“Nothing, it’s nothing,” said Azalea. She grabbed at Bramble’s arm, pulling her back, for Bramble looked ready to attack Lord Teddie. The yellow in her eyes flared. “Steady on,” said Azalea. “He didn’t do anything.”
Bramble cast one more angry glance at Lord Teddie, but her eyes calmed into their light green as they took in Azalea. She tucked a loose strand of hair behind Azalea’s ear.
“Is it the brooch?” she said.
Azalea wrapped a finger around the iron baluster next to her face, squeezing it hard. The corners bit. Bramble made a face.
“Clover thought Keeper wouldn’t give it back, the rotten thief,” she said. “Wonderful. The King is going to go spare when he finds out we haven’t got it.”
“Who cares about the King anymore?” said Azalea. “I’ll be the one to tell him we lost it, if I have to. But—I’ll think of something first. I will.” She glanced at Lord Teddie, who had pulled a coin from Jessamine’s black curls, making the girls squeal with laughter and Jessamine smile bashfully.
“I’ll tell you more tonight,” Azalea said. “When the gentleman isn’t here.”
That evening, after coffee in the library, where Lord Teddie taught the younger girls how to play ring-a-hoop with pen and old inkwells, the girls gathered in their bedroom, passing out the mended slippers from the basket and brushing their hair. Delphinium took the vanity chair, dreamily running her fingers through her wavy blond hair and gazing at her reflection.
“I’ve decided I’m going to marry him,” she said. “Lord Teddie, I mean.”
“Don’t be daft,” said Bramble, throwing pillows on the bed behind her. “You only like him because he’s rich.”
“Well, why not?” Delphinium turned. “I’m pretty enough. If he stops making up stupid rhymes, and learns how to dress, and perhaps stifles that silly laugh he has, then in a few years, we—”
“He’d see right through you.” Bramble sat down on one of their threadbare embroidered poufs, crossing her arms. “So don’t rally up your hopes, young peep. Gentlemen like him don’t marry penniless.”
Delphinium’s lips tightened, and she tugged the comb through her hair. Azalea, between the hearth and the round table, chose this time to produce the sugar teeth from her pocket and lay them on the table, to the initial fright of the girls, who leaped back.
When the sugar teeth only lay and shuddered with a faint clinking sound, the girls crept to the round table, forgetting that they had been the scourge of the palace before. Horrified that the teeth had been bent inside out, they spoke in hushed tones.
“Who would—do such a thing?” said Clover, stroking them gently.
“Oh, Keeper, of course!” said Azalea. “Of course it was him!”
Bramble took a dried pink rose from the vase in the middle of the table and snapped off the blossom. “Rotter,” she said, pulling the leaves from the stem. “When I see him, I’m going to tell him exactly—”
“Don’t!” Azalea yelped.
The girls stared at Azalea, hands halted about their slipper ribbons, mid-tie. Azalea rubbed her hand against her aching forehead.
“Look, just—let me handle Keeper, all right?” she said. “And the teeth—well.”
They stared sadly at the twisted piece of metal. None of them liked to see the sugar teeth as such, so forlorn and helpless, shaking. Glumly, they took Azalea’s powder box and shredded bits of dried petals in it, making a little bed for them. Azalea agreed to slip away to the kitchen and fetch some sugar cubes, and maybe a teacup to keep them company. Inside, she clung to the thin hope that if she stayed in the kitchen long enough, the younger girls would have fallen asleep and she could convince them to stay in their room tonight. It hadn’t happened before, but Azalea had seen Kale’s and Lily’s nodding heads, snuggling into the crook of Clover’s arm.
Azalea arrived at the creaking kitchen door and pulled back when she saw the King sitting at the scrubbed servants’ table, drinking a cup of cold leftover coffee and sorting through a stack of paperwork in the flickering candlelight. His hand was better now—though it moved stiffly as he shuffled the papers. He looked up when Azalea arrived, and Azalea twined her fingers through the weave in her shawl. His intimidating frown always made her feel as though she were balancing on a three-story banister.
