Page 23

The fear was always mine.

*

We make left turns, and right turns, and go up a flight of stairs—though I remember no stairs from my wanderings—before Aletheia lets me pause. This blindness—this forced blindness—is exhausting. My mind feels too alert, like an animal that senses something is amiss. I hear a door open, and then close once I’m ushered through.

His voice speaks from behind me.

“We are back in the great-room, Psyche. Come—there is something I wish to show you.”

The great-room: I suppose he means that enormous, muraled room that my bedroom opened onto.

I feel his presence draw nearer and he takes my forearm, quite gently. A strange feeling floods through me. I remember once again the ride through the air from Sikyon, the few moments of it before I lost consciousness. I felt it then, too, where his skin touched mine—this sensation, as if I could feel the life in his veins, the same way that when dipping one’s hand in a moving stream, one feels its current. It seems to sing out under his skin, the song of his life force, coursing and rippling.

Are demons immortal, I wonder. Perhaps this is what it feels like to touch an immortal.

He leads me a few paces forward, and stops.

“Careful. This stone is uneven.”

I hesitate, then feel it out with my foot. One wide, square stone, raised higher than the rest.

“This is the Hearthstone,” he says. “The heart of this palace. The oath-binder.”

Beneath the black silk, I blink.

“And why do you speak of oaths?” I fold my arms across my chest. “Have you not taken all the pledges you needed from me already?”

He sighs, as though I require some great patience from him.

“Psyche, I wish you to speak it here, on the Hearthstone: that you will never look upon my face.”

I don’t know why I hesitate. Why would I even wish to see his demon face? It is the other faces I’m thinking of now. The other faces so far away from me, which I love and cannot look upon.

“Very well,” I say. “I will never look upon your face.”

Not that I can imagine having the opportunity, given the lengths he’s going to prevent it. But my words seem to hang in the air, strangely final. Then he clears his throat, and the moment passes.

“Aletheia, we will eat now. Please prepare the lady Psyche for our meal.”

I feel Aletheia’s bony grip close over my arm again, and she tugs me away, into what I realize—once she shuts the door, and loosens the blindfold—is my bedroom. But out the window I’m greeted by the strangest sight. The view has changed: it is no longer of an endless, tranquil sea, but instead, seems to look out over a thick forest. I stare, then close my eyes and open them again. But the sea does not reappear.

Am I to believe this palace is…moving,somehow?

Aletheia makes an impatient noise in her throat, and indicates the divan where a new change of clothes has already been laid out.

“I am to wear these?”

I wait for Aletheia to turn her face to the wall while I change. My old nurse helped me dress often enough, but I do not wish to be naked under those scornful, beady eyes.

When I’ve finished, she gestures to a chair and table with alarge mirror on it. I hesitate, then take a seat. She takes a comb from the desk and begins to run it through my hair, none too gently.

“Ow!” I protest. “You might go a little slower.”

She doesn’t listen, but proceeds to fasten my hair with surprisingly nimble fingers.

Since our nurse left, Dimitra is the only one who has dressed my hair—we used to dress each other’s. But that stopped some years ago, around the time people started to call me beautiful. Which was also around the time Dimitra began to dislike me.

Aletheia’s hands do not shake at all; they are precise and deliberate. Her movements do not match her age, I have noticed. Her walk, too, is the sprightly, powerful walk of someone much younger. But as I watch her gnarled old hands secure my hair in braids and pins, I can’t help but cringe. Despite her deftness, she is too old to labor over me like this, doing something I could certainly do myself. It makes me uncomfortable for another reason, too: I do not wish her to beautify me forhim. But when she has finished, I must admit she has some special gift. My hair has never looked so elegant, and she has brushed it to a fine radiance, so that now it seems to catch the light strand by strand.