Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Excerpt from Cruel Beauty

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

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About the Author

Copyright

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My mother loved me more than life itself. That’s how everything went wrong.

I wake with fear prickling at my skin.

I sit up, knuckling the sleep out of my eyes. The kitchen looks the same as usual: garlic and rosemary hang in neat bunches from the ceiling. The pots I scoured last night sit gleaming on the stove. From over the doorway, the little miniature portrait of Mother smiles down at me. Everything is peaceful and safe. I begin to stretch.

And then.

From the corner of my eye, I see them: shadows clustered around the coal scuttle. Too many shadows.

And one thought burns through my body: there is a demon in the kitchen.

Even before my heart slams against my rib cage, my hands fly to cover my eyes. To see a demon is to go mad. Every child knows that. Every child knows the prayer. Apollo all-healer, Apollo light-bringer, Apollo Invictus: deliver us from the eyes of demons. I remember Mother whispering it to me when I was little and she was still alive; I remember how she stroked the hair back from my face and explained why I must never look too long at the shadows.

But I don’t say the prayer. Because I am no longer a child. And my mother is not alive.

“Mother,” I whisper instead. “Please. Send away the demon.”

Suddenly my skin no longer feels like the taut surface of a drum; my heartbeat slows, and the pressure in my chest eases. The kitchen gapes chill and empty about me. I’m alone again.

The air stirs against my shoulder, half a sigh and half a kiss. I swallow convulsively, then smile, because I’m never alone.

My mother’s ghost is always with me.

“Thank you, Mother,” I say.

I am the only girl in the world whose mother can protect her from demons.

The clock chimes seven thirty. Fear hurtles me to my feet, sharp and cold as when the demon huddled by the coal scuttle. Stepmother always comes down to breakfast at eight, and if it isn’t steaming on the table when she walks into the room, then she’s angry. If she’s angry, then she punishes me. If she punishes me, then Mother will get angry—and if Mother gets angry, as she did with my nurse—

Don’t think it, don’t think it. I slam the pots into position, because if I think about what happened to my nurse, then I will cry, and I can’t cry. I cannot ever, ever cry.

That airy caress again, this time against my cheek. I smile; my body is trained even when my mind is awhirl.

My mother will never stop loving me, so I can never stop lying.

“It’s a beautiful morning, Mother. I’m glad I can get up early enough to see the dawn.” Sausages are in the pan. Time to start the porridge. “And cooking breakfast makes it even better. Of course, I wish I could cook it for you, but cooking it with you for Stepmother and Koré and Thea is still delightful.”

The sausages start to sizzle. Their thick, greasy scent turns my stomach, but I’ve found my rhythm now, and the lies dance easily between my teeth. “Poor Koré and Thea, never allowed in the kitchen! Stepmother’s awfully hard on them, but I suppose she knows best. And I get to be alone with you.” I set the coffeepot on the stove and twirl. She likes it when I twirl. It makes her think that I am happy.

I catch myself against the countertop and smile at the painting over the doorway. “I’m so happy to be with you,” I say, and the lie comes out smooth and sweet as fresh butter. “I’m so very, very happy.”

It’s not exactly a lie. I am always happy. I have to be.

Because I’m the only girl in the world who can protect anyone from my mother.

Serving breakfast is a relief. In the kitchen, I must smile and sing and dance through my tasks, because if I don’t like my tasks, Mother may get angry at the ones who set them. In the breakfast room, I need only stand silent in the corner, hands clasped and head bowed, because Stepmother gets angry if I am too cheerful.

I nestle into the curtains. They used to be stiff and scratchy, but last year Stepmother squandered nearly a month’s income to buy cascades of soft, frothy white lace. We had to eat bread and pickled fish for a week. And I watch my family from under my lashes.

Stepmother sits at the head of the table, wrapped in a moth-eaten dressing gown that was crimson once but has faded to a dirty purple. She spears her sausage with a fork, then holds it up and sniffs, her eyes half-lidded. I think she’s trying to show she has demanding and refined taste, but she only looks like a pampered lapdog trying to decide if a table scrap is worth the bother of chewing.

“Maia,” she says, setting the sausage down again, “you know I don’t like them cooked this crisp.”

“I’m sorry, my lady,” I murmur.

Thea looks up from her plate, where she’s cut her sausages into twelve pieces and pushed them around without eating a bite. She doesn’t like heavy food in the morning any more than I do.

“It’s my fault, Mother,” she says. “I asked Maia to make them crisp. I love them this way.” She stuffs four pieces into her mouth, then looks pained.

Thea is kind and impulsive and very stupid. I’m not sure, sometimes, why she is still alive. Or why she thinks she can love and be loved by everyone in this house. She even thinks that the two of us can be friends, and she is forever trying to drag me from my chores and make me drink tea or practice dancing. No matter how much either of us gets punished, she never learns.

“You’re too kind to her,” says Koré. She’s the older of my stepsisters—seventeen, like me—and even eating breakfast, she manages to look like a statue carved by a master artist. Partly it’s her perfect posture, but there’s no denying the gods gave her beauty—wide dark eyes and high cheekbones, a face of pure symmetry framed by night-black hair. She looks worthy of a hundred statues, and it’s a testament to Stepmother’s foolishness that she’s never had a single suitor.

“But I love them,” says Thea through the mouthful of sausage she still hasn’t managed to swallow. It makes her look like she’s only ten instead of fourteen. It also makes her look even more like a lackluster imitation of Koré than she usually does: she has all her sister’s lovely features, but smudged and softened from beauty down to mere prettiness.

“You are making excuses for that girl like you always do.” Stepmother’s voice is suddenly thin and harsh with loathing. “The honor of our house demands—” She pauses, wincing, and puts a hand to her forehead.

Without either of us meaning to, Koré and I meet each other’s eyes grimly across the table. It’s never a good sign when Stepmother starts talking about the honor of our house. Stepmother loved my father more than reason; this ramshackle building and our half-disgraced name are all she has left of him. When she starts talking about the honor of our house, at best it means that she’s going to squander more money on curtains and silverware, and be more strict than usual with the three of us. At worst—

“Don’t just stand there, you lazy girl,” says Koré. “Go check the morning post.”

The morning post never brings us anything except letters from creditors, and those are not going to calm Stepmother. I go anyway. Someone has to smile and desperately placate Stepmother, and better Koré than me. Koré actually wishes that Stepmother would love her. For all her attempts to look dignified, she’s just as foolish as Thea. As foolish as Stepmother, as my own mother, as everyone who’s ever lived in this crumbling, dusty house where demons crawl through the laundry chutes and nothing ever changes.

But today something changes.

When I open the front door and reach into the letterbox, there’s a big envelope of thick, velvety paper. It’s addressed in flowing cursive with extra loops and curls:

Lady Parthenia Alastorides

The Misses Alastorides

13 Little Lykaion Way

Fine penmanship, not the neat, blocky letters or hasty scrawl that tradesmen use to address their bills. It’s the handwriting of an aristocrat, or his secretary. I can faintly remember the parties from before Mother died—the silk dresses, the glasses clinking, and the soft, refined laughter—but no one of that world has acknowledged our family’s existence for years. Not since Father died and Stepmother . . . changed.

I take the letter back to the breakfast room, where Stepmother has forgotten her anger and is telling Thea how a proper young lady should sit at the table. “In accord with the honor of our house,” she says, but the words don’t have the desperate edge they did before.

Then she sees the envelope in my hand.

“Give me that,” she says, and tears it open.

We wait for her to read it. Thea leans forward, curiosity written across her face; Koré is perfectly posed as always, but her jaw is tight.

Stepmother draws a breath, flushes, and looks up at us. I don’t remember when I last saw her smile so brightly.

“Duke Laertius himself has invited us to a masked ball in honor of his only son’s nineteenth birthday,” she says, and while it’s fine that the lord of our city still has us on his list of nobility somewhere, that doesn’t explain her joy. Then she leans forward and says, “And at midnight, Lord Anax will select his bride from the ladies present.”

“I know it will be a lot of work getting ready for the ball,” I tell my mother the next day, “but I really think it would be delightful if Koré married Lord Anax.”

I’m sitting in the garden, beneath the apple tree. Our house lies on the outskirts of the city, beyond the Old Wall, where the city frays into countryside, where you can find foxes on your doorstep and hear owls hooting at night. So our walled garden is huge, nearly an acre, and once it was an exquisitely ordered wonderland, with little stone paths looping among slender birches and carefully sculpted rosebushes. There was a pond full of great gold-and-silver fish, with a marble statue of Artemis bathing at the center; there was a marble bench beneath a pomegranate tree, and a trellis covered in blackberries.

Now it’s overgrown and gone to seed, the pathways choked with moss and weeds, the pomegranates transformed into a thicket, the blackberries a vortex of thorns. The pond is low and muddy, the gleaming fish replaced by minnows, and Artemis’s pure white face is worn and covered in grime.

But the apple tree is the same: glossy dark leaves, branches swaying gently down as if they longed to embrace me. It’s spring, so the tree is covered in white blossoms, and their sweet scent is thick on the air.

Mother’s bones are laid to rest in the family mausoleum three miles away, shrouded in silk and with golden coins upon her eyes. But this tree, where we played together for long, lazy summer afternoons, where she held me in her lap and sang my favorite song about the bumblebee who was friends with a frog, where she laughed as she kissed all my fingers and toes and said, I love you, I love you, I love you—

This is where her spirit rests.

The air shivers all around me, and it’s as if my whole body is wrapped in her embrace. I close my eyes, and the air presses against my lids, almost like a kiss.

“Stepmother would be so happy,” I whisper, “and, of course, Koré would too. And I would be happy. Even more happy than I am now.”

I can almost feel her fingers on my arms, ten separate little pressures holding me in place. I don’t often feel her touch this strongly. When I do, it’s usually a comfort—however bitter—because the touch feels nearly human, nearly the mother I remember.

But now an icy tide of fear starts to rise in me. Fifteen minutes ago, Stepmother told me again that a stupid, ugly, ungrateful brat such as myself would never go to the ball. I had smiled afterward and whispered, Stepmother tries so hard to protect me, but what if it wasn’t enough? What if my mother listened to Stepmother instead of me, or what if she heard the dull resentment locked inside my head?

I am never sure just how much she hears, or how much I must suffer before she gets angry. All I know is: if I cry, she will avenge my tears. All I know is: I cannot ever let her avenge me again. No matter what Stepmother does to me, she does not deserve what my mother would do to her.

“I’m glad Thea and Koré will be there to represent the family at the ball,” I say. “Otherwise, I’d have to go, and I really don’t want to.”

My heart is pounding. Butter, I think, trying to keep my voice easy. Silk.

“I love dancing, but in front of other people? That would be torture. And the dresses, they’re so pretty to look at, but having to wear one? I would hate to be laced up in a corset and squeezed into tight little shoes.”

The pressure eases slightly. She agrees, I think dizzily. I am almost sure she isn’t angry. My body wants to shake, but I must hold myself trustingly still; it’s only my tongue that rattles faster and faster: “Altogether it’s more fun to get someone else ready for the ball, and isn’t it lucky we don’t keep a maid anymore, so I get to do it all and I don’t have to share and I can’t wait to start working on the dress and perhaps Stepmother will buy some new silk—”

I snap a hand to my mouth, sure that she can hear the panic in my voice. But the air is soft and happy as her presence unspools from my shoulders, winding back into the breeze.

“Talking to yourself like a lunatic again?”

I flinch and look up. Koré stares down at me, her dark eyes narrowed, her arms crossed. She looks warlike and severe as Athena, and if she starts scolding me now, right here with my mother’s spirit watchful and rustling the leaves overhead—

I bolt to my feet and babble, “The garden’s so pretty, I can’t help myself.” I seize her hand and start dragging her down the moss-choked path, back toward the house. “But you must be tired; you had your lamp on all night.” We are three steps from the tree, then four. Five. Six. “Won’t you come inside and have some tea? You can tell me all about how you want to be dressed.” If I can just get her back to the house, maybe it will be all right. “Weren’t you and Thea planning your dresses?”

Koré plants her feet and tears her hand free. “Thea asked if you could come with us to the ball, and now she’s not allowed out of her room until tomorrow.”

Our eyes meet. Trying to stop Thea from befriending me is the one thing on which we have ever agreed.

“That is not my fault,” I say quietly.

Koré shakes her head. “No,” she says, because when Stepmother isn’t watching, she can afford to be fair to me. “But she is being punished because of you, so you will help me. You’re going to take my letters to Lord Anax.”

I stare at her. “Your letters?”

Koré has always been the perfect young lady, every day that I have known her. And it is deeply inappropriate for any lady to write a man who is not related to her. Unless—

“Are you secretly engaged?” I demand.

“Of course not,” says Koré. “But I will be engaged. Publicly. When he chooses me at the ball. And he will choose me over all the richer, more beautiful girls from better families. Because when I dance with him, I will reveal that I am the one who sent him the anonymous letters and courted him while discussing history and literature and Hermeticism. Lord Anax is a scholar. He is always turning down invitations to society functions because he would rather study. Everybody knows that. I will show him that I am the only woman who can match his learning, and he will marry me. He must.” She draws a shaking breath. I have never seen her so passionate. “And you will deliver my letters to him. Anonymously. Today.”

She thrusts the letter at me: thick, creamy paper, folded and sealed with red wax. I take it and feel the hard ridges of the wax; the paper flexes between my fingers.

“Stepmother won’t approve,” I say.

“She’ll approve when I marry him.”

Koré would make her heart beat backward to get Stepmother’s approval. It’s what makes her a fool: Stepmother has never seen her as anything more than an asset to the honor of our house. Is this scandalous plan at last her rebellion? Or just a final, desperate attempt to win the love that Stepmother isn’t capable of giving?

It doesn’t matter. If Koré can convince Lord Anax to marry her, then she will leave this house. Probably she will take Thea with her. Maybe they’ll even convince Stepmother to live at the palace with them, and then I won’t have to protect anyone.

Nobody to protect. I can hardly imagine such freedom.

“I’ll do it,” I say, my heart beating a swift, dizzy song of maybe, maybe, maybe. “I’ll do it.”

Leaving the house is easy. Nobody raises an eyebrow; I already do the shopping, as I do everything else for the household. Stepmother hasn’t bothered even trying to hire servants for nearly a year. She complains about the fickleness of the common folk, but I think it’s a mark of good sense that none of them will stay more than a month. They may not know about my mother’s ghost—they certainly don’t know our house is haunted by demons, or a mob would have burned it down long ago—but they can tell something is wrong.

Stepmother and my sisters don’t even realize anything is wrong. They are very great fools, all three of them.

When I reach the front gate, I pause and whisper, “I’m just leaving for a little, Mother. Koré gave me a delightful errand,” because I know her spirit is bound to our house, but I don’t know if she can see into the city. And I don’t know what she would do if I left and she didn’t know why, but there are demons at her command. I can’t risk her doing anything. It’s why I have never even thought of running away.

Delivering the letter should be easy too. The minor gentry scheme and curry favor for months before they dare approach the doors to the palace of Diogenes Alector Laertius, Duke of Sardis and First Peer of the island of Arcadia. But a mere nobody like me can walk up to the servants’ gate, hand over a letter to a palace footman, and be done. That’s what I leave the house planning to do. It’s what I should do.

Except, as I trudge through the narrow, twisting streets—as I skirt the edge of the marketplace, where a hundred vendors scream their wares at once while children sing and old men beg for spare coins—as the white-and-gold filigree hulk of the duke’s palace looms larger and larger above me, I think of Koré. I think of the seams where you can see that her dress has been turned inside out and re-sewn because the fabric faded. I think of the single pearl that she wears around her neck because Stepmother sold the rest to pay for expanding the house, though that string of pearls was meant to be part of her dowry. I think of the rich ladies I’ve glimpsed walking down the street, silk and lacing rippling with every move, white kid gloves and white lace parasols gleaming in the sunshine, golden bells tinkling in their ears.

Lord Anax is heir to the greatest dukedom on the island of Arcadia. However little he cares for parties or flirtation, he must care for his station. He is selecting his future duchess, and an anonymous letter on the mail tray, no matter how erudite, hardly has a chance of influencing him. And that’s assuming the letter ever reaches him. No doubt someone sorts his mail and burns all such foolish missives (surely he receives a hundred daily) before he has to read them.

I should hand over the letter and be done with it. But the thought of getting Koré and Thea out of the house and out of danger has infected me. I try to imagine what it would be like to draw one breath without my family as hostages, and I want it more than I’ve wanted anything in years.

And this is how I’m a fool: I know what happens when I want things, but today I try anyway.

Stepmother once said that her daughters were born to be adored, and I was born to be invisible. I think she meant that I was ugly, but it’s true: my stepsisters could never pass unnoticed. Koré is too magnificent: roll her in ashes and dress her in rags, and she’d still turn heads as people wondered who was the impoverished princess. Thea is too lovable: she could pass as a servant, but let her wrinkle her forehead once, and five bystanders would demand to help.

I’m nothing but a wisp of a girl with a sharp little nose and a cloud of dull brown hair that never stays neat. Shopkeepers look past me even when I’m trying to get their attention. Now I smooth my face into my best expression of brainless docility, the one I wear when Stepmother is even angrier than usual, and I walk into the duke’s palace.

It is amazing what people will let you do when you are wearing a neat but shabby gray dress and you scuttle demurely down the hallway, body angled toward the wainscoting as if you’re about to slip into it. Everybody thinks I am someone else’s temporary help, and I even get a lean, harried man with gray hair to tell me the way to Lord Anax’s study.

But after three gaudy flights of stairs and two hallways (one covered in writhing gold bas-reliefs, one paneled in silver and mirrors), I’m getting scared. I have never been anyplace so magnificent in my life; I feel like a clump of soot smeared across the gleaming floor of the palace. There are fewer people bustling through the halls than down below, but they’re all upper servants, clad in neat black-and-white uniforms. There is no more humble wooden wainscoting for me to blend into. My back crawls with icy fear; it takes all my will not to duck behind statues and into doorways every time somebody passes me. The only thing that holds me to my steady, purposeful stride is the knowledge that if I run, I will look guilty, and if I look guilty, I will be caught, and if I am caught, I will be punished, and if I am punished, Mother will know and she can’t know, she can’t, she can’t.

My cheeks ache. I realize I’m smiling.

Finally I reach the little green-painted door that the old man described. I walk inside placidly, ease the door shut—and slump against it with a gasp of relief.

I’ve done it. I’ve successfully invited myself into Lord Anax’s personal chambers. All the smiling, silk-clad ladies in Sardis would die of envy if they knew.

No, they wouldn’t ever envy a drudge who scrubs pots every day. And I’m not successful yet: I still have to find a way to make this letter special to Lord Anax, and I have to get out of here again. Without being caught.

Then I will have to come back tomorrow, because I doubt Koré will waste an instant.

I look around the room. After the terrifying glory of the hallways, it’s surprisingly comfortable. The clock hanging by the door is gilt, the bookshelves lining the walls hold a fortune in leather-bound volumes, and the huge, lion-footed desk at the center of the room is carved of cedar that’s been polished and varnished until it gleams dark red. But books slump out of their places or teeter in piles at the edges of shelves, as if they’re often rummaged through in a hurry. The desk is awash in papers; there are stacks of books, a brass slide rule, and a skull carved out of white marble.

Every room in our house, though shabby, is kept dusted and in perfect order, not even a porcelain shepherdess or a mildewed lace doily out of place. The honor of our house will accept nothing less. This room clearly belongs to someone who doesn’t need to please anyone. I imagine Lord Anax reading in his chair, his feet resting on the desk, and I feel a sudden stab of envy that he can live so carelessly.

I step closer to the desk. The silver mail tray teeters on one corner, but just setting the letter on top won’t do. I remember the great vases full of roses on the second landing; if I had stolen some, I could mound them underneath the letter like a pyre. But would that really impress Lord Anax?

What would a duke’s son who has ignored all the blandishments of high society find intriguing?

I pick up the marble skull. It’s lighter than I expected: it’s been carved out hollow. I poke my finger into one of the eye sockets, and then I roll up the letter and poke it inside as well.

Now it looks like the skull has died by letter. It’s ridiculous, and I’m about to pull the letter out again when I hear voices outside.

The doorknob rattles.

I should stay. I should keep my gaze on the floor and my mind full of wainscoting and pretend. But my body has other ideas. A moment later I am curled beneath the desk, my heart beating wildly.

The door slams open.

“—in just a fortnight, and I will declare my chosen bride as the clock strikes twelve. That’s romance for the ladies, profit for the lucky father, and a politic gesture for you. What more, sir, could you possibly want?”

It’s the voice of a young man, well past the awkward squeaks of boyhood, polished and clipped with a nobleman’s accent. Lord Anax.

“For a start?” The second voice is equally polished but deeper, older, more languid. “A son who doesn’t insult my dearest friends.”

I stop breathing. This must be Duke Laertius.

“I didn’t insult them,” says Lord Anax. “I said I was indisposed.”

“For the birthday party of their beloved only daughter, the day after you had been seen riding to hunt. All Sardis knows you meant to snub Lydia, boy.”

“Perhaps I caught a chill on the hunt.”

