“Judge, jury, and executioner, are you?”
“Are you forgetting that there’s an innocent dead girl here?”
Saber is quiet for a long time. “And that’s worth it to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Vengeance? Your personal definition of justice? That’s worth drugging your neighbors without their knowledge or consent? Worth sacrificing your father? Your mother is dead, Danica! As much as you don’t seem to care, your bringing Glitter into the castle killed her. Excuse me for saying so, but I think your vengeance is a little hollow.”
His idealism is infuriating. “This is all quite rich coming from you. My mother started this nightmare. I’ve spent the last few months in perpetual fear for my life! I’ve had to allow that man to paw me and manipulate me and expose me to the ridicule of the press and—” I shut my mouth when my voice begins to quaver. “Five months ago I stood by and did nothing, Saber. There’s no worse feeling in the world. I have a chance, one chance, to do something to make him pay for everything.”
He tosses his hands in the air and turns his back on me, but I’m not finished.
“You think this is just about some sort of petty revenge, but you’re wrong. I would rather accept the consequences of doing something wrong than continue to live with the soul-destroying agony of doing nothing.” I take a few seconds to gather my composure. I need him to understand. “I have no choice.”
But there’s no softening of his expression. “You don’t know the meaning of no choice, Dani. You had your choice. And you made it. Now you have to live with it. And so does everyone else.”
—
WHEN OUR SILENT, awkward run to Paris is completed, I set my status to Unavailable and toss off my robe to ready myself for the ball tonight. Saber goes right to my father’s office.
“M.A.R.I.E., my corset.” I lean over slightly and brace my arms on the gilded settee at the foot of the bed, allowing the nimble dressing-bots to undo my stays. As my corset loosens, I have to regulate my breathing. My lungs ache to expand, to fill, but if I let them, my head spins. I’ve wound up crumpled on the floor more than once. Only when the urge to gasp in air has passed can I stand. Slowly. I keep one arm on the bedpost as I straighten. My spine feels weak and soft without the support of the polyethylene boning, and my innards feel like they want to slip into the wrong places.
One dressing-bot unfastens the six hooks that latch the busk into place, and the entire corset falls, leaving the thin, wrinkled linen of my shift clinging to my skin. I peel it carefully away, then pull it over my head. Naked, I step through the doorway and into the bathroom, where a steaming bath, heaping with bubbles, is already waiting for me.
In my hidden washroom I have a modern, water-saving shower, but standing upright while I wash, with a jet of water pounding at my back, is more than I can generally bear without my stays. I’ve switched to baths almost exclusively. I still get that sickening feeling of my stomach sloshing out of its proper place as I lean forward to wash my feet, but at least I don’t have to stand upright and keep my balance at the same time the way I would in a shower. In the end, despite the steamy water and sweet-smelling soaps, it’s a relief to be back on my dressing stool, my torso heavily powdered with fine talc and draped in a fresh shift, ready to be relaced.
As the bots begin to tighten my corset, I impulsively call out to M.A.R.I.E. and stop them. I’ve gone too far, I think. I can barely stand on my own until my stays bear me up. I swallow hard and say, “Four centimeters looser, please.” That measurement will only return me to how tight I was lacing when I moved into this room. It’s a start. Once the measurement is reached, I don’t feel comfort—but it’s bearable.
I wish I could turn back time. Two days ago, everything was perfect. Being with Saber made me feel smart, strong, and infinitely worthy. Having lost that, I feel low and selfish. By the time I’m fully decked out, I can’t decide if I’m hoping Saber will accompany me to the ball, or if I’d rather preserve what’s left of my deflated pride and avoid him for a while.
As it happens, the choice is out of my hands—as are so many things lately. The moment I enter the ballroom and the damned crier announces me at the top of his lungs, Saber falls into place at my right shoulder. Every eye turns to me, whether outright or subtly. It makes me uneasy, but I can hardly have expected anything else. My mother was alive yesterday, and now she’s dead.
