Midnight Beauties

by Megan Shepherd

  Anouk reached the end of the bookshelf. Saint’s perch was just a few feet away. The falcon was hooded and asleep, as best she could tell. The bell sparkled in the light of the study. “She wasn’t a kind person,” Anouk said.

  “Heavens, no. She was a monster even as a young Pretty. But the Coals don’t care if a girl is good or bad.” He motioned to the books she was inspecting. “These volumes were written by the original Royals. They deal with the morality of magic. A complicated thing. It isn’t like the morality of the Pretty World. Magic doesn’t reward one for good deeds and it doesn’t punish one for being bad. It’s far more complex than that. It could take ten lifetimes to understand it.”

  She saw Saint out of the corner of her eye. “You’ve read them all?”

  “Each one a hundred times.”

  She glanced at the door anxiously. She needed to stall for time. She blurted out, “Do they mention something called the Noirceur?”

  This seemed to surprise the Duke. “That’s quite an obscure reference, one I haven’t heard mentioned in decades. It happened thousands of years ago, at the time of the Snowfire Court. Few Royals today know of the Noirceur. How does a beastie know of it?”

  She sneaked another glance at the door. “Something I heard Mada Vittora say once.”

  He gave her a doubting look. “You have greater concerns than an ancient force. You came for my advice, did you not?”

  A knock finally came, sharp and insistent. Anouk let out a long breath of relief.

  The Duke grumbled but strode around his desk, adjusting his red cloak, to answer it. Petra was on the other side, staggering under a crate of fresh oranges.

  “Ah! These just arrived,” she said. “Where do you want us to put them? The pantries are full and there’s a family of rats in the kitchen. I’m afraid if I leave them out, the rats will eat them.”

  He made a dismissive gesture toward the hallway. “Put them in the kitchen. I’ll whisper away the rats.”

  “Thanks, and, um—”

  “You’re a clever girl, Petra. You can figure out where to put some fruit.”

  He closed the door and rubbed his nose, then turned back to Anouk and dropped his hand, looking almost as though he’d forgotten she was there. Then he said, “You asked me about your crux.”

  Anouk’s hands were deep in her apron pockets. “Yes. I . . . I thought that because I’m not a Pretty, my crux might be different. Something unique to a beastie. Maybe a bit of Beau’s fur?”

  She couldn’t read the odd expression he gave her, but after a long time, he took off his glasses. “It sounds like you don’t need my advice after all.” He opened the door, clearly dismissing her. She was all too happy to hurry out.

  She ran to the cellar, taking the stairs as fast as her tender feet could handle, and then threw open the door to Little Beau’s cell and wrapped her arms around the dog. He sniffed at her pocket and she took out the bell she’d stolen while Petra had distracted the Duke.

  “I made a fake bell out of an old brass cup in the kitchen,” she told him. “I put that around Saint’s neck instead of this one. We have to hope the Duke doesn’t notice before the Baths.”

  In the faint light of the cellar, the bell glowed with soft green light.

  Little Beau let out a low whine.

  Anouk sighed. As tempted as she was to swallow it down to regain her magic, the Duke would know instantly that she’d broken the rules. Besides, Rennar had made it clear that magic wouldn’t protect her from the Coal Baths.

  “Everyone else’s crux is something from the Pretty World,” she mused. “But I’m not of the Pretty World, so why would my crux be? My crux is of the Haute. It’s something magic.”

  She carefully stowed the bell in her pocket, then clipped off a bit of Little Beau’s fur and tied it with thread; she would use it as a fake crux. Little Beau nosed her jacket again and looked at her with big eyes, letting out a heavy breath.

  * * *

  Over the next three days, the Cottage was a flurry of activity. Anouk barely knew when it was day and when it was night. The Royal procession was due to arrive at any moment, and the acolytes were kept busy preparing the guest rooms with fresh linens and sprinkling the requested rose petals everywhere. Anouk stayed in the kitchen with Karla and Jolie, organizing the new ingredients and planning a menu that would please eight Courts of Royals from across the near realms. She baked star-anise croissants and pain aux raisins. She selected a triple-crème Crémeux des Cîteaux for the cheese course, planned a winter salad with buttermilk dressing, began slow-braising the pork, set out the quail to thaw, selected brussels sprouts and pancetta to go with the salmon they were keeping on ice. And the desserts! Clafoutis fruit pie, cream puffs, upside-down tarts, chocolate gâteaux, and macarons colored with the dust from butterfly wings.

