Malice, page 5
“All right.” I rush forward before I can stop my feet, understanding flooding through me in a rush. “The enchantment keeps you from speaking of it?”
He nods, gulping down air.
“Dragon’s teeth,” I whisper, kneeling beside him. A tingling suspicion raises the hair on my nape. The only creatures I know to be capable of such magic are the Fae. But they can only summon light magic—surely not this sort. Even so, I have no desire to trifle with them, one in particular. And yet—if the stranger’s crime was so terrible, he would be known. There would be chains and guards and locks. I wouldn’t be able to just stroll inside his prison on a Friday afternoon. “You mentioned a war. Do you mean the War of the Fae?”
He grunts something like assent. And he must, for there isn’t any other war in Briar’s history. But that was centuries past. And this man has been rotting in here ever since? It’s impossible. And yet…here he is.
“Does the enchantment keep you from telling me your name?”
“K—” He heaves a ragged breath. “Call me Kal.”
“Kal.” I test the name on my tongue. “I’m Alyce.”
After a few more hacking coughs, Kal calms. He looks at me, a fine line wrinkling his forehead. “You look. No. It cannot be.” He scrunches his eyes closed and opens them again. Without warning, he seizes my forearm and yanks me toward him.
“Let me go!” But he’s stronger than I imagine. And so painfully cold. Like frosted steel through the sleeve of my dress.
He examines the tracks of green on my wrist. “You are Vila.”
An all-too-familiar shame trickles down the back of my throat. “Half.”
“Your mother. Who was she?” His grip tightens.
“I don’t know,” I admit, heat burning in my cheeks. Perhaps this man is telling the truth about his captivity. Even the youngest child in Briar knows the story of the Dark Grace, and I don’t appreciate being made to retell it. “She left me. When I was an infant.”
“Twenty years ago.”
A cold that has nothing to do with Kal prickles across my shoulder blades. The sea crashes outside. “How do you know that?”
He smiles, a real smile this time. He glows with it. “Because I knew her. Lynnore.”
The breath leaves my body. Lynnore. For twenty years I’ve wondered, haunted by the specter of parents who abandoned me near the harbor like I was no better than a basket of rotting fish. I pictured my mother a hundred thousand ways. Weak and destitute, hoping someone would take pity on her cursed child. Indifferent and shrewd, willing to cast me off for her own gain. Terrified and lost, having birthed a defective Grace and too afraid to claim it.
And now those ghosts have a name: Lynnore.
“Why should I believe you? My mother left me to die in an alley. If you were her friend, then—”
“She did not leave you.” The prisoner’s black eyes flash. “Lynnore entrusted you to a woman in the Common District, where you would be safe while she came here to help me. Free me from this tower. And then we were going to leave together—all of us.”
A wind whistles through the cracks in the stone. The fishmonger. He could have had a wife. I imagine the woman waiting with me as the hours ticked by, apprehension building. And then, when my mother never came back for me, she panicked. Her husband would have wanted nothing to do with a hideous infant and her unknown powers, and so he delivered me to the Grace Council. Which means my mother might have walked these very stones. Smelled the salt and the mold and the reek of fish. It takes me a moment to find my voice and I struggle to disguise how much Kal’s words have affected me.
“She was—she was Vila?”
“Only partly. Like you. Oh, Alyce. I can see her in you. The same mouth and nose.” He lifts my hand. “The same fingers.”
I remove myself from his grasp and retreat farther into the sunlight. “Why would she have wanted to help you?”
Hurt flits across Kal’s features—an expression I know well from the number of times I’ve been brushed off or shoved aside—but he continues. “They did not know about her Vila blood. She disguised it well. And she found me here, much as you just did. We were kin, in a way, as both of us hailed from Malterre. And she understood the cruelty of this prison. No one deserves this fate.”
“But how did she hide from the Fae ambassador? I couldn’t.”
Endlewild.
