4. Harlow
HARLOW
M y maid, Marie, sets the heated iron on the table to cool. She’s spent the last two hours curling my hair into tight ringlets. She begins to wrangle the coils into submission, pinning them up on my head and topping the updo off with an emerald-encrusted headband.
I stare at myself in the mirror, brushing my fingers over my lips. I haven’t spoken a word about last night to anyone, not that there’s anyone I would tell other than Bea or Aidia. If something is wrong with my magic, the moment I’m about to be sent to Mountain Haven is not the time to bring it up.
Besides, I would have no easy way to explain it without outing my secret. If my family knew what I’ve been up to, I would be locked in a tower like some fairy-tale princess until a prince of their choosing came to claim me.
Though I suppose that’s what today is about. My prince has finally come.
While I didn’t initially want this assignment, I now see it for what it is: a way to earn a favor from my father. I have had a plan since the first time Aidia showed up with the bruise on her face.
Years ago, when the Drained population grew and traveling far beyond the walls became almost impossible, my father commissioned my brother Frederick to use his blessing for manipulating nature, to build a tunnel to the outside world.
It was a way to continue trade without losing so many guards and resources to the Drained.
According to the tradesmen who came through before the forest was overrun, the Drained rarely wander into the mountain pass because there isn’t much coverage during daylight. While the sunlight doesn’t kill them, it’s enough to keep them from straying too far beyond the Drained Wood.
For years, I have stared at the key, hanging from the chain around my father’s neck, imagining how it would feel to get far enough away from here that I would feel true safety for the first time in my life.
I’ve fantasized about stealing it and disappearing with Aidia to finally find the freedom we’ve always dreamed of.
Unfortunately, my father is too controlling for escape to be so simple.
The entrance to the tunnel is cloaked, the route mired with dead ends and magical traps, and it requires the collective magic of several of my siblings just to navigate it, as well as my father’s magic to pull down the wall of holy fire at the end.
Like every other resource in Lunameade, my father has made sure that no one can use the tunnel without him.
If I do this, I’ll finally have a safe way out of the city. By the time he realizes he’s lost two daughters instead of one—that I’ve used it to get Aidia away from Rafe—we’ll have escaped beyond the mountain pass, beyond the reach of the Drained, and, more importantly, beyond our father’s reach.
“Are you sure about skipping a lip color, dear?” Marie asks.
I nod. “People like the spectacle of an otherwise invisible magic.”
Marie is the only servant in the whole castle who knows about my power because she helped raise me and needed to know for her own safety, much like Gaven needed to know in order to protect me.
She has sworn a vow of silence that sends her into excruciating pain if she were to ever try to speak it to someone outside of the family.
“What do you think he’ll say when he finds out that he can never kiss his wife?” I ask.
Marie arches a brow. “As I understand, most men care more for other bedroom activities anyway. I suspect he’ll live.”
I blow out a sigh. When I turned eighteen, my mother brought a handsome young man to “test” that other activities were safe. She waited in a sitting room down the hall, but it was still the most uncomfortable night of my life. I wouldn’t have gone along with it if I hadn’t been so curious myself.
“Yes, at least there’s that.”
Marie laughs and shakes her head. “Don’t be so morose. You could use some affection, love. You’ve been on your own too long, and while your independence is admirable, this alliance will help Lunameade. Peace is good for everyone.”
Even if my parents want peace, Able doesn’t give a Divine damn about it. The true poison apple on the family tree will someday be head of South Hold and rule over the magical families of Lunameade. I kill for vengeance and protection, but if Able had my gifts, he’d do it for fun.
Marie squeezes my shoulder, a knowing look on her face. She’s helped me get ready for years, but this is always where she leaves me. She can do nothing for this ache—the burn of knowing that I am nothing more than a currency for my parents to trade.
My bedroom door creaks open, and my mother steps inside. I avoid meeting her gaze in the mirror, turning and busying myself with pulling on my stockings and fastening the stays to my slip.
It’s been months since I’ve looked my mother in the eye.
