Chapter Eighteen
I have a vague recollection of Marion reading at my bedside by candlelight. Then, of Greer rebandaging my hands. “This is what you get for jumping into the Thames with open wounds,”
she lectures, but her voice is gentle, her face etched with concern.
Will the Crown pay my family if I die like this, or will I become just another Benton girl sacrificed to the gossip mill? It is a little funny, I suppose, to attempt a coup against the queen and die of an infection instead.
The dreams set in, places where the colors bend all wrong. I’m at a coronation, a crown on my head. I’m at a tea party, and the walls are melting like chocolate left out in the sun. I’m cantering on the back of a horse through a land that looks nothing like this one.
There’s a strong, calloused hand against my forehead, soothing, like he could brush away the fever.
Brown hair. Sharp eyes.
That one feels the most real.
When I wake again, it’s Olive who is keeping watch. She gasps from where she sits on the chair placed next to my bed and drops her book to the floor.
“You’re up!”
she exclaims.
I’m more lucid than I’ve been in days, though still too weak to lift my head.
“We thought you were going to die for certain!”
she continues, and I wonder if Olive has ever had a thought she didn’t immediately voice aloud.
Emmy appears in the doorway, leaning casually against the doorjamb. “Don’t say that.”
She turns to call down the staircase. “Ivy is awake!”
There’s a flurry of footsteps, then a pile of girls tripping into my room. They’re wearing silk gowns, diamonds in their hair, dressed for a ball. Greer drops her fan of albatross feathers as she rushes to me. “I thought you were dead.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint,”
I croak. The other girls laugh, but something brittle and sorrowful crosses Greer’s beautiful face.
Lottie pushes past where everyone is congregated in the doorway. “Give her space!”
she calls as she wipes away the hair plastered to my forehead and props me up with pillows. My bones feel one hundred years old, but the burning of the fever has receded. I test the joints of my fingers and find them less swollen. I’m past the worst of it.
“How long have I been out?” I ask.
“Three days,”
Olive chirps.
I’ve missed Wednesday’s string quartet concert, and now I’m missing the Harrowfields’ ball. I assume there have been no more trials in my absence, given that no one is sporting visible wounds, but I’ve wasted so much potential time with Bram.
Lottie disappears to find broth for my dinner, and each girl bids me her best before filing out the door for the carriages.
It’s another day before I’m out of bed and allowed to continue activities with the others. Everyone but Faith babies me, even Greer, who seems to have softened.
I remember what Olive said the first day in Caledonia Cottage: I was hoping we’d all be friends. I never shared her hope, but perhaps a near-death experience was all it took. Faith hasn’t brought up my late-night escapade again.
The next day, I’m finally strong enough to be out of bed, and I’m eager to be outside. Lottie is dressing me for my first full outing since my sickness, a turn around the park, when she slips a note into my hand. She continues to button my dress as if nothing has happened, but I tuck the square of parchment away in my palm. I can’t read it now, with Faith watching.
The larger green of the palace grounds is open to the public, and today’s walk feels as if we are on display. People whisper behind fans as we pass, judgments on our beauty, our charms, which of us will make the best princess.
I’ve got a lace parasol in one hand and the other looped through the crook of Olive’s arm. Olive is a perfect companion for these sorts of things, as she never stops talking, so I don’t need to say a word.
“The thing about croissants is you have to fold the dough into layers—”
She’s been droning on about dough lamination and filling technique for ages.
I tune Olive out and take in the gardens, vibrantly green from a damp English winter. There’s a patch of purple crocuses along the gentle hill and a tangle of rosebushes beyond that.
There’s a gentle breeze today, but the shawl tied in a knot around my ribs keeps me from shivering. My bonnet hangs loose down my back; it’s not exactly proper, but the sun on my skin after so many days indoors feels like heaven.
Faith and Marion stroll arm in arm ahead of us, Emmy and Greer at our heels.
