The Rose Bargain

Chapter Twenty

For a moment we just look at each other. Olive slips her pointer finger into her mouth to suck at where it’s bleeding. My whole body is so shaky with effort, I collapse onto a love seat, and Emmy joins me with a heavy sigh.

As if nothing out of the ordinary has happened, the footman rings his golden bell signaling the start of the next rotation.

There’s a glance of recognition that goes around the room, as if the thought crosses all our minds simultaneously. If we all refuse to do this, a loser and a winner cannot be chosen.

“Let’s call it a tie?”

Greer proposes.

“It’s like you read my mind,”

Emmy says.

“Agreed,” I add.

“Obviously,”

Faith says.

Olive just nods, her finger firmly in her mouth.

We’re halfway down the stairs when Olive stops suddenly. “My bracelet!”

she exclaims. “It must have come unclasped. Just one moment, I’ll be back.”

As we wait, I stare up at the tree that reaches the ceiling, its green leaves quaking slightly, the very tops brushing the honeycomb glass.

I felt such determination the first time I saw this tree on the day of the Pact Parade. Now I just feel wrung out.

Olive comes bounding down the stairs a few moments later.

I’m half expecting the footmen or royal guards or the queen herself to stop us, but the six of us stride right out the door and across the lawn to our cottage, with no fanfare at all.

Marion is waiting for us, sitting at the dining table, where the cook has laid out an impressive lunch.

She pops up, her eyes wide with surprise. “What happened?”

Emmy plops down at the table and grabs a scone. “We decided you were right.”

Marion’s eyes get misty with tears, but she doesn’t say another word. Faith sits down next to her and lays a comforting hand on her shoulder.

Lunch passes with the tense silence of children expecting a scolding. We all flinch at the slightest creak in the floor, expecting some consequence for walking out of the queen’s second trial.

At teatime, there’s a sharp rap at the front door. We startle. “I’ll get it,”

I say. Standing there is a footman with a package wrapped in brown paper. He hands it to me. I peel back the paper to take a peek and find an achingly familiar shade of green.

I run up the stairs to my room. “Who was it?”

Olive calls.

“Just a letter from my mother!”

I toss the book on my bed and tear the paper open to reveal the cover. In gilded lettering it reads Faeries of the British Isles.

I flip open the cover to find a note from Bram. A book about magic, for a girl who already has plenty. —B.

It’s the same edition as the one I had as a child. There’s an annotation inside the front cover. From the Library of EJB, 4 Waters Lane, Alton, England. 1702.

I clutch it to my chest, savoring the smell of it, then tuck it under my mattress.

Tonight we’re expected at the Welbys’ masquerade ball. Count and Countess Welby are some of the younger members of the peerage, with reputations for throwing full-on bacchanalia. Tonight’s party doesn’t even begin until after ten and is anticipated to rage until sunrise.

The cottage turns into a tornado of silks and jewels and feathers. Olive runs back and forth from our room to Marion’s in nothing but her chemise and a pair of butterfly wings. Greer’s enormous peacock feather backpiece is too large, and she is momentarily lodged in the stairwell. Emmy has to push her through, both of them laughing so hard they’re on the verge of tears.

All the while, Lottie holds me still in front of the mirror, painstakingly placing crystals in my upswept hair. She even uses little bits of paste to stick a few to my cheekbones and at the corners of my eyes.

My dress tonight is midnight-blue silk, with sleeves that fall wide at my wrists and a daringly low neckline. It’s embroidered all over with a golden spray of constellations.

Lottie gestures for me to stand and then ties a cape around my neck that shimmers with hundreds of falling stars.

The final piece is a tiara made of stars, with one crescent moon in the middle.

Even I can’t help but gasp upon seeing myself in the mirror. “Oh, Lottie, you’ve outdone yourself.”

She smiles proudly. “He’s going to faint when he sees you.”

I bite back a smile, picturing Emmett’s stunned face across a crowded ballroom. Then I immediately wipe the thought away, angry that it was there in the first place.

The party is roaring by the time we arrive. The grand front steps of the house are aglow with torches, everyone in their fancy dress spilling out into the night.

We help each other tie on our masks when we are out of the carriages. Mine is fashioned from a delicate silver mesh. Olive’s is made of monarch wings, matching perfectly her orange and black butterfly dress, nearly the exact same shade as her ginger hair.

