Chapter 2
When John and I were young, we sometimes stole down to the base of the manor’s clock tower—our excursions scheduled around when our nanny snuck out to spend time with her suitor, of course. We’d pick the lock on the door with my hairpins, then make wagers on which of us could climb to the highest rung of the rusty ladder. As children do, we adored the danger—the thrill it offered in exchange for letting it hold our safety in its precarious fingertips.
Looking back, it’s strange to think that John and I rebelled in such a way. Neither of our temperaments leans toward disobedience. But by the time we found the clock tower, we were already aware of my curse. Perhaps we felt as if the world had already betrayed us, and this was the last bit of recklessness the two of us could manage before reality swept in and stole it away.
When our youngest brother, Michael, came along and showed a preference for running and climbing, we brought him into our game. At random times in the day, one of us would shout, “Last one to the top is dead meat,” which would send us into a frenzied dash for the clock tower, the three of us shoving and clawing at each other the entire way.
Once upon a time, that clock tower was my haven. Now it clangs with a reminder of what’s to come, screaming at me with every hour that slips from my fingertips, along with the pocket watch Father gifted me on my nineteenth birthday.
I’m fairly certain he gave it to me intending for it to hasten my search for a husband. An ever-present, ever-ticking reminder that my time in the light is running out. I’m also fairly certain he realized how inconsiderate of a gift it had been because he gifted John a matching one on his birthday.
I’m making my father sound worse than he is.
It’s ironic really. My father is rather progressive. The last man one would expect to make his entire life’s mission to catch his daughter a husband, but the Fates had other schemes.
My father doesn’t really have a choice.
In the end, John and I find nothing substantial to help free me of my fate that’s to take place in, say, eighteen hours now.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I have something else I’m working on.”
There’s little confidence in his voice to inspire any in me.
John leaves my room at first light, rubbing at his eyes and sending his glasses askew. It makes him look boyish again, and I sketch a portrait in my mind, silently promising never to forget my brother’s innocent sort of determination.
It’s a good thing he leaves when he does, because my mother comes barreling into my room not a minute later, almost tripping over my rug as she does.
My mother isn’t the barreling and tripping sort, but today isn’t exactly a normal day, either.
“Wendy.” She says my name with such feigned optimism, it snaps my ribs one at a time.
Mary Darling is a woman built of poise, the by-product of countless generations of aristocratic mothers passing along their grace and tact until it all became concentrated in my mother. My smile—the one I don so that others won’t have to feel the rattle of my lungs as I drown in the twilight tide of my future—I got from her.
She beams down at me with such love and adoration, it almost hides the way her stomach must be twisting on the inside. Almost. She’s a professional at hiding agony, my mother. She has the look perfected, even down to the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes upholding her smile.
But if you look closely, you can see the way her jaw bulges ever so slightly. Like she’s keeping that smile not buoyed but bolstered, feet planted in the sand as she holds her breath and hoists the edges of her barely wrinkled lips above the crashing waves.
“Mother,” I respond with equal affection.
“I suppose we should be getting you ready.”
She makes it sound as if it’s not a death sentence.
If my Markweren’t raised, simple ivory paint would probably do to cover it up completely. The golden tint has a tendency to shimmer in the light, but the color itself is faint enough to be easily obscured.
At least, it is with two coats.
My maids twist my chestnut hair into a plait at the crown of my head. I prefer to wear my hair down, but Mother says if my pretty features are going to be buried underneath a mask, we’d better let the men see as much of my face as possible.
I’m just thankful the gown she’s chosen for me better covers my bosom this time. As desperate as my mother is to marry me off and break this dreadful curse, I suspect the modest gown is meant to be an apology of sorts for a betrayal neither of us dare speak aloud.
When the maids finish preparing me for a night full of charming men twice my age, they step aside, clearing the path for my mother to look at me.
For me to look at her.
In so many ways, I’m her mirror image. In her eyes, I find the same deep blue that dwells in mine. She keeps her chestnut hair pinned back, but if she ever let it down from its ornate combs, it would fall in the same cascading waves as mine. Her pinkish face has a heart shape to it, one that makes her full cheeks stand out.
