Chapter 18
Selene tried to keep the startled expression from her face. “Yes, Madame.”
“You’ll have time enough to get ready.”
Gigi cast a long, lingering glance at the two of them before disappearing with the empty cups of hot chocolate.
Selene followed Madame to her office. They’d stopped their regular lessons in the last few months, allowing Selene to focus on her aria. Madame could not help her write her performance piece. It was all up to Selene.
She stood beside the piano. Back straight, heart pounding in her chest. Madame struck a chord.
“Sing through E.”
She nodded and began, moving up the scale, and then chromatically through the next key. E was a tricky vowel. It was unforgiving, revealing every weakness and break in the voice. They worked up, up, up to the G above high C, and then came back down.
“Messe di voce.”
Selene matched the note played on the piano. She crescendoed and decrescendoed on that same pitch. Moving up the notes of the scale and back down.
Simple, easy warmups she did almost every day to wake up her voice.
Would she miss this, the way she missed her days at the palace?
It was bittersweet. She loved music; she loved the push to greatness and the endless possibilities in between the notes.
She would not miss feeling like her life was about to start and she was doing it all without her father.
She wished she could talk to him, wished she could ask him why he’d pushed himself so far.
He already had everything. The title of the King’s Mage and a second tenure, a daughter, a life.
What could have pushed him to the edge? Selene could answer that for Benson, but she didn’t have answers from her own father.
Her eyes caught on a tiny brown speck, marring the black lacquer of the piano.
A seed.
A few hours before, she’d gone without one.
She’d made a seed out of blood and sorrow.
But magicians needed more than that. They carried seeds and sang them into trees and flowers and other beautiful things.
Her father had often marveled over the whole of creation captured in the tiny hull.
A seed was a whole world. It contained everything it needed to live.
A seed was a heart and a whole and it did not bleed. That was all she needed. She could go back in the mirror and offer the ghost a seed.
Selene reached down between arpeggios. She wasn’t sure what compelled her to take it. She could offer him one that she made, a drop of blood and the truth of this moment. It would be her heart, then.
But the seed was waiting there, like a mirror in a place that should not be. Like it had been put there for her. Selene stopped singing. She looked up at Madame. “Do you know what my father was trying to achieve before he died?”
Madame stopped playing for a beat. She continued on to the next chord. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask me that question for a long time.”
“Do you know?”
“Nothing is as simple as that.”
Madame kept playing. Moving away from scales and into a D minor sonata.
“When a king asks something of you, it is nearly impossible to say no. He has asked a great deal of my predecessors. To train up young magicians and present them like lambs to the slaughter.”
“I don’t understand.”
Madame’s fingers drifted over the keys. “Whatever it was, the king still hasn’t found it. Every mage since your father has lived but has given up magic entirely since their tenure as the King’s Mage. They won’t tell me what happened and perhaps that is for the best.”
“Why are you still doing this, then?” The words tumbled from her affannato. “Why bring the lambs to inevitable slaughter?”
“Sometimes young girls make foolish promises.” Madame’s mouth flattened into a thin line.
“And what of your promise to us? As our teacher, as our protector. Where was that promise when Benson was going mad?”
“There is one every year.” Madame picked her words carefully, like she was sharing a secret.
Selene counted the students she’d seen go mad. There were a few, but certainly not one a year. “Who?”
“You think you are the only mages in the kingdom? The Asylum fills with or without the Opera Magique. I do all I can to keep you safe. But these things do happen.”
Selene pondered that, her eyes drifting to a small portrait on the desk.
She hadn’t seen it before. It could have been Gigi, but it wasn’t.
A young Madame Giroux standing in the grand foyer with a look of light and wonder on her face.
It was before the cane, before the years had carved a darkness into her face.
Selene knew she’d been here, the cycle before her father.
She was both singer and ballerina, blending the crafts much like Gigi.
But she hadn’t competed in L’Opéra du Magician.
Selene and Gigi had often wondered about what happened—settling on an injury.