“Perhaps it’s time you stopped sulking over an engagement three years broken and bore yourself like a man!” The duke’s voice snaps like a whip. “Zeus and Hera, how did I beget such an unruly son?”

“If you’ve forgotten, perhaps you could summon up the dead and ask my lady mother.”

The duke barks a laugh. “You got that tongue from her, that’s for certain. But she was obedient to me for all her carping.”

“Obedient?” says Lord Anax. The desk creaks and shifts; I think he is leaning against it. “We must remember her very differently.”

“Always when it counted, my boy, which is more than can be said of you. I wanted that girl for my daughter, you know.”

“Adopt her, then. I believe it’s legal.”

“First I’d have to kill her parents,” says the duke, “and I am given to understand that’s frowned upon these days.”

“It’s gone the same sad way as the right of a father to execute his sons.”

The duke sighs. “The girl’s still free, you know. You could have her for the asking.”

There’s a silence. When Lord Anax speaks again, his voice is low and soft. “Father. I forced Lydia to break the engagement.”

“That was transparently obvious at the time. But what has never been clear to me is why you acted like the injured party, then and ever since. Or why, if you were so brokenhearted, you did not take the few steps necessary to win her back.”

“You wouldn’t understand.” Still the soft voice.

“I understand that Cosmatos would leave her on your doorstep tied up in red ribbons if you so much as winked at her. As it is, he won’t let her accept even a nosegay from another man because you’re still unshackled and he takes that as a sign of hope.”

“Then rejoice, because in a fortnight I’ll be engaged and she’ll have her pick of suitors again.” Lord Anax is back to sounding polished and defiant.

“He’ll keep her on the shelf until you’re wed . . . mmm, and perhaps until your wife has survived her first birth. Cosmatos does not give up any more easily than I do.”

“He can keep her till she’s moldered into a skeleton. I still won’t marry her.”

“That’s a harsh fate to wish on a charming girl.”

“To be a skeleton is a high and honorable estate. Just ask Alcibiades.” I hear a whisper of movement, then a crinkle; I think Lord Anax has picked up the skull and removed the letter from its eye socket.

“Yes, very honorable, I see. So honorable that you use him to sort your mail. When will you get rid of that morbid thing?”

“Alcibiades, please don’t mind my father. He speaks to everyone this way.” From the tone of his voice, I imagine Lord Anax staring deep into the skull’s eyes.

“Then I’ll leave you to your best friend. Do remember that to get engaged at the ball, you will actually need to prevail upon the lady to accept you.”

Lord Anax’s voice is very dry. “I’m son and heir to the Duke of Sardis. I could walk into that ballroom naked with Alcibiades balanced on my head, and they’d still want to marry me.”

“Most likely. But if you try it, I’ll horsewhip you on the front steps.”

“Don’t worry. I will comport myself properly enough to please even you, sir.”

“I highly doubt that, but do feel free to try. Good day.”

Footsteps, and the door clicks shut. For a moment there’s silence, and I let myself indulge in a heartbeat of wild hope that Lord Anax has soundlessly followed his father out of the room. Then he sighs loudly. His boots clank against the floor. One step, two, three. He’s circling the desk.

My heart pounds. He’s going to see me, and if he’s angry, if he hurts me, if my mother can see this far—

Because I had to sneak into the palace. Because I had to help Koré instead of placate her. Because I had to hope, when I should know how useless hope has always been.

I’m an idiot.

He flings himself into his chair and hauls one foot up onto the desk. Just like I imagined.

Then he looks down and sees me.

He doesn’t look particularly lordly. Handsome, yes: he has jet-black hair and a face of aristocratic angles. Square metal glasses frame his narrow dark eyes. But no one can look very lordly with one foot on the floor and the other on a desk, staring down with his mouth open in surprise.

His mouth snaps shut. His foot lands back on the floor, his jaw tightening, and then he reaches down, grabs my arm, and hauls me out. I stand obediently, fixing my eyes on the shelves.

“You,” he says. “What are you doing here?”

I can still feel the fear, a cold, distant burn up and down my body, but there’s no time for terror now. I do what I always do when Stepmother gets angry: I mold my body in perfect submission, shoulders slumped and eyes demurely lowered, and I think myself out of existence. I am wallpaper and curtains and the jumbled papers on his desk. I am not real, I am not here, so there is nothing for him to get angry at.

He shakes my shoulder. “You know I can have you sacked.”

“I don’t work here.” I keep my voice meek. “I came to deliver a letter.” I point at the desk, where the crumpled letter sits next to Alcibiades.

“A letter? When your master could use the morning post? You’re here to spy or steal or—”

“A love letter,” I say. “From my lady.”

“Of course.” He releases me, looking disgusted. “Another young lady who saw me only once but loves me more than life itself. Or is she one of the ones who sees me almost every day and weeps in secret because I never lower my eyes to hers?”

“There are a lot of them?” I ask. I always imagined that girls with money and fathers would be less desperate.

“Oh, dozens, though your lady is the only one bold enough to write me directly. Most of them just recite poems to a nameless cruel beloved in my presence. Or they have their brothers write me letters demanding to know my intentions, since I was so profligate as to say ‘Good morning.’ So tell me: Was it love at first sight, or did I slowly grow in her heart like ivy?”

I open my mouth to tell him that Koré is not like the others, truly, she is—

What?

I am an excellent liar. It’s why there is any of my family left alive. But I’m so good because I know exactly what Mother wants to hear. I mostly know what Stepmother and Koré and Thea want as well, even if I can’t always give it to them. But this young man looming over me—who quarrels with his father but obeys him, who names a skull Alcibiades and mourns the betrothed he forced to abandon him—I have no idea what he wants to hear.

Lord Anax snorts. “Speechless? I suppose you didn’t spy long enough to know what kind of lady I prefer.”

I flinch. I’m so used to hiding my feelings, it feels wrong for someone to guess even a tiny bit of them. But he doesn’t notice what he’s done; he rattles on, each word bright and bitter. “Permit me to enlighten you. I am not going to fall in love with your mistress. I am not going to be charmed by your mistress. There is, in fact, nothing your mistress can do to make me marry her. My father has invited all the girls he deems remotely acceptable, and I intend to choose my bride utterly at random. Your mistress has no recourse except to make sacrifices to the gods, in which she’s unlikely to outdo Lord Cosmatos, but she is welcome to try.”

I cross my arms, trying not to shake. His anger isn’t at me anymore, nor is it that bad compared to Stepmother’s rages, but even this much bitterness in a voice sets my instincts screaming run.

But he hasn’t tried to punish me. I realize suddenly that he has no intention of punishing me. He’s only going to tell me how much he hates the ladies I represent; and however much he hates those ladies, he isn’t going to hurt them either. He’s going to marry one and make all her dreams come true.

He is furious and helpless, even though he’s the son of the duke, and I want to tell him the truth.

“Then you and my lady should suit each other perfectly,” I say. “She doesn’t love you at all and she never will.”

Speaking the truth is like gulping a mouthful of brandy: it burns on my tongue, but a moment after my body feels warmer, looser, freer.

He quirks an eyebrow. “Excuse me? Did I spend the last five minutes telling you how much I liked it when ladies pursued me for my title?”

“No,” I say, and without trying, without wanting in the least to save somebody, I break into a smile. “You told me how much you hate being lied to.”

Lord Anax stares at me.

“So here’s the truth: she doesn’t want your title—though it doesn’t hurt—she wants your money, and a way out of her household. She has a mother to please and a younger sister to provide for.”

My skin is shivering and my heart is slamming against my ribs, but I’m not afraid. For the first time in years, I’m speaking the truth and I’m not afraid.

When Koré gave me the letter, I imagined not needing to lie so much. I have never imagined being able to tell the truth.

Lord Anax is still looking at me as if he can’t believe I exist. “And you think I should marry her, just because her lady’s maid is truthful?”

“She’s educated as well. Read the letter; she wrote it to impress you with her learning. Of course, there’s a lot of tripe about loving you, but she won’t bother with lies once she knows you don’t need them.”

“A very practical lady, I see.”

“She’s fool enough to want her family to love her,” I say. “She’s not fool enough to care about being loved by her husband.”

He tilts his head. “You’re quite cynical on the matter.”

Koré has the wit and the will to court a duke’s son in secret. She could have ignored all Stepmother’s plans and gotten herself a respectable husband as soon as she turned fifteen. But she’s so obsessed with pleasing Stepmother, the thought never even occurred to her.

“People who want to be loved,” I say, “always do the most idiotic things.”

He laughs suddenly, his face cracking into a wry smile. “On that we agree. Very well. I’ll read your lady’s letter. What’s her name?”

“I promised her I wouldn’t tell.”

“What’s your name?”

“Maia.”

“Well then, Maia, you can go home and tell your mistress that you accomplished your mission.”

I don’t know why I want to laugh. Maybe it’s the thrill of truth still burning in my veins. But I smooth out my face and drop him a curtsy instead. “Thank you, my lord.”

Then I make for the door. I did it, I think, and start to shake again, this time with relief.

My hand is on the doorknob when I hear him say, “Oh, and Maia?”

“Yes, my lord?” I look back over my shoulder.

He’s sitting at the desk now, the letter open in his hands. He looks at me over the edge of his spectacles. “I am prepared to believe you didn’t mean to spy on me. But if I hear you’ve been gossiping about my former betrothed—and if you do, I will hear of it—I will find both you and your mistress, and I will give you cause to regret your indiscretion.”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I have no interest in discussing your broken heart.”

“Did he read the letter?” Koré demands from the kitchen doorway that afternoon.

I look up from the pot of barley soup I’m stirring. “Yes.”

“What did he say?” Her left hand rests against the doorframe in the languid, graceful way that she always poses, but her right hand is clenched on a handkerchief.

“That he would read it.”

“Watch your tongue. Did he—” She breaks off in a fit of harsh coughing.

“You haven’t caught a chill, have you?” I ask. Koré is forever catching minor illnesses when she doesn’t sleep—Stepmother calls it aristocratic frailty—and she’s even harder to please than usual when she’s sick.

“It’s nothing,” says Koré. “Did he seem—favorable?”

Once I swore you didn’t love him, I think, but I hold the words back. I’m sure I was right when I told him that she didn’t want his love. There has never been any room in her heart for anyone but Stepmother and Thea. But I’m not sure if she’ll be angry that I took such initiative—or if her pride will be hurt—

And I don’t want to share with her the moment when I laughed, when I spoke the truth to somebody who wanted to hear it.

“I think so,” I say instead, which is a truth and a lie at once.

My reward is Koré straightening up, the majesty back in her shoulders and chin.

“Of course he can’t fail to be impressed,” she says. “Good work, Maia. You’ll take him another letter tomorrow. Tell Mother I won’t be down for dinner. You can bring me a bowl of broth later.” A whirl of bright blue skirts, and she’s gone.

“Poor Koré,” I say to Mother. “I suppose she won’t be getting much sleep tonight.” The words are a reflex, but I remember Lord Anax, and I almost mean them. He won’t be easily impressed.

“Well, on the bright side,” I say, “I suppose I’m going to see a lot of the duke’s palace.”

I may tell the truth again two or even three times before the fortnight is up. My heart flutters.

The next day, I try to slip into the palace the same way as on the first, but a footman catches me halfway up the second staircase, in the spot where gold leaf has just begun to bloom across the walls.

“What are you doing?” he demands. “You don’t belong to the household.”

“No, sir, I’m here on an errand,” I say quickly. The molded rosettes on the wall press into my back. I can feel the long, cold limbs of panic slowly unfolding through my body.

“On whose behalf?” The footman looms closer; he’s almost as young as I am but a head taller, with broad shoulders, greased-back hair, and the smug confidence of a man with both muscles and a white waistcoat.

I smile brightly. “Lord Anax sent for me.”

He laughs. “Do you expect me to believe—”

“Ah, Maia, there you are. Finally.”

Lord Anax stands on the landing above, leaning against the banister. He’s facing one of the great portraits on the wall; he looks down at us from the corner of his eye. His waistcoat is cut from golden brocade, and a golden watch chain glints from his pocket. Everything about him proclaims lordly unconcern.

“Well, bring her up,” he says, fixing his gaze again on the portrait. “I haven’t got all day.”

“My lord?” says the footman. “Is this suspicious character—”

Lord Anax favors him with a glance that says the entire universe is too wearisomely stupid for words but the footman most of all.

“This suspicious character has come to visit me on behalf of our friends in the library,” he says with haughty boredom. “Kindly do not interfere with these matters again. Maia, come with me.”

I walk past the red-faced footman to Lord Anax’s side. He straightens up, says, “This way,” and strides swiftly down the corridor. A few minutes later, we are back in his study.

“Well,” he says, turning to me, and his face is suddenly washed clean of the boredom it had before. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

“And now you’ve assigned me a new job.” I wrinkle my forehead. “‘Our friends in the library’?”

He laughs. “The Resurgandi, of course. Everyone’s got a silly nickname for them, and that’s my father’s.”

“That footman can’t have believed it,” I say. “He’s gossiping with the other servants right now.”

“Oh, but I think he will believe it. There’s talk of inducting me, since I did so well at university, and you know how they cloak all their goings-on in secretive mummery. Oaths and hand signs and the like. Keeps them occupied, I suppose.”

Of course I know about the Resurgandi: they have their headquarters at the university here in Sardis, where they research the Hermetic techniques that create streetlamps and grow silkworms despite the climate. Stepmother sometimes mutters that they dabble in demonic arts as well, but I know that’s a lie, because I know what it looks like when people meet with demons.

Or when they’re foolish enough to bargain with one.

“I have another letter for you,” I say, pulling the slightly creased paper out of my pocket.

“I read the other one last night,” he says. “Verified all the quotations, too. Give me another day and I could track down all of the ancient sources from which your mistress drew her rhetorical figures, because—well, imitating six authors in two pages may be a good exercise, but with that many pieces stitched together, it’s impossible to hide the seams, let alone express an original thought.”

I remember Koré’s pale face when she handed me the letter this morning, her ink-stained fingers.

“She’s a very stupid person,” I say. “But it is neither lordly nor kind to sneer at her efforts.”

“You have an odd kind of loyalty.”

“You have an odd kind of tact. Or is that beneath the notice of a duke’s heir?”

It’s like standing in front of a house with open windows and watching all the shutters fly shut at once. He only moves a fraction—a slight lift of the chin and tightening of the shoulders, a minuscule lowering of the eyelids—but the bored young aristocrat is suddenly back.

“You’d be surprised what I’m expected not to notice.” He plucks the letter from my hand. “So. Tell me why.”

“Why you’re expected not to notice things?”

“No.” He looks away, plucks Alcibiades off the table. “Why I should respect your lady, when you call her stupid?”

Again I feel the strange, heady rush of chains uncurling from around my tongue.

“Well,” I say, “she’s stupid because she wants her mother to love her, and she thinks her mother will if she obeys her perfectly. But she’s clever enough, at least, to realize she can’t love or be kind to everyone. And she’s honest enough that she doesn’t pretend. She’s cruel to me, not out of spite, but because she thinks it will please her mother, and she makes no bones about it.”

Lord Anax looks at me. “You think I should respect her because she’s cruel to you.”

“Because she’s practical, despite her foolishness.” He’s still staring at me, and I add hastily, “You don’t need to worry she’ll ever be unkind to you, because she knows how you can help her mother and sister.”

He shakes his head and laughs. “I can’t tell if you’re the maddest girl in the world, or the most noble.”

“I’m not mad,” I say. “I’m the only one who’s not, because I don’t want to be loved.”

Lord Anax looks away at Alcibiades, as if the skull’s empty eye sockets contain all the secrets of the world. “What’s so terrible about being loved?”

I think of how Thea is always glancing at Stepmother, her body gently leaning toward her like a sunflower seeking the sun. Of how Koré stands in marble perfection and never looks at Stepmother once, because that is the way that she believes a perfect daughter would behave.

I remember laughing beneath the apple tree, delighted by my mother’s love, and I remember the day I learned the price of that love.

“Love is madness,” I say. “Doesn’t everyone agree that you’d do anything, endure anything, to be with the ones you love? So either you’re willing to let them use you with any sort of cruelty, so long as they keep you—which makes you a fool—or you’re willing to commit any cruelty, so long as you get to keep them—which makes you a monster. Either way, it’s madness.”

“Alcibiades, I think we’ve found the maddest girl and the only sane girl in one,” he says, and then looks back at me. “You’re not making a very good argument for marriage, you know.”

“I told you,” I say. “My lady won’t ever love you.”

“You’re very devoted to her cause,” he says. “Are you sure you aren’t doing this for love of her?”

“No,” I say quietly. “I just need her out of the way.”

The next day, I’m so tired that I have to walk to the palace double-quick, or I’ll sit down and fall asleep on the street. Thea said she wouldn’t have anyone but me modify her green silk dress for the ball—I think she meant to make Stepmother feel I was valuable, but Stepmother’s hatred for me is matched only by her belief in my speed. I had to sew all night to meet her demands. Now my eyes itch and ache with weariness, and all I can think is that maybe Lord Anax will let me sit down in his chair a moment, or even just curl up in a corner.

I’m so busy dreaming about that corner that I walk straight into a footman. It’s the same one who tried to throw me out yesterday.

“Lord Anax is in the second-best drawing room,” he says after a short, stiff pause.

“Take me to him,” I say, trying to sound authoritative. The drawing room may have a sofa.

The drawing room has gilt mirrors on the walls, a statue of Persephone in the center, and two sofas with plump purple cushions.

It also has a piano. When the footman eases the door open, Lord Anax is sitting at the piano with his back to us, pounding out a rollicking dance tune as if his life depends on it. The footman opens his mouth to announce me, but I shake my head and slip inside silently.

The sofa is soft as newly risen bread dough. I sink into it. Lord Anax is slamming out the notes of the song as loud and as fast as he can, but I’m asleep in moments.

When I wake up, he’s playing a different song—slower, more intricate, with a multitude of trills. He stumbles over every one, and though he manages to keep his playing gentle enough to suit the piece, the whole thing feels shapeless.

He hits the final chord a little too fast and loud. Then he looks over his shoulder at me. “Should I be flattered or insulted that I sent you straight into the arms of Morpheus?”

I stand and walk to his side, digging into my pocket. “I have a letter for you.”

“Of course. Did you think it was any good?”

“What?”

“My playing.” He’s staring at the piano keys, and his voice is light, but I can hear the tension underneath. “Did you think it was any good?”

I consider the question. He’s never punished me for telling the truth yet.

“It wasn’t terrible,” I say. “But it wasn’t good. It wasn’t anything, really.”

He laughs softly. “Did you like it?”

I shrug.

“Don’t be tactful now. You were thinking something.”

“I was thinking,” I say, “what does it matter if I liked it or not? You won’t stop or start playing for love of me. You don’t care what I think, and I don’t care what you play.”

“I would have been a piano player,” he says abruptly. “If I weren’t the duke’s son. I know it’s not genteel, but if I weren’t my father’s son, I wouldn’t be a gentleman.”

“You’d get tired of it,” I say.

“No.” He stares at the keys. “I’d never get tired of music. But I’d never be much good at it either.” Gently, as if he’s closing the doors of a shrine, he lowers the lid back over the keys. “Just as well I’m the duke’s son and everyone has to flatter me.”

I remember this morning, how I yawned and immediately whispered, I’m so happy to be awake, Mother, as I stirred the porridge. I remember Koré looking at the dress I sewed for Thea and saying, I’m glad you’ve found something that stupid girl is good for, Mother.

“You’re not alone,” I say. “Everyone has to flatter somebody to survive. Besides, I didn’t mean you’d get tired of music. Being a commoner isn’t easy, you know. You’d get tired of the work.”

“Do you?”

“Every day. But unlike you, I don’t have a choice. Here’s your letter. I suppose I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He catches my wrist. “Maia,” he says, “thank you. Thank you for telling me the truth about my music.”

“Just for that?” I ask.

“You’re the first one, can you believe it?”

I feel the opulent room weighing down on me, as heavy as the smiles I craft for Mother.

“Yes,” I say. “I can believe it.”

His music really is terrible.

But it echoes in my head, all the rest of the day.

If you weren’t a servant,” asks Lord Anax, “what would you do?”

It’s the sixth day of my strange mission; Lord Anax is wrinkling today’s letter between his hands.

“My lady wrote that,” I say wearily.

“I know,” he says. “I asked you a question.”

“Oh.” I pause and think it over. “What does it matter?”

“Well, I told you what I’d do, if I weren’t my father’s son. What would you do, if you weren’t a servant?”

He should ask: if I weren’t my mother’s daughter, or if my mother had not loved me quite so much. But no matter how I enjoy telling him the truth, that is not something I dare say to him.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “It will never happen.”

Ghosts are laid to rest when injustices are righted, when their duties are fulfilled. But my mother’s duty is to make me happy as long as I live. So there is no rest for her, and no escape for me. I will be happy and happy until it kills me.

“Pretend it does matter,” says Lord Anax. “Pretend that tomorrow you were set free and could do anything you liked. What would it be?”