The crowd parts as the six of us enter the room. We make quite a sight in our costumes. Emmy to my right is in ink black, dressed as a bat, with wings tied around her middle fingers that extend when she stretches her arms.

Marion shimmers in her mermaid costume, complete with a tiara made of shells and pearls.

But it’s Faith I’m jealous of. She’s dressed as Romeo’s Juliet. Her dress is the simplest of all, a warm cream silk that laces up the front. There’s a golden circlet on her head, and her brown curls are pulled off her face and cascade down her back.

She glares as she catches me staring.

As usual, we’re not handed dance cards like the rest of the eligible girls our age. Instead, we mingle by the champagne tower and gossip about the other attendees.

There’s a sudden pull on my arm, and I jump, completely unlady-like, into Lydia’s arms.

“What are you doing here?” I gasp.

She looks better than she did the last time I saw her. There’s more pink in her cheeks, and her hair is markedly less dull. Her costume, however, is uncharacteristically lazy. She’s wearing a lavender silk dress Mama had made for her first season, two years ago, with fresh flowers woven through her blond curls.

“Mama thought it would be good for me.”

My mother appears behind her, my father in tow.

I give them all tight hugs, surprised at how my body relaxes, a bone-deep longing for home I didn’t even realize I had.

My mother grips both my hands conspiratorially. “How have things been?”

I’m sad I can’t give her the juicy gossip she wants, and I refuse to trouble her with my fears. That’s the thing about having a mother who remembers everything. I have to be careful about what I give her to worry about.

“It’s been lovely. The other girls are so nice, and Prince Bram is such a gentleman.”

She grins, and again I remind myself that every moment of pain is worth the joy on her face.

Trumpets sound, and the doors swing open as Prince Emmett and Prince Bram come striding in.

At the sight of Emmett’s face, I feel the fault line crack down the center of my chest, the two sides of me at war. There’s the side that wants only to be a good girl, a good daughter, and to help my family be integrated into society once more, and then there is the side that is allied with Emmett, the side that’s willing to risk burning this all to the ground to build a world better than this one.

Anxiously, I twist Bram’s pearl ring around my index finger.

With my parents in front of me, I feel very much like a child again, with a child’s heart that only wants them to be safe and whole and proud of me.

Emmett’s voice echoes in my head. You could be queen.

Viscountess Bolingbroke waves me over to rejoin the rest of the group now that Bram has arrived at the party.

Bram walks right over to us, taking in our costumes. He’s dressed as something of a pirate, in a black velvet coat and a billowing white shirt open wide around his throat.

He turns to my parents and politely introduces himself. My mother giggles like a schoolgirl, and my father looks up at him like he’s the son he’s always craved.

Bram pulls Olive into a waltz first and then proceeds to dance with us one by one. “You’re getting better,”

he says as he twirls me across the ballroom.

I look into his eyes, the way Emmett taught me. “I’ve been practicing.”

The clock strikes midnight, and Bram disappears with the men to the upstairs drawing room to smoke cigars and discuss topics too worldly for our delicate ears.

It’s been hours, and I haven’t seen Lydia again. I wonder bitterly if she’s snuck home without saying goodbye.

The party shows no sign of dying down, but Viscountess Bolingbroke is snoring softly in the corner, slumped in a chair after one too many glasses of champagne.

I slip out into the garden, where torches cast long shadows over hedges and twisting oak trees, to look for my sister.

There’s a raucous game of croquet happening off to my left, but that’s not where Lydia would be, so I go right, where it’s darker and quieter. “Lydia?”

I call. There is no answer but the rustle of wind through the fruit trees and the hedges trimmed to look like zoo animals.

“Lydia?”

“Lady Ivy, is that you?”

a male voice answers.

“Emmett?”

I see him now, moving toward me in the shadows, haloed in moonlight.

“I was looking for my sister,” I say.

“And I was looking for you.”

“Oh?”

“Come quick.”

He reaches down as if to grab my hand, but thinks better of it and shoves his hand in his pocket.

He’s wearing an open doublet, with a costume crown slightly askew on his dark waves. Both our masks were discarded hours ago.

I gesture to his outfit. “What are you supposed to be?”

