While Papa spoke, Catherine cast her eyes down to the floor and a becoming blush suffused her cheeks. I knew my sister well enough to suspect the blush was charmed. When Papa ceased speaking, Catherine lifted her head. She closed her eyes and began chanting. I couldn’t hear her words, but I could see the delicate gestures of hand and wrist as she laid her spell. The scent of roses intensified, and the lights in the room dimmed, all save a gradual brightening around my sister. The showmanship was part of the performance.
Catherine opened her eyes, and her illusion began to coalesce around her. Like Papa, Catherine was an Elementalist capable of manipulating wind, water, light, and fire. As her ability to manipulate light was particularly strong, illusions showed her skills to advantage. She’d taken roses as her illusion motif, an appropriately feminine choice that reflected her chosen soul sign, the white rose glittering at her throat. The air behind her shimmered with giant roses, a tapestry of red and white and pink superimposed upon the air. Before her, a steadily increasing glow became a tableau: a beautiful golden-haired maiden, asleep on a bed, a bower of thorny roses surrounding her. I deemed the Sleeping Beauty an obvious choice, but it pleased the crowd. I heard gasps from ladies standing near me, and then a ripple of applause ran through the audience.
Another illusion joined the tableau: a young knight who rode toward the maiden, only to be ensnared by the roses. The knight faded away, the faintest hint of a skull hanging in the air to mark his passing. I waited, wondering how Catherine would conjure the young prince who finally rescued the maiden.
More gasps, then laughter. I couldn’t see, at first, what the focus was. I scanned Catherine’s face, and then my family behind her. Finally, my gaze fell on Freddy, and fear ran cold fingers down my neck. This illusion was not all empty air and light. Catherine had drawn a crown on Freddy’s head and placed a gleaming sword in his hand. When Freddy, at the urging of the crowd, stepped forward to the tableau, the thorns fell away from his sword.
My sister had made Freddy a part of her performance. With all the care Catherine had taken for her spells, there could be nothing impromptu about this. She had planned for it.
Practiced it.
Something snapped in me. As the maiden in the tableau opened her eyes and raised herself toward Freddy, I opened my mouth and shouted, a wordless cry that filled the entire hall. Fury pulsed through my blood, seeming to catch at the very air around me.
A thunderclap of silence followed in the wake of my shout.
Then pandemonium.
Catherine’s illusions disintegrated. The roses littering the floor at her feet shifted and twisted into ropy red serpents that slithered away from her and into the crowd. Screaming rippled out from the spot where Catherine stood, aghast at the sudden eruption of her spells.
Freddy’s crown and sword disappeared in sprays of lightning. He flinched, throwing his arms up to cover his head.
The hairs on the back of my neck lifted just before the French doors near my alcove exploded, raining glass across the floor.
An enormous creature of brine and smoke swept past me. Something thin and insubstantial trailed behind the shadow like wings, their tips brushing my cheek in a brittle kiss. It must have been illusion, wrought by the failed spell-path, though I’d never before witnessed an illusion so real, with both heft and smell. The flickering lights of the chandeliers and hundreds of candles lining the wall sconces melted together in a rising wall of flame around the creature.
Fire flooded the room, an illusion so bright I shut my eyes against the pain of it.
Then everything went dark.
The air filled with screams. I could feel my pulse beating in my wrists and pounding at my throat. A creeping winter chill stole through the darkness. The smell of roses had been displaced by smoke and frost and the acridness of fear.
When the energy from the fractured spell finally spent itself and the lights along the walls relit, it was to the entirely indecorous sound of my father muttering “Confound it all!” My mother’s eyes were shut and her hands clasped in prayer. The creature, like the other illusions, had vanished. The members of the Circle, standing in a loose cluster, flicked their hands in the final gestures of a spell. Their foreheads glistened with sweat, their elegant clothing dark and stained with effort.
Catherine still stood in the middle of the room. But her face turned toward me, her expression icier than the winter-cold of the darkness.
Behind her, Freddy also faced me, his eyes wide.
As if Freddy’s and Catherine’s gazes were some sort of compass, the assembled guests slowly shook themselves out of their horror and turned as one body to stare. In the midst of that wreckage, their eyes did not seek the shattered glass windows, or my sister and her failed charms.
Every eye in the room was trained on me, half hidden behind a flimsy plant.
“Anna! What have you done?” Catherine’s wail soared over the crowd.
“Nothing,” I said, though I choked on the word. What had I done? My shadow self—all the dark desires I tried to keep buried—had surfaced. I had let her rise, riding on a wave of fury. I had wanted to destroy something: in that fractional moment before the illusions shattered and dread swamped me, I had felt something perilously close to joy.
I flung myself away from the inadequate shelter of the potted tree and pushed through the murmuring crowd. The room seemed to swirl and swoop around me, colors melting together as paints on a palette. I took a deep breath, thrusting my arms out for balance. I would not faint.
The crowd’s eyes were like so many insects on my back, crawling and uncomfortable. I reached the jagged mouth of the broken window, and, after stepping cautiously over the shards of glass, fled into the welcoming night.
By the time Papa caught up with me at the far edge of the sculpted lawn, my head was pounding in time with my pulse. Pain spangled at the edges of my vision.
“Anna.”
I could not look at him. I did not want to read the disappointment in his face.
“Will you tell me what happened?”
“There’s nothing to tell.” Trees rustled in the wind, shadows moving against shadows.
“Hmm.” He did not press me, as Mama would have. “You must come in. There’s a chill in the air. And the Circle representatives wish to speak with you.”
My heart sank. The Circle comprised the most powerful Luminate in England. Though officially tasked with preserving the Binding spell that held our magic, regulating spell-casting, and aiding in national defense, unofficially the Circle had fingers in nearly every branch of government. The same was true of most European nations, though I knew from Papa’s lectures that the Circle’s strength varied in proportion to the monarch’s power. In England, Queen Victoria, a powerful spell-caster in her own right, headed the Circle. In France, where the Circle had saved the nation from Napoleon’s depredations, the Circle’s rule was absolute, the Bourbons merely puppet kings. And while the powerful Maria Theresa had once dominated the Circle in Austria-Hungary, her Hapsburg descendants had been steadily losing ground to the Circle following her death.