The world slowly came back into focus. The vast lawn had been decorated with floating lanterns and glistening ice statues, and couples walked between them, hands entwined, faces close.
The river meandered through the garden at the bottom of a slight incline, reflecting the lanterns and the stars. I staggered toward it, listening to the gurgle, looking at the lights. I was calm. I was calm.
Naomi hovered about a foot away, watching me closely. “Are you all right?”
I nodded. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine.” If I said it enough, it had to be true.
“You don’t have to be fine, you know. If you’re not.”
Naomi said that every time this happened, and I always nodded, like I actually believed her. It was one thing to be uncomfortable in court, to hate all the pretenses and be desperate to leave. It was quite another to panic, to become so frightened of the people around me that I forgot how to breathe.
But she understood. She said her father reacted the same way to court, or to anything too crowded. That was why her parents lived out in the country, while she and her brother represented the family in the capital. Whenever I panicked, she would appear beside me, ready to talk me back to reality.
She swept her thirty-six layers of skirts forward and sank onto the grass. It must have been cold, but she simply looked up at me with a smile until I settled beside her.
At least I could breathe again. The chatter and music floated through the hall’s open door, but it felt safer now, farther away.
“Want me to take your hair down?” Naomi asked.
I nodded. Naomi moved behind me and began pulling the pins loose with quick fingers. With every tug, my lungs relaxed, just a little.
“How’s the experiment going?” she said. “Any luck?”
I shook my head. I’d been working on a way to create portable heat for weeks, something that could keep your hands warm and perhaps even banish the cold from my laboratory without fire. So far, all I had for my efforts were a whole lot of notes, and a whole lot of burns.
I plucked one of the loose hairpins from the grass and began to twist it between my fingers. The diamonds gleamed. “I’ve been experimenting with different metals,” I said. “But nothing yet. I’ll figure it out.” Naomi tugged the last of my hair free, and I leaned back, falling onto the grass beside her.
“When you figure it out, you’ll be famous.” She wrapped a loose strand of my hair around her fingers, moving it gently back and forth. Prickles ran across my scalp, and I closed my eyes.
“Of course.”
“Cold hands are the worst, Freya. People’ll pay you a lot of money if you figure it out. You could do anything you wanted after that.”
I shook my head. But secretly, I agreed. Not that I’d be famous, perhaps, but that this would work, that this was my solution. If I could solve this, and sell it, I’d have my own money. I could travel wherever I pleased. Travel to the continent, convince a scientist to teach me there. Stop living on the edge of other people’s lives and start living my own.
I couldn’t admit it, though. Not even to Naomi. The thought was too thrilling and terrifying to share. If I said it out loud, even nodded at Naomi’s suggestion, I felt, madly, irrationally, that it would be snatched away from me, just to punish me for believing.
Naomi tucked her legs underneath her. “Well, you can be boring and unromantic if you like. I believe it’ll happen. I’ll miss you, though. When you’re gone.”
“I won’t leave you.” It was the one downside to the plan, the one detail that made me hesitate. I wouldn’t know what to do without Naomi beside me. “You’ll come with me.”
I knew she wouldn’t, she couldn’t, not with her parents’ approval, at least. But I wanted to pretend.
“I suppose I would like to see the continent. But what would Jacob do without me? He gets into too much trouble as it is.”
“He’ll have to come and help you on your adventures,” I said. “Rescue you when that dashing rogue you meet turns out to like girl-bone soup.”
“Because of course that’ll happen to me.”
“It happens to all the best heroines. And if your brother doesn’t have to rush to your aid, how will he employ that handsome stranger to assist him who falls madly in love at the sight of you?”
She laughed. “Well, when you put it like that.” She glanced toward the palace. “Should we go back inside soon? They’ll be missing us.”
“They won’t miss us.” Everyone had already seen us go, and my father was going to be furious about that, whatever I did. At this point, I might as well leave entirely.
