Page 49

Night

The Chateau grounds pass below me in a blur, nothing but spindly steel and skeletal trees, all coated by black-as-soot snow.

I fade in and out, half dazed and half weary but fighting stubbornly against unconsciousness, dreadfully afraid of letting my guard down again.

I don’t know what to think of the fact that Marie holds me to her chest, her chin against the crown of my head, and wings—her wings, glorious wings—spread out on either side of us.

Absurdly I think, It’s a good thing I’m not afraid of heights.

Then I close my eyes and lose the battle against darkness.

I am drowning.

Water fills my nose, my mouth, bitter and ink-dark, tasting of fish and rust and flesh.

I struggle, looking around myself, searching for the surface, but there is no surface in sight.

Far below, I can barely make out the serrated outline of ruins: crumpled columns and shattered statues and an altar split neatly in half. A temple.

My lungs burn. I thrash, kicking away from the temple, but I can’t seem to move. I know that by now I should have inhaled water, should have drowned. But I can’t. I’m trapped in stasis, not drowned but nearly there, my body begging for air.

Little owl.

The voice comes from everywhere at once, singsong, as fluid as the lake’s water. It floods into my nostrils and streams between my teeth, pushes its way all the way into my bursting lungs.

Little owl, little owl, should I let you drown?

Little liar, little thief, who stole your father’s crown.

Suddenly the ruins below me are gone; in their place is a colossal statue.

A woman, her pinned-up hair and smooth skin forged of cracked marble, with half the skin of her face missing, exposing the golden bone of her skull. Tiny black and white fish swim around her, small as ants. Slowly from the depths her hand emerges, reaching for me like a great sea beast’s maw.

What is it that you seek? Morgane demands.

I shouldn’t be able to speak as I drown, but somehow I can. “I want to destroy the Couronne du Roi.”

Little liar lies again. The Mother’s mouth doesn’t move, her eyes unblinking. Her hand comes ever closer to me, and I thrash, trying to escape, to no avail. Her single finger is the length of my body—somehow I know that if she traps me, I will be trapped forever.

Panic seizes me. “But that’s what I want! I want to destroy the crown so my father can’t use it, so I can free you and bring magic back.”

But why? Morgane demands. Her hand stretches wider and wider, as though to catch me. Why do all this?

“I want to become a sorcier!”

Colder, she sings.

“I want to be powerful!”

Glacial.

I grit my teeth, my eyes pricking. “I want to feel like I’m worthy.”

Ah. Warmer.

“I’m scared that if I’m not worthy, if—if I don’t prove myself, I will end up alone again.” The admission pours out of me in a flood. Tears slip from my eyes, mingling with the water around me. They are, I realize hazily, gold.

Morgane’s hand recoils from me. Little owl, little owl, looking for a nest. No one’s daughter, no one’s prize, whenever shall you rest?

“What do you want from me?” I sob, furiously brushing the tears from my eyes.

Morgane stares at me, unmoving. I want to tell you a story.

“Then tell it,” I snarl. “Or let me drown.”

So eager to self-destruct, Morgane remarks.

But very well. The story goes thus, little owl, little liar: Once upon a time, an ambitious king and his doubly ambitious advisor sought to steal magic from its protectors and unleash it lawlessly upon the world.

So they took the collar that had once restrained a beast and reforged it into a crown.

They were of two powerful bloodlines—but you have heard this part of the tale. You have heard how they trapped me.

What you do not know is how they tricked me.

In my own shrine, my own home. They came to me as eager as young gods themselves, saying they had a great gift: a body for me to inhabit, to walk the mortal plane with, to transform not only with my magic but also with my hands.

With it, I could taste the magic of my sisters.

I could create and destroy as only humans can do.

My sisters always said I was too curious about humans, too kind to them.

They said I should have never given that little saint my gift of golden blood.

And perhaps I shouldn’t have, for it was turned against me.

But I did not know that until I had put on the crown they gifted me, and I only had enough time to cast a curse of vengeance upon them, condemning them to face their worst fears: the King, to lose the control he so craved; the sorcier, to lose the magic that never seemed to satiate him.

