Madeline, Annette, and Charles had not hesitated in buying new clothes for the occasion, and Madeline and Annette had taken a particular interest in torturing me with trips to a tailor’s and dressmaker’s and several other places where I had been poked and prodded while half-asleep and recovering. Annette, at least, I trusted to pick out something appropriate. Madeline was liable to pick out something solely to vex me.
“Good.” My mother packed up her alchemistry curio and kissed my forehead. “You looked quite happy in that future.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Our affection was a fragile thing, a careful titration, but I was still afraid to twist the lever and let my emotions flow free. It was a slow, steady drip, and for now, we were both all right with that.
* * *
The evening after Coline was crowned queen and her new council—one noble, one not—was selected, the stars fell. The coronation had started at dusk and the celebration would last till dawn, a new day for Demeine. As the last tendrils of red had seeped from the sky and faded to deep-ocean purple, falling stars had streaked through the dark, gold and burning. Annette, eyes silver in the light, stared up at the sky with the same tight-lipped smile she wore every time I saw her. Even without magic, she could read portents.
“What does it mean?” I asked, sliding through the crowd to her.
“Not a clue.” She glanced at me. “Estrel had a pamphlet on natural occurrences being misread as omens, but I left it in Bosquet. Seemed silly to bring it here after everything.”
“Most things seem silly these days.” I kicked my feet through the strips of dyed paper and pamphlets on Coline that littered the ground—all handwritten, some portraits, mostly frivolous. “What we did…”
“We did what we had to,” Annette said quickly. “Do you regret it?”
Sometimes, if I looked just right, I could see the threads of quicksilver that still infected her. It made my head ache catching the flickers in the corner of my sight. Neither of us had left that day unchanged.
“No,” I whispered. “I regret so many people died before Henry XII and his ilk were stopped.”
Annette nodded. A gaggle of children raced by, splitting us and kicking up a fog of paper. One of the crinkled pamphlets caught in the lace of Annette’s skirts, and she grabbed my arm for balance as she picked it from her dress. Her fingers closed around my arm, real and familiar. We had neglected each other during our swap.
We neglected each other no more, writing constantly to each other from my place in Delest and hers in Serre. She’d taken to accounting like I had taken to surgery, and within the first two weeks of working had found the “errors” of the noble houses. She had an eye for patterns, picking them out before the rest of us could even finish reading the ledgers. It turned out that quite a few noble families had taken to slightly adjusting their numbers in their favors. Coline had been thrilled.
There was so little accessible, tangible evidence of wrongdoing that we were clinging to everything we had to make sure the posthumous charges were believed.
“You were willing to die for people,” Annette said softly.
I stiffened. “I always would have, as a physician should be.”
“No, you wouldn’t have.” She shook her head, and the wrinkle between her brows deepened. “You wouldn’t have. You’d have said it, but you wouldn’t have.”
“Please don’t say that.” I ducked, so only she could hear me. “I don’t like hearing it.”
It was true, of course. I had wanted to be a physician always, but being the physician had been the important part of that dream. The patients had been faceless and in need, and I had been their savior. Good deeds for the sake of good feelings.
“You might not like hearing it,” she said, “but it’s true.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m working on it.”
Annette smiled, laughing. “Course you are.” She squeezed my wrist. “What part of ‘you were willing to sacrifice yourself’ did you not understand as a compliment? I mean, it was ridiculous. There was no need and—”
“All right.”
“—it wouldn’t have worked—”
“I got it.”
“—and you deserve better. Like I do.”
A piece of celebratory scrap paper drifted down and landed on her nose. I left it there. “You live to mock me, don’t you?”
“Absolutely.” She hugged me and held up the pamphlet. “Look.”
Portents and Propaganda by Estrel Charron.
“Well,” I said, “that is my cue to leave. If tea leaves are beyond me, I can’t imagine I’ll be much better at deciphering how that got here.”
