Scene XV The Lake
A Foggy Midnight
“No!” I scramble for the edge of the dock, ready to jump into the water after them, but Marie grabs me quickly, her hands warm and firm on my waist. “Odile. Odile!”
I shove at her, despair screeching through me. What if one of those pages had the answers I needed? Worse, what if it could help me get the Couronne? I pull myself out of Marie’s grip. “No, let me go! I need them!”
“There’s nothing you can do!” It’s the first time I have heard her raise her voice, and it is such a stark contrast to her usual sultry warmth that it stuns me into stillness. I turn to stare at her, tears of disappointment pricking my eyes.
“They were barely wet. I could still have saved them!”
She steps away from me, sweeping loose curls out of her face. “I doubt it. And it isn’t worth risking a horrid cold.”
“A cold.” My laughter comes out of me in a bitter wheeze. “You think I care about a cold? ? That journal had magic all over it! There’s no telling the knowledge I just lost.”
“Odile—” She reaches out as if to soothe me.
It’s petulant, but I don’t care. I slap her hands away.
“No. No, I should have known better than to ever involve you. You’re just a spoiled princess, gifted with the perfect clothes and the perfect life.
You could never understand. You’re worried about a cold?
My brother is imprisoned and there’s a monster in the palace and the Mothers are gone and I have no magic . ”
I stumble back, clutching what’s left of the journal to my chest. Part of me knows that I’m being unfair toward her. But if I let go of my anger, nothing waits behind it but tears, and I refuse, utterly refuse, to cry.
I look up at Marie once more, and that is a mistake.
She’s staring at me, brows tilted up in regret, and there’s a soft, apologetic light to her eyes that I hate, hate more than anything.
Because it taunts me, saying I’m sorry, saying I know it’s not your fault.
I whirl on my heels and storm off toward the Chateau, my teeth clenched and eyes stinging, the remnants of brittle paper clutched tight in my fingers.
Only once I am stowed away in the Dauphine’s apartments do I dare to open the journal once more.
I sit by the vanity, my own reflection hovering, pale and windswept, in my periphery.
I light a single candelabra with shaking hands, the three candle flames winking like dying fireflies.
Beneath their hesitant light, I inspect what remains of the paper.
What I find is a scrawled mess, great loops of writing that I can barely decipher.
Between them—my heart leaps—are drawings of spiderwebbing spells, the lines labeled with letters so small, I cannot make them out.
Sorcery. These are notes—no, musings —on sorcery.
And thanks to my own foolishness, my own impatience, I might have lost precious information to the lake’s greedy waters.
My eyes droop. Two sleepless nights have begun to weigh on me, pressing heavily on my eyelids.
And yet I can’t seem to stop. I find a drawing of a spell that seems relatively legible, and my heart speeds up with excitement.
A simpler way to transform a whole into pieces, the author begins.
A smaller scrawl in the margin’s notes: May be useful.
Beneath, the spell-threads intersect in a hexagon, a small paragraph beside each thread instructing how to form each one.
Envision the material, says one. Envision an object of said material in pieces , says another.
The line in between instructs the sorcier to carefully imagine their object of choice shattering.
I look up at the mirror before me, stretching out my palms. I envision raw golden magic pooling in my palms. In my imagination, I use no goddess-gold— only true magic summoned from Morgane, just as the youngest Mother taught the Golden-Blooded Girl to do.
I draw each spell-thread in the air, focusing my thoughts.
Mirror, I think, imagining the looking glass before me, silvery and whole.
Then shards , a razor-sharp sliver pricking my thumb.
Finally break , a pane of slick glass splintering outward.
A childish part of me hopes to hear the musical peal of shattering glass. But the mirror does not break. Nothing happens at all. There are no sticky spell-threads hovering before me, no sage and iron acrid against my tongue. There is no magic for me to call on at all, because Morgane is gone.
I clench my hands into fists. My words to Marie at the lake, though embittered, were true. I’m tired of creeping around in the shadows, of being starved of magic, of sustaining myself on Regnault’s promises. I want this . What’s in this journal, in my blood.
If I’d had magic when Damien left me, I would not have cared about his betrayal. If I’d had magic when my mother died, I would not have mourned so deeply. If I’d had magic when Regnault threatened to cast me out, I would have left him with my head held high.
I would have called on Morgane and let her fill my every crevice, gorged myself on power.
With magic as my timeless companion, I would never be alone.