Madame caught her looking and quickly turned the picture over.
“If it were just me, I’d leave.”
“Gigi would go wherever you go.” The finality of the moment made Selene brave. “She wants your approval. Your love.”
Madame struck the wrong note. “Soon, this will all be over.”
The words rang through the room eerily.
“What do you mean?” Selene said.
“You’re asking the wrong questions, Selene.” Madame struck a chord with her left hand, the piano rumbling with music. “Haven’t you figured it out by now?”
Selene’s heart raced. Did Madame know about the ghost?
Madame shook her head, straightening at the piano. “There will come a time when all is brought to light. Until then, I am bound to my silence by our sovereign.”
“Who can say no to the king?” Selene said softly.
Her father certainly hadn’t. Selene had never considered that Madame’s role in their lives might be a burden, that she might not want this.
It didn’t change anything for Selene. She couldn’t simply shift her goals, this close to the end.
Could she? Madame played a few more arpeggios.
Selene sang with her. She put her hand into her pocket, brushing her fingers against the seed.
There was magic in it, she could feel it.
“Sing the aria.”
Madame played a chord, and then another. Selene tried to hold the notes in her head. But they kept slipping away. This wasn’t the song she’d auditioned with. This was the aria she had written for her father.
“You’re like a daughter to me, Selene.”
Madame knew.
She knew that Revelio had performed her piece, like she knew that Selene had pushed herself to the edge with a song that was never meant to be sung.
And that wasn’t the worst of it. Selene knew she was good. And that wasn’t a trip of ego or delusion. It was a fact. Selene Dreshé was born on a clear, cloudless night and she was good at magic. She knew what she was capable of, and it was so much more than this.
Devastation burned beneath Selene’s skin like the magie du sang. All this potential and talent left to rot, like a ripe plum burst against the earth. She didn’t know how to make herself known. She didn’t know how to be more. But then, what if that wasn’t enough? What if she was never enough?
Selene steadied herself on the music stand. She wished the edges had been sharp enough to cut away the terrible ache in her fingers and toes and head. It wasn’t enough to be good. It wasn’t enough to be great. She needed to be ruthless.
Some stars burn bright, some stars burn out.
The violence of a light so powerful, it shone from millions of miles away. A fire so hot, it created its own mass, own gravity. She needed to be a force of nature. A star, a star, a star. And if she went out, she’d take them all with her.
She sharpened her words into points.
“You know I am the best mage here.”
Selene waited for admonishment. She’d spoken out of turn.
“I want what is best for you, Selene.” Madame kept playing. “That pretty little prince of yours would take you away from here. You could have a life outside of this opera house.”
“I don’t want another life.” Selene could scream, but she wouldn’t. “He doesn’t even remember me.”
“Make him remember.”
Selene drew in a breath. Victor didn’t matter to her. She had moved on. But the ghost? She could help him remember. Then she could fulfill her promise and get him out.
Resolve burned through her. “Stay out of my way.”
Madame faltered on the note and recovered quickly.
She did not speak. Selene’s rage moved from a boil to a simmer.
She counted the measures, tapped the rhythms on the inside of her palm.
The magie du sang bubbled beneath her skin.
It rushed with her blood, pulsing and pulling to be let out.
She wanted to. She longed to prick her fingers and build a dragon out of shadow and wanting.
Big enough that she could climb on its back and fly away—straight to the palace where she belonged.
Madame worked her way through the last movement of Selene’s aria.
She leaned into the end, closing her eyes and letting those final notes resonate.
“There is a bird,” Madame said. “That lays an egg so beautiful that it is sought out, hollowed, and displayed. It is treasure to kings and emperors.”
Selene knew of this. She had seen the eggs lined up in the palace. That same bird was engraved on her father’s pocket watch. “The silver-breasted nightingale.”
“Only a few remain. The shell is beautiful. But unless it breaks, you have nothing but a pretty, empty thing.”
“Am I the bird or the broken shell?”
“That is all for today.” Madame looked up from the piano. “Go prepare for your ball.”