“It’s been odd.” Annette tucked the pamphlet into her pocket.
For the first time all day, I laughed. “Unbelievably.”
* * *
I had returned to university not as a hack but as a surgeon-in-training. Medicine without magic was a wholly different beast, and the new studies had distracted me from my loss. Charles was wondrously busy between school, his new project with Yvonne, and learning how to run Monts Lance for when the time came. We had gotten into several marvelous fights about the ethereal nature of bodies, though, and set to testing the more intriguing of the concepts. It was invigorating.
I had turned my quarters in Serre into a small laboratory to study. I went there now, needing the quiet. I was all right without magic—mostly, though Madeline said it made me very grumpy—and Charles, as so often happened, had been struck by the same inspiration as me. I opened the door as quietly as I could and peeked inside. He was writing on the glass board, one hand running through his hair and the other smeared with ink. His coat was thrown over one of the chairs.
“We are horribly predictable.” I stepped inside and shut the door behind me.
Charles glanced over his shoulder, dropping the ink brush. “I love it. I was hoping you’d show up. I can’t get this equation right.”
“No math, please. I dream in mathematics now.” I held up my hands in defeat and sat on one of the tall stools near him. “It’s my least favorite class and the one with the most reading.”
“You adore those classes.” Charles stepped forward, slowly, and smiled. His legs nudged open my own till he was standing between my thighs and our lips were even. His fingers gripped my knees. “You’re a very bad liar.”
“I know,” I muttered, nose brushing his. “It made this week very hard.”
“May I kiss you?” asked Charles. “First, that is, assuming your news isn’t life-shattering?”
“Please.”
His lips pressed against mine. His hands slid up my thighs, my stomach, my chest, till he clutched the collar of my shirt in his hands, and I hooked my feet behind his back to pull him closer. He shuddered and pulled away. Only a hairsbreadth. Only far enough for us to breathe.
“I have a present for you.” I kissed him, quickly, and uncurled his fingers from my collar; they started tugging the bottom of my shirt from my trousers. “Remember how you had an idea to test out infection rates but not how to actually do it?”
Charles laughed. His hands stilled, and he laid his forehead against my shoulder. “Really? Now?”
“Really.” I ran my fingers through his hair, the little smolder of contentedness cooling at the base of my spine. “I know you Charles du Ravine as well as I know myself. You’ve been bored since dusk. Parties are not our thing.”
He laughed again, the sounds rumbling in his chest and seeping into mine, hot and heavy. “We don’t have to work. We can—”
Hurried footsteps raced down the hall outside. Charles untangled himself from me, and I straightened his suit and he straightened mine. His hair was a mess, delightfully so, and my fingers caught in the strands at the nape of his neck. He chuckled, leaned back against the table. It was our work space.
Surely no one would m
ind.
The door flew open. Madeline darted inside, locking it behind her. Back to the door and chest heaving, she held up her hand to her lips. Soft voices outside—the dreadfully attentive group of new physician assistants she had helped pick out and decided to tutor—called her name, and Charles opened his mouth to shout. I wrapped both hands around his lower jaw.
“Play nicely,” I muttered.
He glared. His tongue flicked against my palm.
“Is that a promise?” I unwound my hands from his mouth. “Or a threat?”
“Promise,” he whispered and cleared his throat. “Madeline, what are you doing?”
“I made the mistake of mentioning I needed to check on something within earshot.” The right side of her lip pulled up in a sneer. “I wanted a break. Everyone keeps asking about what happened, and I do not want to talk about it.”
“Join us,” I said, waving my hand to Charles’s glass board, “as we fail at equations.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What even was that?”
Charles and I turned back to the board. The ink he had used had dripped until the equation was unreadable.
“If I can’t even make ink correctly, I doubt I can do math right.” Charles pulled away from me, head tilting as he tried to read what was left. “Oh well.”
Madeline sighed. “Thank the Lord. I need something new to do.”