She sounds pleased with herself, as though the curses were some clever accomplishment, and I resist the urge to scoff. Then she finishes, mournful: That is all I could do. The next thing I knew, I was trapped in a deep, drowning darkness, not unlike this one.

“So how do I free you?” I ask, my head spinning.

Little owl, she says kindly. Little lost one, looking to atone.

Little owl, little sorcier, always on your own.

“Enough with the rhymes!” I grit out.

Enough with the rhymes? Morgane echoes petulantly. Very well, if that is what you ask.

And she begins to sink back into the deep.

“No!” I shout, despair filling me. “No, wait, I’m sorry. Please, you have to help me, please .”

The statue’s full lips stretch into a stony smile, revealing teeth sharp as needles.

That which gives the most strength can also be the greatest weakness.

“Wait!” I try to shout again, but all that escapes my mouth is a gurgle. I choke, water searing my sinuses, clogging my throat. My body convulses, once, twice; my vision fogs and darkens.

Alone again in the dark, I finally drown.

I jolt upright, coughing violently, and immediately double over. My hands scrabble for my chest as I try and fail to force up lake-water, over and over again, though my mouth is dry and there is no lake at all.

“Odile?” I’m too panicked to identify the voice calling my name. I press my palms to the dusty floor, taking wheezing, desperate gasps. Reality trickles in slowly, leaving me only more disorientated, only more uncertain.

“Odile, what’s happening?”

That’s when I realize who it is that’s standing beside me, his hands extended hopelessly, his eyes wide and earnest—and oh, I’m going to kill him.

“You.” I whirl on Damien, wiping my mouth, my chest hot. “What are you doing here?” I reach into my pockets for Buttons and come up empty-handed, my panic only amplifying as I realize I’m defenseless. “How did I get here?”

My chest heaves. My vision spins. I don’t know who I’m angriest at—Morgane, Damien, myself, or the fact that I have just drowned in my own dreams.

Distantly I recognize my surroundings—this is the uppermost room of the Théatre, beneath the cupola.

In the middle of the floor is the hole through which the Théatre’s chandelier can be pulled up.

It feels almost manipulative that Damien has brought me here of all places, to a spot I remember so fondly.

Damien stands swiftly before me. He looks uncharacteristically disheveled—his black hair is mussed and unruly, there are bags under his eyes, and he’s gone unshaved for at least two days now. He’s still wearing his guard’s uniform, cape and all, but even that is grimy, the edges frayed.

He holds his hands up slowly, as though to surrender. “I’m not going to hurt you. Mademoiselle d’Auvigny brought you here. She’s been helping me keep you safe.”

“Where is she now?” I demand. I remember the haze of my rescue. The feeling of white wings wrapping around me. The feeling of flying. “Where is Marie?”

“She’s gone to gather information. She’ll be back soon.” Damien makes a placating gesture. “Please, Odile, I can explain everything.”

“You don’t need to,” I snap. “You explained enough when you betrayed me to the Regent and got me arrested, you absolute asshole—”

“I know,” Damien interrupts. “What I did was stupid. I was wrong. I didn’t—I’d spent days fermenting in anger and doubt.

All I knew was this: The night after you arrived at the palace with some sort of covert mission, I found the King disemboweled by the lake.

Then I was seized and blamed and thrown in a dungeon and told I would be executed.

What was I supposed to think? Especially after you came to see me with Aimé, seemingly for no purpose other than to gloat. ”

“Gloa—? I was trying to help him find the killer, you dunce.”

“I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t seen you in five years.

I wasn’t sure who you were anymore.” He looks away.

“Before I knew it I was being transferred to the city prisons, to a tiny, crowded cell, where I rotted in uncertainty. Until Aimé showed up, saying my name had been cleared, because the Queen had been killed by the same sorcier that killed his father, and he thought I might know how to find her, and I—”

“You thought it was me,” I say, dismayed.

He runs a hand across his face. “You were acting so cryptic!”

“Right, so you thought to yourself, oh, my sister is surely transforming into a horrifying beast and going around ripping out people’s organs. A very logical conclusion, of course.” I give him a scathing smile. “But you’ve always assumed the worst of me, haven’t you?”

