Chapter 7
Even the purest magic holds within it a sliver of darkness, shifting the very balance of the world.
LEMPICKA
The purple forest never seemed to end.
My boots sank into the spongy moss like an over-soaked old cake.
Yeun, in his fairy form, drifted between gelatinous mushrooms that pulsed like jellyfish on the dew-slicked ground of eternal damp.
Persian-blue flowers opened slowly, their hearts releasing orange sparkles that danced in the air before fading like embers.
Chouquette bounded after me, mouth open, snapping at glass-winged fireflies that left pearly trails in the shadows.
Such enchantment could only mean one thing: the orchard was close.
“Lempickaaa!”
A rustle in the bushes, followed by a groan that could only belong to one creature. Aignan collapsed dramatically at my feet, one paw over his forehead as if exhaling his last breath. éclair trotted behind him, looking like a giant ball of green moss.
“I smelled food. I may be at death’s door, but my nose never fails me,” he grumbled. “Bring me something sweet. Mille-feuille, perhaps… or nougatine. Yes, nougatine would bring me back to life.”
I couldn’t help but smile. And here I’d thought, for just a moment, that he cared more about me than his stomach. “You tracked me by dinner’s scent, didn’t you? I can’t smell a thing.”
“He’s right. The banquet is about to begin. You’d better hurry,” Yeun said, his iridescent wings rippling around him like veils of light.
Hurry if I didn’t want to end up on the banquet table myself.
“The little flame’s right. You’ll carry me to the feast?” Aignan batted his long lashes, all sugar and bad faith.
“I have to pick golden apples for the sorcerer, but enjoy yourselves.”
“I told Nyla that the day would come when her sweet, innocent Lempicka would fall for some despicable man and forget I ever existed,” Aignan complained to the two Cursed who had sidled up beside him. “And soon after, she’ll cast me out. I’ll end up thin and miserable, abandoned!”
My cheeks puffed with heat, seconds away from imploding like a brioche forgotten in the oven. “For your information, my standards are far higher than that.”
“Yeah, sure,” Aignan snorted. “But let me manage your love life: no sorcerers. A prince, maybe, or at least a duke—”
I turned away, lips tight. “Let’s go, Yeun.”
With a beat of his wings, he showed me the way to the weeping willows whose long, dripping branches formed a shifting curtain. Yeun slipped through first, lifting the branches with grace and reverence, as though opening a forbidden door. I followed.
“Lempicka!” Aignan called behind me one last time. “If you die, who’ll make my tarts? LEMPICKAAA!”
The curtain of leaves closed.
“We’re here,” Yeun whispered.
My eyes widened. The orchard looked as if it had stepped out of some forgotten fairy tale.
Branches, heavy with clusters of pearly apples, tangled together into a protective vault.
Their smooth skins caught the starlight, gleaming as though they’d been dipped in molten sugar.
Here, time itself seemed suspended. The apples were already in bloom, brimming with magic.
“It’s not even harvest season yet.” I knotted my apron to make a makeshift basket. “They’re already ripe. How is that possible?”
The air was thick with a sweet fragrance, somewhere between fresh snow and melting guimauve.
“This orchard was special. Before.”
Before. That word was always ash in a whisper—a wound that bled in the heart. My gaze drifted toward the far end of the orchard, where the trees lay fallen, dead, broken. Where magic no longer lived.
“This is where I grew up, and where my family disappeared,” Yeun said. “I’m the last of my kind. It was a wondrous forest once. Now, this is all Master could save.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, gently holding my palms out toward him.
He nestled into them. His warmth spread through my sugared skin, comforting as a cup of tea in winter. “It was so long ago. But you should know, the orchard is guarded.”
A boy Spirit drifted between the trunks, his step as light as rustling leaves. He didn’t spare us a glance, moving along some invisible path. He looked like something left behind, like a toy abandoned in a room emptied of its laughter. A shiver crawled up my neck.
“Who is he?” I asked.
Yeun didn’t answer at once, watching the spectral child disappear among the trees.
