Page 56

No.” Panic surges through me, brittle and horrified and desperate. I run to Marie, falling to my knees at her side. Lake water laps at my ankles—the sun shines with vicious, mocking brightness.

“Marie?” I whisper, hovering my hands over her spine, over her wings, over the dagger sunk hilt-deep into her back.

And I know, I know, this is not the sort of injury anyone survives.

But I still wrack my brain for a solution.

I have so many skills, yet in the face of this, I come up empty-handed, useless.

I’m useless.

“Oh, Marie, no, please—” Numbly I reach for her face, wanting to lift her away from the wet earth that now sullies her clothes, her cheek.

Marie’s eyes flutter open, then closed again.

Blood trickles from the corner of her mouth, from the dagger wound; it sinks into the beautiful white feathers of her wings, and I try, ineffectively, to wipe it away.

“What happened?” Aimé kneels beside me, and unfairly, I want to shove him away, to tell him to leave. “How did this happen?”

“Regnault,” I spit between chattering teeth. “He must have thrown it at her as she was carrying me away.”

“Oh,” Aimé manages, his voice cracking, his eyes already pooling with tears. “Oh, Marie .”

Behind me, I can hear Damien shouting for the guardsmen to get to the Chateau, to fetch a physician, but I know it is too late. It is far, far too late.

It hits me with violent certainty. “This was my fault,” I whisper. “She came to save me, I should have known better, I should have told her not to come back, why didn’t I tell her that—” I grab Aimé’s lapels, shaking him, and he endures it with a pitying look, brushing tears from his eyes.

I shove him away and turn back to Marie, running my fingers along her cheek. “Why did you have to come back for me?” I whisper. “Why did you always come back for me?”

“Because I love you,” Marie says weakly.

It’s just like her, to break such devastating news in the most logical, matter-of-fact manner. But the words might as well be a dagger, because they embed themselves ruthlessly in my heart.

“What?” I burst out. “You fool, why—why would you do that?”

Marie laughs weakly, another ribbon of blood dribbling from her lips.

“I’m not certain.” Then she seems to gather her strength, and she pushes herself up from the ground, soil sticking to her hair and smeared across her cheek.

I grab her before she can fall back down again, pull her against me, carefully avoiding the dagger.

Marie’s eyes flutter closed, then open again, their usual beautiful silver clouded over with pain.

“I’m not certain,” she says again, gazing at me.

“Perhaps it’s because you are headstrong, and obnoxious, and conniving.

Perhaps it’s because I like the way you laugh, too loud and sharp and free, like you don’t care who hears.

Perhaps it’s because when I’m with you, I feel like I’m stretching my wings after years of being caged.

I don’t know the true reason.” She smiles, her chest hitching painfully.

“Isn’t that ironic? This is the puzzle I can’t solve. ”

“That’s why you have to stay alive,” I plead, frantic. “We’ll solve it together. We’ll learn to navigate this together .”

“I wish we could,” Marie says, swallowing painfully. Her breathing is dreadfully shallow, her fingers cold when they brush my cheek, trying to collect the tears there. “But I fear I—I haven’t the time.”

“Marie, please —”

But her eyes are already closed again, her chest barely rising.

“Marie!” I say desperately, shaking her cruelly, trying to bring awareness into her freezing body. But there comes no reply. “Marie, open your eyes, damn you—”

Through a haze of red-hot anger, I can barely make out Damien crouching beside Aimé, reaching gently for Marie’s wrist and seeking out her pulse.

Whatever he finds, it makes him draw in a rattling, harsh breath.

He meets Aimé’s eyes and shakes his head, and I watch as Aimé crumples against my brother, sobbing.

“No!” I snarl, because the pain is unbearable; the pain is no longer one dagger but a thousand, and I am pierced over and over again. “No, no, she can’t be dead, don’t lie to me!”

Damien reaches for me, but I slap his arm away.

“Get away from me!” I say, because all I can feel is anger, because this is not how a story should end, because the heroes are not supposed to be the ones who die, because I don’t want to be alone again, because because because—

Because I never told her that I love her too.

I let loose a terrible growl, all my frustration and panic escaping through my teeth.

I pull Marie closer against myself, tilt my head up to the sky.

“Morgane!” I scream. “Morgane, I know you’re there!

” I flex my fingers, imagining magic pooling between them, and I’m surprised to see them glow briefly gold.

So it is back, I think numbly, and somehow the thought is cruelly punishing, because magic may be back, but Marie is dead, and I don’t know any spells that can change that.

“Morgane!” I shout again, my voice carrying across the lake’s placid waters. “I freed you, and now you owe me a debt! Come back and pay it!”

Nothing happens. No answer comes. I drop my eyes, my chest heaving. The world suddenly feels like it is tightening, compressing, grasping at me and the body in my arms.

I press my forehead into Marie’s pale curls and sob in defeat.

I cry, and the world fades out around me, silent but for the distant call of a waterbird, the sloshing of the lake against the dock, the whispering of wind over Marie’s limp wings.

I cry, my shoulders seizing, my world crumbling.

I cry, whispering incoherent pleas against the forehead of the girl I might have loved.

Little owl. My head jerks up at the grating, familiar voice.

Around me, the lakeside is suddenly empty. No sign of Damien, or Aimé, or the guardsmen, or the dead tarasques—there is only bristling grass and withered weeds, and a woman standing over me, beatific and impossible.

Morgane appears just as she did in the lake, though she has done me the mercy of shrinking to a regular human’s height.

Her skin is cracked stone, aged and water-worn—there are pond weeds wrapped around her arms and the bones of a fish tangled in her hair.

Her peeled face appears even more garish in the daylight, the gold skull beneath dull and scratched.

Her eyes, too, are stone, and a ring of golden spines haloes her head, more ominous than divine.