“Dilou…”

“Don’t call me that,” I growl. Now that I’m properly awake, I become slowly aware of the aches of my body—the throbbing at the back of my skull, the protests of my wounded knees where they’re bent beneath me.

I look down to see that they’ve been bandaged.

The previous day returns to me in a blur—Regnault turning the Duke of Marsonne into a statue, my attempt at stealing the Couronne, and the disaster that followed. The reminder only fuels my anguish.

“Don’t pretend you’ve changed your mind about me,” I snarl at Damien. “You made it clear when you left five years ago.”

“Mademoiselle…” A new voice joins in hesitantly.

I whirl to meet the wide, soft eyes of Aimé-Victor Augier, who has been sitting behind me all along, watching everything unfold with nervous worry.

His golden hair tumbles loose around his shoulders, and he’s wrapped in a blanket I recognize distinctly as having once belonged to Damien.

He’s still wearing his white clothes from the wedding, but there isn’t a claw or tusk in sight.

In normal circumstances, I might have been relieved to see the Dauphin. But I’m still rattled from the nightmare, shaken by my father’s brutality, and all I can remember is how he’d spoken about me to Marie right before the wedding.

I am acutely aware that both Aimé and Damien were responsible for putting me behind bars, and Regnault, the only person I thought I could trust, turned out to be the greatest liar of all.

I feel like a caged animal, surrounded by hunters on all sides.

So I turn on Aimé-Victor Augier, hackles raised.

“Bold of you to interject, considering everything that’s happened,” I say.

“Last time I saw you, you were busy slaughtering innocents, committing all the crimes you locked me up for.”

Aimé pales immediately, and my brother shouts, “Odile! How could you say that?”

“N-no,” Aimé says painfully, “she’s right.

And the truth is I… I simply didn’t know.

I had no memory of when I—when… Anne hid it from me my whole life.

She told me that the gaps in my memory were…

episodes. Because of… nerves. And that night in her study, all I remembered was seeing you transform.

Next thing I knew Anne was dead, and everyone was blaming a sorcier. So I thought—”

“Yes, I know what you thought,” I interrupt darkly, something inside me twisting and shattering. “You made that perfectly clear.”

Aimé recoils as if stung. I have to shove my teeth into my lower lip to keep a sob from breaking free.

“Dil—Odile,” my brother tries cautiously. “You know that isn’t fair. You aren’t exactly the victim in this situation. What happened to you was a mistake, but you…” You brought it upon yourself. He doesn’t say the words, but he might as well have screamed them.

I march up to him, ignoring the protests of my bruised knees. “You know very well none of this would have happened if you hadn’t abandoned me five years ago. If you hadn’t left me, just like our parents did.”

Damien blanches. “You—you told me to leave!”

“Yes, because you said you didn’t want to be around someone as cruel and vindictive as me!” I shout. Damien looks stricken. Before he can say another word, I turn and rush for the door.

I barrel out of the room. My body screams at me to slow down, to take a breath, but I refuse to rest, refuse to stay here, refuse to look my brother or the Dauphin in the eye.

And distantly I know, distantly, that my reaction is extreme.

That perhaps I should have considered that my knees are bandaged, that I was covered in a blanket when I woke, that both boys were clearly keeping vigil over me.

But there is a fissure between us now that is not easily mended.

And if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that kindness can be a weapon too.

I make it down the stairs and into the hollow Théatre entrance hall, my chin ducked and my vision blurring. Don’t cry. I try to force the tears back. Don’t cry don’t cry don’t—

“Odile?”

I have been so focused on holding myself together that I didn’t notice the familiar figure striding toward me through the grand foyer. When I do look up, it’s like a fist has closed around my heart.

Marie d’Odette approaches the stairs, as delicate as sea-foam and powerful as the pull of tides. She’s wearing peculiar clothes—a puffy-sleeved silver doublet and narrow breeches I recognize as belonging to a dancer’s costume.

Poking over her shoulders are the tips of white wings.

She’s as beautiful as ever, the Swan Princess, and seeing her is like being blessed, like the merciful touch of a deity’s hand. The relief that washes over me is so heady that it nearly sends me to my knees.

“Marie,” I whisper.

Then I run down the stairs and launch myself into her arms.