I flip open the beauty caisse beside me. Du Barry gave each of us a different chest, engraved with our initials and the flowers that we’re named after. I run my fingers across the golden carvings before lifting the lid to reveal a medley of instruments tucked inside endless drawers and compartments. These items mask my gifts. Du Barry’s morning instructions repeat in my head: Display only the second arcana, and what has been instructed. Keep them wanting more. Show them what you truly are—divine artists.
Three scarlet post-balloons, carrying three trays, float up to the little girl’s stand. One sprinkles little white flakes—bei powder—all over her, and she ducks as it coats her like snow. The other dangles a porcelain teacup full of Belle-rose tea, an anesthetic drink steeped from the roses that grow on our island. It sloshes and dances near her mouth. She refuses to have a sip. She swats at the cup like it’s a nagging fly.
The crowd cries out as she nears the platform edge again. The last post-balloon chases her with a brush smudged with a paste the color of a cream cookie. To her left and right, the other girls shout at her, telling her not to be scared. The crowd roars. Onlookers try to convince her to drink the tea and wipe the brush across her cheek.
My stomach knots. Her constant squirming could spoil my exhibition. A surge of panic hits me. Every time I imagined this night, I never thought my subject would resist.
“Please stop moving,” I call out.
Du Barry’s gasp echoes through her voice-trumpet.
The crowd goes silent. The girl freezes. I take a deep breath.
“Don’t you want to be beautiful?”
Her gaze burns into mine.
“I don’t care,” she yells, and her voice gets carried off by the wind.
The crowd erupts with horror.
“Oh, but of course you do. Everyone does,” I say, steadying my voice. Maybe she’s starting to go mad from being gray for so long.
“Perhaps they shouldn’t.” Her fists ball up. Her words send a shiver through me.
I paint on a smile. “What if I promise it’ll all turn out well?”
She blinks.
“Better than you expect? Something that will make all of this”—I wave at our surroundings—“worth it.”
She nibbles her bottom lip. A post-balloon putters back up to her with tea. She still refuses it.
“Don’t be afraid.” Her gaze finds mine. “Drink the tea.”
The post-balloon returns.
“Go on. I promise you will love what I do. You’ll feel better.”
She reaches toward the post-balloon, then pulls back like it will burn her. She looks at me. I smile and motion for her to tug it forward. She grabs its golden tail ribbons, then lifts the teacup from its tray and sips.
I examine her, noting the details of her small, undernourished frame. Fear flashes in her red irises. Her body shakes even more.
“Now, take the brush,” I gently goad her.
She wipes it along her cheek, and it leaves behind a milky streak as a color guide for me.
A blimp shines a sky candle over the carriages, and I catch my reflection in the glass again. A smile creeps into the corner of my mouth as I see myself. I abandon Du Barry’s instructions: the snowy skin, the black hair, the rosebud lips. An idea leaves behind the warmth of excitement.
The risk might cost me, infuriate Du Barry further, but if it allows me to stand out from my sisters, the gamble will be worth it.
It will be unforgettable. It has to be.
I close my eyes and picture the girl inside my mind like a small statue. When we were little, we practiced our second arcana by manipulating paint on a canvas, shaping clay on a pottery wheel, and molding fresh-dipped candlesticks, until we were able to transform them into treasures. After our thirteenth birthday, we moved on from using our teacup dogs and the stray teacup cats that lurk on the grounds to enlisting our servants as subjects of our beauty work. I’d give my room servant, Madeleine, bright sea-glass-green eyes when the red seeped in. At fourteen, we changed the babies in our nursery chambers, giving color to tiny fat legs and little wisps of hair, and just before our sixteenth birthday, the queen gave out voucher tokens to the poor to help us train and perfect our skills.
I am ready for this.
I summon the arcana. My blood pressure rises. My skin warms. I heat up like a newborn fire in a hearth. The veins in my arms and hands rise beneath my skin like tiny green serpents.
I manipulate the camellia flower in the little girl’s hands. I change it, just as I will the little girl, shaping the flower’s fibers and veins and petals.
The crowd gasps. The stem lengthens until the tip hits the platform, like a kite’s tail. She throws the bloom and inches away. The flower quadruples in size, and the petals lengthen to catch her. They wrap around her small, squirming body, until she’s swaddled inside a pink chrysalis like a writhing worm.
The crowd explodes with claps, whistles, and stamping. The noise turns into a rolling boil as they wait for me to reveal her.
I will be the best.
It will be perfect.
I love being a Belle.
I hear the whoosh of the little girl’s blood racing through her body, and the thrum of her pulse floods my ears. I say the mantra of the Belles:
Beauty is in the blood.
3
My childhood is a blur of quick images, like the twirling of a télétrope. I can never quite remember it fully. Not my first word or image or smell. Only the first thing I ever changed. The memory appears like a sharp ray of light. Du Barry took us into the solarium in the north wing of the house for a lesson. My sisters and I were folded into the scent of flower nectar, and arranged ourselves around a table.
Garden servants buzzed about, pruning, watering, and extracting perfume to be used in the Belle-products. The sun beamed down through the curved glass above me, warming my day dress, turning me into a hotcake. Du Barry gave each one of us a flower potted inside a wire birdcage, and instructed us to change its color and shape. I was so excited that my flower exploded, the petals bursting through the wires like thick tentacles, knocking my sisters’ cages to the floor, and stretching between us like an octopus creature.
I have more control now and make fewer mistakes, but I still feel that tickle creep over my skin. When that happens, I know the arcana have done exactly what I wanted.
I open my eyes. The camellia flowers peel away from the Gris girl’s body like wax, exposing her to the crowd. Voices gasp and cry out with excitement.
“Bravo!”
“Magnificent!”
“Impossible!”
“Brilliant!”
The chants make the glass vibrate. My blood pressure decreases. My heart slows to a normal pace. Sweat disappears from my brow, and the flush in my cheeks drains away.
The girl wears a small replica of my pink dress, made from the camellia’s petals. Her skin matches the exact shade of mine—a sugared beignet fresh from the oil, golden brown and glistening under the lantern light. I’ve put a tiny dimple in her left cheek to mirror my own. Dark curls are swept high into a Belle-bun, the hairstyle only we wear.
She is my twin. The only difference: her eyes glow crystal blue, like the color of the water in the Royal Harbor, while mine are an amber brown like my sisters’.