I hear I owe you a debt. The goddess purses her lips, as though the idea leaves a sour taste in her mouth. What is it that you would ask of me?

I lower Marie’s body against my lap, gently brushing muddied hair out of her face. “I saved your life by freeing you from the Couronne. Now save hers.” I rest my hands on Marie’s chest, as though I might force it to move again.

Morgane’s response comes slow and measured. That is not within my domain, I’m afraid.

“?‘Within your domain’?” I repeat, disbelieving.

She eyes me exasperatedly, looking surprisingly childish. I am the goddess of transformation, not creation nor destruction. I can turn one thing into another, but I cannot create flesh where there is none, cannot make life blossom where it is wilting.

“Wilting? You mean she’s not dead?”

Not quite. Seconds from it, to be certain—her heartbeat is very weak, but it has yet to fully stop. You humans are remarkably hardy creatures.

“But… but she’s going to die.”

Yes.

I shake my head, refusing to accept her words, refusing to lose this battle. “If you cannot do it, call your sisters. They owe me a debt as well, for I saved them from your fate, from capture by Regnault.”

Morgane looks away from me. I cannot.

“Why? ”

She is silent for a moment, a troubled look tightening her regal features. Finally, reluctantly, she says, Because they do not answer my calls.

I blink. “What?”

My sisters are missing, Morgane admits. When I was captured, they fled far from Auréal, and they do not know yet that I have been freed and that they can safely return. Perhaps if you find them, they might concede and bring back this— She gestures to the girl in my arms.

“Marie.”

Marie, she amends flatly. Find them, win their approval, and they might teach you magic stronger than mine, might give you power unfathomable. Or they might kill you. You never know with siblings.

I stare down at my hands, still clutching at Marie’s doublet, that silver costume that had made her look so ethereal. My mind reels. “But by the time I find them, Marie will be dead.”

This I can help with, Morgane says, sounding pleased at the notion. To repay my debt, as you have asked.

She crouches beside me, and it takes all my willpower not to flinch away. “What are you going to do?” I demand, covering Marie’s body with mine defensively.

Peace, Morgane scolds. I am going to preserve her. If she allows me to, of course, and if she has the willpower to survive the process.

“Will it be painful?”

Morgane regards me flatly. Do you want my help or not, little owl?

I grit my teeth but sit back reluctantly, lowering Marie to the ground with as much gentleness as I can.

I roll her carefully onto her side so that the dagger in her back isn’t jostled.

I want to touch her one last time, to reassure her, but before I get the chance, Morgane snatches the dagger in Marie’s back and pulls.

There comes an explosion of brilliant light, Marie’s body vanishing beneath a veil of blinding golden brightness. The light grows and grows and grows, until I am forced to close my eyes, until I am falling back, pressing my arm protectively against my face, heat searing my skin—

Then, just as quickly as it started, the light vanishes. I lie on my back, blinded and breathless, awareness returning to me slowly and then all at once. Suddenly I’m hearing Damien’s and Aimé’s panicked voices.

“By the Mothers, how did this—”

“Is she all right?”

“She’s all right, but—”

“How is this possible?”

“Odile, can you hear me?”

Nearby, I can make out the awed murmurs and gasps of the guardsmen. I blink furiously, trying to dispel the afterimages impeding my vision. Someone helps me sit up, and I groan, pressing the heels of my hands to my eyes. “Damned Mothers.”

“Odile, what happened?” Damien asks, a strangely breathy, awed note to his cadence.

“I spoke to Morgane,” I grit out into my hands. “Tried to bargain with her.”

“And is—is she the one who did this?” Aimé asks, his voice still croaky from crying.

“Did what ?” I demand. Then I look up, and a broken sound escapes me.

Where Marie had been lying just moments before stands a beautiful, mournful statue.

It’s Marie d’Odette, lithe and elegant, her every feature molded perfectly from pearlescent stone.

Her wings are outspread, her full lips parted in a hopeful smile, and one of her hands reaches upward, as though trying to seize the sun from its lofty perch.

Her hair unspools around her, wild and free, her bare feet barely touching their marble pedestal, mere seconds from leaving the ground and taking to the sky.

Wordlessly I walk up to the statue, clutching my hands to my chest, wishing I could grip my heart and force it to stop aching.

I can’t help but extend my hand, pressing my fingertips to the statue’s knee.

Half of me still expects to find smooth, warm skin, as I’d felt last night in the Théatre’s dressing room.

But only cold stone greets my touch, sending a chill down my arm.

I quickly pull away, my throat tightening.

“Odile?” Damien calls behind me. “How did this happen?”

I don’t answer him. I can’t. A troubled, numb sort of peace spreads over me as I walk around the statue, as I catch sight of the golden streak that runs along Marie’s wing, widest in the spot where the dagger had sunk into her flesh.

“Odile?” my brother asks again. I let a breath judder out from between my lips.

Then I straighten my spine slowly, forcing every vertebra to click into place.

Firm. Unwavering. For the first time since I broke the Couronne, I can feel the trickle of magic in my veins, testing the limits of my skin, begging to be used.

I turn back to the onlookers, meeting my brother’s uncertain gaze and then Aimé’s earnest blue one. I smile at them, strained and sharp-edged but determined.

“She’s not dead,” I say. I don’t explain further—there is no point telling them what I learned from Morgane about the missing Mothers. The kingdom has enough trouble brewing without mixing in the affairs of sorcery. “And I’m going to get her back.”

I take one final look over my shoulder. My heart is heavy, full of doubt and grief and regret—I leave all of it at the feet of Marie’s statue, along with a promise to return once I have the power to heal her.

Then I turn back to my companions.

“Let us go back to the Chateau,” I say. “We have a king to crown.”