Chapter Eighteen #2
“Hi,” I say, offering a smile. “Listen, I know it’s the middle of the night, but I really need to talk to you.”
Her gaze turns frostier. “I’m still pretty irritated you lied to me.”
I purse my lips. “You’re right, but not about what you think I lied to you about.”
The anger on her face is replaced with sleepy confusion. “Huh?”
“We need to talk,” I say firmly. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
She frowns as she thinks, and I hear shuffling from inside her room.
“Do … do you have someone in there?” I ask, unable to hide the grin spreading on my face. “Is it Bianca?”
I try to peer over her shoulder. She moves in front of me to block my line of sight.
“Bianca?” I call, almost giggling.
Cerise closes the door behind her as she steps into the hall. “It’s not Bianca. Now let’s talk if you want to talk.”
Cerise follows me to the common room, and before the last embers of the previous night’s fire, I tell her …
almost everything. I explain, at least, that I didn’t lie about my feelings for Kole, and that I had to strike the sudden, unexpected deal with Roze to keep myself safe.
But I can’t tell her about the Grimmstone Society or that Roze killed the Queen.
I don’t know what he’d do if I betrayed him, but it’s not just fear keeping me silent.
He killed the Queen for you.
A strange sense of loyalty has developed between the Prince and me.
When I’m done explaining, Cerise sits with her back to the hearth, elbows propped on her knees, staring up at the ceiling. “So he’s forcing you into this fake engagement—”
“Not forcing me. I think—” I toy with my locket, studying the embers of the fire. “Roze isn’t as bad as I thought. I think I’ve misjudged him for a long time.”
“Misjudged him how?”
“I’ve realized that all that pride and cruelty … it’s a sort of mask he wears. I keep catching him in moments when he’s, well, kind. He protects the people he cares about, feels obligated to them, even at cost to himself.”
She raises her eyebrows at me, studying me for a long moment. “Fucking Saints.”
“What?”
She tosses her head back, chuckling at the ceiling. “You like him.”
“I do not.”
She snorts. “It’s all right. I suppose he is pretty. For a boy.”
“That … has nothing to do with anything.”
Cerise barks a laugh as I fight back a blush. “Oh, stop it,” I say, grabbing a pillow off the nearby armchair and throwing it at her far-too-gleeful face.
Of course, she catches it, grinning like a cat, and throws it right back at me, much harder than necessary. I, being the less coordinated of the two of us, am hit right in the face and topple backward.
“You ass,” I say as she laughs, pushing myself upright. When we catch our breaths, I ask, “And it doesn’t bother you? That I’m engaged to a Roquelart after what they did to your family?”
Cerise stills, her shoulders tightening. It’s a familiar gesture—her body’s response every time her dad’s death is brought up. “You don’t have much choice, do you?” she mutters.
“No,” I say. “But even if I did, from what I’ve seen of the Roquelarts this week … They’re not all the same, Cerise. The Queen controls her children like they’re servants.”
Cerise nods, a distant look in her eyes.
I draw the book that Professor Borges gave me from my robe pocket. “I need your help with something.”
I hand it to her. She runs her hands over it, her long fingers caressing the intertwined dragon and lion, and I immediately want to snatch it back, like I’m afraid it will bite her if she gets too close.
“Why do you need my help with a book? Linguistics is your specialty,” she says. But I know Cerise. She only needs her curiosity piqued.
“The pages are all blank, though. What if there’s a hidden message? What if it’s invisible ink or something?”
She narrows her eyes. “Does this have to do with whatever you and the Prince are up to?”
I think about lying, but with Cerise, I know I don’t need to, even if I can’t answer all her questions. She understands that much. “Yes.”
She studies the cover. “You’re not one to bend the rules, Vi. Anything with this”—she taps the symbol on the front—“is banned.”
“I know.”
She thinks for a moment, then grins. “All right, let’s go.”
“Where?”
“The laboratory, obviously.”
After a few minutes of passing through the empty corridors of Vandenberghe in silence, Cerise decides to break it. “I snuck into your engagement party tonight.”
“What?”
She glances at me, smirking. “You thought I was going to miss it because I don’t have a fancy title?”
“Cerise,” I chide. “You could’ve gotten in so much trouble.”
“Says the girl walking around with this.” She waves the book in the air.