I open my mouth to tell him he’s a fool, but then I remember he does not know I am a slave to my mother’s love. He imagines I have only living masters to fear. And it’s true, if I succeed in getting him to marry Koré, if all my stepfamily leaves the house, there will be nobody alive to rule me. I realize that while I have dared to dream of such freedom, I have not yet dared to imagine what could come after.

“I think,” I say slowly, “I would like a kitchen where I was mistress and I could decide what I cooked. And I would like . . .” As I speak the words, the desire unfurls like a crocus blossom. “I would like to have a great fluffy orange cat that would sit by the fireplace and purr.”

I’ve surprised him; I can see that in the tilt of his eyebrows. “Is that all?”

“It’s more than I have.”

“You’re not a timid girl,” he says. “You don’t lack imagination either. You walked into this palace and commanded me to marry your mistress. Why do you dare to dream so little for yourself?”

“Do you imagine everyone is so fortunate as you are?” I demand. “I’m already dreaming more than I ought, and far more than I’ll likely ever have a chance to get. And you, in what way are you better?”

I see his face stiffen; then he swallows and looks at his desk, shoulders slouched and hands in his pockets, a careless posture that I know is a lie.

“You are heir to the Duke of Sardis—in ten or twenty years, you’ll be the most powerful man in Arcadia—but you can’t imagine anything better for yourself than choosing at random a wife you despise and pitying yourself to the end of your days because you broke your own heart.”

He lets out a breath, nostrils flaring. I should stop. But I’m drunk on truth, and though my body is shaking in anticipation of his anger, my mouth won’t stop.

“Why don’t you tell your father that you don’t want to marry?” I say. “He may want you to secure an heir, but he can’t force you—a firstborn son has rights—and if he does find a way to disown you, you’re not helpless. You’re a man, you’re wellborn, you’ve been to the university, and you have contacts in the Resurgandi; you can find a way to support yourself.” I think of the way Thea goes over the accounting books, late at night when Stepmother isn’t there to tell her it isn’t ladylike. “Why are you carrying on with this madcap plan? Why are you trying to marry anyone?”

He turns on me, and all pretense of lordly boredom is shattered by the raw, helpless fury in his face. “Because she asked me to.”

Even though I’d been expecting it, his anger rocks me back a step. “Who?”

“Lydia wrote me. Said she knew I despised her, but if I had any pity, I’d bestow my name on someone else so that her father would let her accept suitors and not doom her to spinsterhood.” His voice drops as he looks away, running a hand through his hair. “I’d taken everything else away from her. What else could I do?”

I stare at him. “But you said—that first day, you said you didn’t care—”

“Yes, yes, I said! I am the duke’s son and I often lie, my lady. Despite my exalted position, there are freedoms you have and I do not, and the truth, I regret to inform you, is one of them.”

My body stiffens, a thousand memories icing over my skin: smiling when Stepmother tells me I’m a stupid little girl, and afterward whispering, Mother, it’s so funny how she pretends not to love me. Koré saying I’m useless and slow and she can’t imagine why they feed me. Mother, I feel so sorry for Koré when she’s cross. Thea trying to make peace and only bringing down more punishment on my head because she’s too stupid and spoiled to think through the consequences of her words. Mother, Thea is so good to me.

“Do not,” I say quietly, “presume to tell me about withholding truth.”

Then I whirl and run from his study, run from the palace, before the cold ache in my chest can turn into real anger. But though I’m calm again by the time I reach home—though I smile to Mother and whisper, He’s so sweet, though I say to Koré, I think he’s weakening—his words are still lodged like splinters beneath my skin, and I hear them again every time I move. Lydia wrote me. Lydia wrote me.

What else could I do?

I go back the next day. I must, because Koré gives me a letter and I cannot let her be angry with me. But as I creep into the palace, I feel raw and helpless and naked, like a chicken trussed up for baking. A few of the maids nod at me as I pass, and one giggles—all the servants know about my visits now—and though yesterday I ignored them, today I flinch, as if they can know about yesterday’s fight just by looking.

I can’t believe I was foolish enough to goad him. If he’s set on marrying miserably, what of it, so long as he marries Koré? If he can’t forget this Lydia, what should that be to me?

Nothing. It should be nothing. I’m the girl who never gets angry and never wants anything, and that’s why my family is still alive.

It used to be so easy. I used to huddle in the corners and think of the wallpaper and forget I even existed. Now, as I march grimly through the hallway of golden rosettes and mirrors, my body and my thoughts and my wretched, tangled emotions cling to me like sticky bread dough.

When I reach Lord Anax’s study, I pause a moment. I tell myself, You are the only one who can protect your family. Nothing else matters. Then I push open the door.

Lord Anax is sprawled back in his chair, feet on the desk and Alcibiades in his hands, his shirtsleeves rolled up and his forehead creased as he stares at the marble skull.

The moment he sees me, he flails upright, papers flying everywhere. In a moment he’s on his feet.

“Maia,” he says, and doesn’t go on, just stares at me.

“Lord Anax,” I say, and bob a curtsy, then flush because I’ve never curtsied to him before. I thrust my hand out. “I brought you another letter.”

“I really don’t care about the letters. At all. Not one bit.” He’s still staring at me with—not fear, I don’t think, but a sort of dazed caution.

“Then I have no errand here,” I say, and I mean to go—this is a relief, isn’t it, that I don’t have to face him any longer, so why this plummeting sensation in my stomach?—but my feet won’t move.

“Wait.” His hands are clenching and flexing. “I wanted—that is to say—I am sorry for speaking angrily to you yesterday.” He swallows. “I hope you will not repeat . . . anything I may have said unwisely.”

My spine stiffens. “I’m not a gossip, my lord.”

“I didn’t mean that—well, maybe I did. A little.” He rubs the back of his neck. “I’m no good at this. Maia-who-refuses-to-tell-me-her-family-name, will you sit down? I think you deserve to hear a story.”

His eyes flicker to me once, then focus on his desk.

“You don’t have to tell me anything, my lord.”

“I don’t,” he says. “But you wanted to know why I am determined to marry—anyone but Lydia—and you deserve to know.”

“I’ve only brought you letters, my lord.” I don’t want to keep spitting the title at him, but my tongue won’t do anything else.

His head snaps up and now he does look at me. “You have told me the truth, and Tartarus take me if I do any less for you. Sit down, woman, and do as you’re told.”

“Yes, my lord.” I sit down.

He draws a breath. “I’ve known Lydia Cosmatos since I was three years old. We were childhood playmates. We did everything together, until we were old enough that it wasn’t proper, and then we still saw each other as often as we could. Our fathers largely looked the other way, because while they never said anything, it was generally understood that we were destined to marry each other. When we were children, we thought it a very good joke. When we were older . . . Lydia was beautiful. Is beautiful. And sweet, and kind, and good. I was in love with her, or thought I was, and though she grew quieter every year, I was positive that she returned my feelings. So on my sixteenth birthday, I declared myself—told her that I loved her more than light or breath—and begged her to marry me. I thought we could be wed before the year was out.”

Then he pauses, staring at the skull. Finally he continues. “Lydia smiled and said yes. She said—I can still remember the exact words—‘I had given up hope that you felt about me the way I feel about you.’” I kissed her and kissed her and thought it was the happiest day of my life. Our fathers were delighted, though they said to wait at least a year.

“And then.” His hands clench. “Lydia and her father were guests in our house that summer. One day, they went walking in the box-hedge maze. I went after them, and I heard them talking. Lydia was—was begging her father to break the engagement. She said that she had thought she could bear to marry me because he wished it and I was a friend, but every day the thought of marrying one she regarded as a brother grew more abhorrent to her. She said that every time I kissed her, she wanted to die.

“I don’t remember how I got back to the house. I don’t really remember anything until that evening, when I cornered her in the library. I was—vile. I threatened to slander her to the entire city unless she broke the engagement herself. I wouldn’t tell her why. I had enough decency, at least, to pretend I didn’t know her secrets; I just said that I was sick of her, that I couldn’t bear to see her face again. Which was true enough. So Lydia jilted me the next morning, and her father has been plotting to reconcile us ever since.”

Finally he turns to me. “You see why I have to marry. She won’t ever be free until I do. And as much as I despise the thought of marrying a woman who smiles and lies to me, I think I can bear it if she’s not a friend.”

“You still love her,” I say quietly.

“Maybe. What does that mean, anyway?” He crosses his arms and stares over my shoulder, out the window. “I think I’d die for her if she asked it, but I couldn’t attend her birthday party. I’d have rather died than walk into that room and smile at her. What sense does that make? Frankly, I’ve gone off the idea of love.”

“It would only be sensible if you had,” I say. “But you haven’t.” I can see it in the miserable, hunched lines of his shoulders.

And yet, for all his love, he let her go. He tried his best to escape her. I had not believed that anyone could love like that.

He barks a laugh. “And you have?”

Yes, I mean to say. I have never loved. I have never wanted to be loved. In all the world, I am the only girl who doesn’t.

But then he looks at me—his mouth twisted halfway between a smile and a grimace, the skin crinkled at the corners of his dark eyes—and I can’t speak.

I’m the only girl in the world who doesn’t want love. I’m the only girl in the world who can protect people from my mother. And I am always, always alone. But the slant of his shoulders, the set of his mouth, the line of his eyebrows all say, Me too—and for one crazy, impossible moment, I believe him. I believe that someone else could understand me.

I believe that love could possibly be kind.

And then I don’t.

“I haven’t gone off love,” I say. “I never liked it to begin with.” My hands are shaking; my heart is pounding as hard as the time that Stepmother slapped me, and all I could think for an hour was, Mother, Mother, my darling mother, I love my stepmother so very much.

“Well, you are a lucky girl, then, to swear off love so gladly. Just be sure Aphrodite doesn’t punish you as she did Hippolytus.”

That startles a real laugh out of me. “I don’t think even the gods could make my stepmother fall in love with me.”

“So you’ve a stepmother,” he says thoughtfully, “and you’re well educated. Likely wellborn, too. There aren’t even many nobles who know the story of Hippolytus—let alone servants, who usually only want stories about the hedge-gods.”

I wouldn’t know about Hippolytus either, except that one winter Thea got the idea that she should educate me, and she trailed after me reading plays aloud until Stepmother locked her in her room.

“Actually,” I say, “most servants here in Sardis won’t have anything to do with the hedge-gods. Too rustic and uncouth.” My voice falls into the cadences of our old cook’s voice. “That sort of rubbish is only for weak-willed jennies who wish they were back on the farm with dirt beneath their fingernails.”

“Really? My late mother would have been delighted; she was always trying to organize new programs of improvement for the servants.”

“So said our old cook. Mind you, she wasn’t above throwing midsummer cakes on the fire, though she tried to hide it.” I smile, remembering the way she scolded me when I asked her what she was doing. None of your business, little Miss Nosy.

The memory stabs me straight between the ribs. A week after that scolding, something happened that left her hands shaking, that made her hide beneath her apron at every loud noise. For the next month she burned soups and dropped pots; then Stepmother dismissed her.

I don’t think it was my fault. I laughed at the scolding, and she smiled at me a moment after. If she’d actually met a demon, she’d have died or gone insane. But I can’t be sure. I can never, ever be sure, and that’s when I realized it was better not to make friends with the servants. After her, none of them stayed more than a month, anyway. They always realized the house was haunted and fled.

“You’re like a chameleon, do you know that?” Lord Anax is staring at me now with his eyebrows drawn together thoughtfully, his mouth crooked up in a faint smile. “One moment you have vowels that could put my mother to shame, the next you’re talking like the scullery maid. You dress in rags and you know thousand-year-old plays.”

I am the most perfect chameleon he’s ever known, and he can’t know me. He can marry Koré if he wants. He can even marry Lydia. I’ll smile and pour out wine to the gods in thanks. But he can’t get to know me any better or Mother will notice him and he’ll be trapped in my fate and I would rather die.

I’d rather die, I think, and realize that I mean it.

“I’m also a messenger,” I say. My body feels cold and stiff. “Here’s your letter for today.” I hold it out.

“Maia—”

“Good day, my lord.” I throw the letter at him and flee.

I try not to think it as I sweep the floors, scrub the pots, cook the meals. I try, but everywhere I turn, the thought drums along with my heartbeat: I’d rather die. I’d rather die. I’d rather die.

I can’t love him. I don’t. This feeling is not the selfish, grasping need that I’ve seen tear apart my family, writhing through their hearts like worms through rotten apples.

What sense does that make? Lord Anax demanded when telling me about the girl he didn’t love but would die for. The girl who he was wise and kind enough to leave. Perhaps, I finally admit to myself, perhaps for him there’s a way to love that’s sane and happy, that isn’t cruel. The gods know he deserves it.

For me, there has always only been this desperate, heart’s-blood determination not to destroy.

“I think he’ll marry Koré, Mother,” I whisper into the steam rising from the stewpot. Her touch shivers against my neck. “He’ll be so happy.”

He’ll take Koré away to his gilded palace, let her hold Alcibiades, and smile at her words. She’ll run her fingers through his hair and speak the truth to him until he’s comforted, until he forgets both Lydia and the strange little serving girl who delivered letters, until he’s happy. I’ll stay in the dusty, dim house of demons and broken shutters, and I’ll know that he is safe. I can’t ask more than that, want more than that. I won’t.

The next two days, I bring him letters. We don’t talk of Koré, or Lydia, or who I am. He tells me about his studies, his plans for when he is duke, and I tell him exactly what I think. I stare at the lace on his cuffs, the tendons in his hands, and try to memorize him for the day when I’m alone.

I don’t love him. But I take a treacherous delight in him.

On the tenth day, Koré doesn’t give me a letter. She doesn’t come down for breakfast; when I slip into her room, she’s asleep beneath a tangle of blankets. I lay my hand against her forehead, but I don’t feel any fever. Clearly her all-night letter writing has finally caught up with her; I only hope that she’s started sleeping again in time, and I won’t have to spend a week nursing her.

I still go to the palace.

Even without a letter, I can talk to him, I tell myself as I walk briskly through the marketplace. Perhaps today he will promise to marry her.

I should worry about going to see him with no letter, no excuse, nothing to persuade him but my own wits. But all I feel is a curious, floating happiness. It rained during the night; the sun sparkles on the damp cobblestones. The air is cool and sweet, and I suck in greedy breaths as I wind between the vendors’ booths. For no other reasons than the mud between the puddles, the screaming children, and the strings of garlic hanging between the skinned rabbits in the nearest booth, I think that the marketplace is the most beautiful spot in the whole world.

For one delirious, sun-drenched moment, I do not even slightly remember Mother.

A hand closes on my arm. I wrench free and turn back to tell the merchant that I don’t want to buy anything—

An old woman stands behind me. No, not old—her hair is still jet-black, and the lines on her face are scars, not wrinkles.

“Little dove,” she says, her voice hoarse and breathy. “Little, my little dove.”

The rest of the world is suddenly far away, behind a haze. I can’t look at anything but this woman: her stained and wrinkled dress, the bandages tied over her fingers to keep her from gouging her skin open, her wide and staring eyes, pupils swelled impossibly huge.

“My little dove,” says my old nurse.

I was only eight when Mother took ill. Father tried to shield me; he told me again and again that she was just a little tired, and he wouldn’t let me see her until it was clear that she was dying. By then I barely recognized the skeletal creature with sunken eyes. But she clasped my hands and whispered, “Darling, my dearest, I will always be with you. I have found a way. Even after I die, I will always be with you.”

She told me how. She wasn’t ashamed, not when her only daughter’s happiness was at stake. She had called upon the Gentle Lord, the prince of demons, and she had made a bargain with him.

Everybody knows that the Gentle Lord’s bargains inevitably twist and turn to ill. The price is always higher than it seems. But Mother had made sure that she would pay all the price herself. Her wish was that her daughter would always be protected; her price was that she would be the one to accomplish it. Her ghost would be bound to the apple tree behind our house, and she would have the power and the duty to answer all my tears.

“Nothing will take me from you,” she promised. “There is nothing that I could want more.”

The morning after her funeral, when I sobbed beneath the apple tree, I felt her touch upon my shoulder and heard her humming a lullaby in my ear. The wind stroked my face and dried my tears.

“Stay with me, Mother,” I whispered, and she did. She would do anything I asked, I quickly found: she would bring me caramel apples or new frocks, toys or ribbons or sweets.

I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world.

Until the day my nurse made me cry.

It was the first morning of sunshine after a week of rain. I wanted to play in the garden; my nurse wanted me to pick up my toys. I said no, I whined no, and finally I stamped my foot and shouted no, but she would not budge: if I didn’t pick up my things, I couldn’t go out.

“No,” I said one final time, tears starting in my eyes, because I felt sure that before I finished picking up my things, the rain would come back and I’d lose my chance to sit beneath the apple tree and feel Mother’s fingers in my hair.

My nurse shook her head. “Then you’re not going out at all today,” she said. “I’m very disappointed in you, and I’ll have to tell your father.”

“You’re horrible!” I cried at her as she walked away from me. “I hate you!” The door shut behind her, and I sobbed hot, noisy tears.

Until she started screaming.

It was like nothing I’d ever heard: a desperate animal wail that went on and on. The sound wrapped itself around my spine and clogged my throat. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

When it stopped, for a moment I tottered on my feet. Then I bolted for the door.

Everyone knows about demons, and everyone knows of a cousin’s sister’s friend who was driven mad by them. But nobody actually expects to see it happen.

My nurse huddled against the wainscoting, her left hand stuffed into her mouth. Blood and saliva dripped out between her teeth.

“Nurse?” I quavered.

She looked at me then. Her pupils were huge, and her left eye was stained red with burst veins.

“Make it stop,” she whispered. “Make it stop, little dove, I’m so sorry, please make it stop.”

She laid her right hand against her forehead as if she had a sudden headache. Slowly, she scraped her fingers down the side of her face, leaving behind four bloody trails.

Then she started screaming again.

My nurse was the first one. She was not the last. It wasn’t until the butler and the chambermaid had also been destroyed that I realized what was happening.

Mother had wanted the power to protect me, and she had bargained for it with the prince of demons. So her power was to command demons. She could force them to bring me trinkets and sweets. Or she could use them to destroy anyone who made me cry.

She used to weep over beggars and birds with broken wings. She had thought it would be a small price, to become a ghost so she could protect her little daughter. But she had forgotten that ghosts have no pity.

That’s how I learned to smile.

Father married again, and I smiled. Father died, and I smiled. Stepmother slapped me for the first time, and I smiled so hard I thought my face would crack.

“They’re always singing,” whispers my nurse. She clutches my arms, her bandaged fingers digging into my flesh. “They never stop. I’m so sorry, please make them stop, my little dove, please.”

I smile. What else can I ever, ever do?

Then I shove her aside and flee blindly down the street.

I skid around a corner and slam into someone. “Sorry, sir!” I gasp, and duck to the side.

“Maia?”

The voice catches me in place. It’s Lord Anax, and I turn to see him standing by me with a long black coat on his shoulders and a hat on his head.

“My lord,” I say blankly. My whole body feels numb. “I was—going to see you—”

“What’s wrong?” he asks. “Maia, what happened?”

“Nothing. Nothing happened, everything’s all right.”

Everything is exactly the same as it was fifteen minutes ago. The sun is shining, I’m going to spend the morning with the man I would die for, and my nurse is in agony every moment. Because of me.

The chambermaid died the day she met the demons, but the butler also survived. I wonder if he’s still alive and suffering too.

“You’re shaking.”

“I’m—” I draw a breath and summon a smile. “A boy tried to rob me. I got away from him. I’m quite all right, just a little shaken up.”

“Do take note: when you smile like that, I can’t believe a word you say. But you seem to be in one piece, at least.” He crooks his arm and sets my hand on it as if I were a lady being led into a ballroom. “Come. I was on my way to the park; I know a quiet spot where you can sit down.”

“In public? With a servant?” I protest as he starts to draw me down the street.

“What is the point of being the duke’s heir if I can’t cause a scandal now and then?”

He marches us briskly to the nearby gated park and draws me to a little bench beneath a pair of willow trees, almost completely hidden by the curtain of their hanging branches. He sits me down on the bench and then stands over me with his hands in his pockets.

“Aren’t you going to sit down, my lord?” I ask him. I’m starting to feel a little less shaky. I’ve learned nothing new. I’ve just been reminded what I’ve done and why he needs to forget me. Why he must promise to marry Koré today.

His mouth flattens. “I wish you’d stop calling me that.”

“I’m sure it’s treason if I don’t.”

“No, just impudence, and I really don’t care. I do care, I mean, I care that—” He breaks off. “I was hoping you’d come today.”

“I come every morning,” I say.

“I know, but last night—I made up my mind to tell you something. And then, of course, I was terrified that I’d decided too late, and I’d never see you again.” He looks at me and then at the ground. “The ball’s in four days, you know.”

“I don’t hear about anything else these days,” I say. Every morning at the breakfast table, Stepmother describes an even more elaborate daydream of how Lord Anax will take one look at her darling Koré and fall in love. The dresses are finished; Thea practices her dance steps every moment, and Koré writes letters.

I get to my feet. “I don’t have a letter today,” I say. “But I came anyway, because I wanted—I was hoping you’d finally promise to marry my lady.”

He looks up at me in confusion. “Maia?”

