small gathering of still-silver Stareaters away. One, hoary with age despite its red, red wings, clung to my hand.

  “No,” Isabelle said. “Not here. Why?”

  “Would an alchemist have it?”

  “Probably.” Isabelle nodded. “Almost certainly.”

  * * *

  I nudged open the door to the kitchens. Bottles brimming with power—the power to lower a fever or fight back rot or scab a shallow slice from a sword—covered every surface. A pot of bubbling wax with the Chevalier du Ferrant’s rosy colors sat on the stove, and Yvonne dribbled streams of it around bottles and vials to hold tight the cork tops. I rapped on the inside of the door to let her know I was there.

  “I have not slept in forty-eight hours,” Yvonne said slowly. “I’m afraid I will be terrible company, Madame.”

  I should tell her I was Annette.

  It would be nice to hear my name from her.

  “Let me, then.” I touched her back, wished for a seat where we could rest side by side and work together instead of this awkward handoff, and carefully took the spoon and bottle from her. “Unless there’s a secret alchemist way to do this, you should rest. I’m about to ask you a favor anyway.”

  She laughed, standing right next to me, and her shoulder brushed mine with each breath. “Ah, need to get on my good side?”

  “You don’t have a bad side,” I said. “If you think you do, you need a new mirror.”

  “What do you want?” she said, smiling.

  “Quicksilver, if you have any.”

  “Is that all?” She laughed again and moved to the little room off the main kitchen. “There’s a minuscule amount in each of these. Not enough to poison anyone. It’s excellent for keeping things clean, though, and I tweak it to make it harmless.

  “Here.” In one hand, Yvonne carried a small metal box that rattled as it moved and in the other, a large alchemistry apparatus that she poured like a pitcher. “Drink this and tell me if anything is off, and we’ll call it even.”

  A crinkling layer of frost spread out from her hand on the handle, the light glow of the midnight arts a comfort. Ice bobbed at the surface, midnight purple and melting, of the copper cup. She shook the cold from her hand.

  “What is it?” I asked. Floral and earthy, like blooming carnations crushed in mud, and the soft bite of something acidic and bitter at the back—black currants. I took a sip.

  “Well?” Yvonne asked.

  Wine? I swallowed what was in my mouth and stuck my tongue out, the bitterness clinging to the back of my throat. I sniffed it again—black currant juice—and ran my tongue over my teeth—dark wine undercut by something sweet. “It’s an illusion?”

  “Most of taste is based on what we smell, and I want to make medicine more palatable.” She took the cup from me. “Also, I know you like illusions. Fun?”

  “Very,” I said quickly. I’d never even thought about making illusions with my other senses. “Can we talk about it one day when we’re not falling asleep on our feet?”

  She handed me the quicksilver box, and her frustration fell into the practiced, emotionless half smile I knew so well.

  “I’ll leave you alone.” I laughed and turned to leave, rubbing my face. My eyes burned. “I should sleep anyway.”

  She always had to be on guard when the comtesse de Côte Verte was near.

  “Wait.” Yvonne caught my wrist in her hand. “You always do this. You leave when you know I’m working and need to focus, and I appreciate it, I do, but you don’t have to always leave.”

  An odd, fluttery emptiness opened up in the pit of my stomach. Her hand still held my wrist, and I didn’t mind.

  “I want to stay,” I said, and I grabbed her hand as she let go. “I like watching you work. It makes me feel like something’s gone right in the world. But I have to do something now. I made a promise, and I can’t put it off any longer.”

  Her narrow-eyed focus, the taut lines of her jaw as she gathered magic in her alchemistry, and how she scowled then smiled when something tricky went well. All the good in the world
was here.

  “Of course.” Her head tilted to the side, and she tugged at one of the tight coils of her black hair, letting it bounce and then pulling it back down again. “Come back soon.”

  “I will.” I clutched the metal box of quicksilver to my stomach.

  Gabriel would too.

  * * *

  When the clock chimed four in the morning, when we knew most of the others would be falling asleep so the dawn light didn’t keep them awake, the three of us—Coline, Isabelle, and I—sat in the bright light of our open window and filled a scrying bowl with quicksilver. Stareaters swarmed along the glass, wings thunking against each other as they scrambled into our room. A gibbous moon stared down at us.

