The Rose Bargain

Chapter Eight

I’ve pictured this moment for months. I’ve written down what I plan to ask for over and over, fed the paper to the fire until I was sure I would make no mistakes.

“Your Majesty.”

My voice is high and sweet, just like I practiced. I hunch my shoulders in an attempt to make myself as small as possible. So small, a nothing person, absolutely no one. “I wish to undo the bargain you made with my sister, Lady Lydia Benton, on Saturday, the first of May, eighteen forty-six. Whatever you gave her, let it be returned, and whatever she gave you, may it be given back to her, wholly and unaltered.”

I take a breath as I finish, relieved to have gotten it right.

The queen presses her lips together as she watches me through narrowed eyes. “Are you finished?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I bow my head reverently, desperate to impress her.

The queen laughs until it echoes off the walls of the throne room. “You cannot undo another’s bargain.”

“Your Majesty, I wish for nothing more than to undo the bargain of my most beloved sister. She can’t remember what she bargained for, you see, and I want to end her distress. I’m sure you understand.”

She peers down at me from the dais. “You may wish for whatever you please, but you will be disappointed.”

“Will you tell me, at least, what her bargain was? Can you do me that one kindness?”

“The bargains are made in confidence.”

“Are the bargains always undoable?”

I ask, perhaps too boldly.

The throne room dims as a cloud passes over the sun outside. The queen’s eyes flicker to a stained glass window and then back to me. “There is much about magic you will never understand.”

“I cannot imagine you’d wish to see a subject as loyal and dedicated as Lydia so pained.”

I may have gone too far with that one. I need to be sweet, to be good, that’s the only way any of this will work.

The queen arches a brow. “Your sister made the bargain of her own free will while sound of mind.”

There’s only one more question, the one that plagued me like the wind on that February night, and she’s the only one who can answer it.

“Was she there? In the Otherworld?”

The queen lets out a long breath. “No. That door has been locked for four hundred years.”

Something like sadness flashes in her dark eyes.

It’s drafty in the throne room, but that’s not why my heart feels like ice. Faeries can’t lie. It’s something I loved most about the stories when I was little, but I hate it now, hate it because I know she’s telling the truth, and I don’t want to accept it. If Lydia wasn’t in the Otherworld, that means the police were right. She really was just another runaway who didn’t care enough about me not to leave me behind.

“What about Prince Bram?”

I ask somewhat desperately.

She shakes her head. “A special case. Doors are funny. Sometimes they only open one way.”

It’s more information than I thought she’d give, but it doesn’t make it any easier to accept.

Queen Mor looks down at me from her throne, her back to its stony mask. “What are you most afraid of, Ivy Benton?”

I think for a moment, then answer truthfully. “Failing my family.”

Queen Mor leans back and takes a breath. “I could help you.”

But she can’t. Not really. Not when what I want is revenge and she is the one to blame for Lydia’s ruin.

“You could have more land for your father’s failing estate, a particular mind for bookkeeping, the ability to play piano so beautifully it would calm the nerves of anyone listening. You need only pay the right price.”

“No thank you.”

She laughs again, no pity in it. “I give you one last opportunity, Ivy Benton, to take something for yourself.”

I want my sister back. I bite my tongue before the words can escape.

When we were small and Lydia and I drove Mama and our governess up the wall by bickering and tattling on each other, Mama would grab us by our little faces and say, You are not your sister’s keeper.

But who am I, if not a sister? And what does that mean if not this?

“There is nothing else I want, Your Majesty. I thank you, most sincerely, for your time.”

The queen sighs against her throne. “Bring the next one in.”

Mama talks the whole way home, babbling about my win and her friends, but the words run together, just a buzzing in my ears as I stare out the carriage window.

I fiddle with the edge of the handkerchief and peel it back to find the gash in the middle of my hand almost completely healed. I feel a sudden flood of warmth for Prince Bram. But even the memory of his perfect face and kind smile doesn’t dull the sharp edges of my mood.

It’s only as we pull up to our house that my mother pauses her frantic stream of consciousness chatting and pauses to look at me in earnest. “You know,”

she says, steadying herself as the carriage shudders to a halt, “you’d make a wonderful princess.”

I wouldn’t—not this new version of me who is so full of anger. But I smile softly and say, “Thank you.”

“Your new memory will come in handy in the competition for his hand. What did she take in return?”

she asks cautiously, as if afraid of the answer.

I see no reason to lie to her. “I didn’t make a bargain.”

“Oh, darling,”

she says under her breath, and it breaks my heart to hear her disappointment.

It’s a kindness that she lets me race up to my room and sit there alone for the rest of the day. As the sun sets, Mrs. Tuttle brings up a tray for dinner, but even she has the good sense not to speak with me.

It’s Lydia, back when she was herself, who would have made a good princess. Popular and beautiful, she had a reputation for her quick smile and quicker wit.

It’s well past eleven when I pad across the hall to her room. I’m not shocked to find her awake. She never keeps normal hours anymore. She’s propped up in bed, a gothic novel in her hands.

“Mama already told me,”

she says as I enter. “Will you make me curtsy to you when you win?”

I sink down next to her, like I used to when I was small and she let me sleep in her bed nearly every night.

