She turns and props her face on her elbow. “How is it downstairs?”
“Wonderful,” I say quickly.
“Is everyone being kind to you?”
“Yes,” I lie.
“They better.” She giggles mischievously and wiggles farther into the covers. “Or I’ll have them sacked. Now, will you do your face thing?”
“My face thing?”
“You know. The thing I love, with the stripes.”
On the nights prospective parents came but didn’t pick her, I’d tuck her in and graze my thumbs over the length of her eyebrows, from nose to temple, and then once along each cheekbone, as lightly as I could. “There,” I say, doing it now just like I always used to. “I’ve brushed away anything ugly or bad left over from today. Now go to sleep, and we’ll both wake up fresh tomorrow.”
“I’m glad now, Marit,” she says, already half-asleep, “for all those times I didn’t get picked. Because then I wouldn’t be here with you.”
I look at her with a lump in my throat and kiss her forehead. Then I slip out of her room and am almost to the main floor when Nina emerges from the servants’ corridor with a candle.
Oh, blast.
I dart down the rest of the stairs and manage to slip behind an urn just before she turns the corner. Three seconds more and we would have practically collided. My heart thunders. The shadow of another servant is behind her, blocking my exit to the underground corridor. They are doing one final sweep of the main house, and Nina will likely see me when she comes back down the stairs. I crouch in the shadows until she reaches the second floor, and then I open the front door a crack and slip outside. The night air stings, like a slap, and when the door closes behind me, I hear its lock faintly click. Oh, curse it all, I think, and draw a sharp breath. I turn around slowly.
Moonlight shears off the ice in the pond, which glows white, as though it spent the day gathering light within itself. Smoke from the chimney smells of deep wood and billows out into the night like steam from a teacup. I pick my way around the frozen ice toward the servants’ wing, praying that the side door by the kitchen pantry might still be unlocked. But when I yank, the lock holds fast. I feel the first dull ringing of panic. If I get locked outside all night, I might very well freeze to death.
I always feared that’s how I’d end up, eventually. I just thought it would be from the inside out.
I plunge my hand into the snow, looking for a piece of ice as small and hard as a pebble. Hoping that after this morning with the scone, Liljan and I have reached enough understanding that she might let me in rather than allowing me to freeze to death outside—or ratting me out to Nina. My teeth are starting to chatter as I wind up and prepare to fling the ice rock at our darkened window.
“Marit?”
Startled, I jolt back as Jakob skates out from the pond’s shadows, the moonlight glinting on the blades under his feet.
“Horse’s bells,” I gasp. A gust of wind finds the bare skin on my neck. “You scared me!”
“Sorry.” Jakob curves around sharply and my heart thuds as I plunge my naked hands into my apron. He clears his throat and takes in my coatless appearance. “What brings you out on this fine evening?” he asks. He skates to the edge of the pond, so that we are barely an arm’s distance apart.
I sniff and silently curse to myself. This is not going at all according to plan. “I’m getting some fresh air. And I seem to have locked myself out. Is there, um, a way in”—I blink at him—“or do you sleep out here in some sort of fort?”
He smiles wryly. “There’s a way in. As soon as you can come up with a better story than that.”
I see the flicker of Nina’s candle inside. “Quick, there’s Nina,” I whisper. “Hide.”
He steps off the ice and we duck down just beneath the windowsill. I feel the pleasant warmth of him next to me. Nina’s face appears above us, looking out. Then, after a tense beat, she and her candlelight disappear.
“I hope you really do know of another way in,” I whisper, letting out a breath. When he turns toward me, I suddenly realize how close his face is to mine.
“Oh, we do!” Liljan’s voice says cheerfully from my left. She laughs at my startled jump and finishes lacing up her skate beneath eaves glittering with icicles as sharp and crowded as wolfs’ teeth.
“If Nina finds us all out here,” she says, pulling herself up and shooting me a wicked grin, “she’ll shave our heads and lash us all silly.”
“Really?” I ask tentatively.