Our group stills as two horses round the path. The riders slow to a walk and take off their top hats as they approach.
“Lady Ivy, you’re up!”
Bram hops down from his horse, a wide smile on his face. Emmett stays mounted, looking down at me with an expression I can’t decipher.
There’s a flurry of skirts as the other girls crowd around us, all talking over each other at Bram. Greer is asking if he likes her new hat. Olive is asking if he got the basket of scones she sent over. Faith trips over the toe of her shoe artfully and ends up in Bram’s arms.
He rights her quickly with a grin. Emmy sidesteps in front of her, saying, “I’ve always been praised for my balance.”
High up on his horse, Emmett jerks his chin at me. Do something, he mouths. The other girls are too distracted by Bram to see.
What? I mouth back.
Emmett raises a gloved hand to his forehead and mimics swooning.
That sounds humiliating. No.
Emmett clears his throat loudly. “My, Lady Ivy, you look rather wan.”
“I’m feeling quite well, thank you for your concern, Your Highness.”
“No. No. Brother, doesn’t she look poorly? You’d best get her inside.”
If Emmett weren’t so out of reach, I’d kick him in the shins.
Bram looks down at me with concern. “Yes, you’ve been so ill.”
I swallow my annoyance at Emmett and remind myself that I’ve got a role to play. I have to make Bram love me. Emmett is right, even if he is annoying about it.
“I’ll ask the other girls to take me back to the cottage,”
I say weakly. “I wouldn’t dream of ruining your nice afternoon.”
I dab a handkerchief at my brow and flutter my eyes, really selling it.
“You’re not ruining anything. I insist on seeing you home safely.”
He’s as chivalrous as I expected he’d be.
I catch Emmett’s eye just as I go to turn down the path. “Your horse is a beauty,”
I say to Bram, remembering Emmett’s advice.
Emmett canters off, leaving in a cloud of dust.
His eyes crinkle as he grins. “Her name is Mab, and I promise she’s more polite than my brother.”
“Do you have any others?” I ask.
“A few, though none I like as much as her.”
“I’m feeling better, now that I’m out of the direct sun. Perhaps we could take a detour to the stables? I’d like to see them.”
Bram considers for a moment. “You sure you’re feeling well enough?”
“Very sure.”
We cut across the lawn to the mews on the other side of the palace, shaded by trees and far from the watchful eyes of the viscountess and the other girls. It’s improper, but unlikely anyone will see us.
As we walk, I remember something else Emmett said, about Bram liking the fruit here, since it’s different from what grows in the Otherworld.
I produce a green apple and a pocketknife from the tie-on pocket hanging down the hip of my walking dress.
I always thought the ability to cut slices of fruit while walking was one of the more stupid etiquette lessons we were given, but I liked that it gave me an excuse to carry a knife, and it’s certainly coming in handy now.
I pierce the skin and carve out a neat little wedge. “Would you like some?”
I offer it to Bram on the tip of my knife.
He grins and takes it. “You know,”
he says, still chewing, “we have different fruits in the Otherworld.”
I could laugh. Emmett clearly knows his brother well.
“Really?” I ask.
“Oh yes. Something like a pomegranate but as big as a dinner plate, with seeds as sweet as sugar, and berries blacker than night that taste of smoke and salt.”
I wish I had a notepad. I can’t wait to write Ethel about all of this.
“Which do you like better, the food here or back—”
I nearly say home, but I don’t know if Bram considers the Otherworld home anymore. It’s an unsettling concept, a world near to ours but somewhere just out of reach, maybe that’s why I was so obsessed with the idea of it as a child.
Bram must glean my meaning because he takes a moment to consider, then answers. “The food here, but the drinks there. Fizzy cordials that taste of lemon and roses, wine brewed from night-blooming flowers . . .”
He’s got a far-off look in his eyes as he imagines a place I can’t see.
“You must miss it.”
