Chapter Seven
Whether neither prince realized she had rekindled her flame with the other, or neither cared enough to look past his own delightful cinders, none of them could have said. The days before the marsh ball passed so quickly that Ina lost count of them twice and had to ask what morning it was.
Later, when she tried to think back on that week, memory did not arrange itself into proper order.
It came instead in hasty fragments – the smell of old paper in Karai’s library, the crisp wind of the sky court against her face, sugar on a plate near Derran’s window, a feather drifting loose in her hands where there should have been fingers,
Karai’s voice telling her again to keep the dress in her mind, Derran counting steps beneath his breath while she tried not to tread on his boots.
Something had shifted between the three of them, and no one named it.
No promise had been made. No rule had been spoken aloud.
Yet each time she was alone with Karai in the library, or alone with Derran in his rooms, they no longer stood at that careful distance they had all forced upon themselves for the sake of peace.
The burden of self-denial had vanished. And that had made them all become kinder. More honest. More focused.
When she reached for one of them, she was no longer pretending she meant to do something else. When one of them kissed her, she did not leave the room as if the walls had caught fire.
It made them all easier in their own skins.
When the three of them were together for brief moments to plan lessons, Derran and Karai barely threw any jabs at each other, both far more cordial than she’d ever seen them.
Even when they each aimed a knowing smile at her, as though the two shared a secret kept from the third, she did not bother trying to hide her own smile back.
It made the work go better, when joy surrounded necessity.
With Karai, transformation became less of a battle and more of a craft.
He still taught in the same soft but exacting manner.
He still had the gift of making failure sound like bad planning rather than tragedy.
But Ina learned to hear the shape of his lessons without fighting each correction as if it were insult.
“Again,” he would say in gentle command.
“I’ve done it six times.”
“You’ve done it badly six times.”
“Your encouragement is unmatched.”
“I know,” he would reply, stroking her cheek lightly, eyes glittering with uncaged desire.
And then she would try again.
The heron came bit by bit. First the beak, which stopped feeling absurd once she had lived in it three or four times.
Then the eyes, which no longer sent her reeling when the room flattened and widened under that strange avian sight.
The legs remained hateful. Karai seemed to enjoy watching her struggle on them.
“You’re standing too much like a fairy,” he said once, while she balanced on those ridiculous joints and tried not to pitch into a shelf of law records.
“I am a fairy, as it turns out.”
“At present. The heron has never heard of that.”
Another day she remembered the dress but lost one shoe. Another time she kept both shoes and forgot her necklace, which dropped to the floor beside her with a small accusing clink. Karai picked it up and held it out to her after she changed back.
“The queen appears to have molted.”
She threw a cushion at him. He seized the opportunity and pulled her down on it, allowing them a brief break in practice, ravishing each other until they both trembled from the effort. All in the name of encouragement, of course.
By the end of the week she could change without panic, remain in the heron’s shape long enough to cross the room and turn, and then come back into herself with her gown still on and her dignity mostly intact.
Mostly.
With Derran, the lessons were different from the first step.
He made dancing feel less like instruction than conspiracy.
He taught with patience, but it was the patience of someone letting her discover that she already knew more than she thought.
He moved her through the marsh dance until the turns no longer tangled her and the pauses no longer felt like places to make mistakes.
He was a better dancer than any prince had reason to be, which he accepted as his due.
“The sky court dances for pleasure, on clouds, on sunny days and on rainy ones,” he told her. “The marsh court dances for memory and tradition. The burrow court dances as if someone has challenged it to remain solemn while stepping in patterns.”
“That sounds unkind,” she laughed.
“It’s entirely accurate. Ask Karai.”
When she did ask Karai, he rolled his eyes and said, “We dance properly, which often looks solemn to people with poor discipline.”
He coughed once, and she thought she heard Derran’s name in it.
Ina reported this back to Derran, who laughed so hard he lost the beat and had no right to criticize her for missing it too.
The more they practiced, the easier the dance became. She learned where Lugomir would expect her to turn, how far the circle opened, where her hand ought to rest, when her eyes should lift. By the final day she could move through the full measure without thinking of her feet at all.