My heart is pounding again. My body feels like a coiled spring. “You’ve read her letters,” I say. “You know—she’s a fine lady, she’ll make a fine duchess, she’ll never lie to you. She’s beautiful, too, have I mentioned that? Please, promise me that—”

“Maia, after all this time, can you possibly imagine that I would ever marry her?”

“You must,” I say. “You said you have to marry, and who else is there?”

“Zeus and Hera, you fool, I want to marry you.”

The words burst out of him, and they seem to startle him as much as me; he rocks back a step as if I’ve shoved him.

I stand like a statue. “That’s . . . not amusing, my lord.”

“I didn’t mean it as a joke!” He presses a fist to his mouth. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it that way. But I do mean it. Maia, I had thought that there could never be any honesty between me and a woman, let alone love. And then I found you under my desk, and—I think I loved you since the moment you told me to respect the mistress who was cruel to you, because she was consistent. You’re mad and brave and beautiful, and you tell me the truth. There has never been anyone who did that for me but you. Maia, I don’t care who you are. I love you and I’ll fight the whole world to marry you. Will you grant me the honor of your hand and your heart?”

I feel dizzy. He can’t be asking me. This must be a dream, a fever-born delirium. But the world presses in on me, too real to deny: the sunlight glares through the willow branches, the birds clatter loudly in the trees. I feel the breath rasp in my throat and the skin on every inch of my body.

“You don’t love me,” I say.

He sighs ruefully. “Maybe not. I can’t help seeing you the way a starving man sees bread.”

“You don’t know what it is to be hungry, let alone starving,” I say. “And you don’t love me. You can’t.”

“I do,” he says quietly, stepping closer, and his dark eyes are looking straight into mine.

“You can’t,” I whisper, and that’s when he kisses me.

There’s a moment when I don’t feel anything. It’s been years since I felt any touch besides Stepmother’s slaps and Mother’s ghostly caresses, and now suddenly there are strong hands gripping my shoulders and a mouth crushed over my own. It’s too foreign; I can’t understand the sensation enough to feel it, can’t even breathe.

But he keeps kissing me, and though this is the first time, it feels like recovering a long-forgotten memory. My body seems to say, Yes, this, and then I’m kissing him back as if I were born to be in his arms. I never realized how tightly guilt and fear had been wound about me until this moment, when they unwind into the air and fly away, leaving me with nothing but this guileless delight.

Nothing.

My secrets, my lies. The fragile safety of my family. Everything I worked so hard to create, he’s going to tear it all away.

Suddenly his arms are a prison and I can’t bear the touch of his lips a moment longer. I wrench myself free.

He reaches after me. “Maia—”

I slap his hand away. “No,” I gasp. “Marry my mistress. Or don’t, if you like. But I—I never want to see you again.”

And then I run.

“He won’t take any more letters,” I tell Koré that evening. “He’s too busy. But he’ll look for you at the ball. I believe you have a chance.”

For the first time, lying to her feels like ashes in my mouth.

Everything is exactly the same. Cook the breakfast. Wash the dishes. Bake the bread. Sweep the floor. Mend the clothes. Smile for Mother and fade into the wallpaper for Stepmother.

Nothing is the same. My smiles and my silent submission both feel like a heavy porcelain mask; my face is always tugging against them, trying to take another expression. Trying to speak the truth.

I’ll learn to wear that mask effortlessly again, just as I’ll learn to stop remembering every single word he ever said, every look he ever gave me. But for now, I remember every moment of him. Most of all, I remember when I pushed him back, and his dark eyes were wide in baffled hurt. He had offered to defy his father, his peers, and all good sense to marry me. And I threw him away.

Surely, if the gods have any mercy, he will hate me now. He will choose another wife and be happy.

The day of the ball, Stepmother is up with the dawn to give me orders. I don’t think she knows why; certainly her orders make no sense. First I must cook an extra-large breakfast, and then she tells me to abandon it on the stove because there’s no time. She wants the entire house cleaned, as if Lord Anax were coming to tea tomorrow. She sends me to the garden to fetch armfuls of flowers for the family shrine, where Father’s portrait sits next to the household gods.

Abruptly, while jabbing a finger and telling me to move the vase a little more to the left, stupid child, she drops to her knees and squeezes her eyes shut in prayer. Her eyebrows clench together; her lips hang softly open. For a moment, despite the pinched lines of her face, despite everything I know about her, she looks lovely. I think, Perhaps she felt about Father the way I feel about Lord Anax.

My stomach twists and I turn away, because we are nothing, nothing alike and never will be. I will die first.

And then there are the actual preparations for the ball. The dresses are already chosen, mended, and embroidered. The masks—commissioned at ferocious expense—sit wrapped in tissue paper. Thea can’t stop unwrapping hers and running her fingers over the swirling, golden surface. Otherwise she’s more subdued today; she keeps looking at me and drawing a breath to speak, then stopping. I think she feels guilty that I must stay home, but for once, what I tell my mother is true: I’m glad I’m not going. If I go, I’ll see Lord Anax, and then . . . maybe he’ll hate me and I won’t be able to stop myself, I’ll weep and destroy him. Or maybe he will still love me and I won’t be able to stop myself, I’ll say yes and destroy him just the same.

I won’t give in to him and I won’t hurt him. I will die first.

I seem to think that a lot lately.

Koré doesn’t appear all day, which is nothing new. She’s spent the last two days locked up in her room, probably writing out everything she wants to say to Lord Anax.

But then it’s evening and it’s time to dress. I lace Thea into her gown—butter-soft, pale green silk sewn with iridescent beads, and for once she doesn’t look like a smudged watercolor of her older sister but like a pretty young woman in her own right.

“Where is Koré?” Stepmother demands. She’s been watching the whole process; I don’t think she trusts me. “That stupid girl has been lazing about in her room all day.”

I’m pinning up Thea’s hair, so I can feel the tiny hunching of her shoulders. “I’m sure she’s just practicing her dance steps, Mother,” she murmurs.

“She should know them already. I’ve spent enough time teaching her. For any daughter of our house, that ought to be enough.” Her voice drops to a grumble. “For the honor of our house.”

“I’ll go fetch her,” I say quickly, sliding the final pin into Thea’s hair. If Stepmother’s talking about the honor of our house, it’s bad. “Just a moment, my lady.” I bob a curtsy and flee.

I have to knock three times before Koré answers. She must have been napping: she’s fully dressed, but her hair is a mess and there’s a pillow crease on her cheek.

“Yes, what is it?” she asks.

“Your mother wants you,” I say. “It’s time to dress for the ball.”

“Of course.” Koré’s lips tighten—they are colorless, though her cheeks are flushed—then she pushes past me, coughing.

When we get back to Thea’s room, Stepmother is pacing back and forth. She lets out a bitter laugh when she sees us.

“At last you deign to grace us with your presence.” Her voice is sugar and acid.

“I was . . .” says Koré, her face gone ghastly pale. She blinks rapidly. “I was only . . .”

Then she collapses, eyes rolling up. Thea and I are on her instantly. We drag her to the bed and loosen her corset. In only a few moments, she rouses.

“Mother?” she says faintly.

Stepmother stands a step away, her eyes wide, her mouth opening and twisting and closing, as if a hundred speeches are fighting each other to get out. She looks as mad as my nurse.

Koré sits up, pushing Thea back. “I’m sorry, Mother,” she says, her voice low and, despite everything, still elegant. “I’m not feeling quite well . . . but I can still dance—” Then she breaks into a coughing fit.

Stepmother’s face snaps into a hard, flat-mouthed mask. She crosses the room to us. “You stupid girl. What did you do? You know how easily you take ill.”

“I’m sorry,” Koré gasps between coughs.

There’s a crack as Stepmother’s hand slaps her face. Thea yelps and I drag her away.

“You stupid little bitch,” says Stepmother. “You’ve wrecked all our chances. Do we mean nothing to you? Does your family mean nothing to you?”

Koré shrinks back. For the first time I can remember, she looks terrified.

Stepmother seizes a handful of her hair. “Look at me, girl. Why did you do it? Why did you do it?”

“I’m sorry, Mother,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean—”

Stepmother shakes her like a rag doll. “No daughter of mine would be so selfish. No daughter of mine. None.” Her mouth spasms, and then she shoves Koré against the wall. “Go to your room. Stay there till you rot.”

Thea whimpers, but I have my hand pressed over her mouth. There’s nothing we can do for Koré. There’s never anything we can do.

Koré wavers to her feet. Her eyes meet mine, and she nods fractionally: she understands. Then, head bowed, she stumbles out of the room.

Thea nearly breaks free of my grip, but I whisper in her ear, “The only way to help her is to make Stepmother happy.” And she goes limp. She’s stupid, but not stupid enough to think she can fight, and so I release her.

Stepmother opens the box of masks, pulls out Koré’s, and throws it into the fire. She watches the edges begin to blacken and curl; then she turns back to us.

“Come, Thea,” she says. “We’ll go to the ball together, and you’ll prove you are my true daughter when Lord Anax falls in love with you.”

Thea glances at me. Her eyes are wide and leaking tears. But she pulls herself up straight and bends her mouth into a smile.

“Of course, Mother,” she says. “I—I can’t wait.”

When I bring Koré a bowl of broth for supper, she’s wavering on her feet as she tries to put on her dress.

“Sit down,” I tell her.

“No,” she says, struggling with the buttons. “I must—Lord Anax—” She coughs again.

“He won’t be charmed by a girl who coughs in his face,” I say, grabbing her shoulders, and push her down to sit on the bed.

Koré glares up at me. “You don’t understand.”

“No. I don’t.” My chest feels full of ice and gravel. “You’ve driven yourself sick to win him, but even if he did marry you, do you think it would make Stepmother love you? Do you think she ever has?”

“No,” says Koré.

The low, flat syllable slices through my rage and leaves me staring at her like a gutted fish.

“But,” I say, and can find no more words.

“Mother can’t love me or Thea ever again,” says Koré. “I know that. I’ve always known.”

“Then why,” I ask slowly, “are you still trying to please her?”

“Because she got that way for my sake.”

“She stopped loving you because she loved you?”

Koré’s mouth twists into something like a smile. “No. She married your father because she loved us and it was the only way to keep us fed. She stopped loving us because she made a bargain with the Gentle Lord.”

Our eyes meet. I should feel dread or sadness to learn that someone else in the household has made the same ruinous, wicked bargain with the prince of demons and ruler of our world. But all I feel is a bright, desperate exultation: She knows what it’s like. She knows what it’s like. She knows.

“What happened?” I ask.

“Father died,” says Koré, and for a moment she lets the words sit between us as if they’re all the explanation I need. (Maybe they are. In the end, Mother died is the only thing that will ever need to be said of me.)

“He was rich,” Koré goes on, “but the way his estate was entailed—everything went to his cousin. We would have been reduced to living off his charity, except Mother had quarreled with him, so we had not even that. She married your father because it was the only way to keep a roof over our heads. But she couldn’t forget our father. The one she loved. It was driving her mad, grieving for him while pretending to love her new husband. She told me so and then she told me that she had a plan.” Koré’s fists clench. “She would call upon the Gentle Lord, and when he came, she would offer to pay him with all her best memories of her first husband, if in exchange he could make her love her second husband and his house. And he granted her wish. She loved her husband and his house. She loved them so much she had no room to love anything else, and when he died, it drove her mad.”

I think of the desperate way that Stepmother says the honor of our house. She’s as helplessly relentless as my own mother; I should have known that she, too, had made a bargain.

“And you think,” I say, “if you marry Lord Anax, it will make her happy? That’s why you’re striving so hard?”

A harsh laugh rips out of Koré and frays into coughing. “Oh, she’d be delighted at such an honor to our house,” she says when she has her voice again. “But it won’t make her happy. There’s nothing left in this world that can do that.” She looks up at me, and her face is no longer posed or scornful in the slightest. “But if I can marry well, I can get Thea out of this house. She won’t have to lie awake half the night, afraid the demons are finally going to crawl out of the corners and come for her. She won’t have to spend her days afraid that she’ll finally offend Mother too much. She won’t have to waste her time worrying about you. She’ll be safe and well fed and people won’t laugh at her—she’ll be able to marry somebody kind and be happy.”

I can’t seem to move. I’m not sure I can breathe. I knew my stepsisters must have heard the servants’ reports of something strange in the hallways, but it had never occurred to me that they might believe them, let alone realize that there were demons in the house. That they might be almost as frightened of their mother as I was. That they, too, might long for escape.

“I don’t care whom I have to marry,” says Koré. “I don’t care what he makes me suffer. I will get Thea out of this house.”

Her voice is a rough thread, thin and desperate and utterly unyielding. It feels as familiar as my own heartbeat.

We are exactly the same. Almost exactly, because I deserve my doom and can’t escape it. But maybe I can save her.

“You’re too sick to dance,” I say. “I will go for you. And this time, I will make him promise to marry you.”

So for the first time in nine years, I admit to my mother that there’s something I want.

“Mother,” I say, kneeling beneath the tree and trying not to shiver in the chill evening breeze, “dearest, dearest mother, will you grant me a wish?”

Boneless fingers slide against my cheek. My heart slams against my ribs; I feel fragile and terrified and sure as stone.

“I’ve changed my mind,” I say. “I want to go to the ball—in a beautiful dress and a beautiful mask, just like you used to wear when you were young. I want to drive there in a lovely carriage. Can you do that, Mother?”

The tree leaves rustle, and I hear a faint laugh. My throat closes up, because it’s the same laugh I remember from my childhood, when my mother was alive and danced with me in the garden and I never had to fear her.

Then the air comes alive around me. Ghostly fingers pull off my cap and comb my hair free of its pins. They draw me to my feet and peel my dress away from me piece by piece, thread and bits of cloth pattering to the ground about me until I am standing naked in the twilight with my servant’s uniform in shreds around my feet.

Shadows vein the air like phantom tree branches. My body shudders instinctively, but I am beyond fear. I watch them and I do not go mad as linen and thread, lace and boning swim out of the air and wrap themselves around me into a shift and petticoats and corset. As the corset strings draw themselves taut, the shadows seem to catch on fire, glittering with light; then I realize it is golden thread, great lengths of it corkscrewing through the air. It’s followed by waves of gold satin, honey-colored gauze, and pale, white-gold lace like moonlight. The dress weaves itself around me in great shimmering ripples, and when it’s done, I can barely breathe for wonder.

“Thank you, Mother,” I whisper, and for once I am not lying.

The laughter rustles in the leaves; I feel a touch against my cheek, and then she tilts my head up to look at one of the lowest branches, where a golden mask hangs by a red silk ribbon.

Carefully, I reach up and take the mask, then tie it over my face. It fits as perfectly as the corset, and like the corset it seems to mold me into another person. A lady. It is the most natural thing in the world to curtsy to the tree, just as I did when I was a little girl and we played court together.

From the other side of the house, I hear the clatter of wheels and horse hooves against the cobblestones.

“Thank you,” I say again, and then I go to meet my carriage.

The duke’s palace is different by night: pale, glimmering from the light of a thousand candles, it seems more like a dream or an enchantment than a house built of stone for mortal men.

The front courtyard, though, is a completely human bustle of attendants and carriages. As we draw to a halt, I see that they are checking invitations at the door, and for a moment I’m afraid that I’ll be turned away and Mother will be angry. But then my door is opened by a servant—white livery and a colorless face that will not stay in my memory a moment after I look away—and he has a creamy envelope in his gloved hand. He gives it to the footmen at the door, and they bow to me, and then I am inside.

The ballroom is more glorious than I dared imagine: a vast room of marble and gilt, decked out in cascades of vivid hothouse flowers in every color. Swirling through the room are ladies in dresses just as vivid, each one with a gentleman clad simply in black, like a shadow. All of them wear masks, jeweled or painted or gilt, dangling strings of beads or fluttering with feathers.

The music winds to a pause, and then I see him: Lord Anax, the only one in the room unmasked, bowing to the lady he danced with a moment before. His smile is polite and dead, nothing like the expressions I ever saw on his face.

Then he looks up, and his eyes meet mine.

I am masked. He cannot recognize me. I tell myself this as he strides toward me, but my heart still speeds up and my breath flutters against the cage bars of my corset.

He’s three steps away. Two. One. And then he bows to me and says, “Lady. Would you honor me with a dance?”

“Yes,” I say, trying to culture my voice into Koré’s polished tones. I am not Maia the serving girl; I am not my mother’s daughter; I am Koré Alastorides, and I am going to explain to the duke’s heir why he should marry me.

He takes my right hand and starts to raise it; for a moment I think he’s going to kiss it, and a pang shoots up my arm. Then he clasps it instead, draws me out to the center of the ballroom, and lays his other hand on my waist.

His touch is light, no more than a feather’s brush against the wall of my corset, but it still sends heat rushing to my face, and I wish—

Then the music starts, and there’s no room to wish or think anything. I have never been so grateful for all the times that Thea forced me to practice dancing with her, but usually I danced the boy’s part, and for a little while all I can do is force myself not to trample on his toes.

Eventually it gets easier. Eventually I realize that I have been staring at my feet and wasting time. I look up—and he’s watching me quietly, eyebrows slightly furrowed but without any trace of annoyance.

“I didn’t think you would come,” he says.

“My lord?” I say blankly.

“After what I did.” He looks over my shoulder, his face pale and resolute. “I thought I’d never see you again. I thought I’d never be able to apologize.” Then he looks down and meets my eyes. “I’m glad you came, Maia. And I’m so very sorry.”

“You,” I choke out. “How did you—I’m wearing a mask.”

He grins. “Do you think I wouldn’t recognize your voice? Or your chin, or your eyes? Or do you think I wouldn’t notice you’re the only woman here with chapped hands?”

I look down and see my red, cracked hand clasped in his smooth, soft fingers. I feel like a cheap counterfeit.

He spins me out and back in a sudden twirl. “You know you’re the loveliest woman here,” he says.

Even in just a few days, I’ve forgotten how much he can see of me.

“Why did you want to apologize?” I ask quietly. Perhaps, if he’s feeling guilty, I can make him promise to marry Koré as reparation.

His smile vanishes. “For the last time we met. In the park. It was—inexcusable to seize you that way. When you had given me no permission and clearly had no desire, and needed to fear the power of my position besides.” His lips press together a moment and then he goes on, “I have been very selfish and very stupid all my life. But I promise you, I am starting to learn.”

“Oh,” I say. My head is spinning as I realize what that day must have looked like through his eyes, because despite how well he understands me, he has still never guessed my most important secret. Anax doesn’t notice my confusion; he plunges on, the words tumbling out as if they can’t be stopped.

“And once I realized how I’d wronged you, I realized how I’d wronged Lydia. All that time blaming her for my broken heart, because I didn’t want to admit that I had been so blindly selfish, I could kiss a girl without realizing that she loathed it. So I wrote to her yesterday. I told her the truth and I told her I was sorry. I told her that I hoped someday to earn her friendship again, but that she didn’t owe it to me.” He draws a breath. “I would like to have your friendship, too. Someday. If you will let me earn it back.”

And I know why I came here; I know what I must do. I must win him for Koré and leave him for his own safety. But he is looking so desolate and brave at once, I can’t stop myself.

“You do,” I say. “You have always had my friendship.”

“Thank you,” he says, his voice soft and unfathomably grateful, and I can’t stand it. I can’t stand that he is grateful to receive so little from me, and the words flow out of me without any trying, the same way my feet are dancing out the pattern of the music.

“You were very rude,” I say, “but I didn’t hate it when you kissed me. I didn’t hate it at all. I—” And then finally I manage to close my traitor mouth, but it’s too late. He’s looking at me with dawning wonder and delight, and he can see me. He knows.

“Maia,” he asks, “why did you come here tonight?”

I know what I should say. What I should do. But his fingers are wrapped about mine, his hand is on my waist, and the glittering music is swirling us around and around the room.

“I wanted to know,” I say, and my voice feels like it’s coming from miles away and the depths of my bones at once, “if you really loved me. The way you said when you asked me to marry you.”

“Then?” His mouth crooks. “No. Not really.”

“Oh?” I say.

“I didn’t love you,” he says. “At least, I didn’t know it. I thought you were—lovely, and honest, and the only wife I could possibly respect. But you were right, I didn’t love you. I just thought you were an escape. And then I lost you. These past four days, when I thought you gone forever? Every book I read, I wondered what you’d think of it. Every idea I had, I wanted to ask your opinion. Every breath I took, I listened for your breathing beside me. Then I knew what you meant to me, and what you could have been to me. And then I fell in love with you.”

He stops dancing and clasps both my hands.

“So yes. I love you, Maia, daughter of I care not whom. And I will say so as often as you like, to anyone you please.”

I can’t breathe. Those words are all I wanted in the world, but I can’t hear them. Not when I am my mother’s daughter.

He will die if he loves me.

He will die if he loves me.

He will die, or else he will live beside me as a slave to my mother’s ghost, and I will bear him children who are slaves as well, and I will not do that to him. I will die first.

I will do any other evil thing first.

“Will you,” I say, “will you kiss me?”

His eyes widen. He knows that kissing me here in public is as good as declaring me his bride—that if he does not marry me after, the world will think me wanton and him a cad.

Then he leans down and cups my face in his hands and there’s nothing, nothing in the world but the warmth of his lips.