  Her mind was always on the bell in her pocket. Whether she was in the ice pantry, the confectionery, or the roasting room, she checked for it obsessively. In the canning room, she was so distracted, she didn’t see the shadow looming outside the door or the shovel that came rushing out of the darkness and slammed into the back of her head.

  * * *

  She blinked awake, coming into a blurry kind of awareness. The back of her head stung. She touched the area, and her fingers came away bloody.

  Someone was dragging her.

  The person pulled her down a hallway she didn’t recognize until she smelled the reek of goats. She was in the cellar. She tried to lift her head but a bolt of pain shot through it. The hard ground bruised her back, ripping her muslin dress to tatters, but whoever was dragging her didn’t seem to care.

  She squinted through her blurry vision until a storm cloud of black hair became clear.

  “Frederika! Let me go!”

  She kicked, but Frederika’s grip on her ankles was firm. No amount of twisting or kicking freed her. She heard fabric tearing on the floor. Frederika dragged her down a stone step, and her head smacked it, sending a starburst of pain across her vision. When the stars cleared, she found herself in the goat pen. There was a lantern on the milking table. And a knife.

  Anouk scrambled to her hands and knees in the mud. The smell of goats was overwhelming. From the next stall, Little Beau started barking and scratching at his locked door.

  Frederika picked up the knife with one hand and the lantern with the other.

  “What are you doing?” Anouk cried, cradling the back of her head. “The Royals will be here any moment! Is this about the odds? One in ten surviving? Hurting me isn’t going to help you!”

  “It isn’t about the odds. I need my crux before the ceremony.”

  “Poppy seeds?” Anouk felt dizzy. “There are some in the storerooms . . .”

  “My crux isn’t poppy seeds.” Frederika looked at her own reflection in the knife blade. “I knew my crux as soon as you arrived. The night before, I had a vision of a girl climbing a vine, and then there you were.”

  “So . . . the vine? That’s what you want? Let me get my jacket. It’s right in that stall. I have more seeds in the pocket.”

  “That’s not what I need.”

  Anouk’s stomach plunged. The cold mud was starting to make her teeth chatter. She could taste blood deep in her throat. The whole back of her neck felt tender, as if something were broken, and her ribs were just as sensitive. “If not the vine . . .”

  “I dreamed of a girl who could wield magic. It’s a simple idea. If I take the blood of something that changed from Haute to Pretty, and if I carry it upside down into the flames, then the opposite will happen to me: I’ll go from Pretty to Haute. I’ll become a witch.”

  “You think I’m your crux?”

  “Not you. Your blood.” Frederika removed a glass jar from her apron pocket and stepped forward with the knife. Anouk pushed herself to her feet, pressing a hand to her ribs. She felt for the bell in her apron—​if there was ever a time to break the rules, it was now. But her eyes went wide. Her apron was ripped. The bell must have fallen o
ut, into the mud . . .

  She dropped to hands and knees and searched through the muck. The goats, sensing tension, bleated deafeningly. Was this why Frederika brought her here, to mask her screams?

  Her hands came up empty. Her pulse raced. She’d left Rennar’s mirror hidden in the trunk in her bedroom. What could she use for defense? There was the dung heap. A trough of kitchen scraps. No spare tools within reach, no loose boards . . .

  Frederika lunged.

  Anouk scrambled forward and braced herself against the trough. She pushed it into the center of the pen, keeping it between her and Frederika. Frederika moved left; she moved left. Frederika went right; so did she.

  “Frederika, this is crazy! Beastie blood has never been a crux!”

  “Only because there have never been beasties here before.”

  Anouk’s legs, smeared with cold mud, felt sluggish. Frederika darted to the pile of tools in the far corner and grabbed a broom. Before Anouk could run, she slammed it over Anouk’s shoulders. She collapsed. Frederika rammed the end of the broom into her ribs, knocking the air out of her. Her fingers slipped in the mud, searching for something, anything . . . a rock . . . a piece of wood . . . a nail . . .