“A prince.”

He looks over his shoulder and flashes me an infuriating half smile.

“That doesn’t count—you’re already a prince.”

“I’m one from”—he gestures his hands vaguely—“The days of yore, or something.”

“This is the laziest costume I’ve ever seen.”

He clutches his heart in mock distress. “You wound me, Lady Ivy. We can’t all be lucky to have costumes as impressive as yours.”

“Are you impressed?”

His eyes rake down my body, then back up again to my face. I shiver, as if he’s just touched me. “You look like a fallen star.”

There is no hint of laughter in his words now.

We come to a garden gate at the back of the house, where the noise from the party is dampened. It’s partially hidden by overgrown rosebushes and shadowed by a willow tree.

He reaches around me to pull the gate open, then gestures for me to go on without him. “Bram is waiting for you.”

I told him I needed more time alone with his brother. “I’m glad to hear you can take direction,”

I reply, but it comes out strangely choked.

“You know me,”

he replies, face stony. “So obedient.”

I do want to win. I want to help Emmett and the rebellion and my family. Time with Bram will help me win. So why does it feel like I’m losing?

I step through the gate, and Emmett disappears into the darkness. I don’t have it in me to watch him as he goes.

Bram is waiting for me in the center of the hidden garden under the weatherworn statue of a trumpeting angel.

“Lady Ivy.”

His face lights up as I approach. “A sight for sore eyes.”

“Were you expecting someone else?”

“I wasn’t sure what to expect. My brother led me here and told me to wait for a surprise. I must admit I was a little nervous, given the venue, but you’re better than anything I could have hoped for.”

I’m confused, but then he gestures to the patch of earth closest to us, and I see the fine mist net over the plant and the little stake in the ground that reads foxglove, next to it, monkshood, and behind it, laburnum.

“He left you in a poison garden?” I ask.

Bram just laughs that easy laugh of his. “My brother does have a sense of humor.”

“Or maybe he just thought no one would come looking for us here. I hear he’s clever, your brother.”

Emmett’s face pops into my head again, the infuriating smile, the hair he can’t seem to tame, those goddamn eyes.

“Ahh.”

Bram nods sagely. “Very clever indeed.”

Brown hair. A strong hand on my forehead soothing away a fever. Emmett is just something I need to sweat out. I’m nothing to him but a means to an end.

“I don’t want to talk about my brother,”

he says, his gray eyes sparkling like starlight. They’re not a color I’ve ever seen on a person.

“What do you want to talk about?” I ask.

“I don’t think I want to talk at all.”

He picks up my hand and traces along my pointer finger. His hands are warm. “You’re wearing my ring.”

“Haven’t taken it off.”

My heart leaps into my throat, but the space between us goes quiet and still. It’s not desire I feel, but the burn of inevitability.

I swam in the sea once as a child and got knocked over by a wave. I tumbled in the surf, scraped my knees against the sand, and snorted water up my nose.

It was the first time I felt truly small, the first time I knew what it felt like to be carried away by a force I couldn’t control.

I taste salt water in the back of my throat now.

“Ivy.”

He whispers my name under his breath like he’s been longing for his mouth to taste it.

Then he takes one more confident step toward me and presses his lips to mine.

I’ve never been kissed before. It’s warmer than I expected, a little wetter, too.

For one panicked second, I just freeze, but Bram takes over, confident and sure. It’s obvious he’s kissed others, but in this moment I’m not sure if I care.

I move my lips against his and thread my hands through his curls reflexively.

He pulls me closer, his hands strong on the small of my back.

I keep waiting to feel something. I thought I’d feel sparks or church bells or licking flames. But all I can think is Am I doing it right? I have to get this right. I have to make him want to marry me, or I’ll let Emmett down. I could be letting the whole country down.

Bram wrenches back as if it pains him and looks down at me. He really is extraordinarily handsome, his face just this side of otherworldly. I reach up and trace the pointed shell of his ear, just because I can. He shudders against my touch.

He smiles softly, and finally I feel something, a hollow wrenching in my heart.

I have to fake it, so I smile back, then duck my head. I don’t think I have it in me right now to play lovestruck, but shy, I can do.

“I have to go find my sister,”

I whisper.