And the depths of my own betrayal.

I can’t stand it for long. I break the kiss. “Promise that you’ll marry me,” I say raggedly. “Promise you’ll marry the girl with this mask, no matter who she is in the morning.”

“I swear it,” he says. “I swear by Zeus and Hera, I don’t care who you are. I’ll have you to wife or I’ll have none.”

I pull out of his arms. “Come to the Alastorides house tomorrow. Ask for their daughter. The one who wore the mask.”

He catches my wrist. “I thought you were a servant?”

“It’s a long story,” I say.

The simple, trusting grip of his fingers burns me with shame. I can’t meet his eyes. “I’ll explain later,” I lie, and then I run.

When I get home, Koré is sitting up in bed, cheek leaned against the wall, candlelight glinting from her half-closed eyes.

I kneel beside her. As she straightens, drawing her face back into order, I slip off my golden mask.

“He promised,” I say, “that he will come to this house tomorrow and marry the girl who has this mask.”

She takes it from me. Her mouth clenches a moment, and then she asks, “Are you sure?” in the tired, wary voice of someone who has waited too long to trust in hope.

“He promised,” I say.

She touches my cheek, as if to wipe away a tear, but there are no tears. I know there are no tears, because nobody is dying. Because I am still, even with my heart breaking, strong enough to smile.

“Good night,” I say, and leave her to go tell my mother what a lovely evening she gave me and how perfectly, perfectly happy I am.

Breakfast is a grim meal. Koré is better but still coughing, while Thea can only stare at her plate in exhaustion. Stepmother has forgotten her anger at Koré, but only because she’s too busy being furious at the slatternly chit who danced with the duke’s son and snared him with her scandalous misbehavior.

For once, her anger doesn’t frighten me. I don’t feel afraid at all, because I know exactly what will happen: Anax will come to our door, smiling and impatient, and I will betray him completely. I know this, and all I feel is a cold, sick horror slowly rising in my lungs.

The doorbell rings. I flinch.

Stepmother presses a hand to her forehead. “Maia, I don’t know why you aren’t answering it—this is a noble household, not a stable—”

I walk to the door. My stomach is knotted, my skin is shivering. I think, I am saving him, but it’s no comfort at all when I pull the door open and he grins.

“I’m looking for the daughter of this house,” he says, like all the world is an innocent joke, “who danced with me last night in a golden mask.”

“Right this way, my lord,” I say, stepping back.

“Maia?” His forehead creases, and a shudder runs through me: he can tell something is wrong.

I hold a finger to my lips, meeting his eyes. Then I say, “The family will see you in the parlor, my lord. Tell them . . . exactly what you just said.”

The worry doesn’t go from his face. But after a moment, he nods and silently follows me into the house. Because he trusts me.

I leave him in the parlor. I don’t know how I get back to the breakfast room. As soon as I step inside, Koré goes taut.

“Lord Anax is here, my lady,” I tell Stepmother. “He wants to see you and Miss Koré.”

Chairs squeak and clatter as they’re all on their feet in an instant.

“Koré, darling, you mustn’t cough at him or I’ll have you whipped,” Stepmother says rapidly. “I’ll give you a moment to compose yourself. Thea, go to your room.” Then she’s gone.

Thea looks from me to Koré. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing. Everything. Go to your room,” says Koré breathlessly, and bolts upstairs herself. Thea trails after. A few moments later, Koré clatters down again; she has to stop at the bottom of the stairs for a fit of coughing, but when she lowers the handkerchief, her face is the flawless marble statue again.

“Thank you,” she whispers. The golden mask is clutched in her hand.

I say nothing. When she leaves, I can’t help myself; I tiptoe after and slip close to the half-open door.

“Yes,” I hear Anax say, his voice polished and bored, “she’s lovely as the rosy-fingered dawn and I’m sure she plays and sings as well. But I’m here for your other daughter.”

“You mean—my little Thea?” Stepmother’s voice is like spun-sugar violets, sweet and delicate and utterly false. “She’s so young—but it’s such an honor—”

“Slightly more plausible since I actually met the girl,” says Anax, “but no. I mean Maia, the daughter you keep in the kitchen. Short, scrawny, red hands from washing dishes. She was at the ball last night, wearing a golden mask. I danced with her, and I’m going to marry her.”

“No,” says Koré, in her perfect voice like a low note from a silver flute, “you danced with me. I wore this mask, and you promised to marry the one who held it. See?”

There’s a short pause. Then steps, and Anax flings the door open. He grabs my wrist and hauls me inside.

“Maia,” he says, “tell them.”

“Tell them what?” I ask, regaining my balance. I don’t dare look him in the face.

“What you did last night. When we danced.”

Stepmother is looking at me like I’m a poisonous spider. Koré isn’t looking at me at all; her eyes are lowered, lashes perfectly displayed as she stares demurely at the carpet, a virtuous and obedient daughter waiting for orders from the mother who will never love her.

I can feel each one of Anax’s fingers clenched around my wrist. It’s crazy, but in that one grip I feel everything about him: his tense shoulders, his grim half smile, his heartbeat. His fear and his fury and his hope. He will never touch me again.

“But I never danced with you, my lord,” I say.

He looks down at me. “What?”

“Last night,” I say quietly, “Miss Koré asked me to dress her. I helped her into a golden dress and then I tied that mask on her face. I did take her letters to you, but I never went to the dance. You must have been confused. Perhaps the punch—”

“I didn’t drink the punch,” he says. “And you were there.”

“They look very much alike, my lord,” says Stepmother.

“I can tell the difference between your daughters, madam!”

“You danced with me,” Koré says softly. “You promised.” Her voice is a lifeless marble thing, and I realize she doesn’t have any hope this ploy will work, but she’s like the warriors of old: if she cannot come back from a battle carrying her shield in victory, she’ll be borne back dead upon it.

“She told me about it as soon as she got home,” I say. “You swore by Zeus and Hera you would—”

“Enough.” He hauls me out of the room and into the hallway. The door slams behind us, cutting off Stepmother’s shriek.

“My lord,” I say desperately, “you shouldn’t talk to me alone, I’m just a servant, she’s your betrothed, you kissed her—”

“Hush.” He grips my shoulders. “You can stop pretending.”

He’s still not angry. He still believes in me. My throat aches, but I’m far too skilled to cry.

“I’m not pretending,” I whisper.

“Maia,” he says, softly and urgently, “I don’t know what they’ve done to you, how they’ve threatened you, but it ends now. We don’t have to make them agree to anything. Just come with me, and they won’t have any more power to hurt you.”

“They haven’t hurt me,” I say reflexively.

“But they said they would, if you didn’t let your stepsister marry me.” His hand squeezes my shoulder. “Don’t you understand? I’m the duke’s heir. They can’t touch my betrothed. Walk out this door with me, and you’ll never have to be afraid again.”

I will always, always be afraid.

“I want you to marry her,” I say. “I told you and I told you, but you were so stupid that finally I had to lie and make you promise.”

He goes still. His hand stays on my shoulder, but I can feel it, the moment when he starts to wish he wasn’t touching me.

“No,” he says. “You asked me to promise I’d marry you.”

“The girl who holds this mask! No matter who she is in the morning!” I plunge ahead. If I must be cruel to him, I’ll be so horrible that he’ll never look at me or care about me again. “Can you really think I trudged down to that palace and listened to your whining day after day just so I could marry you? You see how I’m almost a slave here. Koré promised me money and freedom if I got you for her. So go back into that parlor, keep your promise, and make us all happy.”

His face is utterly blank. I summon up the smile I use for my mother. “Didn’t you decide you cared about whether the girls you kissed were happy or not?”

His hand drops from my shoulder. “I’m beginning to reconsider it.” There’s no anger in his voice and none of his polished, defensive boredom either; just dazed, hollow curiosity.

“Then don’t care,” I say. “Marry the one you promised to marry. She’s pretty and you won’t have to lie to her.”

He stares at me. “No,” he says finally.

Panic spikes in my chest. “You must—”

“I’m the duke’s son. I’m pretty sure I can do as I please.” Still he watches me.

“If you don’t,” I say desperately, “I’ll tell them about Lydia.”

He flinches. Then he says quietly, “Tell them what you like,” and turns away. The boredom is back in his voice, and I know that I have finally and completely killed what was between us. “I am going home. You and your lady can stay here and rot. Or have a tea party. I really don’t care.”

“You’ll keep your oath or Zeus and Hera will know you for an oath breaker,” I call after him.

“You forget, madam, you are not the only one with wit.” He doesn’t look back at me. “I swore I’d have you or none, and after this morning, I will gladly choose none.”

He’s safe. It’s all that matters. I tell myself it is all that matters as Stepmother rages at me, as she rages at Koré, as she slaps us and shakes us and drags us down the stairs to lock us in the cellar.

Anax is safe, and I cannot stop thinking of his eyes and his voice as I betrayed him, but he is safe. He walked away from this house and he will never, never come back to it.

Invisible fingers stroke my hair. I lean back, and curve my lips upward, and whisper, “I’m so happy to stay here, Mother.”

“What?” Koré says, and I flinch, remembering she is here with me. I have never been locked in the cellar with anyone else before.

“I said, I’m so glad I can stay here,” I say. “I talk to my mother whenever I feel lonely. Don’t they say that the dead watch over us?”

Koré looks over my shoulder, and then her eyes meet mine. I can see she’s guessing, and recklessly, I go on, “That’s why I’m always cheerful. Because she’s watching over me. And I know she’d want me to be happy.”

The air trembles around me with affectionate, inaudible laughter.

Koré’s eyes widen slightly. I can see she’s putting together my smiles and the rumors of demons and coming up with the truth, and I feel a sudden twist of fear because if she panics—

But she just nods slightly and straightens her shoulders. Even crouched in the cellar with a bruise on her cheek, she looks like an artwork: a princess of Troy, perhaps, mourning and yet stately among the ashes of her people.

For the first time, I don’t think of her poise and her beauty as a lie. She’s lived for years among demons and the ashes of her mother’s love without weeping. Now she knows about my mother’s ghost, and she doesn’t even blink.

In truth, she is as brave as a princess. And she deserves better than this house.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “that it didn’t work.”

“I will find another way to save Thea,” says Koré, and I believe her.

The air around me is still, clammy, and cold. I realize suddenly that my mother is worried—that she thinks I have been thwarted, disappointed. Fear sets my heart thudding and my voice chattering.

“But it was so amusing,” I say brightly, “to see Stepmother angry over such a little, little thing. And then she locked us down here, as if she thought we wouldn’t enjoy it. It makes me love her more than ever.”

Koré meets my eyes. And then she smiles, the perfect image of a gentle girl with a happy secret. “She’s never understood how sweet and quiet it is down here,” she says, in the same elegant, modulated voice that she uses to practice making small talk with the guests who never come.

Nobody has ever conspired with me before, and it’s a thrill almost as drunkenly delightful as telling the truth.

I will never leave this house, and I will never be free, and Anax will hate me forever. But my eyes meet Koré’s, and for a moment our smiles are almost real, and a wisp of happiness curls in my throat.

Locked away belowground, our only light the steady, dim glow of a Hermetic lamp, it’s hard to mark the passage of time. But I’m sure it’s hours later that Thea knocks on the door and says waveringly, “Koré? Are you there?”

Koré, who had leaned drowsing against the wall, bolts upright. “Thea,” she says, and for the first time I hear the urgency under her expressionless calm.

“I’m— Mother’s locked in her room now, she’s talking to herself—I’m going to let you out.”

“No,” says Koré. “Let it be. We’re all right in here, and Mother will calm soon enough.”

She stands by the door, not touching it, but her head tilts an infinite, yearning fraction toward her sister, and I wonder how all these years I never saw the desperate care in every line of her movement. I saw that she loved Stepmother, foolishly and without hope, but not how much she loved her sister.

“I’ve never seen her like this,” says Thea.

“She’s always angry,” says Koré, “and she’s always all right.”

“She’s not angry anymore,” says Thea. “I don’t think she’s just talking to herself. She’s . . . talking to Stepfather.” I hear a little wavering gasp; she’s nearly crying. “I’m scared.”

“Then go to your room and lock the door,” says Koré. “But Mother won’t hurt you. Don’t you realize you’re the favorite right now?” There’s a wry slant to her voice.

“Please let me get you out,” says Thea.

“No,” says Koré. “I am having a tea party with Maia and I can’t be bothered. Come back tomorrow morning.”

There’s a little thump that I am sure is Thea leaning her forehead against the door. “Maia?” she asks wistfully. “Can I get you out?”

And I wonder what is happening to my heart, because I hear the wistful longing in her voice and I don’t despise her; instead I think of Koré’s chill poise, and Stepmother’s heartlessness, and my own silences, and I realize how long she has been hoping that anyone, anyone would turn to her and smile.

“Tomorrow,” I say. “And then we’ll all have tea together in the garden.”

Koré’s gaze snaps to me, but she only says, “Yes. Now go.”

With a snuffle and a sigh, Thea leaves. Koré stays on her feet, looking down at me.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” she asks.

“I’m going to have tea in the garden,” I say. “Stepmother won’t get angry at her for that.”

“Halfway kindness,” she says flatly, “is worse than none.”

I have known for years that Thea longed to be friends with me, that it vexed her I would only obey her orders. But now I realize I might have actually hurt her. Koré’s hatred of me might have more than one reason.

Of course, it does not matter. Not when it’s so dangerous for anyone to love me. Koré, at last, understands how much.

“I’m only going to pour her tea like an obedient sister,” I say. “And, I hope, dance at her wedding.”

“If she comes to love you any more,” says Koré, “she will miss you far too much.”

“She’ll have you,” I say, and so it is settled between us that I will be kind to Thea but not encourage her, and together Koré and I will scheme a way for them to escape, and when my stepsisters are gone, they will never look back.

Then I will be utterly alone, except for my mother and the demons. It is the happiest ending I could ever wish, and thinking of it no longer makes me happy.

But for now, Koré is sitting down beside me and huddling against my shoulder for warmth. For now, there is the promise of tea in the garden and sly half-truths understood. For now, I have sisters, just a little, and that is far too comforting as I fall asleep.

The screaming wakes us.

For the first few moments, I think it is a dream. Nobody has been hurt in so long. I have been so careful. Mother, I am so very, very happy—

Then I realize that Koré is on her feet and flinging herself against the door and this is real. Thea’s screams are real.

It’s too late. Nobody has ever healed from seeing a demon, and as I think this, the screams die away.

If Thea’s lucky, she is dead now.

But Koré is still trying to batter down the door, and I can’t sit still and watch her desperation. Together we pound at the door until the old, rusty lock gives way and we stumble out into the hall.

I lean against the wall, gasping for breath, but Koré immediately bolts up the steps. She will only find Thea dead—or worse, clawing her face open while her eyes stare in silent, ceaseless agony. I should warn her, but she probably knows, and anyway, nothing will hold her back.

I was happy, I think. I was always happy with Thea. How can Mother have turned on her?

Perhaps it was an accident. And it doesn’t matter, because there is only one reason there are demons in the house, and that is me. Stomach roiling, mouth dry, I stagger after Koré.

I catch up with her on the second floor. Stepmother’s voice echoes from her room in a high, querulous rant. It does not sound like she is talking to herself, and we push our way into her room together.

“Koré,” says Stepmother, “maybe you can talk sense into the silly girl.”

But neither of us can speak.

Because I am lying huddled at Stepmother’s feet.

In the hallway of the duke’s palace was a mirror, and I caught a candlelit glance of myself in it as I walked into the ball. It’s as if that glance fell out of the mirror at Stepmother’s feet. Those are my thin, chapped hands; those are the sharp lines of my collarbones. That is how the demons pinned up my hair, taming the wavy brown mess into loops and curls; that is the shimmering gold dress they wove around my body; that is the red ribbon of the mask they gave me to tie around my face.

The girl raises her head, and that is my pointed chin, those are my thin, pale lips. Blood oozes down the side of her face from the edge of the mask.

“Koré,” she whispers hoarsely in my voice. But the way she shapes the word with desperate longing—

It’s Thea.

“The mask is stuck and she won’t hold still while I tear it off,” Stepmother says. “It can’t hurt that much.”

Blood drips from Thea’s face to the floor. One drop. Two.

“You bargained with the Gentle Lord,” says Koré, in the same lifeless, cultured voice that she says, I do like the weather lately.

“Now she’s exactly the same as that chit was when Lord Anax fell in love with her,” says Stepmother. “He can’t fail to marry her once the mask is off, but she won’t stop screaming. I did it all for her and the honor of our house, but she’s so ungrateful.”

Thea hunches away from her. But she doesn’t run, because she knows that would only make the punishment worse, and my throat closes up with horror. We should have saved her before she learned to cringe like that.

Koré tilts her head as if wanting to examine the room from every angle. Then she seizes my arm, and before I can get my balance back to resist, shoves me into Stepmother’s wardrobe and slams the doors shut on me. The latch goes click.

“Koré!” I shout, but my voice is drowned out by hers, loud and terrible and lovely:

“O Prince of Air and Darkness. O Silver-Tongued Deceiver. O Gentle Lord of all Arcadia! Let me make you a bargain.”

And he is there. I cannot see him—the darkness is absolute around me, except for one thread of dim light where the doors meet—but I know he is there from the way the air goes still around me, the way it burns cold against my skin.

“No,” says Thea, “Koré, don’t—”

At the same time, Stepmother begins, “What are you doing, you—”

“Silence,” says the Gentle Lord.

And there is silence. I cannot move my tongue, nor my fingers, nor shift my head from where it leans against the door, because his power has wrapped all around me, binding me in place until Koré completes her bargain.

“So,” he says after an endless moment. “Koré Alastorides. Are you ready to be your mother’s daughter?”

His voice is not a terrifying roar, nor a chilling hiss. It is warm and salt and sweet, like butter and blood and honey, and laughter trembles at the edges of his words.

“Let’s play no games,” says Koré. Her voice sounds like a statue that’s stood a thousand years, worn and weary but unbowed. “I want you to take back what my mother did to Thea.”

“Haven’t you heard the stories? I cannot ever ungrant a wish.”

“Then,” says Koré, “let me steal it.”

“How do you imagine that will work?” asks the Gentle Lord.

There’s a short silence. I know better than to hope that it’s because Koré is reconsidering. She already knows how this bargain will work. She’s seen her mother; she’s seen me. She knows what she is calling down on us, but she’s willing anyway.

There is always somebody willing.

“Set Thea free from this family.” Koré’s voice is low, deliberate. “Let her walk away healthy and whole and sane, never to be trapped in this house again. And for my price, give me the mask and the body Stepmother bought her. I’ll wear them to the end of my days.”

The Gentle Lord laughs softly. “Your price will be half of your dearest wish? That’s a clever equivocation. But it’s not enough. If you want me to grant that wish, you must pay with your sight as well.”

“Gladly,” says Koré.

“Then kiss my ring,” says the Gentle Lord, “and it will be so.”

I hear footsteps. A rustle of movement. And then he says, “Good-bye, Koré Alastorides.”

The air all around us sighs. I shudder and gasp as my body is my own to move again. Somebody falls to the ground.

Stepmother speaks up again, her voice jarringly shrill and human: “What have you done?”

There’s a little gasping noise. Like somebody choking on the sudden sensation of a new mouth and throat.

Then I hear Thea say in her real voice, “Who—who are you?”

A voice like mine says weakly, “It’s me. Koré. Your sister.”

“I don’t have a sister. I don’t—I don’t have a family.” Thea’s voice is high and panicked. “Where am I? Who are you?”

He’s taken her memories. He’s set her free from our family.

My throat clenches as I batter at the door of the wardrobe. I don’t know why my heart is pounding with this awful, tearing feeling. Thea has forgotten us all. She’s stopped her stupid yearning to be loved, the idiot desire that kept her trapped with us. I should be glad.

The latch gives way and I tumble out of the wardrobe onto the floor. Thea is at the doorway, struggling with Stepmother; when she sees me, she gives a little shriek and breaks free. Her footsteps echo as she flees down the hall.

Stepmother wobbles, then sits down heavily by Koré, who is still crouched on the floor.

“She didn’t deserve the honor of our name,” she says, her voice quiet and vicious. “She never deserved it. Any more than that woman’s brat does.” She shoots me a poisonous look; then her hand drops down to Koré’s shoulder. “But you’re true to me, darling. You were brave enough to take the face Lord Anax wants. You’ll come with me to the palace and—”

“No.” Koré pushes her mother’s hand aside. Her voice is low and dull. “I won’t marry him.”

“You’ll do as you’re told, young miss.”

“Thea isn’t here to save anymore.” Koré’s eyes are hidden by the mask, but I can see her mouth twist into a helpless parody of a smile. “I don’t have to do anything.”

And I realize she means to do nothing else, not even live. Koré isn’t as strong as I am. I know this; I think I have always known. She can live with pain, but not without hope. She won’t survive this loss.

Stepmother seizes the sides of the mask and hauls Koré up to her knees, drawing a little gasp of pain from her throat.

“You’re my daughter,” she says.

“You’re dead,” says Koré. “You died seven years ago. Just like me.”

