“I’m sorry,” she croaks quietly, though the visitor can’t hear her. She chokes on the smoke. “I’m sorry,” she repeats, falling to the floor as she continues to cling to the young woman’s dress, holding her back.
Those two words unleash a flood of memories suppressed for so long they make her sick with dizziness. For she is sorry—always has been. She’s been sorry since she was seven years old, and her parents gifted her the enormous golden wheel from a distant eastern country, one that, with just a little magic, could not only spin wool into yarn but gold and silver into thread—and too, she learned, dreams. But that would come later.
Sorry, because her sister was unhappy that the spinning wheel had gone to her. Malfleur would stare at Belcoeur’s fingers, their agility as they danced by the rapid flier, never once getting pricked by the sharp-ended bobbin, and Belcoeur could feel the unhappiness in her dark gaze. Belcoeur had never wanted to compete, had never believed her magic was in any way stronger than her twin’s. There was an ease to it, true—it came to her naturally. She never studied, as Malfleur did. She never practiced. As a consequence, her magic was softer around the edges. It never quite felt like it was in her control, and she didn’t mind that. But her twin did.
Though Malfleur never outright accused her, she must have held Belcoeur to blame when they discovered at a very young age that Malfleur simply couldn’t dream. While Belcoeur experienced lustrously imagined, richly vivid sequences of memory, emotion, and sensation when she slept each night, Malfleur sank only into an infinite blank. It didn’t take long for their parents to conclude that Belcoeur’s gift—her desire, the source of all her magic—had to do with dreaming. Even without learning how to perform a tithing, Belcoeur had somehow absorbed her twin’s ability to dream while they were tangled together within their mother’s womb.
She had tried to make it up to Malfleur in so many ways over the years. Sometimes it felt like all she ever did was compensate for this original sin. She spun nothing with as much love as the threads she used to weave garments for her sister. And when Malfleur was caught causing mischief and sent to bed without any supper, Belcoeur always slipped her food from her own plate.
There were times when she simply couldn’t protect her sister, though. She’ll never forget the day they snuck out to collect flowers for their mother’s birthday tea party. Malfleur had wanted to find violets—their mother’s favorite—but they didn’t grow in the gardens, and she had gotten lost wandering into the vast fields beyond the castle grounds. Belcoeur was forced to return alone to their mother, who was worried and upset beyond belief. Her tea party had been ruined, left out cold and untouched while she sent a search party to find Malfleur.
When they finally brought Malfleur home, Belcoeur, in her effort to make everything better, brewed her mother a fresh pot of tea, hoping they could start over and salvage the day, but by then their mother’s distress had picked up speed like a summer storm and morphed into fury. Their mother, cruel as ever, grabbed the gilt cup from Belcoeur’s tray and splashed still-scalding tea into Malfleur’s face to teach her never to wander again. A white scar remained across her sister’s eyelid and cheek—and that’s when a stain of darkness, Belcoeur is sure, began to settle into her sister’s heart.
Still, Belcoeur continued to accept the blame for her sister’s misdeeds as often as she convincingly could. She even came to enjoy taking her sister’s place in the “punishment chair” positioned in the corner of the parlor room in their summer cottage. Her sister, during the many hours she spent supposedly atoning for the trouble she’d made, would scratch clever limericks and poems into the wall there. It became a secret way for the girls to communicate, for Belcoeur to read and decipher the messages and to feel like she was a part of Malfleur’s world, even as her sister increasingly snuck away without telling her.
It hurt, the idea of Malfleur keeping secrets. Belcoeur wanted more than anything to be her twin’s confidante. And so she was delighted by little phrases, such as The secret boy—we almost kissed—he won my jewel—in a game of whist! Belcoeur guessed what her sister was referring to: the night Malfleur had “borrowed” their mother’s pearl necklace and slipped silently out of the guest quarters at Blackthorn to play cards with the older visitors.
It was only a couple years later and after several more visits with the Blackthorns, both at their castle and at hers, that Belcoeur began to suspect just which boy Malfleur had almost kissed. It was Charles Blackthorn himself. And she could see he was smitten with her by the way he seemed especially attuned to Malfleur’s tenor of sarcasm, was always ready with a reply and a twinkling gaze that seemed to suggest a wink, even where there wasn’t one.
When Belcoeur questioned her sister about her budding romance with Charles, Malfleur always brushed it off as a flirtation. But Belcoeur could see what her sister would not admit: that the bubbling, exciting, yearning intensity between them was mutual. They had some sort of understanding, that much was clear—even when, at sixteen, Malfleur left their father’s lands to learn more about her magic and traveled for three years abroad, without offering Charles any overt promise of her affections. He would wait. That was what everyone thought.
Though Belcoeur missed her sister terribly during those three years, she took pleasure in receiving the packages Malfleur regularly sent home to her: precious knickknacks and odd inventions from all around the world, like a clock with a bird’s face that popped out to chime the hour, a beautiful birdcage, a delicate silver teapot, a hairbrush and filigreed hand mirror.
She was surprised when Charles began to come around more frequently—at first to compare letters from Malfleur’s travels and to marvel at the gifts she’d sent, but then, more and more often, he visited simply to talk. And the more he spoke, the more he let slip. He confessed that he had proposed to Malfleur, and she had rejected him outright. Though she continued to send him letters, she’d made it clear that she was more interested in her own magic than in him. And besides, Malfleur was fond of reminding him that the fae frequently outlived humans by whole lifetimes or more.
Belcoeur could see he was devastated by her sister’s refusal. Which was why she did what she was always doing, whether for her sister or her mother or, in this case, Charles. She offered sweetness and consolation in uncountable small ways.