A full-blooded Etherian appointed to the royal household and tasked with holding together the alliance between the Fae courts and Briar. It was he who recognized my Vila blood when I was dumped in the lap of the Grace Council. He who led the experiments to see if I was Vila enough to kill, or just a darker version of a Grace. My insides wither at the thought of his golden Fae eyes and bark-like skin, brown and grooved like that of an oak, and that same pain from Hilde’s shop resurfaces. This time, I can’t help but press the heel of my palm into the place on my middle.
“She appeared human. More so than you do,” Kal adds quietly, as if worried it will offend me.
“Is that why she never came back for me? Because it was easier for her to hide?”
“They killed her.” He grinds his teeth. “The beasts. It was just after she attempted to sever my bindings. But the power of the enchantment was too great. She went back for you. We would try again another day. I was watching her return to Briar as I always did, and they intercepted her. I do not know how they knew she was here. Or how they determined what she was. There was some kind of argument, and then they threw her into the sea. These abominable shadows rendered me powerless to stop them. And you—I thought you were dead, too.”
“Beasts? Who do you mean?”
It couldn’t have been Endlewild—then there would have been no questions about my origins when I turned up in the Common District. And I doubt it was the king’s men. But Kal’s mouth just opens and closes, the bones of his neck straining as he struggles to speak. Callow screeches outside, and it seems to knock a dose of sense into me.
I have no reason to trust this man. No proof that what he says is true. “This is too much. I have to go.”
“Wait! I can help you. I know the power that runs in your veins. The gift of the Vila.”
I pause mid-step. “The curse, you mean.”
His dark brows knit together. “Is that what you think? What they told you?”
Against my own instinct, I find myself rushing on. “What else can it be? All I can summon is ugliness and pain.”
“Alyce.” I’ve never heard my name spoken that way before, with compassion, and it almost hurts. “You are so much more than that.”
“What am I?” The question is barely more than a whisper, an aching need that’s plagued me since I was old enough to understand the extent of my otherness. “You said my mother looked more human than I do. Why? I’m part Vila, but what about the rest? Do you know?”
“I do.” A tide of Kal’s shadows rolls toward me, sizzling when it reaches the sunlight. “Are you certain you wish me to tell you?”
No. But I can’t seem to turn away, either. And so I nod.
“You are a Shifter. Just like me.”
CHAPTER SIX
I’m not sure how I got back to Lavender House.
As soon as I’d regained my senses, I fled the tower. Away from Kal. Away from the brand he seared into my back.
Shifter.
The word rings in my head, echoing off the curves of my skull until it swallows every other thought. Before the war, Shifters were one of the many creatures drawn to Malterre by the darkness of the Vila’s power. And like all the rest—Demons and Imps and Goblins and more—Shifters are bloodthirsty monsters. But Shifters are more than just vicious. They’re manipulative and cunning. They can turn themselves into whatever form they wish: beasts with the head of a wolf and body of a griffin. Beautiful maidens who lure their victims in and slit their throats.
I read one story in which a Shifter bargained with a mortal—a year of the human’s service in exchange for a pair of wings. The human was unaware that a Shifter can only change its own body. And so after the year was up, the Shifter fashioned a pair of wings out of wax and fixed them to the human’s shoulders. Overjoyed, the mortal leapt off the nearest cliff. He soared over the waves of the Carthegean Sea, but the wings soon melted in the heat of the sun, sending the unwitting mortal to crash into the water and drown.
I cannot be a Shifter.
If the prisoner spoke true, why wasn’t I killed, like all the other Shifters I’d read about? Destroyed before they could wreak havoc on the realm. Why did the Briar King let me exhale a single breath once he knew of my existence?
The questions rend me to ribbons. Corrupt my dreams when I stumble into spurts of sleep. In the swirling images, fur sprouts from my skin and my teeth lengthen into fangs. I try to run, but my legs are fins or spindly spider’s legs and I cannot move, only scream and—
Something slams into my shoulder hard enough to throw me halfway off the bed.
“Get up, you useless creature.”
I catch myself before I fall to the floor and then wince against the white blur of the morning. A shadow looms over me.
“How am I supposed to treat my patrons without ground peacock feathers?”