I am silent. I am the wallpaper. I am smiling. I am exactly the same as every other time Stepmother has raged at us, but I feel like I am made of cobwebs and broken crockery. Because I remember Koré’s eyes meeting mine in the cellar and Thea’s voice through the door—the promise of tea on the lawn—and I realize only now that I love them. Now that Thea is gone and Koré is dying, I think I may have always loved them, and always wanted them to turn to me. And now it is too late.

“You died very bravely,” Koré whispers. “I’m sorry, Mother. I should have stopped you. But I was afraid.”

Stepmother snarls and shakes her by the mask; blood dribbles from the seam where flesh meets gold, but Koré doesn’t make any noise except short little gasps.

I don’t move. I can’t. Koré’s words have wrapped around me, holding me fast as the Gentle Lord’s power. The words I should have said years ago, but I was never strong enough to say: I should have stopped you. I’m sorry. You’re dead.

My cheeks are wet.

I should be strong enough. I am always strong enough. But now there are tears running down my cheeks, because I have lost Anax and my sisters, because they have suffered so much from me and none of them needed to. Nobody needed to suffer from my mother’s madness. Not if I had been brave or strong enough to say what Koré just did.

For years I have pitied myself because I had no way to make my mother’s spirit rest. Because her duty to make me happy would never be done. And I drove myself near to madness trying to protect people from her. But I never even let myself think that perhaps I should tell her to rest. Perhaps I should tell her that her duty was finished, that it was time for her to be dead.

I was afraid of her, but I was also afraid to lose her, even the last, desperate scraps of her. And now I am weeping, and those tears will call down the demons upon my family.

I stand. My body feels numb and hollow, but I don’t hesitate. I grab Stepmother’s arm and haul her back; she lets go of Koré and stumbles into the wall beside the window.

“You ruined us,” she snarls. “With your sly, fresh face, like her portrait come to life. How could he love me? How could I love him? With you there to remind us every day that I was second best?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry. Please leave the house. It isn’t safe anymore.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Now that we’re ruined, you’ll drive us out. But I won’t be a beggar.” She flings the casement open. “I’ll show you how a lady of this house can die.”

“Mother!” Koré screams. I lunge for Stepmother, but it’s too late: she flings herself out, and I only reach the window in time to see her sprawled on the cobblestones below, blood spattered around her head.

Horror claws at my throat. I cannot hesitate now. I grab Koré’s arm and pull her up. “Come,” I say, and drag her out of the room with me. She stumbles and clings to me: she’s afraid because she can’t see anymore.

I hate that she is afraid.

But nothing matters right now except keeping her close to me, because I can see the shadows crawling and writhing at the edges of my vision, and if I hold my newly twin sister close enough, perhaps my mother and the demons will be confused for just long enough.

We stumble into the kitchen. I find an oil can and a packet of matches, and then I drag Koré outside, into the garden. Toward the apple tree, whose pale blossoms are brighter than moonlight should make them, whose branches cast shadows darker than the night. It is lovely and terrible and home, and I drop to my knees amid the gnarled roots. Beside me, Koré falls to her hands and knees.

“Mother,” I whisper, “my darling mother, you’ve taken such good care of me. You’ve given me everything I ever asked for.”

The leaves rustle as she curls around me, caressing my cheeks, my neck, my arms. I lay one hand against the rough bark of the tree.

“Please, there’s just one more thing that I want. I want it more than anything else in all the world.”

And this is my final lie. Because I realize now that I want her to stay with me, even like this, twisted into a mindless, cruel ghost. I have wanted it—if not more than all the world—more than my nurse’s life, and the butler’s and the chambermaid’s. I have wanted it more than Koré and Thea and Stepmother. Even more than Anax.

But now it’s time for me to stop.

“Please die,” I say.

Her cold touch goes still. My heart pounds jaggedly in my throat, but I pour out the words like sugar and cream: “You’re already dead, but you’ve worked so hard and long for me anyway. Please rest. Please leave this tree and rest forever.”

I wait. For a few agonized heartbeats, her touch doesn’t move; it rests cold and heavy as guilt around my neck. Then she begins to stroke me again, to run her bodiless fingers through my hair as she did when I was a little child, and she would untangle me before bed.

Maybe she can’t stop. Maybe she can’t understand me. Or maybe my true mother has never been in this tree at all; maybe her soul rests in Elysium, and what lingers in the tree is not even her ghost but only an idiot whirlwind of love and protection and mine, mine, mine.

Koré’s fingers clench around my hand, human and heartbroken and warm.

“I’m sorry,” I say to my mother that was. “I love you.”

My fingers are steady as I pour the oil down the trunk of the tree, as I strike the match and lift it.

Fire roars up the trunk of the tree and into the branches, faster even than the oil should burn. The heat slams into my face and I drag Koré back. I would run, but then I see the demons, and horror roots me to the spot. They bleed out of the apple blossoms: little tendrils of black shadow that corkscrew and billow through the air like ink dropped into water.

My mother ruled them, and now they are free.

I am not mad yet. I know it is because they have not yet looked back at me, but I can feel their attention swinging toward me. I drop to the ground, pinning Koré underneath me; she struggles and I hiss, “Don’t move.” I shove a hand against her face, feel the mask, and remember she is safe: she cannot see. I squeeze my eyes shut, press my face into her shoulder, and wait.

Their attention crawls over my back and shoulders, ice-cold and multitudinous, like the feet of a thousand rats, like dribbles from an ocean of alien hatred. Suddenly I imagine—suddenly I know—that beyond the parchment dome of the sky waits an abyss of demons, and my body shakes as I wonder if the sky will tear like wet paper and let them flow through.

Mother, I want to call, Mother, save me—but my mother is twice dead and can protect me no longer. Tears squeeze out of my eyes, icy tears that don’t belong to me, and I know that even if I don’t see the demons, their constant, rushing presence will soon shred through the last walls of my mind.

Beneath me, Koré shudders and her hands clench around my arms, nails biting deep enough to draw my blood, which has not yet turned cold. She’s desperate and human and mine, and in the madness around us, she’s the only still point. But it’s not enough. Not enough.

And then something spreads over me, like a soft blanket or sudden silence. I can tell the demons are still somewhere near, but they are no longer scrabbling at my mind. Maybe they have shifted their attention. Maybe the last remnants of my mother’s ghost are huddled over me as I huddle over Koré in desperate, incomplete protection.

Whatever it is, it’s enough. The panic leeches from my body; I feel Koré go limp beneath me. From what seems like a very far distance, I hear crashes and the roar of flames. But we are safe, and in each other’s arms we fall asleep.

I wake up cold and stiff. It’s the chill gray hour before dawn. The birds have just begun to chirp; the tang of smoke is heavy in the air. Sometime during the night, I rolled off Koré; she lies beside me now, her foamy golden skirts spread across the grass, her golden mask glimmering faintly in the dim light.

I sit up and catch my breath. The entire house is a smoking ruin. The roof has collapsed; broken beams and shattered windows stand nakedly against the pale sky. I turn the other way and see my mother’s tree also destroyed: the trunk still stands, though charred black, but only a few twisted stumps survive of its branches.

I hear a step behind me.

“Good morning, Maia Alastorides,” says the Gentle Lord.

Fear sparks through my body, snapping my spine straight.

“Good morning,” I say breathlessly.

I don’t look back.

He laughs softly. “I am not that sort of demon. You can look on me and not go mad.”

“Considering my family’s record, I am not so sure of that.”

“It’s true, they made some very interesting bargains. Would you like to see if you can do better?”

He sounds as if we were all fascinating butterflies pinned to cards for his amusement. No doubt, to the prince of demons, that is all a human life can ever be.

“Is that why you came here?” I ask. “To collect us all?”

“No,” he says. “Your mother’s final death released the demons I had put into her care. They are what I came here to collect. But I always have ears for those in need. Tell me, Maia Alastorides. Isn’t there something you want more than anything else in the world?”

My throat clenches with grief, and I think that I finally understand my mother. Because there are things I want that badly. I want to find Thea, wherever she has fled, and give her back the sister she’s always adored. I want to heal Koré’s sight and peel away the mask and her false shape, so that she can spend just one day in freedom. I want—I want so very, very much—to undo the harm I did Anax, and to heal the bitterness that’s festered in his heart for years.

My mother knew that wishes are always bought with pain. She thought she could shield me from the price, but she was wrong. Maybe I could do better. Maybe I could word my bargain carefully enough that nobody I loved would pay. But somebody would. And I know one thing my mother never did. I know what it is like to live every day and every hour by the fruits of someone else’s wretched bargain. To see people suffer and know, They suffer because I am loved.

I would not do that to the ones I love. Not for anything in the whole wide world.

“There are a lot of things I want,” I say quietly and deliberately. “But I think I will keep what I have.”

The Gentle Lord laughs again. “Then you are wiser than many. Farewell, Maia. I do not think we will meet again.”

And he is gone. I feel it in a sudden relaxation of the air. I let out a great sigh and climb stiffly to my feet. Koré is still asleep; I will need to wake her soon, and then—

Then we will need to find our way in the world with no family, no money, no help. I try to imagine the days ahead, and it’s not fear of ruin that makes my chest ache; it’s fear of the unimaginable blank with every familiar part of life gone. I never thought that freedom would feel so much like grief.

And that’s when I see Anax walk around the side of the house. He’s pale and a little unsteady on his feet; when he sees me, he stares for a few moments as if convinced I’m not real.

“Maia,” he says, and then we’re both running at each other, and a moment later I’m in his arms. He’s squeezing me so tightly I can barely breathe, but it doesn’t matter because he came back, he doesn’t hate me, and he’s whispering things like safe and sorry and dear into my hair.

“Are you all right?” he asks when he finally releases me. “I came back, I saw the house—I thought you were dead.” He’s no longer clutching me to his chest, but he has one hand on my waist and another cupping my chin, and I’m grasping his arms in return. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to let go of him again.

“I’m all right,” I say. “Truly.”

And for the very first time, those words are the truth.

“I found your sister,” he says. “She was wandering the streets. She didn’t even know her own name. If I hadn’t met her at the ball—”

I shudder in fear and relief at once. If he hadn’t remembered that brief introduction, he wouldn’t have known her, and she would be wandering still. She could have been lost forever.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

“I took her to the palace. She isn’t hurt otherwise, but she couldn’t tell me what happened, and when I got back, the house was on fire. Nobody could get close. I thought you were dead.”

“I lied,” I blurt out. “When I said I didn’t love you. I’m sorry.”

“I know,” he says. “I knew as soon as I took two minutes to think about it. I was on my way back to your house when I found Thea. I was going to sit on your doorstep and wait as long as it took you to tell me the truth. And I was going to tell you how sorry I was for all the things I said—”

Then I do let go of his arms, so I can grab him by the neck and pull him into a kiss.

“That’s your punishment,” I say when our lips finally part. “You have to let me kiss you as much as I want.”

He laughs. “Does that mean you’ve decided to marry me?”

“Yes,” I say, and it’s a while before we speak again.

Finally I take him by the hand and draw him back toward the ruined apple tree. “I need you to meet my other sister,” I say. “Properly, this time. I love her very much, and you’re going to help me take care of her.”

“If she can make you admit to loving her,” he says, “she must be very—”

Then he sees Koré and stops.

“Do you know,” he says after a moment, “your house gets stranger every time I visit?”

I laugh shakily. “You have not heard the half of it.”

But now I can tell him. Now I can speak to him day after day and not be afraid. I can speak to the whole world, if I want.

And every word I say will be true.

Excerpt from Cruel Beauty

Turn the page for a sneak peek of Cruel Beauty.

I was raised to marry a monster.

The day before the wedding, I could barely breathe. Fear and fury curdled in my stomach. All afternoon I skulked in the library, running my hands over the leather spines of books I would never touch again. I leaned against the shelves and wished I could run, wished I could scream at the people who had made this fate for me.

I eyed the shadowed corners of the library. When my twin sister, Astraia, and I were little, we heard the same terrible story as other children: Demons are made of shadow. Don’t look at the shadows too long or a demon might look back. It was even more horrible for us because we regularly saw the victims of demon attacks, screaming or mute with madness. Their families dragged them in through the hallways and begged Father to use his Hermetic arts to cure them.

Sometimes he could ease their pain, just a little. But there was no cure for the madness inflicted by demons.

And my future husband—the Gentle Lord—was the prince of demons.

He was not like the vicious, mindless shadows that he ruled. As befit a prince, he far surpassed his subjects in power: he could speak and take such form that mortal eyes could look on him and not go mad. But he was a demon still. After our wedding night, how much of me would be left?

I heard a wet cough and whirled around. Behind me stood Aunt Telomache, thin lips pressed together, one wisp of hair escaping from her bun.

“We will dress for dinner.” She said it in the same placid, matter-of-fact way that she had said last night, You are the hope of our people. Last night, and a thousand times before.

Her voice sharpened. “Are you listening, Nyx? Your father has arranged a farewell dinner for you. Don’t be late.”

I wished I could seize her bony shoulders and shake them. It was Father’s fault that I was leaving.

“Yes, Aunt,” I whispered.

Father wore his red silk waistcoat; Astraia, her ruffled blue dress with the five petticoats; Aunt Telomache, her pearls; and I put on my best black mourning dress, the one with satin bows. The food was just as grand: candied almonds, pickled olives, stuffed sparrows, and Father’s best wine. One of the servants even strummed at a lute in the corner as if we were at a duke’s banquet. I almost could have pretended that Father was trying to show how much he loved me, or at least how much he honored my sacrifice. But I knew, as soon as I saw Astraia sitting red-eyed at the table, that the dinner was all for her sake.

So I sat straight-backed in my chair, barely able to choke down my food but with a smile fixed on my face. Sometimes the conversation lagged, and I heard the heavy ticktock of the grandfather clock in the sitting room, counting off each second that brought me closer to my husband. My stomach roiled, but I smiled wider and gritted out cheerful nothings about how my marriage was an adventure, how I was so excited to fight the Gentle Lord, and by the spirit of our dead mother, I swore she would be avenged.

That last made Astraia droop again, but I leaned forward and asked her about the village boy always lingering beneath her window—Adamastos or some such—and she smiled and laughed soon enough. Why shouldn’t she laugh? She could marry a mortal man and live to old age in freedom.

I knew my resentment was unfair—surely she laughed for my sake, as I smiled for hers—but it still bubbled at the back of my mind all through dinner, until every smile, every glance she darted at me scraped across my skin. My left hand clenched under the table, nails biting into my palm, but I managed to smile back at her and pretend.

At last the servants cleared away the empty custard dishes. Father adjusted his spectacles and looked at me. I knew that he was about to sigh and repeat his favorite saying: “Duty is bitter to taste but sweet to drink.” And I knew that he’d be thinking more about how he was sacrificing one half of his wife’s legacy than how I was sacrificing life and freedom.

I surged to my feet. “Father, may I please be excused?”

Surprise caught him for a moment before he replied, “Of course, Nyx.”

I bobbed my head. “Thank you so much for dinner.”

Then I tried to flee, but in a moment Aunt Telomache was at my elbow. “Dear,” she began softly.

And Astraia was at my other elbow. “I can talk to her for just a minute, please, can’t I?” she said, and without waiting for an answer she dragged me up to her bedroom.

As soon as the door had closed behind us, she turned to me. I managed not to flinch, but I couldn’t meet her eyes. Astraia didn’t deserve anyone’s anger, least of all mine. She didn’t. But for the past few years, whenever I looked at her, all I could see was the reason that I would have to face the Gentle Lord.

One of us had to die. That was the bargain Father had struck, and it was not her fault that he had picked her to be the one who lived, but every time she smiled, I still thought: She smiles because she is safe. She is safe because I am going to die.

I used to believe that if I just tried hard enough, I could learn to love her without resentment, but finally I had accepted that it was impossible. So now I stared at one of the framed cross-stitches on the wall—a country cottage choked in roses—and prepared myself to lie and smile and lie until she had finished whatever tender moment she wanted and I could crawl into the safety of my room.

But when she said, “Nyx,” her voice was ragged and weak. Without meaning to, I looked at her—and now she had no smile, no pretty tears, only a fist pressed to her mouth as she tried to keep control. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know you must hate me,” and her voice broke.

Suddenly I remembered one morning when we were ten and she dragged me out of the library because our old cat Penelope wouldn’t eat and wouldn’t drink and Father can fix her, can’t he? Can’t he? But she had already known the answer.

“No.” I grabbed her shoulders. “No.” The lie felt like broken glass in my throat, but anything was better than hearing that hopeless grief and knowing I had caused it.

“But you’re going to die—” She hiccupped on a sob. “Because of me—”

“Because of the Gentle Lord and Father’s bargain.” I managed to meet her eyes and summon a smile. “And who says I’ll die? Don’t you believe your own sister can defeat him?”

Her own sister was lying to her: there was no possible way for me to defeat my husband without destroying myself as well. But I’d been telling her the lie that I could kill him and come home for far too long to stop now.

“I wish I could help you,” she whispered.

You could ask to take my place.

I pushed the thought away. All Astraia’s life, Father and Aunt Telomache had coddled and protected her. They had taught her over and over that her only purpose was to be loved. It wasn’t her fault that she’d never learnt to be brave, much less that they’d picked her to live instead of me. And anyway, how could I wish to live at the price of my own sister’s life?

Astraia might not be brave, but she wanted me to live. And here I was, wishing her dead in my place.

If one of us had to die, it ought to be the one with poison in her heart.

“I don’t hate you,” I said, and I almost believed it. “I could never hate you,” I said, remembering how she clung to me after we buried Penelope beneath the apple tree. She was my twin, born only minutes after me, but in every way that mattered, she was my little sister. I had to protect her—from the Gentle Lord but also from me, from the endless envy and resentment that seethed beneath my skin.

Astraia sniffed. “Really?”

“I swear by the creek in back of the house,” I said, our private childhood variation on an oath by the river Styx. And while I said the words I was telling the truth. Because I remembered spring mornings when she helped me escape lessons to run through the woods, summer nights catching glowworms, autumn afternoons acting out the story of Persephone in the leaf pile, and winter evenings sitting by the fire when I told her everything I had studied that day and she fell asleep five times but would never admit to being bored.

Astraia pulled me forward into a hug. Her arms wrapped under my shoulder blades and her chin nestled against my shoulder, and for a moment the world was warm and safe and perfect.

Then Aunt Telomache knocked on the door. “Nyx, darling?”

“Coming!” I called, pulling away from Astraia.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. Her voice was still soft but I could tell her grief was healing, and I felt the first trickle of returning resentment.

You wanted to comfort her, I reminded myself.

“I love you,” I said, because it was true no matter what else festered in my heart, and left before she could reply.

Aunt Telomache waited for me in the hallway, her lips pursed. “Are you done chatting?”

“She’s my sister. I should say good-bye.”

“You’ll say good-bye tomorrow,” she said, drawing me toward my own bedroom. “Tonight you need to learn about your duties.”

I know my duty, I wanted to say, but followed her silently. I had borne Aunt Telomache’s preaching for years; it couldn’t get any worse now.

“Your wifely duties,” she added, opening the door to my room, and I realized that it could get infinitely worse.

Her explanation took nearly an hour. All I could do was sit still on the bed, my skin crawling and my face burning. As she droned on in her flat, nasal tones, I stared at my hands and tried to shut out her voice. The words Is that what you do with Father every night, when you think no one is watching? curled behind my teeth, but I swallowed them.

“And if he kisses you on— Are you listening, Nyx?”

I raised my head, hoping my face had stayed blank. “Yes, Aunt.”

“Of course you’re not listening.” She sighed, straightening her spectacles. “Just remember this: do whatever it takes to make him trust you. Or your mother will have died in vain.”

“Yes, Aunt.”

She kissed my cheek. “I know you’ll do well.” Then she stood. She paused in the doorway with a damp huff—she always fancied herself so beautifully poignant, but she sounded like an asthmatic cat.

“Thisbe would be so proud of you,” she murmured.

I stared straight ahead at the cabbage-roses-and-ribbons wallpaper. I could see every curlicue of the hideous pattern with perfect clarity, because Father had spent the money to give me a Hermetic lamp that shone bright and clear with captured daylight. He would use his arts to improve my room, but not to save me.

“I’m sure Mother’s proud of you too,” I said evenly. Aunt Telomache didn’t know that I knew about her and Father, so it was a safe barb. I hoped it hurt.

Another wet sigh. “Good night,” she said, and the door shut behind her.

I picked the Hermetic lamp off my bedside table. The bulb was made of frosted glass and shaped like a cabbage rose. I turned it over. On the underside of the brass base were etched the swirling lines of a Hermetic diagram. It was a simple one: just four interlocking sigils, those abstract designs whose angles and curves invoke the power of the four elements. With the lamp’s light directed down at my lap, I couldn’t make out all the lines—but I could feel the soft, pulsing buzz of the working’s four elemental hearts as they invoked earth, air, fire, and water in a careful harmony to catch sunlight all day and release it again when the lamp was switched on at night.

Everything in the physical world arises from the dance of the four elements, their mating and division. This principle is one of the first Hermetic teachings. So for a Hermetic working to have power, its diagram must invoke all four elements in four “hearts” of elemental energy. And for that power to be broken, all four hearts must be nullified.