“It is decidedly late, Miss Azalea,” said the King, setting his teacup down. “You should be in bed.”
“Yes, sir,” said Azalea. She stared at his paperwork. He was always doing paperwork. She wondered for the first time if he disliked it.
“Did you come to eat something? You know the rules.”
“No, sir.”
“You didn’t eat your dinner.” The King marked a bit of paper with his pen. “You missed breakfast, and tea, and I saw you give your food to Miss Ivy at the table. Am I to believe you haven’t come down here for food?’
“Yes,” said Azalea shortly. “If I were hungry, I would have eaten. I’m fetching something for the girls.”
The King sucked in his cheeks at her tone. Azalea, her fingers still twined in her shawl, opened the cabinet next to the stove and began to sort for the sugar cubes.
“It is gone, isn’t it?” said the King without glancing from his papers. “None of you wore it today. I knew the moment—the very moment—I let you take it from my sight, it was gone. I gave that brooch to your mother, Miss Azalea, and now it is gone.”
Azalea paused, her shaking hand resting on the cold glass of the pear preserves, between the jars of peaches and plums.
Of course he knew it was gone. Azalea doubted anything escaped his notice. He knew everything—
Well…yes. He did know everything. Much more than her, at least, when it came to magic. A glimmer of hope lit inside her. Perhaps finding the sugar teeth would help her solve things after all. Azalea swallowed.
“Sir,” she said, closing the cabinet door and pressing her back against it. The knobbly handle pressed into her corset. Her hands still trembled. “Um. Do you remember…how the sugar teeth were magic?”
The King looked up.
“Were?” he said.
In their room, the King nudged the sugar teeth. They fell to their side, clinking against the polished tabletop. The girls crowded about them, biting their lips.
“They look poorly,” he said. He picked them up and examined them, drawing his thumb across the poking-out teeth. He made to bend them, but stopped when he saw the metal would only snap if he did. He set them down. “What happened to them? Who bent them like this?”
A cold tingling feeling washed over Azalea, prickling and giving her goose bumps. She coughed and tried to shake it away. Everyone must have felt it, for they all shifted on their poufs and beds, rubbing their fingers and cringing. Eve tugged on the ends of her dark hair. The oath…
“Come to think of it,” said the King, “where is the rest of the magic tea set? I haven’t seen it for some time.”
The girls cast nervous looks at one another, but Clover spoke up.
“It’s all right,” she said, sitting on the edge of her bed and stroking Lily’s dark curls. Lily lay asleep on her lap. “It’s my fault. I’ll tell him.”
Clover told the story of how, in a foul temper, she had bashed up the set and thrown it into the stream. She told it all with her chin up, her beautiful face pale—but, surprisingly, without a stutter. The King’s eyebrows knitted at first, then rose, until he was just staring at her with his mouth slightly open. Azalea guessed that he would have been cross if any of the rest of them had done such a thing. But with honey-sweet Clover, the King just gaped.
“Your mother often thought,” he said slowly, when she had finished, “that one day you would do something truly surprising. I certainly did not expect this.”
Bramble flashed a grin at Azalea.
“What now, sir?” said Flora.
“What now?” The King turned his attention to the quaking sugar teeth. “Well. I suppose we ought to unmagic them.”
He
left the room. Some minutes later, he arrived again and shut the door behind him. In his stiff hand, he held the old, mottled silver sword. He gazed at the sugar teeth, lost in thought.
“Unmagic,” said Azalea, turning the odd word in her mouth. “You’ll take the magic from it?”
“Just so.”
The girls watched, rapt, as he gently and solemnly lowered the sword to the sugar teeth. He touched the silver to silver with a soft clink.
As quick and quiet as a snuffed candle, the sugar teeth…lost their luster. They looked the same, but…Azalea couldn’t describe it. No longer shuddering, the teeth somehow seemed at peace. Everyone exhaled silently.
“Well,” said the King. He picked up the teeth and slipped them into his waistcoat pocket, as delicately as a lifeless sparrow to be buried. He turned to the girls.
“What did your mother do?” he said.
