Scene XXIII Théâtre du Roi
The Loges
Reality slinks back to me like a kicked dog, trembling and blearily hesitant.
Everything aches—I feel ancient, as though my joints are wrought of iron and being chewed on by rust. When I shift, I half expect to hear arthritic creaking.
An undignified moan escapes me, and distantly I think I hear a gentle “shhh,” as though I’m a child waking from a nightmare.
I realize there are fingers carding through my hair, light as feather down, and the feeling acts as a momentary distraction from the dull pain in my body.
“You’re all right.” Marie’s voice wraps around me like a cloak, and Mothers, I have never been so happy to hear a voice in my life.
I realize it is her touch brushing against my scalp, and despite my disorientation, my stomach curls pleasantly.
Safe, a small, primal part of me hums—the part of me that is normally dedicated to keeping up my walls in desperate self-preservation.
I contemplate feigning unconsciousness a little longer, if only to enjoy the unfamiliar attention.
Then Marie whispers, “You’re all right,” again, and I realize her voice is shaking. As though she doesn’t quite believe her own words.
Reluctantly, I force my eyes to open. I’m greeted by an unexpectedly familiar sight: the cradle of gold and crimson of the Théatre’s loges wraps around me, the dark of the auditorium visible over the balustrade to my right.
Judging by the opulent furnishings, this is the box reserved for the Augiers.
I’m lying on a velveteen chaise longue, and beside me, Marie d’Odette d’Auvigny sits in a puddle of silver skirts.
I want to say something dignified, ideally witty. Instead, all I manage through my dry throat is a crackling “Marie.”
Her eyes meet mine, their silver depths brightening in relief.
“Oh, thank the Mothers,” she breathes out.
Everything feels unreal somehow, impossible, a flicker of candle flame and a blur of crimson velvet. There’s a bruise blooming across Marie’s cheekbone, and I can’t peel my eyes away from it.
I reach up hazily to brush my thumb along the mark, half expecting her to be a mirage, for my fingers to pass through her. But my touch finds warm, smooth skin, and Marie stiffens in confusion.
“You’re hurt,” I say.
Her lips uncurl from their worried frown into something almost sheepish. “I fought a guard. Well, tried to.”
“I see.” I knit my brow in a frown as I try to force my memories free of the hazy void of my mind.
They come swaying back drunkenly: the Step-Queen’s chambers, the potions and notes and books.
Golden blood seeping between my fingers, crimson blood pooling beneath a stone-skinned monster’s claws.
A scrap of sapphire fabric caught on its tusks. A shattering stained-glass window.
And… “Marie,” I whisper. “I did it. I used magic. Real magic. Like my father does.” I clench my hand, remembering the feeling of magic leaking between my knuckles, the way it had transformed into long, thin spell-threads as I traced my fingers through the air.
“The pendant is gone,” I realize. “But you’re still alive.
I didn’t know if you would be after the Step-Queen stabbed me; I thought…
the spell…” I try to sit up, and pain lances down my side, hard enough to make me gasp.
“Odile, slow down,” Marie pleads. “You need rest.”
I fall back onto the chaise obediently. “And you saved me.”
She gnaws on her bottom lip. “I’m not certain I would call it saving. The injury in your side was shallow enough, thankfully; it had already stopped bleeding when I found you. Did… were you stabbed ?”
I nod through clenched teeth. “Regrettably. The Step-Queen caught me in her rooms.” I glance at her. “You were supposed to keep her distracted.”
I don’t mean for the words to sound accusatory, but as soon as I utter them, guilt roils across Marie’s face.
“I tried, Odile, I swear it. But when I tried to intervene, she only shoved me aside. ‘Do you take me for a fool?’ she said. ‘I can sense your plot unfurling. Who did you send?’ I said I didn’t know, feigned obliviousness.
She took off. I tried to follow, but she commanded one of the guards to grab me, saying I was drunk and needed to be escorted to my rooms. He began to lead me away, but I fought him.
That’s when he elbowed me.” She points to the mark on her cheek.
“I think he was frightened to realize he had injured his future queen, because he released me right after, apologizing profusely. I ran after Anne, but by the time I arrived, it was too—” She stammers somewhat over the word, her voice growing hoarse and haunted. “Too late.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. “What did you… what did you see?”
“B-blood.” Marie shudders, an action I feel more than see.
“Everywhere. Anne de Malezieu’s body. And I could h-hear…
I could hear the beast, hear it running down the hallways, chasing…
chasing something. Chasing you. I thought it had gone outside to the gardens, so I ran out into the night, and—” She cuts off, her breath hitching strangely, as though she has caught herself just before telling a lie.
I furrow my brow, suspicion digging into me. “What is it?”
“I saw you jump.” The words are strained, tainted somehow. “From the chapel window. You fell. And I—” Again, her breath catches oddly. “You were just lying there, covered in glass, bleeding from your side. Mothers, there was blood everywhere .”
“Did you… did you see the beast?”
“No. It was gone by the time I got there—I think it gave up chasing you after you jumped. We were both covered in your blood, so I picked you up and hid us both in the shadows until I was certain we were alone, and—”
“Hold on,” I interrupt. “You picked me up ?”
Marie sweeps her hair over her shoulder. “I’m stronger than I look.”
Which certainly doesn’t help the image my mind has conjured of Marie cradling my limp form in her arms like a knight carrying off his bride. My cheeks heat. “I see” is the only respectable response I can think of. “And then?”