I touched a fingertip to the base of the lamp and traced the looping lines of the Hermetic sigil to nullify the lamp’s connection to water. On such a small working, I didn’t need to actually inscribe the sigil with chalk or a stylus; the gesture was enough. The lamp flickered, its light turning red as the working’s Heart of Water broke, leaving it connected to only three elements.

As I started on the next sigil, I remembered the countless evenings I had spent practicing with Father, nullifying Hermetic workings such as this. He wrote one diagram after another on a wax tablet and set me to break them all. As I practiced, he read aloud to me; he said it was so that I could learn to trace the sigils despite distractions, but I knew he had another purpose. He only read me stories of heroes who died accomplishing their duty—as if my mind were a wax tablet and the stories were sigils, and by tracing them onto me often enough, he could mold me into a creature of pure duty and vengeance.

His favorite was the story of Lucretia, who assassinated the tyrant who raped her, then killed herself to wipe out the shame. So she won undying fame as the woman of perfect virtue who freed Rome. Aunt Telomache loved that story too and had more than once hinted that it should comfort me, because Lucretia and I were so alike.

But Lucretia’s father hadn’t pushed her into the tyrant’s bed. Her aunt hadn’t instructed her on how to please him.

I traced the last nullifying sigil and the lamp went out. I dropped it in my lap and hugged myself, back straight and stiff, staring into the darkness. My nails dug into my arms, but inside I felt only a cold knot. In my head, Aunt Telomache’s words tangled with the lessons Father had taught me for years.

Try to move your hips. Every Hermetic working must bind the four elements. If you can’t manage anything else, lie still. As above, so below. It may hurt, but don’t cry. As within, so without. Only smile.

You are the hope of our people.

My fingers writhed, clawing up and down my arms, until I couldn’t bear it anymore. I grabbed the lamp and flung it at the floor. The crash sliced through my head; it left me gasping and shivering, like all the other times I let my temper out, but the voices stopped.

“Nyx?” Aunt Telomache called through the door.

“It’s nothing. I knocked over my lamp.”

Her footsteps pattered closer, and then the door cracked open. “Are you—”

“I’m all right. The maids can clean it up tomorrow.”

“You really—”

“I need to be rested if I’m to use all your advice tomorrow,” I said icily, and then she finally shut the door.

I fell back against my pillows. What was it to her? I wouldn’t ever need that lamp again.

This time the cold that burned through my middle was fear, not anger.

Tomorrow I will marry a monster.

I thought of little else, all the rest of the night.

They say that once the sky was blue, not parchment.

They say that once, if ships sailed east from Arcadia, they would reach a continent ten times larger—not plunge with the seawater down into an infinite void. In those days, we could trade with other lands; what we did not grow, we could import, instead of trying to make it with complicated Hermetic workings.

They say that once there was no Gentle Lord living in the ruined castle up on the hill. In those days, his demons did not infest every shadow; we did not pay him tribute to keep them (mostly) at bay. And he did not tempt mortals to bargain with him for magical favors that always turned to their undoing.

This is what they say:

Long ago, the island of Arcadia was only a minor province in the empire of Romana-Graecia. It was a half-wild land populated only by imperial garrisons and a rude, unlettered people who hid in thickets to worship their old, uncivilized gods and refused to call their land anything except Anglia. But when the empire fell to barbarians—when the Athena Parthenos was smashed and the seven hills burnt—Arcadia alone remained unravaged. For Prince Claudius, the youngest son of the emperor, fled there with his family. He rallied the people and the garrisons, beat back the barbarians, and created a shining kingdom.

No emperor before nor king after was ever so wise in judgment, so terrible in battle, so beloved of gods and men. They say that the god Hermes himself appeared to Claudius and taught him the Hermetic arts, revealing secrets that the philosophers of Romana-Graecia had never discovered.

Some say that Hermes even granted him the power to command demons. If so, then Claudius was truly the most powerful king that ever lived. Demons—those scraps of idiot malice, begotten in the depths of Tartarus—are as old as the gods, and a few have always escaped their prison to crawl through the shadows of our world. No one but the gods can stop them and no one at all can reason with them, for any mortal who sees them goes mad, and demons only desire to feast on human fear. Yet Claudius, they say, could bind them into jars with a word, so that in his kingdom nobody needed to fear the dark.

And perhaps that was where the trouble began. Arcadia was greatly blessed, and sooner or later, every blessing has a price.

For nine generations, the heirs of Claudius ruled Arcadia with wisdom and justice, defending the island and keeping the ancient lore alive. But then the gods turned against the kings, offended by some secret sin. Or the demons that Claudius had bound at last broke free. Or (but few dare say this) the gods died and left the gates of Tartarus unlocked. Whatever the reason, what happened is this: The ninth king died in the night. Before his son could be crowned the next morning, the Gentle Lord, the prince of demons, descended upon the castle. In one hour of fire and wrath he killed the prince and rent the castle stone from stone. And then he dictated to us the new terms of our existence.

It could have been worse. He did not seek to rule us like a tyrant, nor destroy us like the barbarians. He only asked for tribute, in exchange for holding his demons in check. He only offered his magical, wish-granting bargains to those who were foolish enough to ask for them.

But it was bad enough. For on the night that the Gentle Lord destroyed the line of kings, he also sundered Arcadia from the rest of the world. No more can we see the blue sky that is the face of Father Uranus; no more is our land joined to the bones of Mother Gaia.

Now there is only a parchment dome above us, adorned with a painted mockery of the real sun. There is only a void about and below us. In every shadow, the demons wait for us, a hundred times more common than they were before. And if the gods can still hear us, they no longer raise up women to prophesy on their behalf as sibyls, nor have they answered our prayers for deliverance.

When light glowed through the lacy edges of the curtains, I gave up trying to sleep. My eyes felt swollen and gritty as I staggered to the window, but I ripped the curtains apart and squinted stubbornly at the sky. Just outside my window grew a pair of birch trees, and sometimes on windy nights their branches clattered against the panes of glass; but between their leaves I could see the hills, and three rays of the sun peeked over their dark silhouette.

The ancient poems, written before the Sundering, said that the sun—the true sun, chariot of Helios—was so bright it blinded all who looked upon it. They spoke of rosy-fingered Dawn, who painted the east in shades of pink and gold. They praised the boundless blue dome of the sky.

Not so for us. The wavy, golden rays of the sun looked like a gilt illumination in one of Father’s old manuscripts; they glinted, but their light was less painful than a candle. Once the main body of the sun was risen over the hillside, it would be uncomfortable to look upon, but no more so than the frosted glass of a Hermetic lamp. For most of the light came from the sky itself, a dome of cream veined with darker cream, like parchment, through which light shone as if from a distant fire. Dawn was no more than the brighter zone of the sky rising above the hills, the light colder than at noon but otherwise the same.

“Study the sky but never love it,” Father had told Astraia and me a thousand times. “It is our prison and the symbol of our captor.”

But it was the only sky that I had ever known, and after today I would never walk beneath it again. I would be a prisoner in my husband’s castle, and whether I failed or succeeded in my mission—especially if I succeeded—there was no way I could ever escape those walls. So I stared at the parchment sky and the gilt sun while my eyes watered and my head ached.

When I was much younger, I sometimes imagined that the sky was an illustration in a book, that we were all nestled safely between the covers, and that if I could only find the book and open it, we would all escape without having to fight the Gentle Lord. I had gotten halfway to believing my fancy when I said to Father one evening, “Suppose the sky is really—” And he had asked me if I thought that telling fairy tales would save anyone.

In those days, I had still half believed in fairy tales. I had still hoped—not that I would escape my marriage but that first I could attend the Lyceum, the great university in the capital city of Sardis. I had heard about the Lyceum all my life, for it was the birthplace of the Resurgandi, the organization of scholars that was officially founded to further Hermetic research. I was only nine when Father told Astraia and me the secret truth: after receiving their charter, in the very deepest room of the Lyceum’s library, the first Magister Magnum and his nine followers swore a secret oath to destroy the Gentle Lord and undo the Sundering. For two hundred years, all the Resurgandi had labored toward that end.

But that was not why I longed to attend the Lyceum. I was obsessed with it because it was where scholars had first used Hermetic techniques to solve the shortages forced upon us by the Sundering. A hundred years ago, they had learnt to grow silkworms and coffee plants despite the climate and four times as fast as in nature. Fifty years ago, a mere student had discovered how to preserve daylight in a Hermetic lamp. I wanted to be like that student—to master the Hermetic principles and make my own discoveries, not just memorize the techniques Father thought useful—to achieve something besides the fate Father had given me. And I had calculated that if I completed every year’s worth of study in nine months, I could be ready by age fifteen, and I would have two years for the Lyceum before I had to face my doom.

I had tried telling Aunt Telomache about that idea, and she asked me witheringly if I thought that I had time to waste growing silkworms when my mother’s blood cried out for vengeance.

“Good morning, miss.”

The voice was barely more than a whisper. I spun around to see the door cracked open and my maid Ivy peeking through. Then my other maid, Elspeth, shoved past her and bustled into the room with a breakfast tray.

There was no more time for regrets. It was time to be strong—if only my head would stop aching. I gratefully accepted the little cup of coffee and drank it down in three gulps, even the grounds at the bottom, then handed it back to Ivy and asked for another. By the time I finished the breakfast itself, I had drunk two more cups and felt ready to face the wedding preparations.

First I went down to the bathroom. Two years ago, Aunt Telomache had decorated it with potted ferns and purple curtains; the wallpaper was a pattern of clasped hands and violets. It felt like an odd place for the ceremonial cleansing, but Aunt Telomache and Astraia waited on either side of the claw-foot tub with pitchers. Last winter, Father had installed the new heated plumbing, but for the rite I had to be washed in water from one of the sacred springs; so I shivered as Aunt Telomache dumped ice-cold water over my head and Astraia chanted the maiden’s hymn.

In between verses, Astraia darted shy smiles at me, as if to check whether she was still forgiven. No, she wants to make sure you’re all right, I told myself, so I clenched my chattering teeth and smiled back. Whatever her concern, by the end of the ceremony she seemed entirely comforted; she sang out the last verse as if she wanted the whole world to hear, then threw a towel around my body and gave me a quick hug. As she rubbed me briskly with the towel, she stopped looking at my face. I thought, Finally, and let my aching smile slip.

Once I was dry and wrapped in a robe, we went to the family shrine. This part of the morning was comforting, for I had gone into this little room and knelt on the red-and-gold mosaics a thousand times before. The musty, spicy smell of candle smoke and old incense sparked memories of childhood prayers: Father’s solemn face flickering in the candlelight, Astraia with her nose wrinkled and eyes squeezed shut as she prayed. Today the cold morning light already glimmered through the narrow windows; it glinted off the polished floor and made my eyes water.

First we prayed to Hermes, patron of our family and the Resurgandi. Then I cut off a lock of hair and laid it before the statue of Artemis, patron of maidens.

This time tomorrow I will not be a maiden. My mouth was dry and I stumbled over the prayer of farewell.

Next were the prayers to the Lares, the hearth gods who protect a home from sickness and bad luck, prevent grain from spoiling, and aid women in childbed. Our family had three of them, represented by three little bronze statues, their faces worn and green with age. Aunt Telomache laid a dish of olives and dried wheat before them, and I added another lock of hair, since I was leaving them behind: tonight I would belong to the Gentle Lord’s house and whatever Lares he might possess.

What gods would a demon serve, and what would I be required to offer them?

Finally we lit incense and laid a bowl of figs before the gilt-framed portrait of my mother. I bowed my face to the floor. I had prayed to her spirit a thousand times before, and the words rolled automatically through my head.

O my mother, forgive me that I do not remember you. Guide me on all the ways that I must walk. Grant me strength, that I may avenge you. You bore me nine months, you gave me breath, and I hate you.

The last thought slipped out as easily as breathing. I flinched, feeling as if I had shouted the words aloud, but when I glanced sideways at Astraia and Aunt Telomache, their eyes were still closed in prayer.

My stomach felt hollow. I knew that I should take the wicked words back. I should weep at the impiety I had shown to my mother. I should leap up and sacrifice a goat to atone for my sin.

My eyes burned, my knees ached, and every heartbeat carried me closer to a monster. My face stayed humbly pressed to the floor.

I hate you, I prayed silently. Father only bargained for your sake. If you had not been so weak, so desperate, I would not be doomed. I hate you, Mother, forever and ever.

Just thinking the words left me shaking. I knew it was wrong and my throat tightened with guilt, but before I could say anything else, Aunt Telomache dragged me to my feet and out of the room.

I’m sorry, I mouthed over my shoulder as I crossed the threshold. The morning light had left the statues and picture shadowed; from the doorway, I could no longer see the gods’ or my mother’s faces.

We went back up to my room, where the maids waited. Walking in, I caught a glimpse of Ivy’s face looking pale and pinched with worry—but the moment she saw me, she smiled hugely. Elspeth only gave me a bored look and opened the wardrobe. She drew out my wedding dress and whirled to face me, the dress’s red skirt swirling in a frothy wave.

“Your wedding dress, miss,” she said. “Isn’t it lovely?” Her smile was all bright teeth and wormwood.

Elspeth was peerless when it came to hair and wardrobes, but she performed every one of her duties with that harsh ironic smile. She hated the Resurgandi for being masters of the Hermetic arts yet never raising a hand against the Gentle Lord. She hated my father most of all, because it was his duty to offer the village’s tithe, the tribute of wine and grain that would persuade the Gentle Lord to leash his demons. Yet six years ago, though Father swore he made the offering correctly, her brother Edwin was found whimpering and trying to claw his skin off, his eyes the inky black of someone who had looked on demons and gone mad. She was glad to see me wed, because it meant that Leonidas Triskelion would lose someone just as dear.

I couldn’t blame her. She couldn’t know that for two hundred years, the Resurgandi had been secretly trying to destroy the Gentle Lord, any more than she could know how little Father would miss me. Like all the folk in the village, she knew only that Leonidas, the mighty Hermeticist, had bargained with the Gentle Lord like any common fool, and now, like any common fool, he must pay. It was justice; why shouldn’t she rejoice?

“It’s beautiful,” I murmured.

Ivy blushed as they dressed me, and the dress was worth blushing over: deep crimson like any other wedding dress, but far too gaudy and enticing. The skirt was a mass of ruffles and rosettes; the puffy sleeves left my shoulders bare, while the tight black bodice propped up my breasts and exposed them. There was no corset or shift underneath; they were dressing me so I could be stripped as quickly as possible.

Elspeth snickered as she buttoned up the front. “No use making a new husband wait, eh?”

I looked blankly at Aunt Telomache and she raised her eyebrows, as if to say, What did you expect?

“I’m sure he’ll fall in love with you at first sight,” said Ivy bravely. Her hands were shaking as she adjusted my skirt, so I managed to scrape up a smile for her. It seemed to calm her a little.

For the next few minutes, we all pretended that I was happy to marry. Elspeth and Ivy giggled and whispered; Astraia clapped her hands and hummed snatches of love songs; Aunt Telomache nodded, lips pursed in satisfaction. I stood quiet and compliant as a doll. If I stared very hard at the wall and reviewed the Hermetic sigils in my head, the bustle around me faded. I still noticed everything they did, but I didn’t have to feel much about it.

They combed my hair and pinned it up, hung rubies in my ears and around my neck, painted rouge on my lips and cheeks, and anointed my wrists and throat with musk. Finally they hustled me in front of the mirror.

A gleaming, crimson-clad lady stared back at me. Until this day, I had worn only the plain black of mourning, even though Father had told us when we were twelve that we could dress as we pleased. Everybody thought that I did it because I was such a pious daughter, but I simply hated pretending that everything was all right.

“You look like a dream.” Astraia slid her arm around my waist, smiling tremulously at our reflections.

Everybody said that Astraia was the very image of our mother, and certainly she could not have gotten her looks anywhere else: the plump, dimpled cheeks, the pouting lips, the snub nose and dark curls. But I might have been born straight out of my father’s head like Athena: I had his high cheekbones, his aristocratic nose, his straight black hair. In a rare burst of kindness, Aunt Telomache had once told me that while Astraia was “pretty,” I was “regal”; but everyone who saw Astraia smiled at her, while people only nodded at me and said my father must be proud.

Proud, yes. But not loving. Even when we were very young, it was clear that Astraia took after Mother, and I after Father. So there was never any question which one of us would pay for his sin.

Aunt Telomache clapped her hands. “That’s enough, girls,” she said. “Say good-bye and run along.”

Elspeth’s eyes raked me up and down. “You look pretty enough to eat, miss. May the gods smile on your marriage.” She shrugged, as if to say it was no concern of hers, and left.

Ivy hugged me and slipped a little straw man into my hand. “It’s Brigit’s son, young Tom-a-Lone,” she whispered. “For luck.” She whirled away after Elspeth.

I crushed the charm in my hand. Tom-a-Lone was a hedge-god, the peasants’ lord of death and love. The village folk might sacrifice to Zeus or Hera sometimes, when custom demanded it, but for sick children, uncertain crops, and unrequited love, they prayed to the hedge-gods, the deities they had worshipped long before Romana-Graecian ships ever landed on their shores. Scholars agreed that the hedge-gods were merely superstition, or else garbled versions of the celestial gods—that Tom-a-Lone was but another form of Adonis, Brigit another name for Aphrodite—and that either way, the only rational course was to worship the gods under their true names.

Certainly the hedge-gods hadn’t saved Elspeth’s brother from the demons. But the gods of Olympus hardly seemed inclined to rescue me, either.

With a sigh, Aunt Telomache unfolded my fist and plucked out the crumpled Tom-a-Lone.

“Still they cling to their superstitions,” she muttered, and flung it into the fireplace. “You would think Romana-Graecia conquered them last week and not twelve hundred years ago.”

And from the way Aunt Telomache talked, you would think she was descended in a straight line from Prince Claudius, when in fact she and Mother came from a family that was only three generations removed from being peasants. But there was no use pointing that out to her.

“You don’t know,” Astraia protested. “It might bring good luck, after all.”

“And then the Kindly Ones will grant her three wishes, I suppose?” said Aunt Telomache, sounding more indulgent than annoyed. Then she turned a stony gaze on me. “I trust I don’t need to remind you how important this day is. But it is easy for the young to forget such things.”

No, it’s easy for you, I thought. Tonight you will fondle my father while I am the plaything of a demon.

“Yes, Aunt.” I looked down at my hands.

She sighed, eyelids drooping in preparation for another tender moment. “If only dear Thisbe—”

“Aunt,” said Astraia, who was now standing beside the chest of drawers. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Her hands were behind her back, her smile as big and bright as the time she had eaten all the blackberry tarts.

“No, child—”

“So isn’t it lucky I remembered?” With a flourish, she pulled out from behind her back a slim steel knife hanging in a black leather harness.

For an instant, Aunt Telomache stared at the knife as if it were a big, fat spider. I felt as if I had swallowed that spider, as if it were crawling down my gullet with poisonous legs. That was how lying felt: all the lies I had swallowed and spat out again, vile and empty as the husks of dead insects, all for the sake of making sure that precious Astraia could stay happy. And this knife was the most important lie in our family.

“I had it specially made,” Astraia went on earnestly. “It’s never cut a living thing. Just to be safe, it’s never been used at all, not even tested. Olmer swore it hasn’t, and you know he never lies.”

Unlike the rest of us, who had been telling her for the last four years that there was a chance I could kill the Gentle Lord and walk away.

“You do realize,” Aunt Telomache said gently, “that it’s possible Nyx won’t get a chance to use the knife? And”—she paused delicately—“we can’t be sure it will work.”

Astraia raised her chin. “The Rhyme is true, I know it. And even if it isn’t, why shouldn’t Nyx try? I don’t see how stabbing the Gentle Lord could possibly hurt.”

It would show him that I was not broken and cowed, that I had come as a saboteur to destroy him. It would likely make him kill or imprison me, and then I would never have a chance to carry out Father’s actual plan. Even if the Rhyme were true—even if—trying to fulfill it was still a bad bet, when the Resurgandi might never have another chance like me again.

“I don’t know why you’re so reluctant to trust Nyx,” Astraia added in an undertone. “Isn’t she your dearest sister’s daughter?”

Of course she didn’t understand. She’d never had to think through this plan, weighing every risk because she had only one life to lose. She’d never woken up in the night, choking on a dream of a shadow-husband who tore her to pieces, and thought, It doesn’t matter how he hurts me. I’m the only chance to save us from the demons.

Aunt Telomache met my eyes, and the flat set of her mouth spoke as clearly as words: Indulge her for now, but you know what to do.

Then she pulled Astraia close and dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Oh, child, you’re an example to us all.”

Astraia wriggled happily—she was almost a cat, she liked so much to be petted—then pulled free and gave me the knife, smiling as if the Gentle Lord were already defeated. As if nothing were wrong. And for her nothing ever would be wrong. Just for me.

“Thank you,” I murmured. I could feel the rage pushing at me like a swell of cold water, and I didn’t dare meet her eyes as I took the knife and harness. I tried to remember the panic that burned through me last night, when I thought her heart was broken.

She was comforted in minutes. Do you think she’ll mourn you any longer after your wedding?