“Probably not,” Jakob says, standing.
“But where’s your sense of imagination?” Liljan asks, placing her hand palm-down on the window above her head. It instantly darkens, as if it’s been stained with shadow. I stare at it, wondering if my eyes are playing tricks.
“No more Nina,” she says. “She can stare out this window all she wants, but she won’t see us anymore.” She turns to us with a dazzling smile and then makes her way along the row of windows, turning them each into an opaque black shell. Realization feels like flowers blooming within me. I suddenly understand the intricate beauty of our bedroom walls. How quickly Eve’s room was decorated just for her.
Liljan must have done all of it. With magic.
“My fellow Nina-defiers,” Liljan says to us, stepping out onto the ice. “Shall we skate across Denmark tonight?”
Jakob offers me his hand and pulls me up.
As soon as Liljan places her bare palm on the ice, color seeps and spills out from her touch, over the thousands of air bubbles that have crystallized beneath her feet like fizzing glass ornaments. The ice becomes a living map of Jutland, Funen, and Zealand, with lush green mountains and grass that ripples in the wind. Bluebells and daffodils and violets are set blooming under the frozen stars. I feel lightheaded, seeing Denmark as a bird might, flying high above it all. I’ve spent my life wondering if everyone else with magic is as afraid of it as I am. But Liljan uses hers extravagantly, with pleasure, as if she’s pouring from an endless well. Is she just a fool? Young and silly, with little thought for consequences, even more reckless than Ingrid?
Or does she know something I don’t?
I watch her with the stirring of something deep within me that I soon realize is envy. I love the way magic makes me feel. I just wish that fear didn’t seep in alongside my enjoyment like decay across a flower.
Jakob takes a step onto the ice and gestures to the map. “Marit, which part do you call home?” he asks.
“I came from Karlslunde,” I say softly. “South of here.”
“There?” He points at a spot just beneath Copenhagen. Miniature people walk through the streets, and ballet dancers raise their long legs in front of the Royal Theatre.
I shake my head. “Farther.”
He smiles. “Here?” He points.
“More to the right.”
He raises his eyebrows and points, and this time I laugh a little when I shake my head. I step out gingerly onto the ice. “I’ll show you.”
He comes to meet me halfway. The stars are a crystalline trail overhead. They do not look like the ones outside the Mill, muted and hidden behind coal smoke and clouds. Here the sky is a shattered mirror reflecting a thousand points of light.
“Do you skate?” he asks.
“No.”
“Ever want to learn?” He adjusts his wool hat.
I wobble and stretch my arms out just in time to right myself.
“No,” I say.
It is eight painstaking paces from Hørsholm to Karlslunde. “Here,” I say, pointing to home. Picturing my little thatched-roof house, and then the Mill. I think of Ness; I taste cinnamon twists.
“Karlslunde,” Jakob muses, pulling out a pocketknife. He has a thin, light scar along his chin, as if a cat once scratched him enough to draw blood. “Where Helene is from, as well?”
“And Eve.” I look up at the sky, its glittering mess of stars, and wonder how the three of us could all come from the Mill and end up here, in t
he same house, yet the cards have fallen so differently for each of us. Jakob bends to the ice and carves an X. “Now you’ll see a little bit of home with every glance out your window.” He flicks the knife closed, and when he returns it to his pocket, I notice that his sleeves are slightly too short for his long arms. “You knew Eve? From before?”
Ingrid’s voice suddenly whispers in my ear from long ago. Secrets are like knots, she told me once, that bind people together. “Yes,” I admit, taking a chance. “We grew up together.”
Forming friendships, I suppose, is a little like walking on ice that thickens underneath your feet with every step toward each other. I take another tentative step forward, testing the weight of it. “Do you think she will be all right here?” I ask.
Jakob tilts his head. “All right?”
“I mean . . . safe?”
At his quizzical look, I add, “What Brock said last night,” trying to laugh. “It was all just nonsense? No one would have hurt Mr. Vestergaard on purpose, right?”