“Point is, I saw you with him”—for a moment, my heart stops, and I think she’s about to tell me that she saw something she wasn’t meant to, like the killing of the Queen or the two of us running from the captain—“when you were dancing.” A sly grin spread across her face. “He’s clearly infatuated with you.”
I thank the Saints it’s too dark for her to see my blush. “Believe me, he doesn’t behave that way in private. He just knows how to charm the crowds.”
I can’t help wondering what Cerise saw to make her believe such a thing. What do Roze and I look like to the outside world?
“I don’t know how I feel about him, honestly. I don’t think I hate him, but I really thought I did,” I say, almost accidentally, my inward thoughts spilling out before better judgment can stop me.
Her smile is knowing and crested with mischief. “There’s a thin line between hatred and obsession. You’ve been toeing it for a while.”
Finally, we enter the science wing, and Cerise flings open the door to her favorite room—the laboratory.
It’s perhaps the strangest room in the school, which is why she fits right in here, while the whole place makes me want to retreat to my books and tea in front of a cozy fire.
The weirdness, the wildness, the adventure of it suits her perfectly.
Once we’re inside, Cerise settles on a stool by a long table worn with the pockmarks of spills and burns.
The wall behind her is strewn with peculiar objects—candlesticks; jars of congealed substances in every color imaginable; dark books with strange words on the worn bindings; a jar of eyeballs that look as though they might come from a frog or some other small, slimy creature; large, malignant tools with long blades and serrated edges; and a clay vase that looks suspiciously like an urn.
She takes a little gold magnifier from the table, the sort that fits in the eyelid without being held, wedges it onto her eye, and begins to inspect the book without mercy, running her fingers over the pages and bending the spine.
“Do you think … Could it be enchanted?” I ask.
Cerise glances at me apprehensively. I’ve almost forgotten that she hasn’t witnessed the magic that I have in the last several days.
“I’m not going to look for the supernatural where the natural could be a reasonable explanation,” she says.
She holds the book against the light of an oil lamp. I try not to cringe at her carelessness. I feel protective of it, and I try to tell myself it’s because I’ve always treasured old, rare books, and not because it has begun to feel like a living thing to me.
When she passes it over the gas flame, its heat licking the pages, my shadows press at my fingers, and I have to bite my cheek to keep from snatching it from her.
But the flame doesn’t harm it.
“Interesting,” she mutters repeatedly as she works. “If it’s invisible ink, it’s not activated by heat.”
She crosses the room to a cabinet and retrieves a mortar and pestle and then fishes out something that looks vaguely like a very rotten cabbage from a shelf of vegetables. She grounds the cabbage in the mortar, adds a clear substance, and then uses a brush to paint the liquid across a page.
“Nothing,” she says with a frown. “Wait—”
The cabbage liquid disappears into the page, as though the book has swallowed it in one gulp.
We glance at each other, and Cerise grabs a few other vials off the table. She tries swiping various substances across different pages of the book—one a deep blue, another clear and pungent, and something a sallow umber color. They all vanish upon contact.
“Okay, this book might be magic,” Cerise says.
Part of me doesn’t want to believe it. Because if it is enchanted, then Professor Borges gave me an enchanted book from the Kingdom of Death just before I was sent to my execution.
There’s an explanation for that I haven’t wanted to consider—that she was trying to incriminate me.
It’s too horrible to think that she may have had a hand in the Queen’s attempt to murder me.
“The pages are just absorbing the liquid,” Cerise says with a frown. She flips the pages back and forth, looking for stains or residue of the fluids. “It’s almost like it …”
“Ate it,” I finish.
We glance at each other. And I remember the strange weight of the book, its haunting presence.
“Why would the pages be blank?” Cerise wonders. “Did the book eat its own ink as well?”
Of course. “Cerise, try writing in it.”
Cerise quickly finds a fountain pen and bottle of ink from the dusty clutter on the table. When she dips it in the ink and touches it to the page, the ink pools atop it for a moment, unmoving.
“Write something,” I say.
Cerise dips the pen in the ink again and writes her name.
The letters stain the pages and make no sign of retreat.
“That’s it,” I say. “It only responds to ink. All other substances are washed away so that it isn’t—”
But before I can say the word “ruined,” the ink moves. It coalesces on the page and forms an angry splotch.
“All right, maybe not.”
Cerise and I lean in closer. Then the ink separates again and forms letters.
“The heart is the dominion of evil,” I read aloud. It’s ancient Aragoise. The same text I translated for Professor Borges the night she gave me the book.