“Yes.” I leapt from the table and picked up a brush. “Let’s see what we can do next.”
Epilogue
Annette
Coline fiddled with the hem of her dress. The dress was violet, dark as night and sewn with gold threads. Coline hadn’t wanted gilt at the expense of the people she’d have to swear to serve after what her father had done, but looking good was sometimes more important than being good. The dress was Vivienne’s refitted, the seamstresses well-paid and spreading the rumors we wanted them to spread, and Coline looked, for all I could tell, good enough to be queen. She looked better than her father at any rate.
“You look divine.” The mirrored collar of her dress was cold in my hands. She’d dozens of people to do this for her, but still I fixed it. “Today will be fine. Tomorrow too.”
I couldn’t divine anymore, use any of the arts, but hope was a portent all its own.
The door behind us opened. Isabelle’s soft gasp made me grin.
“You look divine,” Isabelle muttered, circling Coline with the eyes of someone who actually knew what she was looking at. “We should probably stop saying that, shouldn’t we?”
“Not in private.” Coline smiled and shrugged as much as she could in such a heavy dress. “I do love hearing it.”
“We know.” I stepped away and let Isabelle get her look in. “Was me saying it not enough?”
“You’d say I was pretty no matter what,” Coline said. “I appreciate the adoration, but it’s not helpful.” Her smile tightened. “Do you think Brigitte will like it?”
If any of us would tell Coline she looked divine no matter what she was or wasn’t wearing, it was Brigitte.
“She didn’t leave your side as you recovered from your injuries.” I leaned forward, kissed Coline’s cheek, and moved to the door. “Remember?”
Coline hadn’t had many injuries after, no one had, but most had slept for days or paced for days or switched between the two as if their body couldn’t quite decide whether it was exhausted or exhilarated. Emilie and I had slept for two weeks.
Coline said it had been the longest two weeks of her life. She’d been struggling to become a queen while her friends hung between life and death.
Most of the surviving nobles were behind her—or too scared to say anything for now—and nearly everyone who had been there spread the same story.
“I’m going to find Yvonne,” I said, curtsying. “I’ll find you tonight, Your Majesty.”
* * *
Yvonne and I were romancing each other.
Coline had cackled when she’d heard, and Isabelle had clapped. Infuriating.
“I’m glad I was only in charge of the drinks.” Yvonne picked at what was left over from the morning’s breakfast. Coline had been determined to feed anyone who came to see her crowned, and the kitchens had only just stopped cooking so that all the chefs and servers could take their places in the plaza before Serre church. There were only a handful of things left. “This you’ll like, though.”
“So long as it’s not mushrooms.”
Yvonne picked up a raspberry tart no bigger than a fingernail and fed it to me.
“Delicious,” I said, voice cracking.
It did that sometimes now. The flesh of my throat had worn away, and I swore, sometimes, I felt moth wings where skin should’ve been. Emilie’s wounds were even odder.
And Lord help anyone who looked at that battlefield in Segance. Nothing but corrupted things grew there now—trees with bark like nails, willows with leaves like hair, and earthworms segmented like long, long fingers. The university was having a great time studying it.
Yvonne chuckled and set it down, brushing the crumbs from the table. “My mother is right. You are too polite.”
Her mother had said it as a joke when I’d been too tongue-tied to answer her if I wanted water or wine during dinner when meeting them for real last week. Yvonne’s whole family—parents, siblings, a few extra cousins, and a stuffy uncle—had all raced to find her once they knew she had been at the fight in Serre. They’d been nice.
They’d called me part of the family.
My name was in all the gossipers’ mouths, and Maman had written about that. Papa had showed up in Serre with Macé and Jean at his heels, but I’d still been asleep—unconscious, Emilie would’ve corrected—and they couldn’t stay long. Isabelle had sent them away with promises to write as soon as I woke up.
I had woken up. I wasn’t ready to write.