Stomach tight, I swipe my hand across my eyes and flip idly to the end of the journal. There the very last words remain, unstained, written in a bold hand, every arch and dot pregnant with determination.
… We long for freedom. Should all go as planned, we will gain the authority we have always deserved, yet never been given. We will have endless power, endless potential. No more limits. No more fear.
Something inside me lurches at the words. There’s an odd, disfigured familiarity to them, like the wavering face of a stranger seen only in a dream. With frantic motions, I flip back to the front cover, searching all the places an author might sign their name.
And then I find it:
Property of Bartrand de Roux.
It is scrawled, crookedly unassuming, on the back of the cover.
For a moment I forget to breathe. My pulse surges in my ears.
This isn’t just the journal of some court sorcier—it’s the journal of the man who attempted to assassinate the King.
The man whose actions cursed his own kin, saw their livelihoods ruined, forced them to hide their veins filled with golden blood. My father’s ancestor.
And yet, when I touch the faded ink, I feel reverent.
After all, no one truly knows what happened that night. Had Bartrand de Roux attempted to stop the King from going mad? Had he seen something no one else saw? The creeping of insanity already at the edges of the King’s words, his movements, his actions?
I close the cover, wedging my quill between the pages to prevent the little book from locking. I do not want to have to seek Marie’s help again.
As I slip the journal beneath the mattress, my thoughts turn, unwillingly, to Marie d’Odette.
To a girl trapped on the edge of the lake, cursed to become a swan by day and a maiden by night.
Soon the sun will be up, and feathers will once again swallow her.
And I will be walking around in her skin, no more than her caricature, an owl wearing a swan’s mask.
I turn the owl-face pendant over in my hand, and for some reason, I can’t bring myself to put it on.
I don’t sleep long before a maid is knocking on my door, reminding me that morning has come, and with it the King’s funeral.
I clip the owl-face pendant back on reluctantly before unlocking the door to my chambers and allowing her inside.
I sit numbly as she tuts and fusses about with pale-honey curls, stare at my feet as she cinches me into a dull, unforgiving gown the color of a crow’s corpse.
My thoughts feel scattered, as though blown apart by a stray wind.
The maid suddenly clears her throat, the soft sound cutting through the room. “Take care of the young Dauphin,” she bids me gently. “Today will be trying for him.”
I frown, then realize I have seen her before. This is the woman Aimé conferred with secretly in the hallway, the day after King Honoré’s murder. I must look skeptical, because she shakes her head at me. Her graying hair frizzes around her mask.
“They tell lies about that boy,” she says.
“Sent the royal family’s doctor to my home, he did, when my little son broke his foot and no city healer could set it right.
When he learned Cook’s husband had died and left her with debt, it was suddenly paid off.
He told no one, of course, but we knew. There are other stories, too, of kindnesses done quietly.
The court may speak ill of him, but you will not find a servant who will, not even the youngest scullion.
He is not as grand as his father, perhaps.
But when you are grand—well, you don’t see the little things.
” She taps my arm. “Come. I will take you to him.”
The morning passes in a flood of black—black clothes, black casket, black silk stretched over the chapel’s pearl-white pews, and burnt-black clouds smudged over an anemic sky.
The King’s body is wrapped in golden damask and borne from the chapel to be displayed in the sprawl of the Verroux cathedral.
I sit in a gilt carriage with Aimé as the procession of casket and horses and loudly weeping courtiers rattles through the narrow streets.
The Dauphin’s hand flexes where it rests on my arm, his thigh pressed rigidly against mine.
I don’t look at him, distracted by my abrupt return to the stink and noise of the city I once called home.
Jaw tense, I watch the crowd clotting around the main street, watch how color seems to melt away from it as we leave the upper sectors of the city—the vibrant gowns of wealthy merchant ladies morphing into dirt-stained workers’ clothes and the filthy rags of pickpockets.
As color vanishes, so does the sorrow and mourning.
It is replaced by hunger and bared teeth, and a palpable tension in the air.
It all feels strangely foreign to me, more vicious than I remember, more desperate even than when Damien and I haunted these streets.
Two hundred years of a dying, cursed land is taking its toll.
I wonder if the mysterious beast is not the only monster Aimé should fear.
Verroux is starving, and if things do not change soon, it might begin to devour everything.
First itself, then the noblesse, until finally, bloodstained and bristle-haired, it will bury its fangs into its would-be king and bleed him dry.