Chapter Fourteen I Learn Why Everyone Hates Me
Chapter Fourteen
I Learn Why Everyone Hates Me
The following morning, Angelique at last made another appearance, joining the rest of us on the balcony to watch the king and his hunters depart.
While the cheers were still ringing in the air, she pulled me aside, maneuvering me into a room no bigger than a closet.
Since the shelves lining the walls were half-filled with candle stubs, mopheads, and assorted bric-a-brac, a closet is probably exactly what it was.
We were pressed close. I could smell her perfume.
Rose and jasmine, with a hint of cinnamon.
She looked exhausted, her face drawn, tension at the corners of her mouth and eyes. I recognized the expression; my parents’ patients had often tried to disguise the extent of their pain. Angelique’s headaches might have lessened enough for her to get out of bed, but they hadn’t let up entirely.
“Have you tried putting a cold, damp cloth on the back of your neck when you feel a headache coming on?” I could no longer in good conscience leave her to the tender mercies of the chirurgeon. “It sometimes helps if you put a few drops of peppermint oil on it.”
Her brow drew down in puzzlement. “What? No.”
“You can also try taking ginger extract, or feverfew.”
“I don’t—” She stopped and began again. “That’s not what I brought you here to talk about.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to, though? Those remedies might not work, but they have more of a chance than wormwood smeared on your forehead. Or leeches.” I shuddered.
She shook her head, then stopped, grimacing. Her hand rose to press against her temple. The motion clearly hadn’t done her pain any favors. “You are so very odd. Now, listen: There’s a matter we need to discuss.”
She glanced into the hallway, to make sure the rest of the ladies had passed out of earshot, and then shut the door, leaving us in the dim light that crept in around the edges of the frame.
I was beginning to wonder exactly what her intentions were.
And whether I should object if an assignation in a closet was what she had in mind. But that didn’t strike me as her style.
“The others,” she said, “think that you’ve been putting on airs.”
“They do?” I racked my brain for what I might have been doing. Did I have some princessy habit giving me away? “Why would they? Do you?”
“I’m not certain.” She looked me up and down with that keen gaze of hers. “Why won’t you spin?”
I gaped at her in bewilderment; the answer to that question seemed obvious to me. “Are they blaming me for not sharing the risk?” I refrained from pointing out that Angelique did as little spinning as I did; being the king’s sister, I imagined, had its privileges here.
She blinked. Whatever answer she was expecting, that wasn’t it. “The risk? What on earth are you talking about?”
“The risk of death? Or a hundred years of sleep? Or any curse, really.”
A long pause followed before she spoke again. “Are you…are you worried that our spinning wheels are enchanted?”
“Aren’t you?”
“That doesn’t happen here!”
Now that I gave the matter a moment’s thought, I realized that without any sorcerers, witches, or evil fairies in Tailliz, the concern simply wouldn’t exist. I’d been avoiding anything with a spindle for so long it hadn’t occurred to me that the fear of them might not be universal.
“In Skalla, no one would touch one,” I said. “They’ve been banned for a century or more.”
“Because of the terrible peril,” she replied evenly, “of spinning wheels.”
“They’re ridiculously easy to enchant. It’s got something to do with the combination of rotating bits and stabby bits. They suck up dark magic like nobody’s business and spit it out on anyone so unlucky as to brush past. I thought you’d just accepted it.”
“You thought we’d accepted chancing death every time we want to make a shirt?”
“Well, I mean…you need the shirts, don’t you?”
Princess Angelique let out a long breath. “So very, very odd. What do you do for shirts in Skalla? Surely someone’s needed new clothes in the last hundred years.”
“Fairy godmothers are popular. And the fae folk can weave dresses out of cobwebs and moonlight.” They did have a tendency to dissolve back into cobwebs and moonlight if you tore them, which could be embarrassing at a dinner party.
“My sister gets birds and mice to make most of her clothing. There’s all kinds of methods, really. ”
“Fascinating.” She did not sound particularly fascinated. “But be that as it may, everyone here assumes you consider spinning beneath you. Handmaidens spin. Embroidery is reserved for ladies of higher station.”
“It is?” So much for my powers of observation.
I’d worked out that seats by the fire were a sign of status, but it had escaped my notice that the chores were structured by class position.
It might have been easier if I’d been able to work out whether a baron’s daughter ranked higher than a viscount’s sister in Tailliz—assuming I could even keep track of which Yvette was which.