  “Think about him,” I told Isabelle. “And when you have, channel all that magic and all those memories into me. I’ll divine him. I just need to know him as you do.”

  Isabelle laid her hands on my shoulders. She didn’t speak, but suddenly, laughter pealed in my head. Gabriel’s laughter. Power rushed through me.

  A gold sky. Flickering. My skin itched, but I couldn’t move. It was too tight for me. To contain me. Magic pulsed through me, tugged at my bones, and settled deep. I rolled my eyes to the side. To see where the voices were. Muffled. Like sitting at the bottom of a river. Not a gold sky. A tent.

  “It’s not clear enough,” I said. “I’m too close. I’m in his head. I need—”

  I gathered up the moonlight arts spilling over me and thrust all of the power I could into the bowl. It shuddered. The image shifted. I wasn’t watching it in the water. I was in the image with it.

  I walked across the grass, looking down and seeing nothing where my body should’ve been. A girl knelt in the mud at the base of a tent, and my fingers passed through her shoulder. Emilie, the real Emilie, stared wide-eyed and horrified through a mesh window in the tent wall. I bent beside her and watched as well.

  A physician laid his hands, glowing gold as the noonday arts, as the sun, as the flies humming in my ears, on Gabriel’s arm. A knife slipped through his skin.

  I gagged. Blood curdled in my throat, clotted and thick. All the magic, all the power, channeling through me dragged. It wore me down, ripping through my skin. Red tinged the quicksilver pink, and I reeled at the pain. A hand grasped mine, holding them to the bowl, and Coline gasped. She channeled some of the power through her, lightening my load. The pain eased. Welts rose on her hands.

  But the image steadied.

  I stood at the physician’s back and saw Gabriel as he saw him—a catalog of parts, a collection of bone and blood and flesh ripe for the taking. He broke down the marrow of Gabriel’s bones and pulled them out piece by piece. He felt the prick of Gabriel’s pain in the back of his mind, and he pushed it away. He took.

  And he gave.

  I stumbled back, hands flying to my throat, and coughed up a glob of spit tinged red. The Stareaters fluttered to my feet and fed. A small, white mushroom cap crumbled to dust under the moth’s prodding. The quicksilver seeped through new holes in the bowl. It was silver no longer, now a pale, pale red burnt at the edges, powdery and off-putting. It coated every crack in the floor. In my hands.

  “We are not our own,” I said, voice broken. “They broke him down and used the pieces to repair the king’s injuries from channeling too much.”

  Coline leaned back against the wall, blanched by moonlight, and covered her face with her hands.

  “No one will believe us.” I turned to Isabelle. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know he would—”

  Isabel, hands bloodied and face streaked with tears, shook her head.

  “That is the future that will come to pass,” I said. “And I don’t think we can change it.”

  Seventeen

  Emilie

  I crawled into my sleeping roll, didn’t sleep, and rose to the scents of salt and smoke. For a moment, eyes closed, I was home.

  “Emilie,” a hoarse voice said. “Wake up. We need to talk.”

  I opened my eyes. Madeline, eyes red, sat cross-legged before me, her hands folded in her lap. The coat she wore had been Rainier’s.

  It hurt to look at her. I had no notion of what she was going through, and I could offer nothing. Anticipation leaked out of me in a clammy sweat, and I sat up, head bowed. She wrapped both of her arms around me. I stiffened.

  “I need you to be my friend right now,” she said. “I know you’re sad, but he was my brother. I need you now.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I threaded my arms around her, and she tucked her face into my shoulder. “What do you need?”

  She pulled back a little bit. “I need some part of the world to stay the same. Do rounds with me?”

  “Sure.”

  I tried to be the same as always but slightly less biting. Her torpor lasted a single day before anger burned it out of her.

  “We shouldn’t even be here!” She slammed her fists into her thighs. The tent we slept in was empty. “This is all his fault.”

  She meant the king, but she never said his name.