My mother is lovely, but she’s aging faster than she should.
I suppose that’s mostly to do with me.
“You look stunning, Wendy,” she says, her words a muffled whisper as she covers her mouth, probably to give her lips a break from her feigned smile. “It’s amazing, the young woman you’ve—”
The facade of my mother’s impenetrable face fissures—a cracking line that snakes up her slender neck, tensing the muscles in her throat as she fights back a sob. And just like that, she’s weeping, her hands still dutifully clamped to her mouth like she owes me the memory of a smile, rather than whatever warped and twisted thing her mouth is currently doing.
“Mama.” I take my weeping mother into my arms, settling her tear-soaked face into my chest as she cries. Rivulets of salty tears trail down my silk dressing gown. The maids were foresighted enough to know better than to fully dress me yet.
Indeed, I peer over my mother’s pearl-crested comb as my maids slip into the corner of the room, making themselves unobtrusive.
“It’s all my fault,” my mother—my strong, sanguine mother—wails into my chest. She clutches the fabric at my back, the silk protecting my skin from her fingernails digging in. It’s as if she’s convinced herself that if she only clings tightly enough, she might get to keep me. “It’s all my fault. I should have never spoken to that wretched creature. Should have known the evil I was inviting into this house.”
“You didn’t know,” I say, wrapping my hand at the back of my mother’s neck, allowing my thumb to scrape the chain of the three-pronged pendant she wears for me, John, and Michael. “You thought—” I stop myself, correcting myself mid-sentence. “You did save me. I would have died from the plague if it wasn’t for the bargain you and Papa struck.”
“I condemned you, my sweet little girl.”
My heart aches, and when I shake my head in disagreement, my mother’s tears wipe against my cheek. “You bought me time. And time—isn’t that the most valuable thing we have?”
My mother pulls away from me, and now that her hands are removed from her face, occupied with holding me like she intends to force the shadows to wrench me from her arms themselves, her smile has returned.
It’s not the happy sort, but it’s there. Clinging for purchase on my mother’s jaw.
“I’m so sorry, Wendy.”
I open my mouth to protest, but Ma shushes me.
“No. Sweetheart. I thought I was bargaining for your life. But all I gifted you were years of dread. Years of anticipating your nightmares being fulfilled. I fear—” She sweeps her gaze over me, taking me in, and she curls her finger above her quivering lip. “I fear I’ve sold you from one miserable Fate to another, always bargaining for more time, never considering it would be you who paid the higher price.”
I stare at my mother, unable to blink back nonexistent tears.
It’s not that I don’t hurt, don’t ache. It’s not that her words don’t reflect a wound I’ve refused to speak aloud my entire life.
It’s that as long as she’s here, weeping over me, I cannot bring myself to feel it. When she’s gone, leaving me alone with my thoughts—that’s when I’ll absorb her words. That’s when the truth of them will sting. If I know myself at all, I’ll probably find myself bitter toward her for voicing those words on my behalf, for finding them before I could. For daring to hurt alongside me when this is my pain, my torment.
But for now, it’s as if my mother’s grief takes up the whole room, overshadowing mine, drowning me in the numbness of analyzing my own pain like it’s a modern painting hanging in an exhibit. If I were to reach out, I wouldn’t feel the colors, just the texture of the swirls and divots.
Her words fold over my ears in waves of crimped parchment. One miserable fate to another.
It’s not fair for me to blame my mother for my curse. As much as she indicts herself, if it weren’t for her, oblivion would have claimed me long ago.
I was five years of age when the plague swept through the coastal city of Jolpa, where we live. No one knows for sure where the plague came from. Most think it crept in under the cover of the salty mist that so often obscures the harbors, leaching into the lungs of the hardened sailors, who then carried it over the soaked piers. Onto the cobblestone streets. Passed it onto the lips of their wives with the press of a homecoming kiss.
Others say it crawled up from the sewers on the backs of rats who made their nests in the rafters of the fisheries, chewed holes in the gill nets, and poisoned the fish with their grimy teeth. Still others, those skeptical of magic, say it came from the faerie dust imported from the West, poisoning our lungs as we burned it to light our street lamps.
