“I think we should let Eleanora rest,” Roger said.
She turned his words over, searching for traces of disgust, of condemnation, but found none. She looked up cautiously, and saw him smiling at her with a line of concern between his level brows.
“We should all get some rest,” Lord Richard said. “And tomorrow, we’ll start fresh.”
They all wished each other good night, and the others filed out. Marianne turned out all the lamps but the one on the bedside table that Ellen could reach.
After they had gone, Ellen snuffed that one as well and lay in the dark, thinking. She had started the day as a maid named Ellen. Had danced at a ball as the most fascinating and yet hated woman in the room, Lady Ella. And now she was going to sleep as a guest of the Seadowns, someone to be respectfully bid good night, watched over and cared for.
Someone named Eleanora.
Prey
Now when she found herself dreaming of being in the Palace Under Stone, Poppy hardly had the energy to be frightened.
Jaded, she wandered the corridors, trailing her fingers along the cold walls and wondering what half-mad pronouncements Rionin and Blathen were going to make tonight. Whenever she encountered them, they swore that she would never leave again, or some such thing. She looked down and saw that she was wearing the violet and silver gown from Marianne’s ball, and was quite pleased. It was her new favorite, and she wanted to make sure that Blathen got a good look at what he was missing, even if it was all in her own head.
She was still smiling about this when she came into the ballroom, and saw the usual arrangement: the courtiers dancing to give their king power, while Under Stone and his remaining brothers huddled on the dais. This time, though, there was someone with them. An old woman, crouched like a toad on a velvet-cushioned chair.
“You’re the Corley, aren’t you?” Poppy went right to the foot of the dais to study the woman.
“So I have been called,” the old witch said.
“And Eleanora’s godmother, or so you call yourself,” Poppy said. “If you want her to attract a princely husband, you might want to avoid maiming her.” She wondered if this was really what the Corley looked like, if there was something prophetic in her dreams.
“What business of it is yours?” Blathen pushed his way forward to stand just in front of Poppy. He looked her over and licked his lips.
Giving him a look of deep disgust, Poppy tossed back her hair. “Well, let’s see, I keep having all these tedious dreams with you and now her in them, so I’d say it’s rather a lot of my business.” She pointed rudely at the Corley, glad that her finger didn’t shake.
“Tedious?” Again Blathen licked his lips. “Don’t you enjoy visiting your true home?”
Poppy snorted, aware that it was something Lady Margaret would never do. But it suited Poppy. “This isn’t my true home, and it never will be.”
Rionin got up from his throne and crossed to the edge of the dais. He leaned down, bringing his face close to Poppy’s. “Before you wake up, allow me to clarify one thing: you may toss your head and stamp your foot all you like, but you cannot fight us.
“Just like Eleanora, you are nothing but prey.”
He pushed her away with a finger that seemed to pierce the center of her chest like an icicle. She fell and fell until she woke with a lurch in her own bed.
The violet and silver gown lay in a shaft of moonlight, and her nightrobe was damp with sweat as always. She lit a lamp and wrote everything that she had seen and heard in her diary, just as she had been doing for the past few weeks. Then she wrapped herself in a shawl and went to sit by the window. She wouldn’t be getting any more sleep that night, so she might as well finish another bracelet.
She decided she would prefer that her dreams not come true.
At breakfast, Lady Margaret was reluctant to put on the strange bracelet that Poppy offered her. So reluctant, despite her normally gracious attitude toward any gift, that Poppy suspected magical intervention. But in the end Poppy got it fastened around Lady Margaret’s upper arm, and was pleased to see the change that began to overcome the older woman.
She still looked confused, however, so Lord Richard offered her a tumbler of Roger’s strange potion and convinced her to toss the glass into the fireplace. It was such a dramatic gesture that Poppy had a hard time not shouting, “Cheers!” whenever someone did it.
“Do you realize that Lady Ella is our own Ellen?” Lady Margaret looked around, astonished, to see if anyone else had come to that same conclusion.
