And in performing these modest acts of love, she grew to inhabit that love. She fell for Charles. His broad chest and perfect posture. His light brown hair cropped at the shoulders and almost always a bit disheveled from his latest ride. The thin beard he had newly grown, emphasizing the squareness of his jaw. The modest, simple crown he wore—a circlet of gold with no jewels. But more than these things, she loved the way he reminded her of Malfleur: his quick wit, his fiery laugh, his fiercely perceptive gaze.
She didn’t mean to fall, and certainly didn’t expect any reciprocity. But, same as her magic, love blossomed easily and naturally—it was beyond her control. She was helpless to stop the feeling from growing and expanding until it got to the point where the spiky, poisonous vines that often choked the trees in the royal forest would spontaneously sprout purple flowers as she walked over them.
And so it was that on the day Malfleur was to return from her travels, Charles found Belcoeur alone, head bent over a gift she was making for her twin: a dress woven from gold. It was July, so she was at the summer cottage on the outskirts of the royal forest, which afforded their father better hunting, and the Blackthorns were visiting. Having changed her mind several times about the style of the sleeves, anxious to get the dress just right, Belcoeur realized she had run out of gold thread. She had just rethreaded the bobbin and begun to tap the foot pedal, causing the great wheel to spin. As usual, she became lost in the sparkling whir of the metallic filaments through her fingers, and hardly noticed a shadow cast into the room until she heard a quiet cough and looked up. Charles Blackthorn was standing in the doorway.
“I could watch you work all day,” he said, and she flushed, feeling sick with the effort of not smiling more broadly, not letting her affection have its name. He was leaning against the doorframe in his riding gear, and he seemed to be concentrating very hard.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “You seem . . . perplexed.”
“Malfleur returns today,” he said, as though the knowledge hadn’t been tormenting her for days—and nights—both with excitement and uncertainty. She desperately wanted everything to go back to the way it had been. But a voice inside her reminded her that the love between them had been fraying invisibly for years, like the frizzy hair of a much-held doll, and one day the bald truth would be revealed. Was all love like this, she fretted—a covering, a craft, a transient softness impossible to regrow once shed?
Even as she clutched the imaginary doll harder, she wore it down to its porcelain bones.
But all she said was, “Yes. As you can see, I’m hurrying to finish her homecoming gift.”
“I do see,” he said, casting his glance at the single-sleeved dress hanging over the side of the wardrobe, studying it with that same expression of consternation. “It is sure to look lovely on her,” he added.
“Of course,” she replied awkwardly, hating the dress instantly, and hating herself.
“Then again,” he said, “it would be very beautiful on you.” And though he wasn’t making eye contact with her, she understood. She panicked. She should beg him to stop talking, but she was frozen as he went on. “All it would need is a veil, and it would make a suitable wedding gown. No . . . not suitable. Stunning.”
That’s when he finally lifted his eyes to hers, and she shook, snagging her index finger on the tip of the bobbin. “Ow!” she cried, the end of the golden thread flying from her hands.
He ran to her—both the desired and feared effect—and without her perceiving how it had happened, he was kneeling before her, clutching her hands, kissing the injured one, then the other. He turned her hands over and kissed the inside of each wrist. His lips against the tender skin there caused her to tremble again. Stop! her mind shouted, but her heart leaped into her throat, and instead she breathed his name aloud. “Charles.” Tears ran down her cheeks, but she didn’t have the will to pull her hands back and wipe them away.
Though he was normally equipped with a variety of clever phrases and compelling arguments, he was silent now as he slipped one hand to her bent knee and one to her damp cheek, and then, pushing her long blond hair out of her face, he took the kiss she had forbidden herself to imagine.
His lips told the story of how true his love was, that it had not been all hers but had been theirs for some time. His mouth was so human against her own, and without meaning to, she breathed in his deepest dreaming, and dreamed—right in that instant—that they were fated to be together. He pulled away, bewildered. Maybe he knew—could feel—that an unspoken contract had been signed, and with it, her magic had taken something from him.
Or maybe he had no idea yet. It didn’t matter anyway. She felt that first sparkle of guilt, the one that caused her to glance up—and then she gasped as she realized what had happened, as she saw what had been inevitable from the start: Malfleur, still in her travel cloak, entering the room, dropping a gift of glass, which shattered like a scream.
It would have been better if Malfleur too had screamed. Anything would have been better, Belcoeur thought, than the look on her perfectly sculpted face: its scar blazing white like a star, her cheekbones high and proud, her pretty mouth—thinner than her twin’s and more sharply defined—mute with comprehension.
That moment, full of such ugliness and such beauty, became a thorn wedged permanently into Belcoeur’s chest. She would never breathe again without feeling the pain of it.
And still, there would be worse to come.
Her vow never to love. Her promise to shun Charles forever.
The long months of begging for forgiveness. Of being ignored over and over as Malfleur returned to her travels, leaving Belcoeur to feel as though one half of herself had died. The terror of watching her twin become darker, more remote, changed, until Belcoeur’s only source of consolation was her dreams, which she had begun to collect and, using her magic, weave into elaborate tapestries where she would spend days trying to forget, forget, forget, only to return from them panting, air racing into her lungs like angry hornets filling her with the sting of the life she no longer wanted to live.
She called this body of her greatest work “Sommeil.”
More time passed, and the wounds began to scar, the dreams a kind of salve—a salvation, really. They replaced her life, a prettier version of only the best times, while her waking existence took on the form of a blurred memory fading with each day. She had never used her magic so much as she used it then. It got so that she couldn’t enter a room without sapping the power of dreaming from everyone in it.
In the sliver of twilight between waking and dreaming, she sometimes saw herself for what she had become: the type of faerie whom humans misunderstood, dreaded, abhorred.
Some nights she saw Charles again, despite her promise not to.
But she couldn’t say if any of these nights, and the agonizing ecstasies they contained, were real or imagined.
There is no way to know now. Not after what happened. Not after . . .
Belcoeur gags on smoke, the fumes strong in her nostrils. There’s the scent of old things burning:
Lace fire.
Flower fire.
Bone fire.