A petal-pink curl dangles in front of my face. Rose. She tosses a broken vial at my fingertips, and I’m barely able to jerk away before the shards lodge in my skin. I groan, hefting myself upright. That damn sack. In my flight from the black tower, my clumsy hands had dropped it more than once. I’m surprised only the one vial was smashed.
“I’ll get another.” I rub the sleep from my eyes.
“Oh no, you won’t.” Rose taps her slipper and the bells sewn onto the toes jingle. “I’ve already sent a servant. But it will come out of your wages. Mistress Lavender said.”
I doubt that, but I’m too groggy to argue. “That’s fine. Get out.”
“Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed.” Glass crunches under her heel.
“Someone was dragged off the wrong side of the bed.”
“It’s your own fault if you’re lazy. I’ve been up for ages. Already had three patrons.”
“How’s your blood looking?” It’s a low jab, but an effective one. Twin splotches, like gilded dandelions, erupt on Rose’s cheeks. “Finding any silver specks?”
“My blood looks far better than yours.” She sneers. “I’d jump off the Crimson Cliffs if I had green in my veins. Do everyone a favor.”
“Careful, Rose.” I rest my chin on my knees and grin. “You never know what the Dark Grace might do. Poor thing. Your teeth are still a bit gray around the edges.”
She snaps her lips closed and whirls, the bells on her shoes tinkling.
“Speaking of patrons,” she calls over her shoulder. “Yours have been waiting for the past half hour.”
The door slams behind her and I bark out a litany of curses, rushing to pick out a fresh dress. The black wax seal of Delphine’s schedule, still waiting to be broken, glares at me from the floor. A servant must have slipped it under the door on their rounds to wake the Graces. But I’d been sleeping too deeply to hear their knock. Dragon’s teeth! Mistress Lavender hates for patrons to wait; it makes them more likely to bring their business to another house and lower our standings. And even if I am the Dark Grace, the only one in the realm, she insists I adhere to the same standard of service as the others.
I rake a comb through my lank, oily hair and splash some water on my face. The reflection in my spotted mirror isn’t inspiring. But I drag myself downstairs anyway, stuffing a breakfast roll in my mouth and ripping open my schedule before heading to the Lair.
“Alyce, really,” Mistress Lavender chides, herding me through the kitchen. “The ball is tonight. The house cannot afford any mistakes.”
I mutter a few apologies while she continues to rant about duty and service and Lavender House’s rank, then I scuttle out the door.
For the rest of the day I entertain patrons: I whip up elixirs to leaden nimble feet. To tarnish lustrous skin and snub graceful noses. To replace a pleasant singing voice or musical laugh with the squawk of a crow. It doesn’t matter if the victims have already employed the service of a Grace. My magic is stronger, a fact we learned when it was decided that I was to open my own practice and the Grace Council was testing the limits of my power against the Graces’. A Grace can attempt to cover the effects of my elixirs, but the darkness always bleeds through. The ill effects of my magic Fade eventually, but they cannot be completely undone, not even by the healing Graces. Much as I abhor being the Dark Grace, my blood’s power to thwart the Graces’ always gives me a rush of victory.
It’s not until evening that I’m finally stoppering my last vial. The patron is already dressed in his finery for the ball and is quick to depart. My bones ache, fingertips sore from where I’ve slashed myself over a dozen times already. It’s all I can do to feed Callow and haul myself back to the house, desperate for a bowl of whatever Cook has waiting in the kitchen. The smell has been making my mouth water for hours.
“Dragon’s teeth, but you look a fright!”
My mood only further sours as Rose sweeps into view. She looks like an elaborately decorated dessert in her cascade of silk skirts and pearl-studded ringlets. She whips a matching fan out of her reticule and waves it under her nose with distaste. “And what have you been cooking up?”
“Toad piss.” I shake my skirts in the hopes that the dirt and soot will spoil her gown. “I’ll be sure to add some to your bottles of scent.”
Rose glares and steps away from me. Marigold flounces in behind her, dressed in frills of daffodil silk. Heavy gold limns her eyes. Grace powder sparkles on her brown shoulders.
“You aren’t ready!” She feigns shock, an ivory-gloved hand at her breast, then deals a conspiratorial smirk to Rose.