“Not Ellen, my dear, Eleanora,” her husband corrected her.
And then, with Marianne and Poppy talking over him and one another to make certain no detail was forgotten, they explained the situation.
Poppy braced herself for an explosion when Lady Margaret discovered that her husband had himself made a deal with the Corley in order to recover his fortune. But when he came to that part of the tale, she merely nodded. After all the explaining was done, she appeared only half-surprised.
“Did you know about the Corley?” Poppy asked.
“Not her name, but I suspected that Richard’s luck was more than, well, mere luck,” Lady Margaret admitted. “I suppose I didn’t really want to know the details.” She made a face. “Of course, if I’d known that our daughter’s future lay on the line as well, I might have intervened sooner.”
“You know I would die before I would let either of you come to harm,” Lord Richard said. He lifted his wife’s hand from the white tablecloth, and kissed her wrist.
Marianne sighed dreamily, and Poppy found herself stifling a similar noise. Imagine being so cherished. It was never something she had really thought about, until she had seen her oldest sisters with their husbands, and now Lady Margaret with hers.
She doubted very much that she would have been cherished like that by Prince Blathen.
Thinking of her erstwhile partner from the Midnight Balls, she drew herself up. They needed to solve this problem, and quickly. The masked ball was only days away.
“What should we do about the royal masquerade?” Poppy picked up her fork and pressed some lines into the tablecloth. “I suppose I need to go now.” She winced. It had sounded like torture before there was a curse involved.
“And Dickon still needs a bracelet,” said Marianne. “It looks like we have to have both. Roger’s given him the potion four times now,” she said to her plate of kippers and toast.
“I’m working on it,” Poppy assured her. “Also, Roger’s trying to find a Far Eastern herbalist he knows. It’s possible that he could help us.”
But when Roger came to the manor a few hours later, he shook his head in answer to their eager inquiries. The house at the address he had for Lon Qui was empty, and he had left a message with the landlady, though she did not know where her tenant was or how long he would be gone.
“You’d think if this Lon Qui were any good, he would have cured the old bat’s warts,” said Dickon, who had accompanied his older brother.
“Drink your medicine,” Roger said grimly, and poured some sludgy potion out of a flask and into a glass one of the maids brought in.
Dickon shrugged, drank, and threw the glass in the fireplace, the movements well practiced by now.
“And put this on,” Poppy said, wrapping a bracelet around his wrist. She couldn’t stand the expression on Marianne’s face one second longer. Dickon shook himself like a dog and then his gaze went to Marianne.
“I’ve been making rather a fool of myself, haven’t I?” His normally cheerful demeanor was subdued.
“Yes. Are you quite finished doing so?” Marianne’s soft voice was tart.
“I hope so,” he told her.
“Then you may sit by me while we plan what to do next,” she said.
“I hate to say this, Poppy,” Roger said. “But I’m not convinced that your knitted charms are that efficacious. It seems to take the potion as well to make any difference. And even that wears off.” He frowned at
Dickon.
“Roger,” Poppy said evenly, without looking up. “As the knitting doesn’t do any harm, either, I will continue to knit these things and tie them on people until the Corley and her glass slippers are just a memory. And that is all I will say about it.”
Roger stopped pacing to look at her, then resumed. “Very well, I understand,” was all he said.
Poppy didn’t think he truly understood—but then, he was the one pacing. She had to keep her hands moving, she had to be doing something, something to help, or she would run mad. If she knit a thousand charms and none of them did a thing, at least she could say that she tried.
Lord and Lady Seadown came in, looking subdued. They had been talking with Eleanora for the last hour, and Poppy saw that Lady Margaret had been crying.
“The poor girl,” she murmured, and sank down beside Poppy.
“Eleanora is in no condition to attend the masked ball,” Lord Richard announced. “Her feet… the skin …”
“Her feet are turning to glass!” Lady Margaret cried out as she sank onto the sofa beside Poppy. “Glass, the poor child! The physician has never seen anything like it. He’s not sure if it can ever be cured. How could it be? We need to get rid of that Corley creature, and find someone to heal Eleanora.”