I tapped my fingernail on the hairpin. Brand-new, special for the banquet. Made from aluminum, which was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. Someone on the continent had discovered a new metal, and what did everyone here do? Rush to make it into jewelry, without a thought to what better uses it might have.
I’d be there soon. On the continent, with real intellectuals, with people who actually cared, rather than the vapid, fashion-hungry mob here. I just had to solve this one problem.
Another tap of the hairpin. Metal hadn’t worked. Not even close.
But I hadn’t tried aluminum.
I sat up.
“What is it?” Naomi said.
“Aluminum. I haven’t tried it yet. For my experiment.” My thoughts were racing. “What if—what if I combined it with something? Maybe iodine?” Yes. Yes. That would produce heat. Wouldn’t it?
There were carriages around the front of the palace, waiting until they were needed. Surely one of them could take me home. My father must have noticed me leaving the hall, but he hadn’t come looking for me. I could slip out for an hour or two, then come back, and say I’d been in the gardens all along. He’d be angry, but he wouldn’t be able to disprove it. The gardens were huge. He couldn’t search them while I was gone, not without leaving the ball for longer than he’d deem acceptable himself.
I could go back to the laboratory, try out my thoughts, and be back before the end of the feast.
And if this worked—if it worked, I’d never have to go to a banquet like this again.
Naomi grinned back at me. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go make your fortune.”
TWO
IT WAS EASY ENOUGH TO FIND A CARRIAGE. NO ONE wanted to leave the social event of the year and miss whatever drunken gossip would fuel the next two months of court conversations, but the coachmen had to wait outside the gates with their horses, just in case.
The streets were jammed with people. The king would never pay for commoners to celebrate with him—that would be a waste of good gold, in his eyes—but if the taverns could use the king’s birthday as a way to make a profit, and the people could use it as a way to have fun, then little things like invitations weren’t going to deter them. It seemed I was the only one who wanted to hide at home tonight.
It made me nervous. All those people, filling the road, blocking our escape. They were just people, nothing more than that, people who didn’t even care who we were in the slightest, but knowing they were out there, all around us, that they had beating hearts and judging minds, that they might do anything and I couldn’t predict it, that I couldn’t run past them all . . .
I twitched the curtains closed, but the shouts and laughter cut through the window, so I gripped my hands together in my lap, trying to remember to breathe.
It must have taken half an hour or more to fight through the crowds, but finally, the carriage turned onto my street. Only nobles lived here, in black-beamed buildings from hundreds of years ago. Normally, that meant that anyone stepping out of the front door risked being accosted by nosy matriarchs and young social climbers, but the road was quieter now, and no lights flickered in the windows. Who would be here when they could be at the palace instead? Perhaps a few dedicated servants, an elderly relative telling the younger ones to have fun. And now us.
As soon as the carriage stopped, I shoved the door open, stumbling slightly as my heels hit the
pavement. Naomi handed the driver a couple of coins, and I hurried to find the spare key tucked under the windowsill. The servants had been given the night off. Adviser to the king he might be, but my father remembered what working life was like before he married a noble, and he always thought about what the servants might want. He’d never admit to such improper behavior to any of his new peers, of course, but that didn’t make his concern any less genuine.
If only that concern stretched to his daughter. My happiness could never come before the expectations of the court. I had far too many supposed duties to fulfill.
He wouldn’t take it well when I finally left. He wouldn’t hate me for it, exactly, but he wouldn’t understand. So I couldn’t tell him about my plans. I couldn’t ask for any assistance. One day, I’d inform him that I was leaving, and then I’d be gone.
I wished things could be different. I wasn’t close to my father, but I didn’t want to hurt him. I wished he could understand, that he didn’t wish for any daughter other than me, but wishes didn’t mean anything in the end. This was how things had to be.