“I’ll let the others know you have strange foreign customs,” Angelique decided.
“They’ll think you’re somewhat dim, be delighted by their own superior ways, and forgive you.
I won’t mention the part about enchanted spinning wheels.
” She turned and reached for the door handle, but then she hesitated and looked back at me.
“You know a fair bit about magic, don’t you? ”
“Some,” I said, wondering where this was headed. “It’s a basic survival skill in Skalla.”
“Are you a sorceress yourself?”
It was my turn to hesitate, unsure how the truth would be taken. Sorceresses were not well regarded everywhere, and if you took my stepmother as an example, it was not a prejudice altogether without cause. But Angelique appeared to be more curious than concerned.
“A very minor one,” I confessed. “But yes, I have a little of the talent for it.”
She nodded sharply, as if something she’d already suspected had been confirmed. “In that case…how would you feel about joining the hunts?”
The proposal took me by surprise. “I thought women weren’t allowed to go hunting here.”
“Women, yes, but…” She waved her arm in a dismissive gesture. “You’re a Skallan sorceress. It’s not the same thing. I’m sure I can arrange permission for it, and it would make everyone feel so much safer. The king got engaged to a Skallan in the first place for his own protection, after all.”
I stood there open-mouthed as that piece of news hit home.
Again and again, this conversation was leaving me flat-footed, struggling to catch up with things I should have figured out days before.
I was beginning to feel as dim as Angelique planned to portray me.
Jack had said outright that the Skallan princess was supposed to save Tailliz from peril.
To be fair, I’d been distracted at the time by the monsters trying to eat me.
Gervase had broken off his previous engagement and sent out to Skalla for a bride because the situation had grown desperate, and the Skallan royal line was seething with sorcery.
If either of my sisters had been sent along, he’d have been getting a good deal out of the bargain.
But my sisters were both married, so he’d wound up with me instead.
The least of us all. So far, my efforts to defend Tailliz against the terrors that beset it had consisted of beating a few of them with a large stick.
I wanted to go on the hunts. By then, I was desperate to grasp at any excuse to escape from the claustrophobic boredom and hostility of the women’s wing. But if I was charged with the defense of the king and failed miserably at it, I doubted warm regard would be my reward.
Angelique was still waiting for my reply.
“I’m not sure how much I can do,” I said.
“I’m not as powerful as”—I almost said “my stepmother” but caught myself in time—“as you might hope. I wasn’t being modest when I said my talent was a small one.
I can’t magic my way past a few animated statues to plough a field. ”
“Animated what?”
“It’s a long story, never mind. My point is, my capacities are strictly limited.”
She plucked a metal bowl off a shelf and toyed with it.
It reflected the dim light, casting strange shadows across her face.
“Even a tiny bit of magic would make me feel infinitely better if I knew for certain it was on the king’s side.
It would only be until the princess arrives, so you won’t have to do it for very long. I doubt you’d be in much danger.”
When I didn’t answer, she tossed the metal bowl into the depths of the closet with a clatter and put her hand on my shoulder. It still stung from my not-completely-healed cuts, so I had to make an effort not to flinch.
She brought her face close to mine. Her eyes were wide and vulnerable, and I could feel the warmth of her breath on my cheek. “Please,” she whispered. “I’m begging you. My brother is out there every day with only those strange masked men to protect him.”
It wasn’t in me to ignore such a plea. Or at least, I found I couldn’t refuse one that came from her. “All right. If it would mean that much to you.”
She pulled away and turned her face to the side—embarrassed, I imagined, by how much of herself she’d just revealed.
She took a moment to regain her composure.
When she looked at me again, all traces of distress were gone from her face.
Only her exhaustion remained. “Just do whatever you can. I’m glad someone will be out there to keep an eye on the huntsmen.
You can’t trust someone who hides their true self. ”
And with that, she flung open the closet door and swept off down the hall. I trailed along in her wake.
She’d cajoled me into agreeing so quickly I’d barely had time to think, but as I considered the idea, I realized joining the hunt might end up being well suited to my own purposes.
I’d learned little about any murder plots while sitting around with a needle and thread, bored and browbeaten in the sewing room.
And accompanying the hunt would also give me time to observe my husband-to-be.
Spending the day out hunting with him would surely give me a better idea of what he was like.
But that was reasoning after the fact. I’d agreed to go because Angelique had asked me.
And for that matter, for all my rationalizing about getting to know Gervase, I wondered if it was the chance to see Sam again that had exerted the greater pull on me.