Jakob and Liljan exchange a glance.
“Right,” he says.
“Probably,” Liljan adds.
I was hoping for assurance, but instead alarm awakens within me like a fever.
“Wait. Why does Brock think someone would have hurt Mr. Vestergaard?”
“Brock’s not the only one. Those mines are worth a fortune,” Liljan says.
The mines. Something flickers inside me. The mines that killed my father might have cost Mr. Vestergaard his life too?
Jakob sort of turns away. “You heard Nina,” he says. “I don’t think you should concern yourself much with that. If you want to stay employed here.” It feels like a door briskly shutting in my face, and I try to stifle the disappointment at the ice of friendship showing signs of cracking like eggshells beneath us.
But then I start to lose my footing and Jakob’s hands strike out in a flash to steady me. He’s stronger than he looks and he catches me without losing his own balance. For a split second, I’m surprised by how firm his hands feel on my waist. Then he draws back so quickly that you’d think my skin burned him. I tighten my arms around myself in protection from the wind and the disappointment gathering at the base of my throat. I say softly:
“All I want to know is if Eve is going to be safe.”
He’s very deliberate to leave a foot of cold night air between us, but he shuffles next to me, close enough to reach out again if I fall. He’s thinking hard, and he looks at me differently. As if something happened, something that I don’t understand, but it seems to be changing his mind.
“I don’t think Helene hurt Aleks, if that’s what you mean,” he finally says. He’s being careful choosing his words. “I was his valet before he died, and I believe she loved him. Eve wouldn’t be in danger from her.”
“But she might be in danger from someone?”
Jakob’s jaw twitches and my heart beats a tick faster.
“Aleksander and Philip Vestergaard ran the mines after their father died,” Jakob says. “When they found gemstones growing inside the limestone, the mines increased in value a hundredfold.”
“Philip Vestergaard?” I echo, realization dawning.
The Philip Vestergaard who is coming here tomorrow for Mortensaften?
“When Aleks died, Helene inherited all of Aleks’s ownership. The majority of the mines belong to her now. But perhaps that’s not what Philip was expecting.”
A prickle runs beneath my skin. Those bloody mines, coming up again and again.
“He’s visiting tomorrow, to meet Eve,” I say. “How often does he come to this house?”
“In the summers, he stays busier with the mines. But in the winter he comes for most holidays.” Jakob ticks off his fingers. “Mortensaften, Christmas, New Year’s. Helene’s the only family he has left.”
My throat catches. “Do you think there’s any truth to it? That Philip could be dangerous?”
I don’t miss the silent exchange between Liljan and Jakob as she skates past us, with the way siblings can communicate with only a look. When she nods, I suddenly feel as though I’ve passed some sort of test.
Jakob turns to me. “You know what happened with those mines. The landslide that killed all those miners.” It’s a statement, not a question, and he says it with such confidence. Almost as if he somehow already knows more about me than I’ve said. I narrow my eyes but give a slight nod.
“I don’t think that was ever the whole story. I think there was more to it than that,” Jakob says.
“What do you mean?” My stomach cramps with dread. “You . . . don’t think it was an accident?”
The moonlight that catches in the silver of his spectacles suddenly seems shrill. “I think there’s something in those mines they were trying to hide.”
My voice is barely a whisper. “What?”
“Philip still manages the mines, but when Helene inherited their ownership, she wanted me to look into the logs, the blueprints—everything. To make sure the miners were reasonably safe, that an accident of that magnitude wouldn’t happen again. But when I saw the blueprints . . . I found things that made me question whether it had been an accident in the first place.”
“Can you show them to me?” I ask. My throat is tight and cold as steel. Something volatile is building within me, something that threatens to explode.
Jakob hesitates. “When I told Helene what I found, she . . . she asked me to drop it. I think she’s afraid that if something bad did happen, and Aleks had anything to do with it . . .” He swallows. “I understand, in a way, why she doesn’t want to know. I cared for Aleks too. It would change him, in her eyes. In her memory. It would feel like he died all over again. So she’s putting it behind her and moving on now. She adopted Eve. She’s focusing on the future now. But to be honest”—he shrugs—“it hasn’t been sitting right with me.”