I think of my own golden childhood, how it pains me that I can never go back.
He thinks for a moment, and our boots crunch along the gravel path. I take the opportunity to look up at him, haloed by green leaves. He’s got a freckle on his angular jawline I hadn’t noticed before. He’s so beautiful it hurts to see him straight-on like this, like looking directly into the sun. I wonder if I will ever get used to it if I marry him, or if I’ll spend the rest of my life feeling this starstruck.
He runs a hand through his wavy hair, streaked with sun-bleached gold.
Brown hair. A strong hand on my forehead soothing away a fever.
The stable boys scatter as we enter the sun-dappled barn. We walk slowly along the stalls, petting the velvety noses of the horses.
“I want to thank you for visiting me while I was ill.”
He furrows his brows in confusion. “I’ve been away.”
“Oh, it must have been something I dreamed.”
That’s humiliating.
He stops in his tracks and gestures to a stack of hay bales. He lays out his coat for me, and I lower myself beside him.
There’s a deep furrow between his brows, and he twirls the thick gold ring on his pinkie. “I actually wanted to apologize for that. I sent flowers but you deserve more than that. I wish I could have helped.”
“Healed me like you did the day of the Pact Parade, you mean?”
A crease appears between his brows. “No. I would’ve if I could’ve, though. My magic isn’t as developed as my mother’s—more parlor tricks than anything. I can manage small cuts and bruises, but not much more.”
Emmett’s face flashes into my mind. I reach out and brush the sleeve of Bram’s shirt. “I want to get to know you better.”
His mouth pulls into a half smile. “Is that so?”
I nod. “Tell me more about magic.”
Emmett did say that people valued authenticity. I spent most of my life longing for information about faeries. If only ten-year-old Ivy could see me now.
“No one ever asks me these things.”
He smiles. “Small magic, the kind I can do, is innate.”
There’s a dandelion patch growing along the edge of the barn. Bram waves his hand, and it bursts into a cluster of pink tulips. I gasp.
Bram just laughs. “It’s really not all that useful.”
The tulips crumble to ash as he says it.
He closes his fist and opens it, revealing a shiny gold coin. He hands it to me, and I’m surprised to find it ice cold.
“Wait,”
he says softly. And the coin melts into a small puddle of water in my palm.
I laugh in awe.
“Big magic, the kind my mother has, is the product of years of study in palace schools. I never had the patience for it, and I came here when I was so young. There’s no one to teach me but her, and she doesn’t have the time or the interest.”
My breath catches at the mention of the Otherworld. There are a million other questions on the tip of my tongue. What does it look like, what does it smell like, does it rain all the time like it does here, is everyone there as beautiful as you, how does the magic work?
“I have a confession,” I say.
He raises his brows. “Is that so?”
Color rises in my face, and I suddenly regret saying it, but there’s no turning back now. “I spent half my life completely obsessed with faeries. I collected every bit of information I could, drew pictures of the Otherworld, made my sister and Greer play faeries with me.”
I don’t say that I never quite grew out of it. “We had this book that our old cook would read to us, Faeries of the British Isles. I must have traced the artwork inside at least a hundred times.”
I clamp my hand over my mouth. I shouldn’t have admitted to owning illegal information about faeries to the son of the queen. “I’m sorry!”
I exclaim. “The book was burned the moment my mother realized what it was.”
Bram studies my face. “I’m not going to tell. In fact, I’m a little relieved. No one ever talks to me about this. It’s like they’re uncomfortable with the idea of me being different.”
“I like that you’re different.”
I mean it. “And never doubt that I’ll always want to hear more.”
He presses his lips together. “Home can be difficult to talk about. Things didn’t end well between my parents. I felt stuck in the middle.”
“Is that why you decided to come here?”
