“No one hears us,” said Hollyhock, twining the end of her apron string around her eight-year-old hand. “They can’t hear a peep.”
“No, I expect they probably can’t,” said the King. “If there was enough floor to dance in your room, which there is not, it would most certainly make a grand racket, would it not? So. If you cannot be heard from your room, then, where could you be dancing? Hmm? There are no secrets and underhanded dealings in this household, young ladies. If you are harboring a secret, then I will be told at once.”
A strange sensation of cold, tingly prickles passed through Azalea. She cringed, feeling the wash and needles of it to her fingertips, and looked at the other girls. Eve was shaking her hand, as though trying to shake off the feeling. Hollyhock wiped her hands on her skirts. Bramble cast a glance at Azalea, one thin eyebrow arched. They had obviously felt it, too.
“We…can’t tell you,” said Flora, to the floor.
“We promised we wouldn’t.” Goldenrod shrank against the rosebush ledge, looking very much like she wanted to disappear.
“With ’Zalea’s silver handkerchief,” said Hollyhock.
The King’s entire countenance changed, from maligned to staggered. He turned to Hollyhock, his eyebrows furrowed, his eyes searching.
“You made an oath?” he said. “On silver?”
Hollyhock flushed so much it hid her freckles.
“We promised t’ not tell the King,” she mumbled.
The King stepped back, pressing his hands against the table ledge behind him. If it hurt his bandaged hand, he did not show it. Instead he fixed Azalea with an icy blue stare. Azalea could not read it.
“What you have done,” he said, “is called Swearing on Silver. It is a very serious oath. Where did you learn such a thing?”
Azalea clutched the handkerchief in her palm, so tightly it dug Mother’s initials into her hand.
Swearing on Silver.
So Mother had made her Swear on Silver. Azalea didn’t know what it meant, but it couldn’t be bad, not if Mother had done it. Azalea bit her lip, closing her eyes against the frigid gaze. She could never tell the King about Mother, how cold her hands were and how she had made her promise.
“Very well,” said the King, when Azalea kept her eyes closed. “Very well.” He took the basket of slippers from the table.
“These will be flung into the stove—”
“Oh!” cried Delphinium, followed by a thump-thumphf.
“—and you are all to spend the rest of the day in your room, considering the implications of mourning,” said the King, stepping over Delphinium on the floor. “At once. You may not take the bread with you.”
CHAPTER 12
That night, the girls put a chair up against the door and slipped through the billowing silver passage, down the stairs, through the forest, and to the pavilion in their stiff, hard boots. Their heels made a clickety click click the entire way. Mr. Keeper met them at the entrance, bowing as usual. His eyebrow twitched at their shoes, and his dark eyes met Azalea’s. They took in her set jaw, her blazing eyes, her starkly straight posture, and he backed away, bowing again before leaving.
The dance began with an esperaldo, and Azalea, cheering up a mite, taught the girls the hard stomp-click-stomps of the rhythm, showing them how to scuff their soles with the beat, and how to make the sound of their shoes match the accents of the music.
After a while, with the continued chafing, and the rough twists and turns of the boots, the girls started to sit out dances. By the end of the night, they limped. They limped back through the silver forest, up the winding staircase, through the passage to their room. Azalea poured a steaming kettle of water into basins for the girls, and they soaked their red, chafed feet, yawning.
“We did it,” said Delphinium, raising her chin. “The King thought he could stop us from dancing, but he didn’t.”
“Oh, aye,” said Bramble. She looked at everyone’s red feet, and winced. “We showed him.”
The next morning, the younger girls complained as they put on their boots, and the older girls clenched their jaws and bit their tongues. Azalea, who had danced harder than anyone else out of sheer stubbornness, felt her right foot throb with each step. Fortunately they did not see the King all day, for he was out on R.B., dismissing the regiments, and therefore was not there to reprimand them on their self-inflicted injuries.