“I’ll help you,”

he whispers in return, and I have the feeling that there is little I could ask Bram that he wouldn’t do for me.

We’re rounding the corner back to the house when I see a small figure in the dark, hunched over on a bench.

“Lydia?” I call.

She raises her head, and I can see her better now. The flowers in her hair have wilted.

Bram follows me to where she’s sitting. She’s got that dazed look on her face, the one I loathe so much because it makes me worry that’s she’s lost again, and I cannot survive her being gone for good.

I bend down and peer up at her face. “Lydia, let’s get you back to Mama.”

She blinks back to herself, like she’s been wandering somewhere I can’t see. “Oh . . .”

She trails off. “Yes.”

Bram walks to the other side of her to help her to her feet.

“You must be the famous Lydia,”

he says kindly, with a voice one might use to speak to a small child.

She looks up at him, as if only just now realizing he was there. There’s a moment of pause, and I’m racking my brain for something charming to say to defuse the situation, when Lydia clutches her stomach and retches all over Bram’s fancy shoes.

“Lydia!”

I exclaim. Bram steps back in shock. Vomit splashes all over the gravel and onto the stars embroidered on the hem of my dress.

“Lady Benton, are you all right?”

I don’t know which of us he’s asking. He pulls a handkerchief from his breast pocket and passes it to Lydia.

She doesn’t take it. Instead, she mutters, “I’m sorry. I’ll find Mama,”

and runs off into the big house before either of us can stop her.

“I’m sorry about my sister—oh, and thank you for the book!”

I call over my shoulder, but I’m so busy chasing her, I’m not sure if Bram hears me.

I race inside, near frantic with a sickening combination of humiliation and worry. The golden candlelight stings after the darkness from outside. My eyes burn with tears of embarrassment, and my mouth still aches, as if bruised by the kiss.

Bram doesn’t follow us, and I hardly blame him.

Back in the ballroom, the music swells like nothing has changed. Viscountess Bolingbroke still dozes in her wing chair, and the other five girls lean on the wall nearby in various states of boredom.

Marion looks on the verge of falling asleep herself; Olive swivels her head around the ballroom, giving her an air of quiet desperation; Emmy, Faith, and Greer have stolen a bottle of champagne and are giggling, barely disguising the sips they are taking behind their feather fans.

For a horrifying second it looks like Lydia is about to run directly through the center of the dance floor, where couples are spinning like tops. I’ve done so much work to rehabilitate my family, and this would undo it all.

But blessedly, she cuts left, to where my mother is lounging in a half circle of love seats with her friends. Lydia collapses into our shocked mother’s shoulder. I make it to them seconds later. Lydia is inconsolable, incoherent.

“Darling, what happened?”

My mother isn’t asking Lydia, but me. Sweet Lydia, always given every benefit of the doubt by our parents. Of course my mother assumes it must have been my fault.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,”

I say. “She humiliated me in front of Prince Bram, though.”

I loathe the rage that rips through me, the concern I felt just seconds ago transforming into a familiar anger.

Lydia and I, always two sides of the same coin. Her hurt is spilled out onto the floor, messy in a way that demands it be witnessed. Mine, shoved so deep down, my steps are heavier with the weight of it.

Why can’t she suffer in a more palatable way? Why can’t she find a way to make her agony lovable, her pain marriageable, when I’m trying so hard?

Be prettier when you cry, the part of me I hate most wants to say to her.

Maybe this is the crux of my anger with Lydia. I am ready to marry a man I do not love to save our family. I am relieved that Lydia, the person I love most in the world, will be spared the same fate, yet I resent her for letting me do it all alone.

My mother hauls Lydia to her feet. “I’ll send a note tomorrow with news of your sister’s health. I’m sorry, sweet girl, she didn’t mean to do this.”

How could my mother know anything Lydia means to do, when I don’t think Lydia knows herself?

Lydia raises her tear-streaked, snotty face and meets my eye. “I didn’t mean to.”

She never means to. That’s the problem.

I love her too much to bear looking at her like this.

So exhausted by the turn in the night’s events, I walk out the door and to the carriages without an escort. If I get scolded by Viscountess Bolingbroke in the morning, so be it.

The carriage delivers me to the front of the palace, and I cut through the grounds to the cottage.

