Scene XVI The Château #2
I detach myself from the wall and head back down the gloomy corridor, my mind churning.
Ridiculously, a part of me wishes for Marie, for her steadying attentiveness.
I wish I had not burned that bridge. I wish I could sit beside her again, tell her of my discoveries in a way I could not even tell my father, because he would tell me to focus on the Couronne and only the Couronne.
I want to speak to Aimé about the mysterious vial, but he’s already been ushered away. I am left in the corridor, utterly alone.
The Chateau walls seem to lean in toward me, a jeering mass of dark wood. I scowl at them.
“I will solve your secrets,” I declare. “I will take everything back. My brother, the crown, magic… I will reclaim it all, and I will win this ridiculous game.”
Later, a maid tells me that the Dauphin has finally retired to his rooms. As I climb the stairs to his apartments, the shrill scream of a violin comes tearing down the stairwell in a violent crescendo.
The melody is haunting and fierce, tugging at my skin, wanting to strip it from my bones.
Beneath my feet, the stairs seem to pulse to the rhythm, and in a nearby alcove an enchanted statue twitches furiously, drawing on the last dregs of its magic to claw at its ears.
I finish climbing the stairs, and the music grows louder. I don’t bother knocking—I simply shove the door open and step inside.
I am greeted by a flare of light, the candles on every surface of the room lit and brightly burning.
They chase away shadows, reflecting in gilt accents, making the room swirl with dizzying streaks of fire.
In the midst of this strange, flaming miasma, Aimé is the image of languorous glamour, wearing only a loose white shirt and breeches, his fingers dancing across the strings of a violin the color of a midday sky.
He breaks off when he sees me enter, his smile that of an entertainer, all pomp and teeth.
“Marie! Perfect timing, as usual.” He lowers the violin and takes a sip from a nearby wine bottle. “I’ve just had a visit from my wonderful secretary of finance. Apparently, our coffers can barely support the wedding. I certainly hope that theater director can work miracles on a pitiful budget.”
“Are you drunk?” I ask, squinting at him.
“I’m wallowing.” He holds out the bottle. I take it and sniff cautiously. I don’t have a refined taste for wines—I’ve never liked how drinking dulls my reflexes—but the scent is sweetly luxurious, and I have nothing better to be doing. I take a swig and return the bottle to Aimé.
“You know,” I say, the wine’s sour tang on my tongue, “you might gain more respect from your courtiers if you weren’t constantly trying to send your liver into an existential crisis.”
He sighs, staring mournfully at the bottle. “You’re probably right.” He sets it aside, then looks down at the violin in his hand. “Oh, how far I’ve fallen.”
He’s quiet for a moment, his eyes dark. Feeling irreverent, I cross the room and flop down on his bed.
He glances at me, surprised, and a part of me is suddenly terrified I’ve made a horrible mistake.
I’ve just lain on the bed of my intended—I might have indicated I want something that I certainly do not.
Then again, I’ve seen the way he looks at my brother.
It’s possible that his interests lie entirely elsewhere.
My suspicions are furthered when Aimé merely smiles at me fondly. “Make yourself at home, I suppose.”
“Thank you.” I turn over on my side, propping up my head on my hand. “It’s beautiful, by the way. The music. I mean, it’s absolutely horrifying, but that only makes me like it more.”
“My, how very gracious of you,” he says wryly, putting aside the violin.
“Did you compose it yourself?”
“Indeed.” He sketches a dramatic bow. “I call it Help, Who Decided It Was a Good Idea to Make Me King in E Minor.”
“You’re not king yet,” I remind him, though his antics bring a laugh out of me. It feels strange. A sorcier laughing with an Augier—forget rolling, my ancestors must be performing whole acrobatic routines in their graves.
You are here for a reason, I remind myself. I sit up on the bed, crossing my legs beneath Marie’s overabundant skirts. “Aimé,” I say carefully. “Can I ask you something?”
“Whatever you wish, ma chérie ,” he replies, clambering onto the bed beside me, limber as a cat.
To my absolute shock, he rests his head on my knee, staring up at me through heavy lashes as though we are longtime friends.
And to him, we are. I imagine this is how he might have looked at Marie when they were both young and careless, trading gossip in the Chateau gardens.
But we’re not young royals beneath a kind blue sky. I have a mission to complete, a brother to rescue. I can’t let myself forget that.
“That drink your stepmother gives you,” I ask the Dauphin. “What is it?”
His smile dissipates. He turns over onto his side, his head still on my knee. “I suppose I ought to tell you,” he says morosely. “Since we are to be married .”
I take a page from Marie d’Odette’s book and remain quiet, allowing him to fill the silence.
“It’s… it’s medicine,” Aimé says at last, wearily. “For my nerves.”
“Your nerves ?”
He nods, his hair rustling against the silk of my dress.
“I… I’m not very good with… busy places.
Pressure. I get… My hands begin to shake.
Sometimes it gets hard to breathe. The medicine helps.
Most of the time it’s enough. It keeps me from truly panicking.
” He closes his eyes tightly. “It’s the real reason I stopped…
trying. At court. I’ve dealt with it since I was a boy, but every meeting, every humiliation, would make it worse.
Stepmother has had to increase the doses. ”
I narrow my eyes at that but say nothing.