“Don’t worry, Cousin Margaret,” Poppy said, knitting even faster. “If it cannot be done in Breton, I’ll take her to West-falin. Galen can help her, and if he can’t, we’ll find someone who can.”
Poppy, who had once shunned Ellen as irritating and depressing, now wanted to help her just as much as she wanted to free Christian from his infatuation with Lady Ella. She had realized in the night that she and Eleanora were really quite similar: their parents had made horrible mistakes, and the children were forced to pay the price.
“What will happen if Eleanora doesn’t dance?” Poppy’s voice was much more tense than she would have liked. There had been penalties for her and her sisters if they didn’t attend the Midnight Balls, even if their absence had not been by their choice.
“I don’t know, but the Corley’s plans seem to hinge upon the masquerade,” Roger said gravely. “Christian will soon return to the Danelaw, and the Corley told Eleanora that the prince must propose to her by the end of the ball.”
“But if she doesn’t go,” Marianne said eagerly, “then he can’t propose and the Corley’s plan will be ruined!”
“I fear it won’t be so easy, my dear,” her father said. “The Corley will likely find some way to force her to attend, even if it cripples her, or she will exact her revenge upon Eleanora for failing.”
“It’s best to let these things play out,” Poppy said, striving to sound knowledgeable but coming out anxious instead. “There’s always a chance for escape, but you have to wait for just the right moment.”
She thought of the last night she had spent in the Palace Under Stone, not in a dream, but in reality. She thought of dancing at the ball with one eye on her sister Rose, who had tried to make a bargain of her own before Galen had helped them escape. The scream from the King Under Stone as Galen’s silver knitting needle pierced his heart would haunt her for the rest of her life, but the sense of lightness, of freedom, that she had felt when she ascended the golden stair for the last time was worth the occasional nightmare.
“But in order to let this play out,” Roger argued, “Eleanora will have to attend the masked ball.”
“Not necessarily,” Poppy said suddenly. “It’s a masked ball. Someone wearing glass slippers will have to attend, and be proposed to by Christian.” Her eyes met Marianne’s, and the color drained from the other girl’s face.
“I—I—I couldn’t possibly! No!” Marianne clutched at Dickon, who put his arm around her.
“Out of the question,” Dickon said. “I’m not letting Marianne risk her life standing in as a decoy!”
“It’s all right, Marianne, I’ll do it,” Poppy said. “I’m more of a height with Eleanora anyway. No one will even know the difference.”
She looked back at her knitting as though the decision were only of passing importance. On the mantel, the clock ticked loudly as everyone else in the room stared at her, in admiration, in horror, in speculation.
Despite her nonchalance, in her head Poppy kept hearing the voice of the King Under Stone: “You are prey.”
Confused
Wandering from room to room in Tuckington Palace, Christian did his best to stay out of the way of the bustling servants. The weather had turned stormy, with great gales of wind and torrents of rain pouring down, preventing him from riding. Even Hermione and Emmeline were too busy with the fittings for their costumes to plague him.
But the entire palace was taken up in preparations for the masked ball. All the bedrooms were being aired out, floors were scrubbed and waxed, laundry boiled and hung to dry indoors so that the servants’ quarters and kitchens looked like an army camp with pristine white tents every two paces. The kitchen servants wove in and out around the sheets and towels with expert skill, whisking and baking and icing thousands of little cakes, bonbons, and other delicacies for the refreshments. The regular meals suffered because of it, and Christian had made a solemn vow that if he was served cold meat pie one more time he was going to start taking all his meals at the nearest pub, and never mind the proprieties.
