Chapter 10 - Lies of Men
Of all the ways I had prepared to be confronted with my sorcery, standing in my nightgown fresh out of a bath was not one of them.
I stared at my Nordingaard crystal in Brietta’s hand and kept my face schooled. Brietta had always kept my secrets in the pocket I had sewn in her heart, but that was when I was her friend and not a threat to her new House.
Just the crystal was enough evidence that I was using sorcery. If she turned on her heels and took it to Duke Hyton, my head could be on the chopping block by sunrise.
The magic in the bathtub glimmered in my mind’s eye. Maybe I could enchant her to forget it, but the crystal would glow if I used my magic. Then I would truly damn myself.
Brietta’s eyes were hard. “I was raised in the House of Elvar. I know every gemstone that is mined in the Dukedom or traded across our waters. This is not any of them. This is—”
I held up my hands. “Brietta, I—”
“You know everything is different now.” Her lip quivered for only a moment. “It’s Lady Hyton. ”
My shoulders curved forward. Brietta had always towered over me, but I had never felt smaller until that moment.
I hated how she made me feel small.
“I watched you drink five glasses of faerie wine,” she said. The ribbon of the choker rippled as Brietta’s hand trembled. “I have carried stacks of books that weigh more than you—that fourth drink should have knocked you on your ass by now! What happened to you?”
My white flame burned the bottom of my throat, trying to push out an answer I did not have. The magic in my blood must have made me more resistant to spirits. Daigen should have fucking explained how my body had changed!
She took a step forward. “What happened to your husband? We all know he is not here.”
The answer flew out of my mouth. “The Queen of the Giants took Riyan.”
I clamped my teeth down. Fuck! Why had my body forced the answer out?
White fire swirled around my chest, growing bigger and bigger. I had to keep still. I had to hold firm. I could not lose control in front of the future Duchess.
“ The Queen of the Giants took your husband?” Brietta’s lip curled. “Why are you still lying to me?”
My white flame exploded.
“It is not a lie!” My blood was alight, the flames from my magic burning the walls of my chest. “I cannot…I cannot lie anymore!”
White light flared from the crystal. Brietta yelped and dropped the necklace onto the rug.
Brietta stepped away, her eyes not leaving the crystal on the floor. “Sera, what are you—”
“A-and he is not my husband anymore!” I could not stop. Could not stop. “My blood bond is gone! It is fucking gone!”
The water in the bathtub was suddenly ablaze. My breath quickened. I shut my eyes and tried to focus, but words flew out of my mouth like arrows. “Nikkolas and Hilda Bloodstone are dead! The North is going to collapse if I do not get Riyan back!”
Why was I spiraling out of control? What did my heart want so badly that it was forcing my body to combust?
Suddenly I heard whispered poems against my ear. Then shared laughter in the lecture hall. My fists loosened, and I felt a dinner roll that I had passed beneath the dining table in my hand. I felt hands braiding my hair. Wet tears on my shoulder. A warm hug against my cheek.
I just wanted to unload the burden of the past few days. I wanted help from someone who once knew me.
I wanted Brietta. I…wanted to be her friend again.
The inferno within cooled to a warm glow. The fire in the bathtub snuffed out. My limbs were weak as I opened my eyes. Brietta’s back was to the wall, her palms flat against the pink paper.
“You…” she stammered, “are you some kind of—?”
“Sorceress.” The damning admission left my lips. Fatigue weighed me down, but I shifted onto the balls of my feet, as if ready to run from an executioner the moment I said the word.
I had just put my entire life—and Riyan’s—on the line. Before, I would have slithered my way out with a string of lies, but the flame inside me was too bright for the darkness of my deceit.
I had to trust Brietta with my secret.
Her lip quivered. Her eyes darted from my face to the crystal and back. “Sera, you cannot—”
“And unless you want me dead, you cannot tell.”
The silence that followed nearly strangled me. After a couple of thudding heartbeats, Brietta tilted her chin up.
“Fine, sorceress.” The imperious gild to her voice suited her, although it sounded strange coming from her lips. “I will keep your secrets if you can keep mine. Freya and I did not just bring you here for a bath.”
I let out a shaking breath. I was safe. She would not turn me in. I was fine. Just fine.
Brietta turned around, placed her hand against a green bird on the wallpaper, and pushed.
With a heavy clink and a soft sigh, a panel opened up in the wall to her left.
I had slipped into a secret passageway in the palace before with Mother, but this opening had more sophisticated mechanics than a small door hidden behind a tapestry.
Brietta took a candlestick off a nearby table and stepped into the dark stone hallway behind the pink wallpaper.
The flicker of the candlelight in the dark made her round face look almost dangerous. “Lycaster is nothing like we thought. Follow me.”
I picked up my choker off the floor. The moment the crystal met my palm, I let out a slow breath. My knees were still weak, but I was somehow calmer.
Slowly, I entered the shadows with Brietta. She pulled a rusted lever and the bathing chamber wall moved back in place with a groan.