“I should have told you earlier,” he says, sighing. “That I’m mad. Hysterical. Melancholic. Call it what you want.”
“Is that what your father called it?”
He says nothing, but the shine in his eyes is the confirmation I need.
Somewhere within me, the smallest fragment of my rotten lump of a heart softens itself.
“King Honoré was the lesser shadow of a madman,” I tell him.
“He will be remembered for doing nothing, changing nothing. He kept the kingdom afloat but did no more than that.”
“Don’t say that,” Aimé says, swallowing. “He sacrificed much for Auréal. As much as he thought he could, at least.”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
The Dauphin only shakes his head. “I’ll show you tomorrow. Not… right now.”
“All right,” I say, surprised at my own acceptance. “But listen, Aimé. What I meant to say was… you’re nothing like those men. You have the potential to change things. To make them better.”
He snorts. “You don’t believe that.”
“I do,” I say, and I wish it were a lie, because it would make things so much easier. Because then I wouldn’t have this kindling of a friendship, this newborn warmth of it, to make me feel conflicted, guilty, about my true mission.
Aimé’s gaze drifts toward the far wall, to the painting of the turtledoves, the downy brushstrokes of their feathers and gleaming, candid eyes.
“My mother painted that, you know. For me, before I was born. She hoped I would be soft, kind. My father said she cursed me with it—that because of it, he was left with a weak and unworthy son.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died right after I was born. They say it was a sudden illness—one night and she was gone. The violin was hers—Stepmother taught me to play it so I could honor her. I wish you could know Madame de Malezieu as I do, Marie. She can be very kind.”
“Yes, well, she can also hold a ghastly grudge.”
He laughs. “That she can. But she risked my father’s ire for it, you know.
Teaching me to play. He hated all art, be it music or painting.
Pastimes for a bored noblewoman, he would say.
He only kept the theater houses running because he knew how powerful theater could be in forming the public’s opinion of the court. ”
I think of the many grand performances my father has put on, each one glorifying the history of Auréal, painting the Spider King as a hero—not a madman but a genius, putting the kingdom back together after the Mothers abandoned us; wielding the Couronne, a relic gifted by the Mothers themselves. Lies, all of them.
Aimé raises an arm to rub his eyes. “You know, it’s funny. I don’t actually miss my father at all. I’m almost… relieved. That he’s gone. What’s wrong with me, that I think this way?”
He stares at me as though I might have the answer to his question. There is wetness gathering in his eyes. I shift awkwardly.
He sits up, blinking tears away furiously. “Mothers,” he curses. “That was insensitive of me. I shouldn’t say such things, what with your father… well. I apologize if I’ve made you uncomfortable.”
Marie’s father? I knew he was dead, but nothing more than that. I file the information away for later.
“It’s all right,” I reassure the Dauphin. “I’m not… I don’t know what to do when people cry is all. It seems…” Weak, I almost say, but that wouldn’t be very diplomatic. “Vulnerable.”
“Yes,” he says, sniffing. “I suppose it is. But I trust you.”
The words strike me in an odd place, sending aftershocks long after they’ve been uttered.
Don’t be a fool, says a voice in my thoughts, my father’s voice.
He doesn’t trust you. He trusts Marie d’Odette.
And when you reveal your true identity to him, he will call you what you truly are: thief, liar, villain.
Another bloom of guilt spreads through me, more potent this time, and I turn away from Aimé, unable to face the defenselessness of his expression.
Past the room’s ornate windows, night spreads; a mask of black satin drawn over the sky, the stars white pearls sewn into the fabric.
Despite myself, I wonder what Marie is doing.
If our assumption is correct and I did accidentally curse her to become a swan by day, then she must have returned to her human shape by now.
“I need to go,” I say tightly to Aimé. “I hate to leave, but I’m weary. Any longer and I might fall asleep in this bed, and I presume that could be misconstrued as something scandalous.”
“Mothers.” Aimé rubs his eyes with a groan. “Don’t remind me. Sometimes I forget that our marriage will involve… marital duties .”
“Let’s live in ignorant bliss,” I declare, getting to my feet. “I don’t want to think about it either.”
I don’t tell him it’ll never come to that.
That moving the marriage up two weeks has merely sped up the deadline for my heist, and that the moment the Couronne is brought out from the vaults, it will be gone, and I along with it.
I don’t tell him that I’ve come to understand why my brother thinks he’s worth protecting.
I don’t tell him that I wish we could truly be friends.
I merely rush from the room, perhaps faster than I should have, because I don’t want to picture the heartbreak on Aimé-Victor Augier’s face when the time comes for me to betray him.
By the time I make my escape into the gardens, the Chateau looks drowsy, its golden windows flickering in the dark like shuttering eyes.
The cold is more bearable today—autumn caught in its final desperate throes before winter’s jaws close upon it.
I stare at the vast lake ahead, that ever-present shroud of mist spread across it like a layer of stiff icing.
Marie. I shouldn’t want to see her, not after last night’s argument.
Yet there’s a tugging in my chest, incessant, urging me to find her.
It’s for the mission, I tell myself. I need to make sure she hasn’t changed her mind and done something to betray me.
Yes. That’s all this is. I’m being practical.
Squaring my shoulders, I make my way through the maze of iron roses, the Chateau turrets growing smaller behind me.
Just before I reach the lakeside, an ice-cold hand clamps down on my mouth.