He shrugs. “It wasn’t much of a decision. My mother and father once ruled together as king and queen of the Otherworld, but they disagreed on a few things, particularly on how humans should be treated. My mother, like many in her court, was fond of using humans as playthings, but my father had a soft heart and no stomach for it. When my mother tried to oust him in a coup soon after I was born, he had no choice but to close the door permanently between our worlds.”
“That’s how she ended up on the battlefield that day?”
I marvel. “How did you father defeat her?”
He looks so sad I regret asking. “Iron.”
The word is only vaguely familiar. I must have read it in Mrs. Osbourne’s faerie book.
“I don’t know what that is.”
Bram shrugs. “I suppose you wouldn’t. It’s a natural element, a type of metal you can melt down to make things like weapons, tools, chains. She had all mention of it scrubbed from history.”
“And your father used it against her?”
“He was afraid of her. He had good reason to be.”
“So she came here instead.”
Bram nods. “She couldn’t go home, but she still needed to be queen of something.”
“If the door was locked, how did you get in?”
Bram looks down at the ground solemnly. “My father may have been softhearted, but he was still a king, and the closer I came to being of age, the bigger threat I was to him. Court in the Otherworld is vicious and competitive. Everyone lives forever, so the only way to succeed to the throne is by killing its previous occupant. My father feared that I was still loyal to my mother, or maybe just plain old ambitious, and he became paranoid that I was trying to kill him. The enchantments he put on the door allowed only our bloodline to travel through. He threw me out in the middle of the night and locked it permanently behind me.”
Grief roars through me, grief for Bram at being cast out of his homeland, for his father’s betrayal, and grief for myself at this final blow to my theory that Lydia could have fallen through to another world. She was right, I am childish. Lydia isn’t a girl from a faerie tale, she’s just a girl.
But Bram has shown me that magic does exist, even if it’s small.
“I’m so sorry, Bram.”
He reaches up and wipes a tear from my cheek. I hadn’t even realized I was crying. It’s on the tip of his finger, and he turns it into a snowflake before it melts into a bead of liquid once more.
“It’s all right,”
he says. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“It’s so stupid. When my sister went missing, I thought that maybe she was . . . there.”
Bram looks at me, not with pity but with shared sadness. “I’m so sorry, Ivy.”
He fidgets with the ring on his right pinkie finger. He has a band of gold on all ten of his fingers, but this is the most delicate band, inlaid with a tiny pearl.
I gesture to the rings. “Do they mean anything?”
Bram shrugs. “Tokens from home.”
He slips the pearl ring onto my pointer finger.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to.”
“Why?”
“When I look across ballrooms and see it on your finger, it will feel like I am touching you, even when I’m not.”
I blush, and he reaches out and tips my chin up to look at him. “I want to know you too, Ivy Benton.”
I’m suddenly terrified he’s going to kiss me, and I want to kiss him too, in an abstract sort of way, but I don’t feel ready. I take the apple and knife out of my pocket just to have something to do with my hands. Bram watches intently as I carve out another wedge. I offer it to him on the tip of my knife once more.
His eyes bore directly into mine as he leans down, as if to kiss me, then wraps his full lips around the slice and eats it directly off the knife.
I exhale shakily, but he just grins as he chews.
I place the apple and the knife back in my pocket, but my knuckles bump the folded-up note Lottie handed me earlier in the day.
Later, in the privacy of my room, I unfold it. In unfamiliar, boyish handwriting are the words I believe in you. EDV. And below that, a tiny sketch of a shrimp with a heart right in the middle of its head.
Marion Thorne
Faith Fairchild might really be the death of me.
“Psst, Marion,”
she whispers on our turn around the palace grounds. Before I can protest, she’s pulling me by the crook of my arm into the glass walls of the orangery. Ivy Benton’s little stunt with Prince Bram might have been insufferable, but at least it got Viscountess Bolingbroke off our backs for a little while.
Faith is panting, her cheeks flush with exertion. Her chestnut hair is braided in a crown up on her head, but it’s humid today, and little wisps are curling around her ears.