Liljan skates a half step closer to me. “It was a long time ago,” she says gently. “Is there any point? To look into it after all these years?”
“Yes,” I say immediately. “There is to me.” It means learning the truth about what happened to my father. It was the event that changed everything, what sent me to the Mill. And I can’t leave this place if there’s any possibility that the Vestergaards are dangerous or have something to hide. Not with Eve sleeping right upstairs now.
Jakob blows out a breath and considers. “The blueprints are in the third-floor library. I can show you. Tomorrow. When Philip’s here and everyone’s distracted and busy with Mortensaften.” He clears his throat. “Just . . . if any of this is true, no one can know you’re looking into it. Not Brock, not Philip, not Helene. Not even Eve. Be careful.”
Be careful.
I’ve spent my entire life up until this week being very, very careful. Careful with my heart. Careful with my magic. That familiar, simmering rage I’ve nursed toward the Vestergaards for years is back, as if somewhere deep down I always knew. I look from the slick ice below my feet to the sky that’s inky above us and wonder at the idiocy of learning to skate. Why would anyone choose to, when the risk of falling is so great, caught between sharpened blades and ice hard enough to break you? When skating is done right, I suppose, begrudgingly, it is beautiful. As beautiful as ballet. But all it takes is one false move—one wrong split-second decision—for the beauty to become devastating, for bones and ice to shatter each other.
I clear my throat and hear myself say: “Perhaps I’m changing my mind after all.”
“Perhaps?” Jakob asks. “About coming to Hørsholm?”
“About learning to skate,” I say. I give him a tentative smile. “Perhaps.”
The moonlight catches his spectacles again, the shadows cutting along the angle of his cheekbones.
“Then perhaps,” he says, “I might know someone who can teach you.”
Chapter Ten
Philip
1854
Faxe, Denmark
I’m seventeen years old, and tonight I will see tw
o things for the very first time: a dead body, and the way my brother, Aleks, looks when he’s in love.
He’s been home from war for three years, but it still makes me glad to see him, straightening his cravat in the hallway’s oval mirror. He flicks open a mustache comb made of silver and tortoiseshell as the grandfather clock strikes five from the foyer. His hands linger on the horn buttons on his coat. The scent of the oil on his tall leather boots is so familiar that if I squint, in the deepening twilight, he could almost pass for our father.
“Ready?” he asks now, and I nod. I’m growing out my own mustache, which I’ve waxed with pomade. I straighten my overcoat.
Aleksander looks every bit the hero, a man who came marching proudly home after Denmark won the Three Years’ War, beating back Prussia with a stick to keep the duchies our own. I threw myself on him when he walked through the door three years ago and sobbed the deep, silent sobs of someone who has held in fear for so long that now it may never come out.
Aleks helps my mother into the carriage. We’re taking her to the theater in Copenhagen tonight, like my father used to do. My father gave his life to that war, but at least it wasn’t in vain. That’s the only thing that staunches the wound of losing him, I think as the carriage rolls past the shuttered factory that turned me away those years ago. The alley where I saw the little boy with magic is dark and empty. My fingers itch to snap themselves together, something I practiced so much over the years it’s turned into a tic.
“How were the mines today?” my mother asks with her voice that sounds like paper rustling. She uses the pet name she has for me—min skat, “my treasure”—and puts her hand on my own, the blue veins running through her skin like streaks of ore. Fine lines, as delicate as webs, fan out from the corners of her eyes. Losing my father, the worry over losing Aleks and the mines, too—how it aged her. It is good to see her with her hair clean, donning a gown. Like she once was, when my father lived, instead of the shadow self she became.
“Treasured mines, treasure mines,” I say to play on her words, and when she smiles, I squeeze her hand reassuringly with my own.
Splinters of Scarlet Page 7
