Page 43

“Excuse me.” I approached the ladies, fighting the urge to lift my fan to cover my face as I usually did when introducing myself.

“Yes, dearie?”

“You said that the older prince is no longer betrothed?”

“That is what I heard, yes! But his younger brother, Curdy I think, is betrothed to her now,” she turned back to her friend. “Honestly, all this fuss about that princess marrying into the royal family. I personally would favor keeping Avivians in Avivia.”

At that point, the glassblower’s apprentice asked if he could help me, which was fortunate. If I had stayed and listed to the conversation any longer, I may have fallen over. I handed him the letter with instructions to deliver it to Thomas and left in a daze. All this time, I had been so sure that Curtis would move on, find someone else. But now that he had, I couldn’t believe it. For that one glorious year, I thought we would be together forever. Somehow, I hadn’t ever thought that Curtis would love anyone else. I felt like I had lost him all over again. I stumbled back to our manor and fell heavily into a chair.

Why did I feel so betrayed? I had no claim on Curtis’ heart. I had deserted him, fled miles away, then had written that absurd letter. He owed me no loyalty. There was no reason for me to expect anything other than that he had moved on with his life. He should move on. He was a prince; he had to do what was best for the kingdom. I should be happy for him…

But I wasn’t.

Selfishly, I wished that his love for me had never faltered and that one day, he would find me and declare his undying devotion to me.

Again, these were silly girlish fantasies. I would never see him again. And didn’t I have Mother as an example? She had been married to Father for decades before he passed away, and within a year she had remarried. Surely if someone would remarry after twenty years of marriage, a year-long teenage romance didn’t have a chance of withstanding the test of time.

I couldn’t get any work done that day. I tried to pay attention to the words before my eyes, but they wouldn’t focus. I kept imagining Aria in a white dress, walking down the aisle toward a beaming Curtis.

“Truly?”

I tore my thoughts away from royal engagements and weddings. “What?”

Cynthia opened the door. “I was just wondering if you could make the dinner tonight. I wanted to go out.”

I sighed. I had accomplished nothing yet that day except for the brief errand of delivering a letter. The news about Curtis had completely distracted me from the mountainous pile of documents waiting to be translated. “I don’t think I can, Cynthia. I’m sorry, but I have so much work to do.”

“I figured as much,” she sniffed, and snapped the door shut. Great. Now my stepsister was mad at me too. Again. Could I never get anything right?

I had to focus, I had to! I couldn’t keep dwelling on past relationships and hypothesizing about what ifs and where we would be now if Father hadn’t died. If the attack had never happened. Curtis and I might have had a future together. My chest ached with the knowledge of what I had missed out on. What good would it do to dwell on hypotheticals? The reality was that I didn’t belong with Curtis anymore. I needed to move on. I bullied my brain into meticulously copying out a business proposition, but with each stroke of my pen, Curtis’s face, still so perfectly etched in my memory, floated to the forefront of my mind.

For so long, I had trained myself to forget my past life. Now, I couldn’t think of anything else. Why was it so hard to let go of what would never be mine?

CHAPTER 37

A week later, a messenger arrived from the castle. The poor man had to knock multiple times before we heard him above the screeching voices of the music students, all rasping a song about a nightingale. Mother and Comfort were teaching and couldn’t answer the door, and I was upstairs, trying to transcribe a lengthy speech that had been given and needed to be converted into Islandrian. I could see the crest of the royal family on the door of the carriage, and looked straight down out of my window to see who was standing on our doorstep. By craning my neck, I saw Cynthia open the door, cloth tied around her hair and broom in hand, to accept a thick envelope from the messenger.

The messenger sprang back to his carriage as the footman cracker his whip and the horses trotted off. Before the carriage was even out of sight, I heard a hush fall upon the girls downstairs, followed soon after by the loudest shrieks and squeals that had ever been uttered in this house, even louder than the incident in which two mice appeared and darted through all of the swishing skirts.

What on earth?

I scrambled downstairs, hastily pulling my hair out of the knot on top of my head and letting it tumble down to cover my face. Ever since Comfort had announced our financial woes, I had stopped ordering cosmetics. Our family couldn’t afford the expense, so I had reverted to my earlier methods of using my fan or my hair to cover my burns.

The cacophony from the first level was overwhelming. All the girls enrolled in the finishing school leapt up and down, clutching each other and screaming their heads off.

“Girls, girls, settle down,” Mother repeated herself several times before anyone obeyed. She held the heavy, opened envelope in one hand, a piece of parchment in her other. Now she fixed all of her pupils with a firm stare.

“A well-bred lady does not whoop and cheer,” she chastised, “but waits for the other person to finish speaking before making herself heard.”

A few of the girls hung their heads at the reprimand, but most looked too excited to care. Comfort shushed girls, and I barely noticed Cynthia standing inconspicuously in a corner, still clutching her broom. I was halfway down the stairs but had paused, not wanting to miss a word that Mother said. Whatever message that envelope held must be important.

Once the room was silent, Mother shook open the short letter and began to read.

By Royal Proclamation:

In honor of His Majesty, Crown Prince Hubert of Islandria, heir to the throne, all eligible young maidens are invited to attend a royal ball, held at the castle on the first day of the eighth month at sunset.

Signed,