“Sir?”
“When it was time for bed,” said the King. “Tell me.”
The girls exchanged nervous glances. He was talking about Mother.
“She used to help the girls with their prayers,” said Azalea, hesitant. “And—sometimes she would read stories.”
The King set the sword on the table, next to the vase.
“Very well,” he said as the girls whispered to one another. “I will read you a story.”
The whispering stopped.
Jessamine slid from her bed to the ground, the untied purple ribbons of her slippers trailing, and dug a storybook out from Eve’s trunk. She held it out to the King in her tiny four-year-old hands, her crystal blue eyes hopeful.
The King sat on the rug and leaned against Delphinium and Eve’s bed, and the younger girls shyly sat next to him, peering at the pictures. Clover smiled, her right dimple showing, and hugged Lily to her chest while Bramble, sitting on her pouf, cast a wry, surprised grin at Azalea.
“‘In a certain country…’” he began, his voice stiff with the words.
He read the stories of “Hans and Gretchen,” “The Goats of Hemland Shire,” “The Dainty Princess.” He wasn’t like Mother, who read with all the voices and a bubbled laugh at the words, but…he was all right. Everything felt warm and safe, among the linens, the flickering fire, and coziness of their room.
The girls’ eyes grew heavy, and their heads drooped. The King himself grew drowsy, his voice reading slower and slower, until finally he shook himself, and with Azalea’s direction, put the right girls in the right beds. Then he left with the sword and a good night.
The sword! Azalea’s mind whirred. She rolled the dry, crinkly rosebud from hand to hand across the table, sorting things out. Somehow, it was magic after all! How, Azalea did not know, but surely it had unmagicked the palace those hundreds of years ago, at the hand of Harold the First. No wonder Keeper wanted to be rid of it! It could unmagic him!
Hope humming through her, Azalea took her shawl from the peg by the door and slipped into the cold hall. She ran down the stairs, quiet in her bare feet, turning the corner into the portrait gallery. Edges of the glass cases and gold ends of the velvet ropes glimmered in the dim light, and Azalea found her way to the sword display. The King never left anything out of place, and for once Azalea was glad of it. She lifted the glass case from it and, ten minutes later, was back in her room.
None of the girls awoke as she turned up the lamp and smothered the fire in the hearth. She turned everything in her mind, over and over. She would unmagic the passage. They wouldn’t get the brooch or the watch back, but that didn’t matter anymore. What mattered was that Keeper would be rendered powerless—
Or would he? Azalea hesitated. With the blood oath—and the sword broken now—
“Shut up!” said Azalea to her thoughts. She grasped the rapier’s handle with both hands beneath the silver swirl guard cage, stepped into the fireplace, and touched the silver edge to the DE.
Nothing happened.
Nothing had happened before, of course, when the King had unmagicked the sugar teeth, but she had felt something. Something different. Now, as her excitement faded, the logical side of her mind took over.
What was she thinking? Unmagicking the passage would do nothing—Keeper couldn’t die, could he? He would still be there, along with his magic, with the addition that he would be angry. Azalea had the foreboding that he was going to be cross already, since they hadn’t come to dance. If she had truly unmagicked it, Keeper would be left with Mother’s soul—
In a panic, Azalea snatched the handkerchief from her pocket and rubbed it against the magic mark.
It became hot, so hot it burned. Dizzy with relief, Azalea pulled her hand back. The mark glowed for a moment, and faded back into the stone. She swallowed, gripped the sword, and strode from the fireplace, leaving a trail of soot.
After discovering the kitchen empty, Azalea arrived at the library, panting. She didn’t bother to knock, late as it was, but instead shoved the door open. The darkness surprised her; she turned up the nearest lamp, and discovered the King lying on the sofa near the piano, underneath an old blanket. He stirred as Azalea drew near.
“Sir! Sir, you—Do you sleep here every night?” Azalea frowned at the stiff, hard furniture. “That can’t be comfortable.”
The King brought his arm over his eyes as Azalea turned up both the stained-glass lamps on his desk.
“Azalea, really!”