I followed Brietta through the hallway that was so narrow, I was surprised her shoulders did not scrape the stone walls. Her fingers traced the wall until they disappeared into what looked like nothingness. She turned sharply and suddenly she descended.
I followed the light of her candlestick down a tight spiraling staircase.
“Do you remember learning about ‘Alastar the Good’ in school?” Brietta said as her feet softly tapped on the stone stairs.
“The second Duke of Lycaster?” I ran my hand along the soft stone to keep balance. “The Baron council named him ‘The Good’ after his death because he freed all the barbarians his father had enslaved, right?”
“That is what our matrons taught us, anyway.”
“I suppose you also learned that our matrons lied?”
We spiraled another full turn before she responded. “Talking with Freya has been…enlightening.”
Just as I was getting dizzy, Brietta stopped. We entered another dark hallway and she marched forward. Her circle of candlelight was our only bubble of safety against the unknown.
“Alastar the Good abolished one form of enslavement, sure.” Brietta groped along the wall until she found an iron handle of a door. “But he wrote into law another one, a sneakier one, one that we still use today.”
Did she know about Fraleigh’s captivity? Maybe I should not tell her everything I knew just yet. “What slaves are in Lycaster?”
Brietta ducked under the doorway. The candlelight lit up her brown eyes like amber gems. “You think you would know—considering you are one.”
My hand floated up to my neck, stroking the bare skin there. What was she talking about?
“Every noble girl is shipped off to Ashmore Academy the year we turn fifteen,” Brietta said. “No one has a choice—that is the law. They keep us in that prison, stuff us full of lies, and as soon as we are ripe, they auction us off to men to do whatever they please for the rest of our lives.”
Brietta turned and I followed. We walked through the much wider hallway that was lit with gently burning sconces. Polished wood trim and marble floors lined the halls.
A low, slow buzz filled the air.
“Then what is our fate?” Brietta gestured to her left. “This.”
The buzz came from a snoring man who rested on a small bench in the hallway and was using a woman’s rear end as his pillow. The woman’s hair was tousled, her lip paint was smeared, and her bosom was half-exposed over her tight bodice.
Was she even breathing?
“Constant parties until the next full moon,” Brietta grumbled as she started down the hallway again. “Where the men trade wives like they are just another bottle of wine to pass around.”
I slowed my pace, eyeing a sleeping woman on the floor who was smashed between two unconscious men. “Surely Derrick has not—”
Brietta snorted. “No. He makes his obligatory appearance at every party and then retreats to the North tower.”
I let out a relieved breath. Of course Derrick would never treat Brietta with such disrespect. He only loved me, but he was still not that cruel.
Brietta stopped at a large tapestry of hunters with spears surrounding a doe. “But if you think Derrick is a beacon of decency in this depraved morass…” She pulled back the tapestry, revealing another door. “…you are wrong.”
She pushed the door open. Brietta’s candle lit up a small room with a row of four plush leather chairs. All four chairs faced a series of windows that led into…
I held in a gasp. It was a window into the dressing room that we prepared in before the Presentation.
Riyan had confessed that he had seen me before the Presentation through magic mirrors, but were they really magic? My Nordingaard crystal warmed in my fist and I threw out a quick sweep of my power over the glass.
Nothing responded.
I walked over and touched the glass. It felt completely ordinary. How was it possible to be a window on one side and a mirror on the other?
“They pile all the suitors in here and tell them these are magic mirrors that will show them our true selves.” Disgust dripped off Brietta’s voice as she stepped into the room. “All bullshit, Freya told me everything. The mirrors are not magic—it is just some trick with metal. Duke Hyton just tells them the mirrors are cursed so that the suitors’ cocks will fall off if they ever tell a woman about them.”
I tapped the glass with my fingernail, trying to figure out the trick.
I used to be an alchemist’s apprentice. Master of illusions.
Daigen. He had said he performed services for the former Dukes of Lycaster—the mirrors had to be one of his illusions.
Brietta kept her distance from the mirrors. “All the suitors have watched every bride at her most vulnerable for hundreds of years. While we sweat about the biggest moment of our lives, they leer at us and they laugh at us. ”
I stared at the exact spot where I had dressed mere days ago and a shiver crawled up the back of my neck.
Her voice broke. “I always knew we were property. Being slaves to our husbands made sense when Freya explained it…but I never realized how powerless we were until I saw this room. They will not even let us have privacy. We solely exist for their use, for their entertainment, and for their consumption until we finally give up and die.”
I ran my thumb over the ridges of my crystal as I looked at the worn vanity tables and stools. Riyan had watched me. He had…participated in all this.
He was too large to fit into any of the chairs, so he must have just sat on the floor behind them, watching the entire spectacle like it was cheap theatre.
He had watched me backhand Annalisa and order Camille and Dinah to help me fix Brietta’s dress. He had told me I impressed him, that I was so commanding and strong that he had to marry me.
