Chapter Four
He’s still in my bed when I awake in the morning, his crown of golden oak leaves discarded on the bedside table. His dark
eyelashes brush the tops of his cheekbones.
I consider his beautiful face, his sharp jaw, his thick eyebrows, and wonder if faeries can be smothered to death. It would
be so easy to reach over and grab a pillow.
He blinks up at me, bleary-eyed, as the morning sun leaks across the floor.
“Your present is downstairs.” His voice is hoarse with sleep.
“My what?”
He wipes his eyes. “The present I promised you at Rhion’s revel. It arrived last night. It’s downstairs.”
“Oh,” I reply flatly. I don’t want him to see that I am afraid. I rack my brain for what it could be. I pray he hasn’t brought
my parents here. If I’m lucky, it’ll just be a new carriage.
“That’s all the excitement I get?” He smiles, and he looks so much like the boy from the spring, the handsome prince who I
thought was only nineteen, who I believed might actually love me.
I smile artificially, wrap myself in a dressing gown, and pad down the stairs, Bram at my heels.
I check the morning room first; it would be the most logical place to put a present. There’s nothing in there but a startled
maid stoking the fire.
Bram frowns. “She was in here the last time I saw her.”
“Her?” I ask, blood thrumming. “My mother?”
“No.” Bram’s voice lilts as he teases me.
“Lydia?” I gasp.
Bram’s handsome face contorts into anger in a flash. “No. Not Lydia. When will you move on from that, it’s been months. Really,
Ivy, sometimes you’re such a child.”
I recoil. “She’s my sister,” I say quietly. I shouldn’t say anything at all, but I can’t help it.
Bram pushes past me and stomps through the foyer, then wrenches open the front door. “Ethel?” he calls.
“Ethel?” I gasp. She’s so old it can’t be safe for her to come all the way to Bath. She should be in bed recovering from her
journey. I’ll need to ask the cook to make soup and the maids to bring extra blankets and a hot brick for her feet.
Bram looks up and down the street, then turns to me and frowns. “She was right here, I swear it.”
The Royal Crescent is quiet this morning, but from around the corner comes peals of rabid laughter. Faerie laughter.
Dread sinks like an icy stone in my stomach and I chase the sound, running outside in my bare feet with Bram behind me.
Two faerie men, one with dark hair and a cleft chin, the other lanky with a sickly complexion, are on the ground, clutching
their stomachs with glee.
“Have you seen an old woman?” I jut my hand out at the height of my heart. “About yea high?”
This makes them laugh harder. They’re doubled over, their eyes bulging.
A fat raindrop lands on my head. Then another down my nose. I wipe it away, but my fingers come away red.
No. I look up and there she is. Her fragile, elderly body tangled up in the branches of a tree.
“She was so excited.” The sickly one chokes out through his giggles. “She wanted to make a bargain.”
No. No, no, no, Ethel.
My friend. One of the only true friends I’ve ever had.
I never told her not to come to Bath. I never considered the journey would even be a possibility for her.
But I should have known she’d be unable to resist the siren song of a faerie bargain. Or maybe she just wanted to see me.
She didn’t often complain of loneliness in her letters, she was too cheery for that, but I could tell how much she missed
me. For every letter of mine, I received three back. I meant to write her more. I should have been writing her more.
My knees give out. “No, please.” Her blood splatters like dew on the grass.
“Asked us to make her fly,” the dark-haired faerie explains through his laughter. “Didn’t look up for branches. They ran her
right through before the old broad had any idea what was happening.”
“Get her down,” I wail.
Bram doesn’t seem to hear me. He’s just staring at her body, high up in the tree.
“Get her down now!” I scream.
Bram sighs, like I’m a child who has asked him to rescue a toy.
“Fine.”
“And kill them,” I add. “Kill them both! I’m your queen, you bastards!”
I’m blinded by rage, kicking and screaming against the footmen who hold me back, their arms locked around my chest. I don’t
even know when they arrived. My vision blurs.
I’m in bed. My head hurts. My throat is raw.
I blink a few times, and then it all comes rushing back to me. Ethel’s body tangled up in the tree. Her hat on the ground.
It was a lumpy purple thing. She put it on this morning to see me and now she’ll never wear it again. The thought of it lying
in the dirt starts my sobbing anew.
Pig climbs onto my lap and I burrow my face into his fur.
The hope I held in my chest was a small flame, but a flame nonetheless; it flickered in the darkness. Ethel’s death is the
blow that has snuffed it out.
After a few hours of sobbing in bed, no one checking on me, I position myself in the chair by the window. It’s closer to the
fire and it feels less pathetic to be upright.
On the street below, life goes on. Ladies promenade, parasols balanced in their gloved hands, shiny carriages clatter by,
and the green is dotted by a few picnic blankets.
But it all looks so bleak from up here.
Afternoon mist, blown in from the sea, pools in the streets below, giving the Crescent a seafoam-gray, dreamlike quality.
The image of me, up here in this chair, must look serene from the outside, but inside I am raging.
There is nothing sedate about my sadness.
It’s vicious. A monster clawing at my rib cage from the inside.
I’ll be shredded through completely soon if nothing is done.
It’s only been four months and Bram’s court has brought nothing but destabilization and horror to England. What will this
country look like in another four months? In four years?
I’ll be queen of the ashes.
Or I’ll be dead.
Right now, I wish I was dead.
That’s new. I’ve never really wanted that before.
The sun sinks below the horizon. I’ve done nothing but sit in this chair by the window all day, letting the gray world pass
me by.