  “He did something,” I said quickly. I had tried and failed to find the courage to speak about it until now. “Something bad.”

  It was an understatement, but there were no words terrible enough to capture what His Majesty Henry XII and Pièrre du Guay were doing.

  She settled back, legs crossed and skirts flared around her, and took my hands in hers. “With Rainier?”

  “No, not during the fight. A few nights after.” I swallowed and made sure there was no one else around us. “I know what the crown has been hiding.”

  I told her everything, whispering about Pièrre du Guay and His Majesty and the young hack they used to build our king back up, the hair on my neck prickling still, though I knew no one was around to hear, and Madeline’s fingers tightened around my arm till I was afraid she would never be able to unclench them.

  “I feel like I shouldn’t be as shocked as I am,” she said finally. “We have to contact Laurel.”

  “How?” I asked. “Everyone got scattered when this mess happened. It was exactly as planned—someone also found out, they created a distraction, and Laurel’s whole system collapsed because people have to keep on living.”

  “Yes,” she said, pulling me close. “They went through all this trouble because they knew that if people found out, Laurel would be the least of their worries. So how do we tell people?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Let’s start with what we know and go from there.”

  * * *

  The next day, we were no closer to a plan. The war was still happening, the world still turned, and Madeline was stuck working with Pièrre every day. The only saving grace was that Pièrre’s apprentices were too caught up in their work to notice that the hack channeling their art hated them. The three of us almost never left the infirmary for all the small works that needed doing.

  I held a soldier’s heart rate steady as she rebuilt a chunk of missing skin from his shoulder. Charles lingered at the foot of the bed, watching us work. He held up a thick fold of paper.

  “Emilie, you have a letter from Bosquet.” Charles held out a thin letter sealed with wax. A chromatic crescent moon shimmered with stored power above the seal. “Is that an illusion?”

  I tore open the seal, and the crescent moon shifted into a single sprig of laurel. “Yes.”

  Staring at Charles from the corner of my eyes, I waited to see what he would say.

  He only hummed and muttered, “You should probably burn that when you’re done.”

  Charles followed us to an empty bed in the back of the infirmary where Madeline was cleaning. I glanced back at her and unfolded the letter close to my chest. She stayed on the opposite side of the bed.

  Emilie,

  If you do not see a crescent moon on the front, the wax seal holding our illusion was
broken and this letter has been read.

  I divined it. I saw it, and I saw you there. You’ve taken off the silver cuff, but I know what we can do. I’m doing something about it. I have been scrying this letter since it was sent. If you are amenable to helping, please touch your right hand to your nose. If you aren’t, thank you very much for the money and education. You’re dead to me.

  “A bit much,” I whispered and touched my nose. “Point taken, however.”

  “Here.” Charles held out another letter with the same seal. “Messenger had specific instructions, but I am curious to a fault, so I tipped well to leave it to me.”

  “Thank you,” I said, not meaning it at all. He laughed.

  Well, at least someone was putting the family money to good use.

  Good. That boy you saw was my friend’s brother. His name was Gabriel. There will be no forgiveness for this.

  I’ve been working with Laurel to scry for common soldiers and give them information about the court, and if we tell Laurel about Gabriel, they can tell the rest of the Demeine. Flyers, posters, placards—we tell everyone what they did to him. What they want to do to the rest of us. People may decide to believe it or not, but I think they will. We just have to tell enough people. We hope. That’s what we need your help with—getting the word out. We can’t leave the school.

  Also, I’ve enclosed a letter for my brother, Macé. He’s Chevalier du Ferrant’s new hack.

  I’m glad you’re not dead to me.

  “Me too,” I muttered.

  I tucked Macé’s letter into my pocket. I gathered a few small strands of power, channeled them through my hands, and burned the letters to me in my hands. The ash, with a bit of material from my blood, I wiped away as nothing more than water. Madeline had come to stand behind me, and she took a deep breath. I nodded.

  “We have a plan,” I said. “Except…”

  I looked across the empty infirmary bed to Charles.

  He crossed his arms and smiled. “You really should be more careful about working for Laurel.”

  I felt the soft prickle of Madeline gathering the noonday arts behind me.