“This is important,” said Azalea. Sword still in hand, she swept to him. The black sheet over the piano swayed with her breeze. “Sir, this sword. Can it be mended?”
The King roused, not in good humor at seeing Azalea with the sword.
“Great…waistcoats, Azalea,” he said. “That is governmental property! Take it back to the gallery, at once.”
“Sir, please,” said Azalea, on the verge of tears. “Can it be mended? Can you fix the magic in it? How is it even magic? Sir, please!”
Something in the King softened. Perhaps it was Azalea’s desperate eyes. He sighed, rubbed his face, and stood.
“Come along,” he said. “It is time you knew.”
CHAPTER 20
The gallery was so cold that Azalea could see her breath, even in the dark. She shivered and pulled her shawl tighter around herself; the King stirred up the hearth beneath the wall of portraits and added coal to it.
“Well,” he said. He set the sword on the red velvet of the pedestal and lifted the glass case back over it. He looked worn and tired but had enough firmness in him that his shoulders remained straight and solid. He was made of starch, Azalea thought. Starch and steel. “It is something that only the royal family, or the prime ministers have known,” he said. “It is not generally spoken of.”
“It’s magic, though?”
“No,” said the King. “And yes.”
Azalea took a bite of her bread and cheese, not tasting it. They had taken a detour to the kitchen, where the King took a bit of bread and cheese wrapped in a cloth and gave it to Azalea. Now he sat next to her, on one of the fine sofas by the mantel. The spindly legs creaked.
“Azalea, you know about Swearing on Silver. Do you not?”
A slight tingle rose in Azalea’s chest, and she thought of Mother’s handkerchief.
“I don’t think I do,” she said slowly. “Not fully. If…you make a promise with silver, it…helps you keep your oath? Just like if you…swear on blood…” Azalea stopped, shuddering. The King considered her.
“Yes,” he said. “It is like the blood oath the High King made, before he was overthrown. But it is the full opposite. Just as strong, but with silver as the mediator.”
“And it makes the silver…a sort of magic?”
“Just so,” said the King. “But a much stronger magic than the common sort. Stronger than the magic of the passage or the tea set, because it is sealed with your word. The people under the High King D’Eathe had very little, but what silver they had they kept close. Wedding bands, family heirlooms, and such. They believed silver the purest sort of metal. It was with
those things they made the sword and swore to protect their families and their country. We swear on it now, in parliament.”
Swearing on Silver. A stronger magic. Everything connected in Azalea’s mind, a magic sealed with silver. She set the bread and cheese on her lap and pulled Mother’s handkerchief from her pocket, turning it over in her hands, remembering how Mother had pressed it into her palms.
“It doesn’t make sense, though,” said Azalea. “If this were true, then Mother’s handkerchief would be magic. But it’s never unmagicked anything. Or—” Azalea thought of the sword, and how it didn’t unmagic the passage at her hands. “Perhaps there is something wrong with me.”
The King stood and tended the fire with a poker, for it had started to die.
“There is nothing wrong with you,” he said. The firelight illuminated his face, deepening the wrinkles by his eyes. “The sword has been sworn on for many years, by kings and ministers. As such, the magic in it runs deep. For those who have sworn on it. To our visitors and guests, and even you, it is only a sword. Even so, your handkerchief is magic—for you and you sisters, weak as it is. You cannot expect one promise—”
“Two,” said Azalea quickly. “Mother had me swear on it. Before…before she…died. It…well.” She turned her eyes to the bread in her lap, feeling silly. But she couldn’t discount the first promise she’d made—it had felt so strong.
The King was quiet for a while. He looked at the handkerchief she turned in her hands, the silver shimmering softly in the lamplight.
“I gave that handkerchief to your mother,” he said. “As a wedding gift.”
Azalea held it tightly, praying he wouldn’t ask for it back.
He did not. Instead he said, “What did you promise? May I ask?”
Azalea traced the embroidered letters with her thumb. She hadn’t even told her sisters this.
“That…I would take care of the girls,” she finally said.
There was a moment of silence, but not awkward silence.