That was when Derran said, teasing as ever, “Now you’re dangerous.”
“To whom?”
“To every prince at the ball.”
She laughed and told him he was foolish. He answered by spinning her once across the room and catching her with such passion that their next dance ended with them tangled in his bedsheets, quivering from the vibrations they shared.
So the week ran on in work, laughter, and all the unspoken things allowed to breathe again in private. When at last the day came for the marsh celebration, Ina found herself more ready than she had hoped or expected.
The final piece of it came from Emmie, something she had seen to many times before her departure.
The gown Ina chose had been made months before and put away against some court occasion not yet named.
It was rose pink, though no flower in the known world ever held quite that color.
Gold thread ran through the bodice and spilled down the skirt in curling lines that suggested stems, reeds, and small hidden blossoms.
Pink sapphires created the shapes of the flowers and other patterns, sparkling incessantly in the dim light of evening.
The sleeves were short, elegant, flowing around her shoulders and halfway down her upper arms.
When she turned before the mirror, the skirt shifted in soft folds and caught light in the gold stitching.
She stood looking at herself for a moment longer than vanity alone required. Emmie had made it with her own hands. That thought came less heavily now than it once had. Still, it had weight.
Ina chose one of the tiaras as well, a narrow gold one set with more pink sapphires of varying sizes.
Some were no larger than berry seeds. Others sat in raised points above them, bright and clear as drops of sugared wine.
She settled it into her hair and stood still while an attendant made the last corrections, adding color to her eyelids and her cheeks and her lips.
When she came out to the entry hall of the sky court, where they had arranged to meet, she heard the end of Derran prodding Karai in his usual manner. “– though bird wings are something you wouldn’t understand, of course.”
Karai rolled his eyes. “Is being this insufferable just an act, or do you come by it naturally?”
Ina coughed once.
Derran glanced her way and instantly stopped speaking in the middle of whatever retort was coming out of his mouth, staring boldly. Karai, who was harder to interrupt with beauty, having so much of it himself, said nothing at all for a beat, his eyes mirroring Derran’s.
Ina tried for levity. “Well. I know no one could mistake me for a marsh creature in this outfit.”
They said nothing, both still mesmerized.
She clicked her tongue at the silence. “Does it really look that ridiculous?”
“No,” answered Karai softly.
Derran’s gaze moved once over the dress, the tiara, and back to her face. “Not unless the point was to cause trouble.”
“That was not the point.” Ina crossed her arms.
“Pity,” Derran teased. “You would have succeeded.”
They traveled to the marsh with the rest of the sky court trailing behind them, down through a dazzling sunset, until the clouds gave way to hanging moss, broad leaves, and the wet living smell of reeds and black water.
The marsh court had dressed itself for celebration. Lanterns hung in rows from bent willow arches. Platforms had been laid across the shallower waters and strewn with petals. Music carried from somewhere ahead, low and steady, with drums under it like a second pulse.
The gathered courts waited at the edge of the main approach while the queen made her entrance.
Ina stood a little apart with Karai and Derran beside her. Lugomir and Jasenka waited beyond the first bridge with their courtiers, noble lords and ladies, and marsh elders. All eyes, far too many eyes, had turned her way.
“Well,” said Derran quietly, “here we are.”
“It appears so,” said Ina, swallowing with more nerves than she would have liked.
Karai looked at her once, murmuring, “Remember the bird. Remember yourself. Remember the dress.”
“I know.”
“The tiara too,” Derran added.
Ina nodded, though in truth she was thinking of the heron and the gown and the shape of the magic and not at all of the tiara.
She closed her eyes.
The heron came more quickly than it ever had in the library.
Perhaps that was the nerves. Perhaps pride.
Perhaps the plain fact that she had been drilled to the point of obedience.
Her body shifted in one sure sweep. When she opened her eyes again, the world had changed to that bright, flattened avian strangeness, but not enough to trouble her.
She held the shape, stretched her neck once, and stepped forward with only a brief hateful awareness of how ridiculously thin her legs remained.
A pleased murmur passed through the gathered fairies.
Good, she thought, more excited than she had expected to find herself. They like it.