“Your mother may say whatever she likes about me.” I nodded toward the door. “Are you ready to take our places?”
We’d been given chairs in the crowd—spots for retainers not quite noble enough to stand next to Coline. Isabelle was to sit on my other side. Coline had offered us spots nearer to her, but I’d enough of people watching me. I wasn’t that Annette Boucher anymore.
I’d made my choice.
I was here.
“I’ve been thinking about alchemistry,” Yvonne said slowly. “Demeine hasn’t advanced with it in quite some time.”
I leaned against the table. “Demeine didn’t have you to advance it till now.”
“Flattery will get you everything.” She hopped up to sit on the table next to me, thigh pressed to my side, and looped our arms together. Her fingers threaded through mine. Softly. Tightly. “I’ll be leaving for work in a week, and I wanted to know if you would like to come with me.”
Oh.
I’d been looking for a home—a place, a building, a collection of walls that made me feel safe—and never found it, and I was a fool.
“Yes.” I kissed her, quickly, carefully so as not to disturb the cosmetics she’d spent all morning on, and pressed my lips to the back of her hand. New magic. New people. New dreams I wanted to chase. “I would love to go with you.”
She sighed and smiled, cheek against my shoulder. We understood each other. “Good.”
* * *
That evening, long after the parties were supposed to be over, Yvonne and I made our way to the room Emilie was using as a study. Inside, Madeline and Charles were crowded around a board, and Emilie turned a thin letter over and over in her hands.
“We got this,” she said.
Charles glanced over his shoulder. “It’s addressed to all of us from Laurence and Estrel.”
I still tried to scry sometimes. I didn’t need my magic back, but I wanted to see Estrel again, even if only by scrying the past. It never worked.
Emilie showed the letter to me. Even Sébastien des Courmers was included and the sight of his name made Emilie wince. Charles’s shoulders tensed.
“That’s Laurence’s handwriting,” Charles said, and he picked up the letter with a trembling hand. There were quite a few futures that did not come to pass, but time is a curious thing and many happenings occur across every future, repeating as if they are immutable events across all of time. We tried to prepare for some of these, and so, if there comes a time when you are in need of help or simply find that you are not enough for whatever it is you are facing, open the enclosed boxes. Though we are uncertain as to who in particular will need them across all possible futures, more likely than not, Emilie and Annette must be the ones to open them. It’s a rather lovely bit of artistry we concocted. We’ll explain it in greater detail the next time we see all of you. Love eternally, Laurence and Estrel.
From the crate, Charles pulled out a large box I didn’t recognize that he clutched to his chest. Emilie pulled it from him with gentle hands. I peeked into the crate.
It was Estrel’s old lockbox, the one she kept beneath her desk and filled with all sorts of small, important things. I picked it up and set it on the table. I had one too. It still lived in the back of my wardrobe.
“Do you think they mean that something bad is going to happen to us?” Coline asked. “Or has it passed?”
“I would very much like to think that the coup was it,” Madeline muttered.
“We should save them,” I said. The box was impossibly heavy. It was only as long as my forearm and narrow as a quiver, but it weighed as much as a small child, and I ended up cradling it to me. “Whatever they meant, it doesn’t matter. We don’t need whatever it is now.”
I glanced at Emilie.
She nodded. “We survived the worst already, and I would rather have the comfort of knowing these are here even if nothing as terrible awaits us.”
“Agreed,” I said. “We are enough.”
Acknowledgments
There is a strangely deep sense of loss akin to grief when you come to the end of reading a book you love. Like me, Emilie and Annette experienced loss, and I often felt as though writing their journeys was writing mine—each fear, each triumph, and each push to do better tomorrow. Books were my constant companions before I found the people I call family, and the journeys I took on those pages shaped who I am today. I hope that Emilie and Annette are good traveling partners for readers on whatever journey they’re undertaking. We lose people in life, but we find them, too, whether in books or the real world.
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