I’m wearing a more somber dress, befitting my state of mourning, and a wide black silk ribbon is tied around my upper arm. Thankfully, I don’t have to be a veritable chirping bird tonight; I can let a touch of my melancholy show. Is any of the melancholy for her? I’d like to think so. One would hope a girl would mourn her own mother. And I’d like to believe that in her own way, my mother did care for me.
But I couldn’t actually tell.
I nod silently as wave after wave of nobles and nobodies surges in to offer condolences. No one cares that I’m moody and morose; they simply want to make sure they’re seen paying their respects and getting that tick mark in the brownie points column. Molli steps up silently and places a gloved hand in the crook of my arm and simply stands there, a warm presence at my side. I twinge once more at the way she had to come find me, nigh begging for her due as my longtime friend. I’ve underappreciated her, and it’s only now, when there’s no chance of turning back, that I understand how much I’ll miss her when I’m gone.
It takes not quite two hours before the veritable assembly line ends. “Finally,” I mutter to Molli. “I’m utterly parched.” I lift a flute from a passing bot and down the entire thing before turning to peek over my shoulder at Saber. Proof of their good breeding, not a single person asked me about cosmetics tonight, but I suspect that Saber’s doing brisk business in my wake. Indeed, his messenger bag looks quite flat now. I’ll have to find a way to restock him from my still exceptionally full pannier pockets.
Unexpected respite comes in the form of Lord Aaron, who sidles up next to me and laughs quietly. “Finally rid of the scheming hag, eh?”
Molli gasps at his words. Trust Lord Aaron to be so bluntly honest, even if his words do feel like a blade to my battered heart.
“You seem jovial,” I say instead of actually answering. Because I don’t know what the answer is.
“Indeed, I am, thanks to you. Well, perhaps more appropriately, thanks to Sir Spencer, who has been…sharing. Whatever is that shimmery rubbish you’ve been giving me for three months? The other is much better.”
I turn to him with wide eyes, too shocked to speak. But as I observe him more closely, the signs are unmistakable. His eyes are wide, pupils dilated, and the flush in his cheeks tells me he’s floating right now. I recall having had the thought that Sir Spencer was acquiring quite a lot of Glitter the last week or two. Now I know why. I grip Molli’s hand, just to reassure myself that she’s there.
“I tell you, I never had any use for sports,” Lord Aaron says, eyes still sparkling, “but now? I’ve seen the light, Your Grace.”
He must be high; he never uses my title.
“One-on-one wrestling, fencing, even horseback riding. So much potential for body contact, a good excuse for sweat and short breath, not to mention a masculine respect which I shall never comprehend. Why, Sir Spencer and I have both suddenly discovered we were born for sport. Who knew!”
Lord Aaron has always been prone to fits of mania interspersed with weeks of depression—but this is a whole new level of chipper, a mood so bright it seems to oversaturate even the vibrant emerald of his brocade waistcoat. Which very nearly clashes with his mauve velvet jacket. This is what Glitter does to him. I feel like I’m flailing in black water, with no light to show me which way I should swim. I don’t care that his lack of inhibition has led to him finally dallying with Sir Spencer a bit. I hate that he’s using, I hate that I can tell, I hate that he doesn’t even know. I’m so trapped in indecision I can’t move.
“I may find it in me to compete!” Lord Aaron says, fling
ing his hands in the air and, in doing so, splashing the front of Saber’s embroidered livery with the entire contents of his glass.
Saber sputters as the champagne begins to soak into his clothing, and Lord Aaron makes a gasping sound, depositing his empty flute on the tray of a very conveniently passing bot. “So sorry, my good man. I suppose I’ve had a few too many, eh?” Lord Aaron says a bit too cheerily.
Saber is silent, but his eyes are shooting daggers at Lord Aaron that seem more personal than the offense should justify, and I can’t help but feel that I’ve missed something.
“Come, come. The least I can do is assist you in getting an appropriate change of clothes. Molli, dear,” he says, removing her hand from my arm and kissing it twice. “You’ll make our excuses, won’t you? Back in a trice. Come, both of you,” he says, striding away before she can argue.