The last time I did, I was screaming at her until I lost my voice.
She’d traded Aidia to a monster for the greater good of the family, even when she saw the damage done.
I was more angry about my sister being used that way than I am about it happening to me for a second time.
Her reflection appears in the mirror, her appearance so like my own it’s like looking thirty-five years into my future.
Her hair is still a dark raven-black, but instead of making her look young, it ages her.
The color is too stark against her pale skin and plays up the prominent lines around her violet eyes—eyes that are only purple and blessed with magic sight because my father gave her a family heirloom ring that grants her the same vision the rest of us have by blood.
She’s still striking, with her tall, statuesque figure, high cheekbones, and full lips. Despite the lack of glamour, she still looks younger than she is—beautiful in a cold, calculating way that I would probably respect more if she weren’t my mother .
Even her aura is similar to mine: a bright golden swirl around her that remains close to her skin.
Her blessing from Harvain is far kinder than mine.
The Divine of Fortune loves to give eclectic gifts, and my mother’s is no exception.
Her gift is retro-cognition. While most people would have seen it as useless, she landed my father because of the way she was able to glimpse into any political adversary’s past and find unseemly things.
She gained my father’s attention by warning him about a plot another house had hatched against him.
She’s kept his allegiance for years by continuing to find past sins of all the magical families in Lunameade.
I’ve watched her aura stretching out and probing guests for information at every event of the high houses we attend. None of them are the wiser, because you can’t fight off magic you can’t see or feel.
There was a time I worried she might realize what I’ve been doing in my free time, but she doesn’t like to look into her children’s pasts. That would require looking at her own failures, and that’s a thing she cannot abide.
My mother’s gaze drops to my star necklace and her hand instinctively comes up to the ruby pendant around her own throat.
I haven’t asked Aidia, but I suspect that she’s stopped refilling my mother’s necklace with glamour magic.
I respect my sister for the protest because there are few things more reliable than our mother’s vanity.
“Excellent work. You’re dismissed, Marie,” my mother says.
Marie gives me a wary glance before seeing herself out.
“Did you need something else, or are you simply here to fill me in on what you’re planning ahead of time for once?” I say as I run a finger over the belladonna flower embroidery along the edges of my purple silk dress.
My mother blows out a weary sigh. “Don’t sulk, Harlow.
If we’d told you ahead of time, you would have just thrown a fit like you did with Aidia.
You’re always so dramatic about these things—as if duty is optional.
We all do things we don’t want to. It’s part of what it means to be a Carrenwell.
We have to put the needs of the city first, not ourselves.
You haven’t complained about any of your other siblings’ marriages. ”
It’s not that I don’t care about my siblings, but most of them were too much older to bother with me.
They’ve all married people they wanted to, and the only other sibling I cared about, Kellan, had been in love with his wife, Libby, since they were teenagers.
I always knew he would be okay. It was Aidia and I who were the outliers—young and stubborn and ready to put up a fight.
Sometimes I wonder if they agreed to marry her off to Rafe to break both of us. Unfortunately for them, it had the opposite effect.
“You say that like I haven’t already done this once,” I snap. “You can’t just use the same ‘you owe us’ excuse every time.”
My mother holds up a placating hand. “They’ve been operating under our noses all this time and we have no idea if they’re actually coming home to us or planning our demise. This isn’t just about our family, Harlow. This is about the safety of the city. We don’t trust the Havenwoods.”
“So you’ll throw another daughter into the fire,” I say.
I adjust the sleeves of my dress, and my mother begins to button it.
“You’re perfectly capable of taking care of yourself, as you love to remind me all the time,” she says.
I want to argue, but she’s right.
“I know you think I haven’t been a good mother to you, but you should consider that it’s impossible to be a good mother to you, a good partner to your father, and a good ruler of Lunameade. So often those priorities are in conflict with each other.”
“How difficult for you,” I say.
“I can take your anger. It’s all you’ve ever given me. But I know how you feel. I share your victories just like I share your losses.”