Regardless of its origins, Mama and I both fell ill. Papa sent John away to the summer home in Kelton with a nurse, lest he catch the illness too.
Mama recovered with time.
I did not.
From the way my mother tells the story, I was so close to Death, I told her I felt him planting a kiss on my forehead, though there was no one else in the room with us.
I was so far gone, the physicians recommended I be given an opiate that would alleviate the pain of the cysts forming in my lungs.
My mother was distraught. Torn between yearning for her child to be free of agony and knowing the opium would certainly kill me.
But that night, as she held the vial of opium in her hand, a voice whispered to her from the shadows.
“I could save her,” it said. “I could take away her pain.”
My mother had been warned by her mother and all mothers before her not to speak to the shadows, especially not those who lurked close to children or the stench of death. But my mother was addled with grief and forgot the warnings, just as all mothers before her would have done had their child’s chest been rattling with the Reaper’s bell toll.
“Anything,” she’d said.
“Anything?” the shadows had whispered back. “I doubt that very much. A tender lady like you—I doubt you’ve ever allowed your skin to be kissed by the sun, your feet to develop calluses from frolicking bare in the earth. Anything seems quite far-fetched.”
“Please,” my mother had begged. “Anything to save her.”
And anything it had been. The way Mama tells it, the shadows had pounced from the wall like a cat, then melded into the shape of a woman.
The woman had bent over me, pinching her hands against my nose, covering my mouth until shadows filled my lungs, causing my chest to rise, my eyes to cloud over with darkness.
And then I had taken a breath.
But not before Mama had made a bargain.
One she’d thought would be simple to keep.
“My Prince of Never, my Shadow Keeper, needs companionship,” the shadowed woman had said. “I fear what he might become if allowed to continue on as he is. If I heal her, you may keep her until her twentieth birthday. But from the moment this child begins her third decade, she will belong to him.”
My mother had hesitated then, knowing well the atrocities of which mortal men were capable. Who knew what an immortal such as the Shadow Keeper might do to her daughter once she was of age? She had heard of the Prince of Never, the shattered remnant of an ancient fae who kidnapped children from their beds at night, stealing them away with promises of adventure. It was a modern folktale, meant to keep children from sneaking out of their beds and bothering their parents in the middle of the night, but as with all folktales, it was seeded in truth.
“What if she were to marry before then?” my mother had asked. “Surely you wouldn’t take a woman away from her husband.”
The shadow woman had laughed, amused that my mother assumed she would care about such frivolous human concerns as matrimony. My mother had known it was unlikely to succeed, knew she was grasping at the wind, but to her surprise, the shadow woman had conceded.
“Very well, then. Find the girl a husband before the turn of her third decade, and the vow tying her to my Shadow Keeper will become void.”
My mother hadn’t hesitated before grasping at the shadow’s hand and forming the bargain, the stains of which stretch the length of her forearm to this day.
I had been healed, and the sun seemed to shine down on me for a while. John was brought back to the manor. My parents were aristocrats, so though my mother fretted over finding me a husband, she acknowledged there was no genuine need for concern.
Who wouldn’t want their daughter for a wife?
When I reached maturity at twelve, the Mark appeared, a smattering of golden freckles like glistening dewdrops collecting on my upper left cheekbone, falling at its cusp and tracing my jawbone, where they slowly trailed away at the curve of my neck in a smudge of liquid gold.
That’s when my parents knew they’d been tricked, for what man would marry a girl Mated to another man? Sure, it was common knowledge that the chances of a Mated individual ever crossing paths with their match were slim, but jealousy is not a rational advisor.
“We’ll beat the curse tonight, Mama,” I say, regardless of whether I believe the words. “You, Papa, me, John—we’ve all thought this through. Planned for every possible outcome.”
My mother actually raises her delicately trimmed fingers to her mouth and begins biting on them. “Of course. Of course we will.”
Of course you do.
The memory of the shadow’s voice is so clear, it’s almost palpable.
And as the maids place the finishing touch upon my bridal attire—a pearl mask designed to obscure the golden freckles snaking over my cheek—I wonder if, from the shadows, I truly can hear a rumbling laugh.