“Who says I’m going to win?”

“You’ve never had enough faith in yourself,”

she whispers.

“You had plenty for the both of us.”

A family doesn’t need two stars, and Lydia was already ours.

“No.”

She’s staring at the ceiling, neither of us looking at each other. “You’re misremembering.”

Maybe it’s the dark, or maybe it’s that I’ll be moving to the palace tomorrow, but the wall between us feels less impenetrable tonight, like we’re speaking honestly for the first time in months.

A beat of silence stretches between us. She closes her book and turns down the gas lamp at her bedside.

We’re uncomfortably close to the subject we can’t discuss. The second of Lydia’s three great betrayals.

Lydia and I have had a deal since I was seven and she was nine.

We sliced our thumbs with a sharp garden rock and pressed them together until they became slippery with blood. She vowed she’d marry Lord Chapwick’s son from down the street, and I could live with them forever. He was a nice boy with a freckled face and an obvious soft spot for Lydia. My life would be my own, and I’d get to be with my sister. I could think of no better future.

It might not have been a magical bargain with an immortal queen, but to me it felt just as sacred and unbreakable. Our deal was the bedrock upon which our relationship rested, a constant.

But then, after her bargain was made and her first season came and went, she didn’t marry Lord Chapwick’s son. Everyone in town thought their betrothal was a foregone conclusion, especially the Chapwicks, but she rebuffed him. I begged her to explain until I was blue in the face, but Lydia could offer nothing beyond “it didn’t feel right.”

She pretended she couldn’t hear me sobbing through our shared wall at night. I didn’t understand. I still don’t.

Lord Chapwick’s son married Fiona Edgar instead. As for her two seasons out in society, Lydia barely tried at all, always standing at the edge of the ballroom, lying about a hurt ankle.

“We’ll find someone better for you, Lydia,”

I’d say, but she’d just nod with that odd far-off look of hers. It was a betrayal I didn’t know how to forgive her for.

Then she disappeared.

I blink back to the room. “Do you really not remember what happened?”

This is the last time I’ll ask her.

Her breathing stutters. “I swear it. It’s awful, knowing that anything could have happened to me. Makes me feel like my body isn’t my own anymore or something. I can’t explain it.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“I don’t think I would have chosen to do this to you, but I’m sorry if I did. I’m sorry it happened at all. I should have protected you.”

It’s the first apology I’ve gotten, but now that it’s out in the air, I don’t think I ever needed it. I’ve always known this is how Lydia felt. We’re too tied together that way.

“It’s all right,”

I say, and I’m surprised to find I mean it. “We’ll be old spinsters together.”

Lydia laughs, but there’s no real force behind it.

When Papa dies, his title will pass to a second cousin we’ve never met and the creditors will take the rest. I hope selling the May Queen tiara will help once I’ve lost the competition for Prince Bram.

“Mama told me you didn’t make a bargain. That wasn’t very smart,”

Lydia says.

I shrug. “Because it went so well for you?”

She frowns. “Mean.”

I don’t tell her what I asked the queen. Lydia would only feel guilt, and I see no need to punish her with it. “He’s not going to pick me. I didn’t see the point.”

Lydia may have been meant for Lord Chapwick, but my poor prospects were an equally foregone, but much less appealing, conclusion. The awkward second daughter of an impoverished marquess—even at the best of times I could never have hoped for better than a widower decades my senior or one of the lesser members of the aristocracy with something so broken inside of him, he’d been rejected by everyone else: one of the cruel men, the liars, the cheats.

It’s a relief to have saved myself from that fate, even if I’ve doomed us in a different kind of way.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

I ask my sister.

“Always.”

“I went out to look for you when you were gone. Snuck out in the middle of the night and everything.”

She bolts upright, aghast. “Ivy! What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that I’d be able to feel it if you were dead. You ought to give me credit; I was right.”

I was hoping she’d laugh, but she just looks sad again. “What happened?”

“You’re never going to believe me.”

She holds out her pinkie. We only pinkie promise when Mama is not around, as she hates being left out. “I promise I will,” she says.

“I got lost, and Prince Emmett ran me over in his stupid carriage.”

“He did not!”

I nod. “He took mercy on me and escorted me home after that, but still.”

Lydia frowns. “He was probably up to all sorts of lecherous things, out in the middle of the night like that.”

“I pity any girl foolish enough to fall for his tricks.”

“How are you going to stand him when Bram marries you?”

I roll my eyes. “I’ll have you move in as my lady-in-waiting and we can torment him together. He’ll never know a day of peace.”

“He’s awful,”

she sniffs.

“The absolute worst,”

I reply, a little thin. As proof, I run across the hall to my room and pull his calling card out from where I’d hidden it under my mattress. I don’t know why I kept it. I was being stupid.

Lydia gasps in glee as I pass it to her, and she smiles wide when I tell her she can be the one to burn it.

She tosses it into the fire, laughing, and we both watch as it curls and turns to ash.

“Try not to miss me too much when I’m gone,”

I say with an elbow to her ribs.

“I always miss you,”

she says, and it’s a little too honest. It’s not something we can bear, so we say nothing at all.