I turn and glance at Molli as Lord Aaron drags me along, and I cast her an apologetic look, but she’s smirking.
“Finally,” Lord Aaron says in a far less exuberant tone once we’ve cleared the main crush. “You can’t tell me you didn’t want to escape for a few minutes.”
“I thought that was what the ladies’ retiring room was for, and a best friend who’ll take the blame for its need.”
“Sometimes, yes,” he answers evasively. “Now, you, good man, where are your quarters?”
Saber hesitates, and I feel a flush work its way up my neck to my cheeks. “Actually, he stays in one of my rooms.”
“Oh, does he?” Lord Aaron says, the vibrancy back in his voice.
“It’s temporary,” I say sternly. Which is true. Because we’re running away soon.
“Hmm” is the only response I get from Lord Aaron. He turns toward my bedchamber, and we walk silently through two rooms before he whispers, “I suppose you’ve figured out I have ulterior motives for spiriting the two of you away. Your friend here is out of the rouge that I want, and he informed me—rather brusquely, in point of fact—that he’d have to find a private moment with you before he could satisfy my request. Thus,” he says, gesturing between us, “a private moment.”
And thus those daggers in Saber’s eyes. He could tell the champagne was no accident.
“Let’s get into my dressing room,” I mutter under my breath as the double doors to the Queen’s Apartments open for me. “Here,” I say, reaching for Saber’s messenger bag once we’re closed into my dressing room. “You go change, I’ll stock your bag.”
“You’re an angel,” Lord Aaron says, kissing me enthusiastically on both cheeks. “I’ll help Saber. Those jackets are quite fitted and deucedly difficult to get off by oneself.”
Saber starts to argue, but Lord Aaron cuts him off with a sharp wave of his hand. “Please, it’ll be faster this way. Dressing handsome young men is not only my area of expertise but my favorite activity as well.”
Saber shakes his head and strides off toward his small chamber.
I’ve just finished emptying my panniers into the now-bulging messenger bag when a door closes hard and Lord Aaron emerges from the hallway decidedly white-faced.
“Lord Aaron,” I say, rushing forward. “Are you ill?”
“Perhaps,” he says, no longer sounding high at all. “But it would put my mind greatly at ease if you would tell me why you’ve brought a slave into your rooms.”
“WHAT ON EARTH are you talking about?” I ask. For surely his words are a jest, if one in exceptionally poor taste. As a rule, Lord Aaron’s taste is impeccable and beyond reproach in every regard, but the Glitter on his cheeks gives me room to doubt.
“Saber is a slave, and it’s only my rather prolonged trust and intimacy with you that prevents me from believing that he’s your slave.”
It’s ridiculous! “I know he’s not in the staff quarters, but that’s not because he’s a slave. He’s being paid, just not by the government of Sonoman-Versailles.” I force myself to stop babbling and fix him with a hard stare. “Lord Aaron, it is the twenty-second century. No one in the world practices slavery anymore. Certainly not me.”
“Of course not you,” Lord Aaron says, then points at the narrow corridor he emerged from only moments before. “But that boy is a black-market slave—for many years, by the look of his mark. And at the moment, he appears to be in servitude to you. You can, I hope, understand how that looks.”
My stomach feels hollow. Mark. The tattoo—I’ve seen it many times. Asked about it, even. But Saber told me it was nothing, and I…well, I was easily distracted. I sink down onto the settee when my legs refuse to bear me up.
“You didn’t know.” Lord Aaron exhales with obvious relief. “Thank God you didn’t know. I would hate to have been forced to think ill of you for the rest of my life.” He gives me a grin at the end, but it looks more like a grimace.
“I asked him,” I say in a choked voice. “He said it was nothing.”
“Would you have told the truth?”
“Certainly not,” I whisper. The words Saber flung at me this afternoon echo in my skull. You don’t know the meaning of no choice. “Mon dieu, he must hate me.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” Lord Aaron says, joining me on the settee.