The front hall was dark, the chandelier looming above us. I strode underneath it, to a narrow staircase at the far side of the room. Anyone visiting the house would probably dismiss it as a servants’ passage, and one step into the run-down corridor at the bottom of the stairs would seem to confirm it. I didn’t want anyone interrupting my experiments, and my father didn’t want anyone to stumble across them.
My laboratory wasn’t perfect. The cellar room was cramped, for a start. A scarred wooden table took up most of the space, and I had personally fastened several sturdy but slightly lopsided cupboards to the walls. The only windows were high up, long rectangular panes of glass that looked straight on to the grass of our garden. They could be opened to let out smoke, but they were far less effective at letting in light. Books spilled off the shelves, and every spot of counter space was covered in bottles and vials and notes.
But the busyness was comforting to me. Everything had a system, even if it was one I couldn’t express in words. I knew where everything was. When I stepped into that room, all the doubt that defined my life in court melted away. I knew what I needed to do. I knew who I needed to be.
I’d been interested in science for as long as I could remember, for longer than I’d had a word for it. I’d driven my mother and father insane with endless questions—why is the sky blue? Why is fire hot? Why does food change when it’s cooked? Why do people in different kingdoms speak different languages from us? Why, why, why, why, about anything and everything. My mother always indulged me with some ridiculous answer. Food cooked because it had big dreams, and it wanted to be the best it could be. The sky was blue because we were being watched by a giant and she had the bluest eyes anyone had ever seen. When it rained, she was crying. And at night, it got dark because she was asleep.
My father took the questions more seriously. He saw my curiosity as a good thing, then, and as a merchant who traveled far, he had some answers, if not all of them.
Of course, both approaches led to more questions, about the giant or the languages spoken across the sea. But the first time I’d learned about science, the first time I’d realized that we didn’t have all the answers and that some people worked to find them, was when I was about eight. My father mentioned his enthusiastic daughter to a scientist he’d met abroad, and the man gave my father a book called The Scientific Method, designed for students just beginning their studies. He’d said it was probably too dry for a child, but I became obsessed with it.
The accompanying letter said I sounded like a very intelligent young lady, and he hoped I would keep asking questions. So I did.
After my mother died, my father stopped traveling, but he also stopped caring about the court, for a while. He just wanted me to be happy. So he let me build my lab. But as I got older and my mother’s death faded from trauma into fact, my father became more concerned with her legacy. He needed a proper daughter with a future at court, not a stuttering scientist who planned to run as soon as she could.
I’d left the laboratory door ajar. I stepped inside and began to light the lamps.
Dagny was curled up on the center table, a perfect circle of fluff. She was precisely the wrong breed and color for a laboratory cat—all the dust and dirt stuck in her long gray fur, making her look like she’d been crawling up a chimney—but that didn’t matter. She was my partner in science, even if her contributions were restricted to meows that Naomi called “assertive” and I called “needy.” She watched me as I talked through my ideas, like she was listening, like she already had the answer in mind and was just waiting for me to catch up, and her intelligent eyes always coaxed the greatest breakthroughs from my brain.
Now I picked her up and move her aside. She mewed with annoyance. “Well, what do you expect, sleeping there?” I said. “I’ve got work to do.” I deposited her on a stool, and Naomi offered her a comforting rub under the chin. Dagny shut her eyes and tilted her head back, a ripple arching along her spine.
Naomi was the world’s best tamer of cats. Or maybe cats were excellent tamers of Naomi. She had no pets of her own, so she fussed over Dagny whenever she saw her. I’m not sure which one of them enjoyed it more.
I squeezed past them, toward one of the cupboards on the far wall. “Can you grab that flask from the countertop? The round one, wide at the base, narrow at the top?” Dagny trilled as Naomi moved away.
I opened the cupboard door to reveal rows and rows of jars, each with a different substance stored inside. The iodine was near the back. The silvery flakes were volatile, to say the least, so it was best to keep them tucked away, safe from mishap. I pulled out the jar and carried it back to the center table. Then I took the hairpin from my pocket and held it up to the light to consider it again.