What had Riyan thought while Brietta cried because Ilsa’s dress did not fit her? He was supposed to choose her, but did watching her tears make him select me as his bride instead?
No, Riyan had said he wanted me from the moment he saw me through the mirrors. I looked through the window at the row of white doors in the dressing room. My eyes locked on the door that I had stepped through not even two weeks ago.
There. That was when he first saw me. He had known of me, the younger sister of Erik and Endre Ravenwood, but he did not know me. He could have never known me or seen me had it not been for the centuries-old trick of glass and metal.
Such a strange duality. The opportunity to spy on the brides so the suitors could see “our true selves” was infuriating and unjust…but had Riyan really seen my true self through those mirrors? Was I truly commanding and strong?
Riyan certainly thought so, anyway.
I folded my arms and hissed out a breath. The mirrors were a reflection on one side and a window on the other—how fitting. Riyan got to see all of me, but I still did not know who he truly was…other than that he was a leering bastard like the rest of the men.
As much as I hated to admit it, Daigen was beginning to make sense. Riyan loved me because he got to choose me. He got to look through the glass, reject Brietta, and pick me to marry. He got to see me at my most vulnerable and decided that I was right for him.
But I never got the same choice…and of course the creator of the mirror illusion knew that.
I wanted to punch those damn mirrors until they shattered into a thousand pieces.
Brietta gently stepped across the room until she stood at my side. “The humiliation and pain after Annalisa’s ball was horrible but…” Her knuckles turned white as she gripped her candlestick. “They all saw me in here.”
Her voice was tempered, but her chest rose and fell faster.
“There is nothing Annalisa, Dinah, or Camille ever did that made me feel as low as knowing all those men watched me break down from the shadows like I was just…meat.”
Brietta let out a breath. “I will never feel that low again, and neither will anyone else. What Freya and I are planning…it will change the fabric of the Dukedom forever.”
I dragged my eyes up to hers—they glistened with rage and a glimmer of determination. If her anger matched mine, maybe I could trust her with not only my secrets, but Fraleigh’s as well.
She took a long breath like she was about to jump into the ocean. “Full citizenship for every woman in Lycaster—not just the nobility. Women will own property, inherit titles, and Selection Night will be nothing more than an embarrassing chapter in the history books.”
My eyes widened. Maybe I did not have to sneak around Hyton Palace to uncover Ilsa’s secrets after all. The women of the House of Hyton were already working on plans for liberation that perfectly aligned with mine.
I lifted my chin slightly and matched her measured tone. “Would those plans of citizenship include the Great Sorceress of Nordingaard?”
Shock flashed across her face. “No, Fraleigh…”
“Made a bad deal with the Hytons long ago and ended up in the same place as us,” I finished. “ That is why Ganora took Riyan, she wants to use him as a weapon to finally free her sister.”
Her mouth fell open slightly as the machinations of her mind processed the impossible. After a moment, Brietta looked away from me. “The situation may have just become more dire, but I am glad you are here. You played a crucial role in our plans…”
I furrowed my brows. “What did you have planned for me?”
She swallowed. “I cannot get pregnant. You heard Freya, the only scrap of power I have right now is an empty womb. My cycle ends soon and…I want you to keep Derrick as far away from me as possible.”
I scanned her face, looking for a clue for what she meant, but for once I could not read her. “Exactly how do you want me to keep him away from you?”
Her eyes stayed on the rug. “He is still obsessed with you. He has barely looked at me since the…incident.” Her hold on her arms tightened. “I want to keep it that way.”
Now it was my turn to stare at the swirling filigrees on the rug. Derrick certainly had not put his feelings for me aside when he had married Brietta. We had kissed, my hands had wandered along his chest, and I had wanted to go further, but we never did.
Did Derrick still want me like he had before? Everyone believed I was still married to Riyan, but that did not matter. Despite what we were taught in Ashmore, fidelity was not a pillar of any Lycaster marriage.
But Brietta never specified how she wanted me to distract Derrick. He was still…just my friend, after all.
I finally pulled my gaze away from the rug and looked up at Brietta. “We cannot take long. The Queen of the Giants gave me until the next full moon to free Fraleigh.”
Brietta hissed out a breath. “That is in less than three weeks…no time at all.”
I shook my head and suppressed a smile. Brietta could act tough, but she still had no idea how to manipulate people. “If you want the Duke to give you what you want, you have to threaten him with a larger cudgel than an empty womb.”
Brietta arched an auburn brow and I let my smile finally break through.
“You threaten him with the truth of what really happened with his mother,” I said.
She gave me a sly smile and extended her hand. “Allies?”
Allies. Not friends.
I bit back my disappointment and took her hand. “Allies.”
She squeezed my hand. “I will schedule a tea with Freya. We can see how much she is willing to say about Ilsa.”
I smirked. “Better fill her teacup with wine.”
She sighed. “Whatever it takes.” She turned to look through the window again, peering into the darkened dressing room with carpets stained with stale tears. “I am through with the lies of men.”