“No, no, you don’t understand. The things I said to him today. I told him my mother sold me to the King. Metaphorically.” I remember the way Saber flinched. “But someone actually did sell him once. I think I might faint.”
“You never faint.”
“I just might.” I sit for several long seconds before the buzzing in my head stops. “How can he be a slave?” I whisper. But what I’m really asking is, how could I have worked with a slave? I’m a slavery enabler, and that feels worse than anything else I’ve ever done. The fact that I didn’t know doesn’t make it any better, and suddenly the parallel to the hundreds of people I’ve tricked into unknowingly doing something illegal stabs like a thousand knives in my belly.
“Maybe you should ask him,” Lord Aaron says, his eyes darting to the still-empty hallway that Saber has yet to appear from. “I’ll make your excuses—the two of you can decide whether or not to return.” He takes the fingertips of both my hands in his and rubs them gently. “You have every reason not to.”
“Thank you,” I say, and attempt to muster a smile. Attempt and fail.
“Oh,” he says, reaching into a pocket. He removes a folded stack of bills and puts them on my dresser, then digs three pots of Glitter out of the messenger bag. “This is the reason I brought you here in the first place.” He bends down and kisses my temple. “It will work out. Maybe with this come to light, the two of you can understand each other at last. I’ve seen how you look at him.”
And before I can protest, or say anything at all, his back is turned and he’s gone, the wardrobe door swinging shut behind him.
I get to my feet shakily. It’s not so much that I’m nervous about approaching Saber as that I’m utterly stunned there’s any kind of slave market at all. Not surprised in the least that Lord Aaron knows about it; he’s always involved himself more in the world outside our own than I have. But this? Certainly I had a sheltered upbringing, even before moving to the palace. We’re a wealthy and somewhat insular people. But we’re not stupid. There’s not a nation in the world that condones slavery—hasn’t been for decades. There are places where people are overworked, underpaid, in some cases perhaps not much better off than slaves. But to mark a person like a piece of inventory?
In this respect, at least, Reginald is more truly Baroque than anyone at the court he despises.
The door of Saber’s chamber is ajar, but only a few centimeters. I raise my hand, knuckles forward, to knock, but hesitate. Knock? On the door to a room we’ve shared? Where my sense of hope in life was rekindled after I thought it had been extinguished for good? And now to knock as though I’m a stranger—no. I relax my hand and push softly instead.
He’s sitting on the bed with the fingertips of each hand touching. The pose appears casual at first, until I see that his fingers are press
ed so tightly that they’re white.
“Saber?”
He startles. He didn’t hear me come in. But at least his fingers separate. He jumps to his feet and looks everywhere but at me. “Is he gone?”
“Lord Aaron? Yes.”
“We should go too.”
“I don’t think we should.”
“Why not?”
“Saber, you—”
“Nothing has changed, Danica. I’m the same person, living the same life.” He pauses, his face a tableau of sharp angles. “You still have a job to do, and, quite frankly, so do I.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What good would it have done?” he whispers.
“I don’t understand. It can’t be legal.”
“Says the person selling drugs.”
I step back like he’s slapped me across the face, but he’s not wrong. “I don’t…how? What happened?”
He shrugs as though it doesn’t matter. “My family lived in Eastern Mongolia until I was eight. When the East Asia Conflict got bad, we fled—us, and a million others. We did better than most, got as far as Paris before we ran out of money. Reginald found us sleeping in an alley and said he could get my family to North America—at a price.”
“You were the price.”
He nods. “Made sense, really. I have four younger siblings. Add in my parents and it was a choice between saving six people and letting seven people starve. We weren’t here legally—no papers, no money. Altan wasn’t even two yet. I don’t…” He hesitates. “I don’t fault them,” he says, more emotion creeping into his recitation now. “They didn’t have any good choices.”
“Ten years.” It’s not really a question, simply me doing the math. “And you never tried to—”
“Run away?” Saber asks with a bitter edge that makes my chest hurt. “You ever studied slavery? In any culture? Running rarely works out very well.”