“I had patrons.” I divide a look between them, confused. “Why didn’t you?” This close to the ball, they should have been swamped.
“Oh, we’ve been finished for simply hours.” Rose twirls her fan. “Delphine arranged it. A courtesy so that we could prepare for the ball.”
“I was granted no such courtesy. My last patron just left.”
“Really?” A tiny crease digs between Rose’s brows. One of the peach-colored ostrich plumes on her fan brushes against her cheekbone. “An oversight, I’m sure.”
Marigold titters. “It’s a shame you won’t be ready.”
A bell chimes from the drawing room, announcing the arrival of their carriage. Marigold links arms with Rose, who bestows an infuriating wink upon me. “Good night, Alyce. We’ll tell Mistress Lavender you’ve decided to stay home.”
My blood grows so hot I think my skin might be glowing green as their bustles round the corner toward the front door. This is Rose’s doing. She probably bribed Delphine to shift my appointments until the last possible moment. It wouldn’t have taken much coin. Every servant in this wretched house hates me. It would be useless to involve Mistress Lavender. I can’t prove anything. And I’ll never be ready in time. I haven’t even thought of what to wear.
Part of me wants to go as I am now, just to spite them all. Show up on the palace doorstep in my sweat-stained, reeking gown with remnants of enhancements still caked under my fingernails and smudged on my face. A picture of the deranged creature they think I am. See if they have the gall to turn me away.
But they would turn me away. And Rose would revel in it. I’d never live it down.
And so I turn my attention to the trays of leftover tarts from today’s Grace sessions. I fill a plate—blueberry, raspberry, cardamom—piling them as high as I can, and head up to my attic room. I didn’t want to go to the ball anyway, I remind myself. Wouldn’t have even thought to go if Rose hadn’t rankled me. But now—
There’s a heap of fabric on my bed that doesn’t belong there.
My mouth freezes around a bite of creamy filling. I swallow quickly, setting the plate down on the top of a side table.
Folded neatly on the twisted coverlet of my bed is the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen. It’s onyx silk, overlaid with a sheer, gossamer fabric that shines like spun moonlight. Beads of jet dance in intricate patterns down the bodice. The sleeves are the same silvery fabric as the skirt and cut to fall next to the hem, like long, delicate wings. Next to the gown is a mask, one large enough to cover the wearer’s entire face. Black, silver-dusted ostrich plumes protrude from the forehead and there’s a stiff veil of black and gold netting gathered around the eyeholes, thick enough that it will obscure the midnight color of my gaze.
Beneath the mask, a note:
No one need know.
L
* * *
—
It takes several attempts to convince a servant to both help me into this gown and flag down a carriage to take me to the palace. Her name is Lorne, I think. And I can tell by her puckered lips and pinched brow that she doesn’t think I should be going. But after some convincing, her own fear of the Dark Grace wins out and she finally begins unlacing my work dress.
The new gown fits like a glove. Laurel must have spent her own coin to have it made for me. It’s the nicest gift I’ve ever received. The only gift, actually. An unfamiliar surge of emotion swells beneath my breastbone as Lorne does up the fastenings at the back of the bodice. Perhaps Laurel is fonder of me than I thought.
Lorne pins up my hair in a fashion she slyly comments will flatter me, which I take to mean it will hide the oil and dirt I didn’t have time to wash out. Because the style isn’t particularly flattering—just tightly braided and coiled at the crown of my head. She adds a healthy dusting of Grace powder as well. It itches where it sticks to my chest and neck.
By the time she’s finished, the carriage is already waiting. Lorne fastens the mask to my face, then helps me navigate the stairs in my tissue-thin skirts, pausing at the front door. She hesitates, then opens up a closet and pulls out a Grace cloak. One of Rose’s that she hardly ever wears. It’s gold taffeta trimmed with mink. Gems bright as petrified sunlight are studded down the back, patterned in the Grace sigil of a blooming Briar rose wreathed in laurel leaves. I argue with her at first. The powder is one thing, but to wear the sigil feels too close to flouting the Grace Laws.