“Every night, he walks the orchard and reaches the Lake of Spirits. He watches over the apples and was probably here when it was all destroyed. He never lets anyone near. He’s never liked confectioners.
All of them have been too weak for Arawn’s magic. ”
Arawn? It was the first time he’d called the sorcerer by name—not with servitude, but with a hidden affection. So the sorcerer was testing my heart. Ironic, for someone who had sacrificed his own.
“I can do this.”
I left Yeun and slipped between the apple trees. In the next row over, the boy walked barefoot, just a few feet away. His blurred outline wavered in the silver light. A faint crackling hung in the air, like the fizz of freshly poured cider.
I followed at a distance until our paths joined. He stopped there, and I knelt to his height.
“Your master sent me to pick apples.”
His red eyes, fixed and unfathomable, locked on me, as cold as a dying flame.
“Where are your parents?” I asked softly.
Spirits had parents too… didn’t they? But the boy slowly shook his head. I swallowed. I didn’t know much about children, less still about Spirits.
“I don’t have parents either. They were passing through my village and left me behind.”
His large red eyes stayed locked on mine. He was listening. For now.
“I cried for days,” I admitted in a breath.
“Until my mentor took me to the orchard in the prince’s realm for my first harvest. I was about your age.
She told me every apple was like a wish.
If we care for them, they bloom into magic…
just like us. But if we don’t protect our hearts, rot sets in from within. ”
Slowly, the boy lifted a finger toward me in a silent accusation.
My heart tightened. He didn’t need to speak for me to understand what he meant.
Just like me. My hands clutched the fabric of my skirt.
I understood why the Wish Witch had cursed me.
I had wished for it once. To shine like those apples, so I’d never be left behind again.
So Nyla would love me as much as she loved the orchards.
“What I’m trying to say… is that I want to take care of your orchard and—”
A crack of leaves startled me. éclair, his head crowned with a wilted mushroom, was slipping between the apple trees, followed by Chouquette trotting along, tongue lolling.
“You were supposed to stay with Aignan! And where’s Yeun?”
The two Cursed pointed in opposite directions. Then, without hesitation, each marched off the way they’d pointed.
“They’re not bad, just curious, and—”
I didn’t have time to finish before another crack split the air. éclair, with all his clumsy enthusiasm and too long arms, had already seized a branch to pull it toward him. With a badly measured force, he tore an apple free.
“No, wait!”
The damage was already done. The Cursed, by their very nature, could not pick the golden apples. The apple shriveled instantly, its golden glow blackening in his hand. In the space of a heartbeat, the flesh crumbled into a violet pulp.
The wind rose. The boy trembled. His limbs stretched, trying to form a protective dome around the orchard, or a cage. I had lost what I had barely brushed against: his trust.
I leaped toward the wounded branch. Violet sap was already creeping, like a living poison.
It was aiming for the trunk—and the entire orchard if it reached the roots.
My hands shook. I had nothing to cut with.
The Spirit kept growing. His arms passed over my head, ready to close us both in his embrace.
So I seized the branch and cut my hand on a splinter.
Where my skin split, a golden tear of sugar welled up.
The sucre d'or is lethal to anyone who consumes it raw.
The drop slid onto the wound in the wood, and the dark sap stopped dead.
The sugar crystallized on the bark, forming an irregular, rough shell.
A heart of burnt caramel. The rot was locked inside.
And all around it, a golden vein stretched across the bark.
I set my hand on the trunk and collapsed against it. My palm burned where I’d cut it. But what mattered was that the orchard was safe. The wind fell. The boy Spirit drew his limbs back and stepped toward me.
“I’m sorry… I couldn’t save it all.”
The soft mushroom on éclair’s head sagged as he bolted, Chouquette darting after him.
The boy bent to pick up an apple that had fallen to the ground.
The moment his fingers brushed it, it rotted, sinking into the earth.
He straightened and pointed at a higher apple. His stoic face gave nothing away.
“May I?”
