It’s not the first awful thing I have endured and pushed into the back of my brain. That’s how I’ve been coping, and if there’s another, better way, I do not know it.
I focus my attention on the cloth until I can breathe evenly again, until the panic dissipates. There’s a velvet blue-green, reminding me of the lake at dusk. I find an amazing, fantastical fabric embroidered with moths and butterflies and ferns and flowers. I lift it up, and underneath is a bolt of beautiful fog-gray cloth that ripples like smoke. They’re so very pretty. The kind of fabrics that princesses in fairy tales wear.
Of course, Taryn is right about stories. Bad things happen to those princesses. They are pricked with thorns, poisoned by apples, married to their own fathers. They have their hands cut off and their brothers turned into swans, their lovers chopped up and planted in basil pots. They vomit up diamonds. When they walk, it feels as though they’re walking on knives.
They still manage to look nice.
“I want that one,” Taryn says, pointing to the bolt of fabric I’m holding, the one with the embroidery. She’s done being measured. Vivi is up there, holding out her arms, watching me in that unnerving way she has, as though she knows my very thoughts.
“Your sister found it first,” Oriana says.
“Pleeeeeeeease,” Taryn says to me, bending her head and looking up through her eyelashes. She’s joking, but she’s not. She needs to look nice for this boy who is supposed to declare himself at the coronation. She doesn’t understand what use my looking nice would be, me with my grudges and feuds.
With a half smile, I set down the bolt. “Sure. All yours.”
Taryn kisses me on the cheek. I guess we’re back to normal. If only everything in my life were so easily resolved.
I choose a different cloth, the dark blue velvet. Vivienne chooses a violet that seems to be a silvery gray when she turns it over her hand. Oriana chooses a blush pink for herself and a cricket green for Oak. Brambleweft starts to sketch—billowing skirts and cunning little capes, corsets stitched with fanciful creatures. Butterflies alighting along arms and in elaborate headpieces. I am charmed at the alien vision of myself—my corset will have two golden beetles stitched in what looks like a breastplate, with Madoc’s moon crest and elaborate swirls of shining thread continuing down my front, and tiny sheer drop sleeves of more gold.
It will certainly be clear to what household I belong.
We are still making small changes when Oak runs in, being chased by Gnarbone. Oak spots me first and scrambles onto my lap, throwing his arms around my neck and giving me a small bite just beneath my shoulder.
“Ow!” I say in surprise, but he just laughs. It makes me laugh, too. He’s kind of a weird kid, maybe because he’s a faerie or maybe because all kids, human or inhuman, are equally weird. “Do you want me to tell you a story about a little boy who bit a stone and lost all his pearly white teeth?” I ask him in what I hope is a menacing fashion, sticking my fingers under his armpits to tickle him.
“Yes,” he says immediately between breathless giggles and shrieks.
Oriana strides over to us, her face full of trouble. “That’s very kind of you, but we ought to begin dressing for dinner.” She pulls him off my lap and into her arms. He begins screaming and kicking his legs. One of the kicks lands against my stomach hard enough to bruise, but I don’t say anything.
“Story!” he shouts. “I want the story!”
“Jude is busy right now,” she says, carrying his squirming body toward the door, where Gnarbone is waiting to take him back to the nursery.
“Why don’t you ever trust me with him?” I shout, and Oriana wheels around, shocked that I said a thing we don’t say. I am shocked, too, but I can’t stop. “I’m not a monster! I’ve never done anything to either of you.”
“I want the story,” Oak whines, sounding confused.
“That’s enough,” Oriana says sternly, as though we’ve all been arguing. “We will speak about this later with your father.”
With that, she strides from the room.
“I don’t know whose father you’re talking about, because he’s sure not mine,” I call after her.
Taryn’s eyes go saucer-wide. Vivienne has a small smile on her face. She takes a minute sip of tea, and then she raises the cup in my direction in salute. The seamstress is looking down and away, leaving us to our private family moment.
I cannot seem to contort myself back into the shape of a dutiful child.
I am coming unraveled. I am coming undone.
The next day at school, Taryn walks beside me, swinging her lunch basket. I keep my head high and my jaw set. I have my little knife with me, cold iron, tucked into one of the pockets of my skirt, and more salt than I reasonably need. I even have a new necklace of rowan berries, sewn by Tatterfell and worn because there was no way she could know I didn’t need it.
I dally in the palace garden to gather a few more things.
“Are you allowed to pick those?” Taryn asks, but I do not answer her.
In the afternoon, we attend a lecture in a high tower, where we are taught about birdsongs. Every time I feel as though my courage will falter, I let my fingers brush the cool metal of the blade.
Locke looks over, and when he catches my eye, he winks.
From the other side of the room, Cardan scowls at the lecturer but does not speak. When he moves to take an inkpot from a satchel, I see him wince. I think about how sore his back must be, how it must hurt to move. But if he holds himself a little more stiffly as he sneers, that seems to be the only difference in his manner.
He looks well practiced in hiding pain.
I think of the note I found, of the press of his nibbed pen hard enough to send flecks of ink spattering as he wrote my name. Hard enough to dig through the page, maybe to scar the desk beneath.
If that’s what he did to the paper, I shudder to think what he wants to do to me.
After school, I practice with Madoc. He shows me a particularly clever block, and I do it over and over again, better and faster, surprising even him. When I go inside, covered in sweat, I pass Oak, who is running somewhere, dragging my stuffed snake after him on a dirty rope. He’s clearly stolen the snake from my room.
“Oak!” I call after him, but he’s up the stairs and away.
I sluice off in my bath and then, alone in my room, unpack my schoolbag. Tucked down in the bottom, wrapped in a leftover piece of paper, is a single worm-eaten faerie fruit I picked up on the way home. I set it on a tray and pull on leather gloves. Then I take out my knife and cut it into pieces. Tiny slivers of squishy golden fruit.