A parade of storm clouds has blown in, nearly blocking out the light of the moon and stars. I drag my heavy, beaded dress through the grass, trying to outrun the rain. The air smells of it; it won’t be long now.

I expect the cottage to be dark and quiet with the other girls still at the ball, but I startle at the sound of fabric moving through the grass.

From the corner of my vision a flash of movement makes me jump. For a split second I think it’s the other girls returning from the ball, but it’s not.

Queen Mor walks toward me, only a few dozen feet away, her steps completely silent. Her pale skin is a near-ghostly pale blue in the moonlight, her dark hair loose around her shoulders.

She’s in an ornate gown of cerulean silk the color of the night sky. She’s carrying something, a basket, perfectly still in her right hand.

Shit.

Like a prey animal, something primal pings in me at the sight of her, a long-forgotten instinct to run.

Her black eyes stare me down.

I unlatch the door to the cottage. “Please, won’t you come in,”

I say, because politeness is the only armor I have.

“This is my house,”

she replies with a serene smile.

Nonetheless, she follows me in to the sitting room, where the staff have stoked a roaring fire.

We step inside just in time for the rain to arrive, beating on the roof and windows.

“May I ask the reason for your visit?”

My voice wobbles.

“No.”

I call for tea because it seems the right thing to do, but I don’t drink a drop as we wait. I have to hold the cup steady against my leg so it doesn’t clink against the saucer as my hands shake. The clock on the mantel ticks and ticks, each second slower than the last.

The agonizing silence doesn’t seem to bother Queen Mor in the slightest. She sips her tea, and I wonder if an eternal lifetime feels a lot like waiting. We must be nothing but a blip to her. I wonder if she’ll even remember the first crop of silly girls she tortured to find a bride for her son. I’m struck with the deeply unsettling feeling that we may be the first class of many.

Perhaps I am delirious from lack of sleep, or perhaps it is because I fear I will never get another chance, but I set my teacup down on the table and open my mouth to ask a question. “Will you tell me what my sister’s bargain was?”

Her gaze snaps to mine, and she shakes her head like a mother, ever patient but exasperated. “I will not.”

There’s another question on the tip of my tongue. I can’t stop it from spilling out. “But do you know where she was those weeks she disappeared?”

This time she answers more slowly, like she’s chewing on my question and can’t quite decide how she wants to react.

“Of course I do.”

The words land like a punch to the stomach. She wasn’t in the Otherworld, I know that for certain now. Where the hell were you, Lydia?

The front door swings open and Viscountess Bolingbroke and the rest of the girls come piling in, finally home from the ball.

There is giggling, the swishing of silks, wet shoes plopping onto the stone floor.

And then the hush of terrified silence as they enter the sitting room to find Queen Mor and me in front of the fire.

“Sit,”

she commands. The drawing room is small, and with this many bodies, it’s crowded.

Olive perches on the edge of my armchair, her butterfly wings wilting behind her. Faith and Marion tangle together on the chair across from us, Marion’s seashell tiara now askew on Faith’s head. Greer and Emmy sit on the ground right in front of the fire, and I’m terrified that Greer’s peacock feathers are going to catch some embers, but I’m too afraid to break the tense silence to warn her.

“It seems you didn’t enjoy our game today,”

Queen Mor says, frowning. “There are few things I hate worse than poor sports.”

My stomach curdles with fear. Olive’s knuckles go white as she grips the edge of the armchair.

“These lessons are important, they help me get to know you. Bram needs my help in selecting his bride,”

she continues. “One of you will one day become a most-beloved daughter-in-law, and we can’t leave something like that up to chance, can we?”

None of us answer, too scared or angry or frozen to manage it. But she stares us down with those uncanny black eyes until Emmy breaks.

“No, ma’am.”

We echo her in a shaky chorus.

“I realize now, the fault was mine,”

Queen Mor says. “I should have given you more instruction. How can one play a game when the rules are so poorly defined?”

She lets her words hang in the air, then closes her eyes and takes a big inhale, her body visibly relaxing, as if luxuriating in our fear. “Let’s add a few more terms, shall we? The girl with the lowest score at the end of all this will have her family stripped of their titles and their land. Any more acts of insubordination will be your last. Understood?”

My blood turns to ice. She’ll kill us all if we don’t play along.