She runs a tongue over her full bottom lip and—
“Marion,”
she says more harshly, and I blink back to myself. Get a grip.
“There was something I wanted to speak about with you,” she says.
Anything, I nearly say, but that would be silly, so I just nod.
“Would you mind if I swapped rooms with Olive?”
I blink a few times. “Swapped rooms?”
“Yes, so you and I can share.”
Faith exhales. “I can hardly stand to look at Ivy. I know she’s been sneaking off with Emmett, and after that stunt with Bram, I’m even more tempted to smother her in her sleep. It’s really for everyone’s safety. I don’t think Olive would mind moving across the hall, and then I could take her spot with you.”
I laugh at her joke, but it comes out hollow. It’s about Emmett, of course. I should have seen this coming. I was so stupid to assume anything else.
Faith confessed her history with Emmett to me our second night in the cottage. I was outside watching the sunset in the rose garden when she stomped out and said something under her breath about longing for some air.
I stole two flutes and a dusty bottle of something from the kitchen and settled down with her on an old stone bench that was crawling with moss. “You look like you need someone to spill your guts to,”
I said. And she did. I wasn’t lying, but I also wasn’t about to pass up the chance to be close to her. Since the moment I first spotted her in profile the morning of the Pact Parade, I was . . . enamored. Yes, that’s a word. Let’s go with enamored. She felt so familiar to me, like there was a string tied directly to my heart, and every time I saw her face, an invisible force tugged at it.
“I thought I could love him,”
she explained that night in the garden. “That feels silly now.”
“I don’t think love is ever silly,”
I replied.
“Is that why you’re here?”
she asked. “Because you think you could love Bram?”
“Oh no,”
I answered honestly. It was quite the opposite, though I didn’t tell her then.
“Is that why you’re here,”
I asked her in turn. “For revenge?”
She sighed, like the weight of the world was pressing down on her narrow shoulders, and shook her head. “No, Emmett doesn’t love me like that. I couldn’t get that kind of reaction out of him if I tried.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“What Emmett and I had . . . it’s hard to explain. We needed each other.”
That I understood, at least a little. “If you’re not here for Emmett, then why?”
Faith worried her lip again, I was afraid she’d draw blood and I’d be forced to do something chivalrous, like produce a clean hanky and dab at the wound.
“My father told me I had to enter the season, and I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. My father would have made me accept the first offer that came my way just to make me not his problem anymore. I figured Bram was my best option. What a cliché, right?”
“I think you’re more than a cliché,”
I said, too honest.
Faith smiled. I wanted to keep making her smile. “You might be the only one who does.”
I thought I was so clever when I signed up for the competition for the prince’s hand. The subject of my match has been a conversation at the Thorne family dinner table for as long as I’ve been alive.
Queen Mor’s England is deeply isolated from the rest of the world. Other than tightly regulated, necessary economic trade, there is functionally no contact with the outside world. It’s said that on a sunny day in Dover, you can see all the way to France. The light is supposed to be beautiful as it reflects off the remnants of the wall they built four hundred years ago to keep Mor out.
Every country seems to have its own explanation for Queen Mor and her eternal rule. Angel or demon, depending on who you ask. To my father’s people, she was a monster. There was no other reasonable explanation for a woman who lived forever. You don’t go into the forest on Thursdays, and you certainly don’t leave your home to sail to England. But as my father tells it, drought had dried up his family’s land in Ghana, and he was out of options. So he boarded a boat with others who believed that demons were the stuff of myth, and he crossed an unfriendly ocean.
Per the Royal Decree of 1597, all who are brave enough to make a bargain with Queen Mor are made citizens.
He was just eighteen when he knelt in front of her and bargained for one hundred bolts of fabric and a sewing machine.
Within the year, he’d become the most sought-after tailor on Savile Row. A year after that, he used his profits to open a department store. He now controls half of London’s shopping district in the West End. He changed his last name from Agyapong to Thorne, like slipping on a new coat that he didn’t like half as well as the last one.