After finding himself yet again halfway down a hallway he didn’t recognize, and unable to think what he was doing there, Christian finally just went back to his room. He started a letter to his parents, tore it up, started a letter to his sisters, and tore that up as well. There were green sparkles in the corners of his eyes again, and his head throbbed. The bracelet Poppy had given him itched worse than anything he had ever worn, yet he didn’t want to take it off.
Poppy had made it, just for him, as a sign of friendship … or something more? The letter to his parents that he had just cast into the fireplace had started out as a request that Poppy be invited to Damerhavn after her visit to Breton was over. He’d discarded it because he didn’t know how to describe his feelings about Poppy to his parents … or to himself. Were they just friends? Or did he care more deeply for her? What did she feel for him? He hoped that spending time with her in his home, with his family, would help him understand.
But Ella will be there, a little voice nagged in his head. And she might not like having Poppy around.
Christian frowned and shook his head. Ella? Why would Lady Ella be there? She wasn’t a pawn in this grand marital game, like himself and Poppy.
His cheeks went hot at the idea of introducing Poppy to his family as a potential bride. He imagined her riding through the streets beside him, though, still awkward on horseback but determined not to show it. And she would love the Danelaw: it was very near to Westfalin and she could visit her family. Perhaps he would get to meet them as well.
There was a sudden zing through his body, as though he had been struck by lightning, and hot guilt poured over him. How could he have been thinking of courting Poppy? He hoped that Lady Ella, his darling intended, never found out about his treacherous thoughts!
Christian shook his head again, feeling the fog come back. Lady Ella? He knew nothing about her! His parents would have to meet her, and he wouldn’t invite a girl to travel all the way to his home before he had met her parents … or guardian, in Lady Ella’s case. She had never said, but he got the impression that she was an orphan. There was a mysterious godmother that she made reference to. And those references were mysterious indeed. Even King Rupert, with his determination to see Christian married to a Bretoner lady, could find out nothing about Lady Ella.
“For all we know, she’s a pirate or a laundress who has stolen someone else’s gowns,” Christian muttered aloud.
Instantly another zing of lightning coursed through him, this one powerful enough to make him cry out. The throbbing in his head became a blinding pain that settled behind his right eye and sent him reeling to his bed. He flung himself across the mattress, clutching at his hea
d with one hand. The bracelet Poppy had given him itched so fiercely now that it felt like his wrist was on fire. One of these pains had to go away, or he would end up barking mad!
He started to rip the bracelet off, but stopped himself just in time. Through the green sparkles that kept sending him visions of Lady Ella dancing in her glowing slippers, he saw glimmers of Poppy in her red and white gown from the gala.
Poppy, with her regal bearing and flashing eyes. Poppy gambling like a hardened cardsharp and teasing Roger Thwaite about his stern demeanor. Poppy in lavender, with her knitting needles flashing and the tip of her tongue in the corner of her mouth—a habit she denied.
She had put this bracelet on him for a reason.
He took his hand away from his head, and forced himself to breathe deeply in and out. He clutched at the bracelet, not to tear it away, but to press the wool even tighter against his skin. He raised his shaking hands and rubbed the itchy band against his forehead, against his eyelids.
The green sparkles fled and the pain subsided.
Still holding his wrist to his forehead, Christian got to his feet. He needed to see Poppy right away; it seemed that the bracelet she had made for him had some sort of power. But why? To prevent headaches? Or was it a love charm, to entice him?
He snorted at the very idea. Poppy wouldn’t try to ensnare him with some love charm!
Scrubbing his forehead with the rough wool bracelet, he lurched for the bedroom door. He had to get to Seadown House; from there he could send for Roger as well. Roger knew things; Roger would help.
He fumbled the door open and nearly bowled over a small man with ridiculously curled hair and an elaborate green waistcoat that made Christian’s eyes sting. It reminded him of the green sparkles, and he had to look away quickly before they returned.
“Your Highness!” The man bowed with much flourishing of lace cuffs.
“Who are you?”
“Monsieur Flamonde,” the little man said. “The tailor!” More flourishing. “Your Highness’s costume is ready to be fitted!”