A butterfly clung to one end, its wings studded with diamonds. I snapped it off and placed it to one side. I couldn’t allow it to adulterate the aluminum.
Naomi, meanwhile, picked up the jar of iodine and considered the metal inside. “How much do you think you should use?”
“Three pinches, I think.” That would probably be safe. Less wouldn’t tell me anything, and more might work a little too well, if things didn’t go as I expected.
Dagny was too busy rubbing her head against Naomi’s arm to give her opinion.
With my thick leather gloves firmly in place and my goggles tight over my eyes, I twisted open the jar and used tongs to move three pinches of iodine into the flask. Then I carefully added the hairpin. Nothing happened. “It needs something,” I said. “Something to encourage it to react.”
I glanced at Dagny to make sure she was still a safe distance away, and then grabbed a pipette and went to fill it up with water. “Maybe you should stand back for this,” I said to Naomi. “Just in case.”
“But it’s okay if it explodes in your face?”
“It won’t explode in my face.” I wasn’t going to be wrong. I could feel it. “But—just in case.”
Naomi made a face at me. But she did step away.
I squeezed a couple of drops of water into the flask. For one second, and then two, nothing happened. Then bright purple smoke began to billow from the hairpin.
Not what I had been expecting.
The aluminum sparked. I jumped back just before it burst into flames.
The smoke billowed from the flask, getting thicker and more purple. My lungs tightened as the smoke swelled toward me, and I coughed. Dagny hissed in protest and dove under the chair.
The smoke grew and grew, the fire casting purple light across the room. I held my breath and counted to three, giving myself time to note the exact shade of purple, the intensity of the reaction, the speed with which it seemed to burn. Then I ran to the window and heaved it open, letting fresh air rush in.
Naomi clambered onto the counter to haul open the second window, her toes balanced between more flasks.
Dagny meowed again. She wasn’t pleased.
“I know, I know,” I said, as I fanned the smoke toward the open window. “But breakthroughs don’t come from being cautious. And nothing bad happened. Iodine is only a bit poisonous.”
“Only a bit poisonous?” Naomi said. “Freya—”
“Only if you eat it! Or touch it. Or inhale its fumes.” But we hadn’t breathed in much. “We’ll be fine.”
Naomi glared at me, eyebrows raised. Which . . . yes, all right, perhaps she had a point. It hadn’t been entirely safe. But science wasn’t safe. You had to take risks. And I was wearing goggles, and gloves, and I’d made sure she stepped back! Plus we’d learned something new. Wasn’t that the most important thing?
“That was amazing,” I said, as I moved back toward the flask. “Did you see that smoke?”
“That purple was pretty impressive. Not quite a hand warmer, though.”
A distorted white lump remained stuck to the bottom of the flask, and it split when I tried to remove it. Even I wasn’t eager enough to add more water to it without further research, so I put the pieces in a jar of their own and labeled it “aluminum iodine.” Maybe I’d have a use for it once I learned more.
I grabbed my journal from its spot on the far end of the desk, while Naomi sank onto the stool beside me. Aluminum, I scrawled, the ink smudging slightly. Did not react as expected.
I frowned as I wrote, making sure to describe the exact color of the product, the scent and thickness of the smoke.
That attempt had failed, but there had to be something useful in it. If you mixed metal with iodine, and added water, it burned. This one had been too hot, obviously, and reacted too fast, but maybe if I tried something else, something that changed gradually but still produced heat . . .
I glanced at the clock on the wall. Ten p.m. One more attempt, and then I’d return to the ball.
Three attempts later, Naomi settled on the chair in the corner and pulled a book from between the cushions. She always had at least one novel stashed somewhere in the lab, so she could sit with Dagny purring on her lap, half listening to my rambling as she read and I worked.
Long May She Reign Page 2