“And then I brought you here.” She presses her palms to her eyes, and it’s the first time I’ve seen her truly weary.
As she does, she sits back on her heels, and I notice a low table behind her, a candelabra set upon it for light.
Beside it lies a pile of items: my blood-smeared doublet, the Queen’s sapphire dagger, and—
“Buttons!” I exclaim.
Marie looks around in confusion, then follows my gaze to the enchanted button.
“Oh, yes. I found it in the Step-Queen’s study when I was looking for you.
I recognized it from—well, from the time you threatened me.
Several times.” She huffs out a laugh, reaching over and passing it to me.
“I did have to, ah, remove your jacket.” I could swear she blushes then. “To bandage your wound.”
I take the items from her, then lift up my shirt curiously to find a layer of red silk wrapped around my abdomen. It looks to be a scarf—a familiar scarf, no less. “Did you get this from the dressing room?”
She pouts. “I only have so many petticoats, you know. And they are expensive.”
I shake my head at her and slip Buttons into the pocket of my breeches before picking up the Step-Queen’s dagger. The sapphire glints at me slyly from the pommel.
I scowl at it. “After Anne stabbed me with this, my disguise vanished.” I tell her quickly what happened in the study and how Aimé had run in to see me transform. “There must have been a spell on it.”
Marie squints at the dagger. “Can I see it?”
I hand it to her, and she holds it up to the light, turning it over. She scrapes her nail along the flat of the blade, then knocks the sapphire pommel against the side of the chaise.
“Hey!” I exclaim. “Be gentle with that!” I have been intending to add the weapon to my arsenal.
Marie doesn’t acknowledge me. She gets to her feet, still frowning at the knife. She taps her fingertips on the sharp edge, sniffs them. Then she moves to the nearby candelabra and sticks the dagger into its flame.
I make a strangled sound of alarm.
“What?” Marie demands, not shifting her focus from the weapon.
“I said, be gentle with it!”
She gives me a flat look. “I am.”
“You’re setting it on fire!”
“I’m setting it on fire gently .” She pulls out the dagger once more, the redness already fading from the heated blade.
The edge of it sizzles strangely, and a moment later a scent reaches me—faintly, unpleasantly sweet, like a rose stem rotting in the stale water of a vase.
A few spots along the dagger have blackened.
“Poison,” I realize. “Of course.”
“Most of it was gone,” Marie says. “I imagine it rubbed off when she…”
“When she stabbed me. Pleasant.”
“Well,” Marie says, “that would explain why you looked on the verge of death when I found you, even though your wound was not very deep. And why you wouldn’t wake up. Your body must have been fighting the poison.” The recollection leaves her looking troubled. “Do you think the beast was her doing?”
“It must have been. She was clearly using sorcery. Or at least, she was able to create potions that allowed her to use sorcery. I’ve never even seen my father do that.
” I don’t admit that there is much my father has withheld from me when it comes to magic.
“Regardless, she certainly knew the beast. She tried to reason with it before it killed her. It seemed like she lost control of it.”
“So the mystery is solved,” Marie says. “We can only hope that the guards managed to capture that monster and kill it. I’ll… I’ll have to go back to the Chateau soon and gauge the situation.” She seems to dread the prospect.
“Aimé will be a problem,” I point out. “He saw me bleed gold right before the beast appeared. He will think it was my doing.” I rub my temples, trying not to remember the Dauphin’s scream of terror. I hadn’t seen his body after the beast’s attack—I need to believe he’s still alive.
“If that is the case,” Marie says tightly, “then we will find a way to prove your innocence. To convince Aimé to take our side.”
My chest swells with sudden gratitude. I have tried to push Marie away so many times, yet she keeps helping me, keeps saving me. I do not know what I’ve done to deserve it, and I’m certain it will not last, but I want to clutch it, white-knuckled, for as long as I can.
I slip my hand into hers, rub my thumb against her palm. Her fingers are cold, and they lie limp in mine, unresponsive.
“I’m sorry, sorciere,” she says after a moment, staring at our interlaced hands. “This was my fault, all of it. I didn’t manage to distract the Step-Queen, and everything fell apart because of me.”
I stare at her. I’m so taken aback by the fact that she is apologizing to me for my own horrible plan that I bark a disbelieving laugh. “Don’t apologize to the villain, Marie. I had it coming.”
I know immediately I have said the wrong thing. Marie draws in a wet-sounding breath, and her bottom lip trembles before she presses her mouth into a tight white line.
“I wish you wouldn’t call yourself such things.”
“Why not?” I demand. “It’s the truth—I am a villain.”
“I don’t believe that.”
I snort. “Of course you don’t. You’re kind and honorable and pure—it’s in your nature to see light in everyone.
And it’s in my nature to be forever in the dark.
I came here with the intent to steal a crown and destroy the Augier dynasty.
None of it was selfless; none of it was kind.
Everything I do, I do for my father’s cause. For power.”
She looks away. “Yet I wish I could be like you.”
“Why—why ever would you wish that? You’re perfect .”
Her eyes are murky, oceanic, tempestuous waters churning in a storm. “Perfect? I’m a coward, Odile.”
I blink, surprised by her outburst. “What?”
Marie pulls her hand out of mine, gets to her feet. “It matters not. I’m going to… to take some air.”
“Marie, wait!”
But she’s already gone.