He nodded. I tightened my apron and rose on tiptoe. My fingers brushed the apple. Smooth. Cool. Gleaming.
He protects this orchard, yet he can’t touch a single thing without it withering in his hands.
My throat tightened. It wasn’t fair. I placed the apple into the fabric. Aignan would have grumbled the entire time, but at least he would have held my apron between his teeth. I wished I had him here. Like before. Like with Nyla.
“You remind me of an old fable Nyla used to tell me,” I whispered, resuming the harvest. “The one about the frozen prince.”
The boy sat, his head tilting slightly.
“They said this prince had a heart so cold that every sweet offered to him would wither in his hand. So everyone came to believe he hated sweets. Until the day a confectioner made him one meant only for him.” I glanced up at the highest branch.
A single apple hung there, slender, pearly, almost weightless.
“It glowed softly, like a star trapped in sugar. He kept it with him his entire life, without ever taking a bite. Many wondered what the confectioner’s secret ingredient was… ”
He had moved closer. His red eyes devoured me, wide, fixed, as if he’d forgotten even the idea of blinking.
“What she had put inside it was simply the certainty that he was worthy of it. That something sweet could exist just for him. He was no longer the one who ruined things. He was the one something had chosen to stay with.” I gathered the edges of my apron around the apples and tied them in a knot.
“You can’t touch the apples… but I could make you a sweet meant only for you. ”
“No.” His voice shot out, echoing against the trunks, winding through the branches. “He doesn’t want you here either.”
I flinched. He could speak? “Who?”
The boy didn’t answer, but his gaze said enough.
“Arawn?”
The child nodded. “You’re just a weak human. You can’t do anything.”
He had called me “human,” not “Cursed.” I smiled faintly. “Exactly. As long as I’m still human, there’s something I can do.”
I was about to thank him, but before I could utter another word, the boy was already walking away into the mist.
“Wait!” I cried, slipping between the willow’s branches. “I don’t know where to go!”
No answer. The Spirit didn’t turn, didn’t slow, didn’t give me a final glance. So I followed. The fog thickened around us like a sea of cotton. The orchard’s scent faded, replaced by something cooler: eucalyptus, mingled with moss and freshly turned earth.
“This isn’t the way back to the manor, is it?”
It wasn’t the boy who answered me.
“Why do you always refuse what you’ve become?”
I pushed aside a branch beaded with dew and froze.
The Mist Sorcerer floated in the black water, head tipped back, his pale throat bared to the moonlight.
The light slid over the breadth of his angular shoulders, tracing every line of his back with a precision almost cruel.
Dark water licked at his skin, steam rising where it touched, as though a branding iron had been plunged into an icy spring.
A black horn lay on the bank, cleanly severed. When he lifted his head, a shiver traveled up my spine. The other horn curled back along his temple, sinuous, knotted, streaked with dark veins like a root. The Spirits floated around him, their ethereal forms nuzzling against him like docile animals.
“Get out before I turn you to ash,” he said, his voice cutting through the silence.
But it wasn’t to me. One of the Spirits had dared drift too close.
“If you want my attention, make yourselves useful.”
At once, one plunged into the water and surfaced with a long filament of algae, which it began to rub against the sorcerer’s feet as he lifted them from the water. Another waited on the bank, holding a black silk robe, ready to hand to him.
I bit the inside of my cheek. I felt like an intruder in a moment I was never meant to see.
Then he took a heated blade in his gloved hand.
I held my breath. He didn’t tremble. His face remained impassive, almost empty, as he slid the edge along his remaining horn.
My stomach twisted. The sound was sharp—a wet crack, bone and nerve torn.
The horn fell, swallowed by the lake. A dark vein surged at his temple, and a line of violet blood traced down his cheek.
He didn’t flinch. He wiped it away with a cloth, as if screaming were useless and pain could no longer reach him.
I was about to turn back when a branch snapped under my foot. I shut my eyes and stopped breathing.
“You didn’t leave.”
This time, he was speaking to me.