  Frederika slammed the broomstick down again. Anouk felt hot tears at her eyes. They mixed with the blood and mud in her mouth. She couldn’t find the bell. She raised a hand to shield her head against the next blow, but Frederika slammed the broom into her shoulder. She fell back, out of breath. Tried to sit up. Her fingers found the trough, reeking with rotted vegetables for the goats. She tried to pull herself up but her arms gave out and she collapsed back.

  Frederika raised the knife.

  “Let. Her. Go.”

  Frederika turned toward the new voice. Anouk tossed her head up. Petra, crowbar in hand, stomped through the muck and knelt next to Anouk. She rested a hand on Anouk’s back. Her fingers came away with blood and she grimaced.

  “You’re complètement folle, Frederika! This is a place for sane people! The Duke will throw you out when I tell him.”

  “This is a place for Pretties,” Frederika said, her face red. “For girls.” There was an edge to her words.

  “For girls,” Petra repeated with an equally sharp edge. “Not a place for me either, is that what you mean?”

  Frederika’s eyes blazed. “You weren’t born a girl.”

  Petra let out a harsh laugh. “The Duke doesn’t care about that.”

  “It isn’t up to the Duke. It’s the Coal Baths that determine who will live and who will die. What will happen when you step into the blue flames and the magic there senses that someone born as a boy has—”

  “Shut your fichu mouth.” Petra let go of Anouk, grabbed a rotten apple from the goat trough, and slammed it into Frederika’s mouth before she could react. Frederika doubled over and coughed out rotted, wormy bits.

  Little Beau continued to bark viciously from his stall.

  “I’ve got your back,” Anouk whispered to Petra.

  “I’ve got yours.”

  Frederika raised her knife. Anouk grabbed a shovel from the tool pile in the corner, and a pitchfork for Petra.

  A rumble began in the coal chute, though no coal had been delivered to the abbey in decades. All three of them whipped around. Something from outside was coming in with the sound of frantic movement and cries. Before anyone could close the coal-chute door, a storm of wings rushed in. Birds! There must have been hundreds. Crows. Ravens. Falcons. Even a few owls, their eyes round and yellow. Anouk clutched the shovel, staring, transfixed. The birds circled the goat pen, flapping their sharp wings, cawing their deafening cries.

  Frederika ducked to cover her head.

  And then as soon as they’d come, the birds circled and poured out through the coal chute again, leaving the goat pen in a thunderous silence. Anouk dared to raise her head again. The sound of cawing came from high above and they looked upward.

  “They’ve moved on to the courtyard,” Petra said, tracing the sound from room to room overhead. “And there . . . now it sounds like they’ve moved to the great hall.”

  The shrill whistle of Duke Karolinge’s falcon call pierced the din, and Frederika jumped as though she was conditioned to respond to the whistle just as his birds were. Muttering a curse, Frederika sheathed the knife in her apron. “I have to have a crux before tomorrow.”

  Petra, blood trickling from her lip, waved her toward the stairs. “Well, there’ll be no murder today, so va se faire foutre.”

  Frederika gave them a long, unreadable look, then turned and climbed the stairs.

  Petra snorted. Anouk fell to her knees, dug through the mud, and sighed in relief as her fingers at last closed around something small and hard. She wiped it on her apron. The bell.

  “What’s that?” Petra asked.

  “Nothing.” She pushed herself to her feet. “Those crows.” She coughed. “I recognize them. They belong to Rennar.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The Royals are here.”

  Petra cocked an eyebrow. “From Paris?”

  Anouk shook her head. “From all of the realms.”

  Chapter 14

  Petra and Anouk hurried upstairs, and Anouk cleaned her wounds as best she could; fortunately, the gash at the back of her head had stopped bleeding. They washed off the mud and changed clothes and then found the rest of the acolytes gathered in the enclosed cloister to watch the Royals’ arrival, their breath fogging the glass.