“Here, I’ll help!” She dropped to her knees and strapped the knife to my thigh. “I’m sure you can do it. I know you can. Maybe you’ll be back by teatime!” She beamed up at me.

I had to smile back. It felt like I was baring my teeth, but she didn’t seem to notice. Of course not. For eight years I’d borne this fate, and in all that time she’d never noticed how terrified I was.

For eight years you lied to her with every breath, and now you hate her because she’s deceived?

“I’ll give you a moment to yourselves,” said Aunt Telomache. “The procession is ready. Don’t dawdle.”

The door clicked shut behind her, and in the silence that followed, from outside I heard the faint patter of drums and wail of flutes: the wedding procession.

Astraia’s mouth trembled, but she pushed it up into a smile. “It seems so recently we were children dreaming of our weddings.”

“Yes,” I said. I had never dreamt of weddings. Father told me my destiny when I was nine.

“And we read that book, the one with all the fairy tales, and argued about which prince was best.”

“Yes,” I whispered. That much was true, anyway. I wondered if my face still looked kind.

“And then not too long after Father told us about you”—well, he told her, when she turned thirteen and wouldn’t stop trying to matchmake me—“and I cried for days but then Aunt Telomache told us about the Sibyl’s Rhyme.”

Every half-educated child knew about the Sibyl’s Rhyme. In the ancient days, Apollo would sometimes touch a woman with his power, granting her wisdom and driving her mad at once, and she would live in his sacred grotto and prophesy on his behalf. They said that on the day of the Sundering, the sibyl stood up and proclaimed a single verse, then threw herself into the holy fire and died; she was the last sibyl, and that day was the last time the gods ever spoke to us.

Every well-educated child knew that it was just a legend. There was no good evidence that there had been a sibyl in Arcadia at the time of the Sundering, let alone that she had said such a thing, and no ancient lore about demons, nor any newly discovered Hermetic principle, so much as hinted that what the Rhyme prescribed could work.

The day that Aunt Telomache told Astraia the Rhyme, she forbade me ever to tell her that it wasn’t true. “The poor child’s had enough of tears,” she’d said. “As you love her, let her believe it.”

I had promised and I had kept my promise, and so now I got to watch Astraia clasp her hands and recite it in a low, reverent voice:

“A virgin knife in a virgin’s hand

Can kill the beast that rules the land.”

A hopeful half smile twisted at her lips, and she darted hopeful half glances at my face. It was my cue to smile and pretend to be comforted, as if the Rhyme were true. As if Astraia weren’t asking for comfort as much as trying to give it. As if I had ever lived in her world, where daughters were loved and protected, and the gods offered an escape from every terrible fate.

You wanted her to think that, I told myself, but all I wanted right now was to seize a book off the table and throw it at her face. Instead I clenched my hands and said sourly, “We both know the Rhyme. What’s your point?”

Astraia wilted a moment, then rallied. “I just wanted to say . . . I believe you can do it. I believe you will cut off his head and come home to us.”

Then she flung her arms around me. My shoulders tightened and I almost jerked away, but instead I made myself embrace her back. She was my only sister. I should love her and be willing to die for her, since the only other choice was that she die for me. And I did love her; I just couldn’t stop resenting her either.

“I know Mother would be proud of you,” she muttered. Her shoulders quivered under my arms and I realized she was crying.

She dared to cry? On this day of all days? I was the one who would be married by sunset, and I hadn’t let myself cry in five years.

There was ice in my lungs and in my heart. I was floating, I was swept away, and out of the cold I spoke to her in a voice as soft as snow, the gentle and obedient voice that I had used to consent to every order that Father and Aunt Telomache ever gave me, every order that they would never give Astraia because they actually loved her.

“You know, that Rhyme is a lie that Aunt Telomache only told you because you weren’t strong enough to bear the truth.”

I had thought the words so often, they felt like nothing in my mouth, like no more than a breath of air, and as easily as breathing I went on:

“The truth is, Mother died because of you, and now I have to die for your sake too. And neither one of us will ever forgive you.”

Then I shoved her aside and strode out of the room.

Astraia didn’t follow me, which was lucky. If I’d seen her face again, I would have shattered. Instead I floated numbly down the stairs. I knew that soon I would realize what I had done, that the acid of my self-loathing would eat through my walls and burn me down to the bone. But for now, I was wrapped in cotton wool, and when I reached the bottom of the stairs I stepped out onto the floor and curtsied without even trembling.

“Good morning, Father.” Beside me, I heard Aunt Telomache’s intake of breath, and I realized that I had strayed from the ceremony. I curtsied again. “Father, I thank you for your kindness and beg that you will let me leave your house.”

As if the Gentle Lord cared about propriety.

Father held out an arm. “I will grant that with a glad heart and open hand, my daughter.”

Certainly the glad part was true enough. He was avenging his dead wife, saving his favorite daughter, and keeping his sister-in-law as his concubine—and the only price was the daughter he had never wanted.

“Where’s your sister?” Aunt Telomache hissed as she draped the veil over me. The red gauze covered me down to my knees.

“She was crying,” I said calmly. It was easier to face the world from behind the red haze of the fabric. “But you can drag her down to ruin the ceremony if you like.”

“It’s not proper for her to miss your wedding,” Aunt Telomache muttered, adjusting the veil.

“Let her alone, Telomache,” Father said quietly. “She has enough grief.”

The icy hatred swirled back around me, but I swallowed it down and laid my fingertips on Father’s arm. We walked out of the house together at a slow, stately pace, Aunt Telomache behind us.

Sunlight glowed through my veil; I saw the golden blur of the sun well over the horizon, and by now the whole sky was bright and warm. Music washed over me, along with a clatter of voices. The people of the town were enjoying themselves; I heard cheers and laughter, glimpsed red streamers and dancing children. They knew that I was marrying the Gentle Lord as payment for my father’s bargain, and while they did not know Father’s plan, they knew that marriage to such a monster must mean death or something worse. But I was still the manor lord’s daughter and he still planned to give the traditional feast.

For them, it was a holiday.

We walked the length of the village. It was well before noon, but between the sunlight and the closeness of the veil, there was sweat trickling down my neck by the time we got to the tithe-rock. Every village has one: a wide, flat rock straddling the village bounds, for people to leave their offerings to the Gentle Lord.

Now there was a statue set atop it: a rough, half-formed thing of pale stone. The oval head had two dents for eyes and a soft line for a mouth; ridges along the sides of the body suggested arms. Usually it stood in place of a dead man, for a funeral or rites concerning the ancestors. Today it would stand for the Gentle Lord. My bridegroom.

Before witnesses, my father proclaimed that he gave me freely. The village maidens sang a hymn to Artemis and then to Hera. In a normal wedding, the bride and groom would each give the other a gift—a belt, necklace, or ring—then drink from the same cup of wine. Instead I hung a gold necklace around the sloping neck of the statue. Aunt Telomache helped me lift the corner of the veil so I could gulp cloying wine from a golden goblet, and then I held the goblet to the statue’s face and let a little wine dribble down the front. I felt like a child playing with crude toys. But this game was binding me to a monster.

Then it was time for the vows. Instead of holding hands with the groom, I gripped the sides of the statue and said loudly, “Behold, I come to you bereft of my father’s name and exiled from my mother’s hearth; therefore your name shall be mine, and I shall be a daughter of your house; your Lares shall be mine and them I will honor; where you go, I shall go; where you die, I shall die, and there will I be buried.”

For my answer, there was only the rustle of wind in the trees. But the people cheered anyway. Then began another hymn, this time with dancing and flower scattering. I knelt on the stone before the statue, not watching, my head bowed under my veil. Sweat beaded on my face, and my knees ached from the hard stone.

One girl’s voice lifted above the others:

“Though mountains melt and oceans burn,

The gifts of love shall still return.”

I supposed that was true: Father had loved Mother too much, and seventeen years later the gifts of that folly were still returning to us. I knew that wasn’t the sort of gift the hymn was talking about, but I didn’t know anything else. In my family, nobody’s love had given anything but cruelty and sorrow, and nobody’s love had ever stopped giving.

Back at the house, Astraia was crying. My only sister, the only person who’d ever loved me, ever tried to save me, was crying because I had broken her heart. All my life I had bitten back cruel words and swallowed down hatred. I had repeated the comforting lie about the Rhyme and tried not to resent her for believing it. Because despite all the poison in my heart, I knew it was not Astraia’s fault that Father had picked her over me. So I had always forced myself to pretend I was the sister she deserved. Until today.

Five more minutes, I thought. You only had to hold on for five more minutes, and all the hatred in your heart would never have been able to hurt her again.

Hidden by the veil and the clamor of the wedding, I finally cried too.

When the sacrifices to the gods were finished, Aunt Telomache dragged me off the stone and packed me into the carriage with Father. Normally the bride and groom would stay for the feast—as would the father of the bride, who hosted it—but getting me to the Gentle Lord took precedence.

The door closed behind us. As the carriage rattled into motion, I stripped the veil off my head, glad to be rid of the suffocating heat. My face was still sticky with tears; I rubbed at my eyes, hoping they weren’t too red.

Father looked at me, his gaze even and impassive, his face an elegantly sculpted mask. As always.

“Do you remember the sigils?” His low voice was calm, even; we might have been discussing the weather. I noticed his hands clasped over his knee; he wore the great gold signet ring shaped like a serpent eating its own tail: the symbol of the Resurgandi.

I knew what was inscribed on the inside of his ring: Eadem Mutata Resurgo, “Though changed I rise again the same.” It was an ancient Hermetic saying, long ago adopted as the motto of the Resurgandi because they sought to return us to the true sky.

I was not riding to my doom with my father. I was riding to my doom with the Magister Magnum of the Resurgandi.

“Yes.” I clasped my hands over my knees. “You’ve seen me write them with my eyes shut.”

“Remember the hearts may be disguised. You will have to listen—”

“I know.” I clenched my teeth to keep back all the poison I wanted to snarl at him. I might not be able to hurt Father, but I still owed him my duty and respect.

Some people distrusted the Resurgandi’s secrecy, the way that dukes and Parliament consulted them; they whispered that the Resurgandi practiced demonic arts. In a way, that was true. By dint of long study and careful calculations, the Resurgandi had come to believe that while the bargains of the Gentle Lord were accomplished by his unfathomable demonic powers, the Sundering was different. It was a vast Hermetic working, whose diagram was the Gentle Lord’s house itself.

This meant that somewhere in the Gentle Lord’s house must be a Heart of Water, a Heart of Earth, a Heart of Fire, and a Heart of Air. If someone were to inscribe nullifying sigils in each heart—so the theory went—it would disengage the working from Arcadia. The house of the Gentle Lord would collapse in on itself, while Arcadia returned to the real world.

The Resurgandi had known this for nearly a hundred years, and the knowledge had availed them nothing. Until me.

“I know you will not fail her,” said Father.

“Yes, Father.” I looked out the window, unable to bear that calm face a moment longer. I had spent my whole life pretending to be a daughter glad to die for the sake of her family. Couldn’t he pretend, just once, to be a father sad to lose his daughter?

We were driving through the woods now as we began the slow ascent up the hills atop which sat the Gentle Lord’s castle. Between the tree branches, I could glimpse scraps and pieces of the sky, like shredded paper tossed among the leaves. Then we suddenly drove through a clearing and there was a great foolscap folio of clear sky.

I looked up. Father had installed, on account of Aunt Telomache’s claustrophobia, a little glass window in the roof of the carriage. So I could see the sky overhead and the black, diamond-shaped knotwork that squatted at the apex of the sky like a spider. People called it the Demon’s Eye and said the Gentle Lord could see anything that passed beneath it. The Resurgandi officially scoffed at this superstition—if the Gentle Lord had such perfect knowledge, he would have destroyed them long ago—but I wondered how many secretly feared that he might know their plans and be drawing them into one of his ironic dooms.

Was he watching me now from the sky? Did he know that fear was swirling through my body like water running out of a tub, and was he laughing?

“I wish there had been time to train you more,” Father said abruptly.

I looked at him, startled. He had been training me since I was nine years old. Could he possibly mean that he didn’t want me to go?

“But the bargain said your seventeenth birthday,” he went on, so placidly that my hope wilted. “We’ll just have to hope for the best.”

I crossed my arms. “If I try to collapse his house and fail, I’m sure he’ll kill me, so maybe you can marry Astraia to him next and give her a chance.”

Father’s mouth thinned. He would never do such a thing to Astraia, and we both knew it.

“Telomache told me that Astraia gave you a knife,” he said.

“She has only herself to blame for that,” I said. “Or was it your idea to tell Astraia that story?”

I still remembered the day that Aunt Telomache told us about the Sibyl’s Rhyme—Astraia’s muffled sniffling, the hard ache in my throat, the sudden stab of wild hope when Aunt Telomache said that I might not have to destroy my husband by trapping myself forever with him in his collapsing house. That I might kill him and come home safe to my sister.

It can’t be true, I had thought. I know it can’t be true—and yet that night I had still nearly wept when Aunt Telomache told me it was a lie.

“She was a child and she needed comfort,” said Father. “But you are now a woman and know your duty, so I trust you have already disposed of it.”

I sat up straighter. “I’m wearing it.”

He sat up too. “Nyx Triskelion. You will take it off right now.”

Instantly the words Yes, Father formed in my mouth, but I swallowed them down. My heart hammered and my fingertips swirled with cold because I was defying my father and that was ungrateful, impious, wrong—

“No,” I said.

I was going to die carrying out his plan. Against that obedience, this little defiance could hardly matter.

“Are you actually deluding yourself—”

“No,” I repeated flatly. That had been another part of my education: the history of all the fools who tried to assassinate the Gentle Lord. None succeeded, and all died, for even if they stabbed the Gentle Lord in the heart, he could heal in a moment and destroy them the next. I had long ago given up hoping that any mortal weapon could kill a demon.

“I don’t believe in the Rhyme, and even if I did, I wouldn’t bet our freedom on my skill with a knife. You trained me too well for that, Father. But this is the last gift my only sister ever gave me, and I will wear it to my doom if I please.”

“Hm.” He settled back in his seat. “And have you thought how you’ll explain it to your husband, when the time comes?”

His voice was once again as calm as when he read me the story of Lucretia. The euphemism was dry and bloodless as dust on the old book. When the time comes. Meaning, When he strips you naked and uses you as he pleases.

In that moment I hated my father as I never had before in my life. I stared at the loose skin of his neck and thought, If I were really like Lucretia, I would kill you and then myself.

But just thinking the impiety made me feel sick. He had only been trying to save my mother. No doubt, in his desperation, he’d deluded himself into thinking the Gentle Lord would be easier to cheat; and once he knew how wrong he’d been, what could he do but try to save as much as he could?

Iphigenia had gladly let her father, Agamemnon, sacrifice her to the gods so that the Greek fleet would have good winds as they sailed to Troy. My father was asking me to die for something much better: the chance to save Arcadia.

All my life, I’d seen people driven mad by demons; I’d seen how everyone, weak or strong, rich or poor, lived in fear of them. If I carried out Father’s plan—if I trapped the Gentle Lord and freed Arcadia—nobody would ever be killed or driven mad by a demon again. No fools would make disastrous bargains with the Gentle Lord, and no innocents would pay the price for them. Our people would live free beneath the true sky.

Any one of the Resurgandi would gladly die for that chance. If I loved my people, or even just my family, I should be glad to die for it too.

“I’ll tell him the truth,” I said. “I couldn’t bear to part with my sister’s gift.”

“You should make him think you didn’t even want to have it. Tell him that you made a promise to your father.”

I couldn’t resist saying, “He bargained with you himself. Do you think he’s fool enough to believe you’d try to save me?”

His eyes widened and his jaw hardened. With a little flicker of pleasure, I realized I had finally hurt him.

This is the first way that I heard the story: Father drew me aside and said, “When I was young, I promised the Resurgandi that one of my daughters would fight the Gentle Lord and free us all. You are that daughter.”

I suppose it was a kindness that he told me that way—the first and last kindness he ever showed me. I heard the rest of the story soon enough from Aunt Telomache, and I heard it over and over again, from her, from him, from visiting members of the Resurgandi.

The story was all around me—in Aunt Telomache’s grim silences, Father’s carefully blank stares, the way their hands touched when they thought no one was looking; it was in Astraia’s overflowing toy chest, the portraits of my mother in every room, the stack of books Father gave me about every hero who had ever died for duty. I breathed that story, swam in it, felt like I would drown in it.

This is how it goes:

Once upon a time, Leonidas Triskelion was a young man, handsome and clever and brave. He was the darling of his family and the hope of the Resurgandi. And he was also the beloved of a young woman named Thisbe, and in time her husband. But as the years wore on, their joyful marriage filled with sorrow, for Thisbe could not conceive a child. No matter how Leonidas swore he loved her, she despised herself as a worthless and unlucky wife, who would cause her husband’s name to die with him because she could not give him a son. At last she fell into such despair that she tried to kill herself. For if even Leonidas’s Hermetic arts could not help her, what hope was left?

Just one.

So at last Leonidas, who had spent years studying how to defeat the Gentle Lord, went to bargain with him. And this is the bargain that the Gentle Lord struck: a son was out of the question. But Thisbe would conceive two healthy daughters by the year’s end, and the only price would be that when one of them was seventeen, she must marry the Gentle Lord himself.

“And do not think that you can cheat me,” said the Gentle Lord. “If you hide your daughters, I will find them, and after marrying one I will kill the other; but deliver one daughter to me and the other one will live free and happy all her life.”

But while the Gentle Lord always keeps his word, he always cheats at his bargains. He made Thisbe conceive and grow heavy with twins, but he did not make her able to bear them. The first daughter was born quickly enough, but the second came out crooked and covered in her mother’s blood, and though the baby survived, Thisbe did not.

Leonidas could not help loving Astraia, the daughter his wife had paid for so dearly. He could not help despising me, the daughter who had received her life for no cost, as he had paid nothing of his own to receive us. So Astraia grew up beloved, the living image of her mother. And I grew up knowing that my only purpose was to be my father’s vengeance incarnate.

The carriage stopped with a jolt and a bump.

I looked at Father. He looked back at me.

My throat tightened again and I swallowed. I felt sure there was something I could say—should say—if I could just think of it fast enough—

“Go with all the blessings of the gods and your father,” he said calmly.

The rote words stung more than his silence. As the driver opened the carriage door, I realized how desperately I had always wanted him to show one hint of reluctance, one suggestion that it pained him to use me as a weapon.

But why should I complain? Hadn’t I just hurt Astraia even worse?

I smiled brightly. “Surely the gods will bless such a kindly father as much as he deserves,” I said, and clambered out of the carriage without looking back. The door slammed behind me. In an instant the driver was snapping the whip at the horses, and the carriage clattered away.

I stood very still, my shoulders tight, staring at the house of my bridegroom.

They had not brought me quite to the door—nobody would go so close to the Gentle Lord’s house unless he was already mad enough to seek a bargain—but the stone tower was only a short distance up the grassy slope. It was the only whole part that remained of the ancient castle of the Arcadian kings. Beyond it, the hill was crowned with crumbling walls and revenant doorways that stood alone without any walls about them.

The wind moaned softly, ruffling the grass. The sun’s diffuse glow warmed my face, and the cool air had the warm, ripe smell of late summer. I sucked in a lungful, knowing this was the last time I would stand outside.

Either I would fail, and the Gentle Lord would kill me . . . or else I would succeed, and either die in the house’s collapse or be trapped with him forever. In which case I would be lucky if he killed me.

For one moment I considered running. I could be down the hill by another path before the Gentle Lord knew I was gone, and then . . .

. . . and then he would hunt me down, take me by force, and kill Astraia.

There was only one choice I could make.

I realized I was shaking. I still wanted to run. But I was doomed in any case, so I might at least die saving the sister I had wronged. I thought about how much I hated the Gentle Lord, how much I wanted to show him that requesting a captive bride was the worst mistake he’d ever make. While that hate still flickered within me, I marched up to the wooden door of the tower and banged on it.

The door swung open silently.

I stepped through before I could change my mind, and the door promptly slammed shut. I flinched at the crash but managed to stop myself from trying to tug it open again. I wasn’t supposed to escape.

Instead I looked about me. I was in a round foyer the size of my bedroom with white walls, a blue tiled floor, and a very high ceiling. Though from the outside it had looked as if there were nothing of the house but one lonely tower, this room had five mahogany doors, each carved with a different pattern of fruits and flowers. I tried them, but they were all locked.

Was that a laugh? I went still, my heart thumping. But if the noise had been real, it did not repeat. I circled the room again, this time pounding on each of the doors, but there was still no response.

“I’m here!” I shouted. “Your bride! Congratulations on your marriage!”

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About the Author

Photo credit Janelle Bighinatti

ROSAMUND HODGE grew up in Los Angeles, where she spent her time reading everything she could get her hands on but especially fantasy and mythology. She received a BA in English from the University of Dallas and an MSt in medieval English from Oxford. She now lives in Seattle, Washington. Visit her online at www.rosamundhodge.net.

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Copyright

GILDED ASHES: A CRUEL BEAUTY NOVELLA

Text copyright © 2014 by Rosamund Hodge

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EPub Edition © APRIL 2014 ISBN: 9780062266804

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