But now my stomach is grumbling and I have no interest in sleeping.
Still in my dressing gown, I pad downstairs to the kitchens, and pass Bram and Rhion sitting in the dining room.
They’re discussing something intently over dinner. I hear the words forest, hunt, and queen.
They pause when they see me in the doorway.
“Your Majesty, how lovely to see you.” Rhion greets me without a second glance at my limp hair and bare feet. Maybe he thinks
this is a new human fashion trend. I’ll probably see him in a dressing gown at the next revel, with makeup mimicking dark
bruises under his eyes.
“Oh, it’s you,” I reply weakly.
“Have you puzzled the answer yet?”
“I’m sorry?”
“To my riddle. What can you shatter with just one word?”
“Um—” I sputter. “I’m not sure. I was just looking for dinner.”
Rhion pats the seat next to him and I want to die. “Plenty of room here.”
I pause, desperate for some excuse.
Bram’s gaze levels me. “Don’t be rude, Ivy.”
I drag my feet across the carpet and sink down in the seat next to Rhion. “I don’t mean to interrupt your meeting.”
“Oh, you’re not interrupting anything. After one thousand years of friendship, we’re out of things to talk about.” Rhion laughs
but Bram doesn’t.
“What did you do with her body?” I ask flatly.
Bram looks up from his plate.
“Her body,” I say again. “Where is it?”
He clears his throat. “Sent home to her family. I saw to it.”
“And the men who killed her?”
Bram shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“You let them go?” I ask, horrified.
“She bargained with them of her own free will. I’m not a governess. My citizens can do as they please.”
“She was an old woman and they killed her for entertainment!”
I push back from the table and my chair topples behind me. I want to tell him I hate him, but I know too well what harm it
would bring. First it was the girl in the deer mask, then it was Ethel. It could so easily be Marion or my mother next.
I’m nearly to the door when Rhion’s voice calls out. “A promise.”
I stop and turn. “What?”
“That’s the answer to my riddle. What can you shatter with just one word.” He glances to Bram. “A promise.”
That’s funny. I would have said heart.
I’m not supposed to be in the kitchens. The poor old cook startles as I walk through the door, and the rest of the staff jump up and begin washing pots and sweeping the floor in an attempt to look busy.
“No, please,” I say, but they don’t listen.
I don’t intend to stay for long. I’m only looking for something to eat—and more importantly, a moment alone with Ben, the
most unexpected member of our little rebel group.
Only eighteen, he’s the cook’s apprentice, mostly responsible for breakfasts and desserts. He joined us completely by accident.
The first time I took notice of him was two months ago when he walked into the morning room with a plate of scones, tripped
over his own feet, and sent them flying into our laps.
He looked up and fell in love with Olive at first sight.
From that point on, he found excuses to come to the sitting room when she visited me. He asked me about her favorite desserts
and made them for her with painstaking care.
And then he followed us to Marion and Faith’s town house, innocently enough.
Olive had left her shawl behind and he was attempting to return it, and, he confessed to me later, have the opportunity to
talk to her about something more than bread flour.
The problem was he arrived a moment too late. We shouldn’t have been speaking so openly in the drawing room and Ben’s footsteps
as he approached were silent, a symptom of his years in domestic service.
“What did they use to lock up his mother—iron, was it? Could we get more?” Marion was saying as Ben hovered in the doorway.
I swore and jumped out of my skin when I saw him standing there. “Are you spying on us?”
“Are you talking about Queen Mor?” he asked plainly. “What an awful woman. Killed my dad. The son doesn’t seem much better.
It’s a pity.”
He was so profoundly unselfconscious, I trusted him immediately.
“That’s my husband you speak of,” I replied, just to see what he would say.
He bowed his head. “My condolences.”
Everyone in the room burst out laughing.
Then Lottie vouched for his character and he was initiated.
I suspect he shows up more as an excuse to see Olive than because of any ambitions as a true radical, but he’s relentlessly
pleasant and genuinely helpful when it comes to spying on Bram’s whereabouts.
I don’t think Olive has even noticed how he moons after her.
He’s stirring something purple on the stove when I find him.
“Want to try?” He offers the spoon to me.
“What is it?”
He smiles. “Grape jam.”
He spreads some on two thick slices of toast when I explain I haven’t eaten all day. We sit at the rickety staff dining table
and I tell him about Ethel. He cries for me, which makes my tender heart swell, and then I explain the strange things Rhion
has said about Olive. I’m desperate to think of anything but Ethel’s body in that tree, and Ben watches everything Olive does.
Really, I just want him to assure me I have nothing to worry about.
But he frowns. “She comes through the kitchens most afternoons. That’s usually when I bake and she’ll come sample things for
me.”
“That seems harmless enough.”
“I agree, but there is one curious thing: her hair is always soaking wet.”
“Soaking wet?”
Ben nods. “Like she’s been swimming.”
“That’s very odd.”
“I thought so as well, so I asked her where she’d been, and do you know what she said? She said she’d been taking the waters.”
“The waters?” Since the Romans, it’s been believed that the hot springs of Bath contain the power to heal an array of ailments,
but Olive’s never mentioned anything to me.
Ben nods. “That’s what she said.”
I’m at Marion and Faith’s door at first light. Their beleaguered housekeeper leads me to the morning room, where a bleary-eyed
Faith and Marion enter a few minutes later.
“Why are you here?” Faith asks. She’s plaiting her long dark hair, still wearing her lilac dressing gown.
“Send for Emmy.” I spring up from the love seat. “We’re taking the waters.”