  The Royal procession descended upon the Black Forest like something out of a dream. The flock of birds was only the first herald. Next, the treacherous mountain path, normally accessible only by foot or by mule, smoothed and unrolled itself, carpet-like, into a meandering road that led across the bridge to the abbey’s front steps. Birch trees curled their branches inward to form an archway. Snow swept itself to either side of the road and rose up in ice statues.

  Anouk and Petra kept carefully to the back of the group of girls, placing as much space as they could between themselves and Frederika, who threw them wild-eyed stares.

  “Look,” Jolie cried. “That must be the Court of the Woods!”

  They had all heard rumors of the various Courts, and it turned into a fabulous game of guessing which Court was which and trying to name the princes and princesses who stepped out. The Court of the Woods’ delegation drove up in a hunter-green Daimler with spotless chrome and oak running boards. It purred as it stopped in front of the bridge, and a princess dressed in thick furs climbed out on the arm of a duke in an ink-black suit. Behind the Daimler, a pair of cream-colored coupes that the girls guessed belonged to the Crimson Royals pulled up, and a delegation of three—​the queen and her sisters—​climbed out, their eyelashes and brows dusted in butterfly wings. Next to arrive was the Lunar Court, composed of a gray-haired king and his brown-skinned son, whose barely tamed long hair was swept back in a loose plait. The Minaret Court came in a horse-drawn carriage that, no doubt, had been glamoured to look like something mundane to the Pretties in the valley—​a trolley car, perhaps. A count and countess descended, both dressed in red capes and with garnets dotted around their eyes.

  “Where’s the Court of Isles?” Marta asked. “They’re missing.”

  Anouk kept her mouth shut. She’d been careful since her arrival not to tell anyone but Petra about the Coven of Oxford’s takeover of London. She liked most of the acolytes but that didn’t mean she trusted them. They were all willing to risk their lives for magic—​it wasn’t a stretch to think they might try to seek favor among the Haute by warning the Oxford witches that Anouk and Rennar were planning their downfall.

  A fleet of silver motorcycles that could only belong to the reckless Barren Court arrived, and the missing London Royals were forgotten.

  There was one car left at the end of the procession, a sleek black Rolls-Royce with a gleaming hood ornament in the shape of a crow instead of a winged woman. Anouk drew in a breath. She’d seen it before, outside the to
wnhouse and in front of Castle Ides. The door opened and there he was, Prince Rennar, dashing in his frost-gray suit and crown of golden briars. A few of the acolytes sighed. He limped only slightly. If you didn’t know his right leg was made of stone, you might not even notice.

  Two lesser Parisian Royals accompanied him: a young black man wearing a hat that shaded his face and a preteen girl in a silver gown and glass slippers with polished black claws affixed to each of her finger­nails. She bore an uncanny resemblance to Countess Quine, who had been dead for months and whose body, as far as Anouk knew, was still at the Château des Mille Fleurs, decomposing in the rose beds. She hadn’t known that Quine had a daughter, but the Royals valued family only as far as lineage. It was entirely possible the girl had wanted her mother dead as much as Anouk had.

  “I thought Prince Rennar’s entourage would be twice that size,” Sam mused. Anouk felt a stab of guilt—​it would have been twice that size if Anouk hadn’t killed the other members.

  Jolie let out a long sigh and stroked her braid dreamily. Seeing the glittering princes and princesses setting their fine shoes on the abbey grounds only highlighted how bleak their home truly was. Bare floors. Dust and the cobwebs. The eternal winter.

  Anouk glanced again at Frederika. A bruise was blooming on the girl’s left temple, although it was mostly hidden by her hair.

  A car door slammed and Anouk’s attention returned to the Royals. The Crimson Court delegation’s vehicle seemed to have bumped fenders with another delegation’s. Curt words were exchanged between the Court of the Woods and the Barren Court, and then, suddenly, the girls heard someone pointedly clearing his throat right behind them.

  Several of the girls jumped.

  Duke Karolinge gave them a stern look. “Girls. You’ve seen cars before. You’ve seen dresses and diamonds. Don’t embarrass yourself by swooning over riches. Show the Royals that you are not impressed by their glamour; you didn’t fight your way here to learn how to shroud yourself in luxury. You came with nobler aims.” He added in a gentler voice, “Tomorrow you will have your chance to prove your worth.”