Queen Mor took from him the ability to dream. He once told me that if he could dream, he’d dream of home.
An incredible storyteller and ruthless businessman, he quickly became a favorite at court, and the queen granted him a dukedom in less time than it took to buy his first two-story storefront.
The summer he turned twenty-three, he met my mother, a prim and proper English girl who grew up on an estate near Cornwall, and they were wed two months later. I came along the following winter, and the scheming began immediately. He might have been a duke, but he hadn’t been one for long, and he knew he needed to secure his family’s legacy. That meant marriage. That meant me.
My future always felt like a pit filling with sand. There was nothing I could do to stop it. I stitched samplers that said nice things about being a nice girl. I learned to play the pianoforte, became a wizard at whist, and could identify all the plants growing on the edge of the forest that bordered our family’s estate.
My little sister, Este, was my shadow, my partner. Our governess and tutors drilled us like little soldiers, and by ten and twelve we could plan a banquet, balance a household’s budget, and dance a perfect quadrille.
We were good girls, so we could become perfect wives.
After our lessons, I had to go for long walks to cool myself off, until I stopped feeling like I needed to claw my way out of my own skin.
When I was fifteen, I kissed a girl for the first time at Lady Richfield’s spring equinox tea party, and then I threw up in a hydrangea bush. Penny Richfield was two years older than me, and she blushed when our hands brushed over the clotted cream. She married the second son of a viscount last fall and now pretends not to know who I am.
My future became a grave filling up with dirt.
I made everyone laugh at every event of the social season. I dreamed about hopping on a boat to Accra, finding my father’s family, and building a life different from this one.
But I couldn’t break my parents’ or Este’s hearts like that, so I shoved everything real about me deep down to a place that was hard to reach.
I put on my Pact Parade gown like I was dressing for my own funeral.
But then Queen Mor announced that this was the season Bram would take a wife.
The plan popped into my head with the weight of inevitability. I would enter. I would lose. And then I would be free.
Signing that contract in blood was the easiest thing I’ve ever done.
No husband. Oh boo-hoo. I’ll find some way to carry on.
I’ve only lost sleep at night over the reaction of my parents. They’ve fought so hard for the life they’ve given to my sister and me, the last thing I want to do is let them down. I can’t bear it. But I’ll find some way to spin the tragic tale of my failure when it comes to telling my family. We could all still come out of this winning.
It’s why I still worked so hard at the May Queen competition. I had to make it look like I was trying.
There’s absolutely no way Bram is going to pick me. I’m not trying at all now, but they don’t need to know that.
They also don’t need to know about my bargain. The story I made up for the other girls about the headaches are real. I’ve been plagued with them for as long as I can remember, but that’s not the bargain I made.
When Queen Mor asked me what my greatest fear was, I looked her right in the eye and said, “Living a life as small as this forever. If I have to embroider one more cushion, I’m going to throw myself into the Thames.”
She laughed, and it made me strangely proud.
When I asked her to make me a great writer, her face turned serious. “I can do that. For a price.”
“I understand.”
I could picture it so clearly, the life I would have when all this was over.
What she took from me in return was so strange, I didn’t completely understand it in the moment. In fact, I only barely understand it now. But I fill my notebooks with sonnets and novels that flow out of me like water, and I don’t think about what I lost at all.
The only thing that causes me to ache now is looking at Faith Fairchild.
“Marion?”
Faith prompts, and I come back to myself, back to the orangery, where she’s standing in front of me with that face.
“So, room swap?” she asks.
“Anything,”
I reply, again too honest.
“Fabulous. I’ll move my things into your room tonight. You’re sure Olive won’t mind?”
“She’s an angel. Ivy will have to tolerate sleeping with a lamp on, but it’s really not so bad.”
“Done.”
Faith extends her hand and I take it in mine.
“Done,” I agree.