“Did you know?” Gigi asked.
“Know what?” Selene took a drink and set the cup beside her. She willed her hands not to shake.
“What Benson was going to do.”
Selene waited a beat too long, and that was enough for Gigi. Instead of fury, she was met with sorrow.
“Promise me you won’t push yourself that far. I can’t lose you, too.”
Promises, promises, strung up like pearls. Meant to be broken. When they were younger, they’d promised not to keep secrets. Not just Selene and Gigi, but all the King’s Mage hopefuls. There’d been so many of them then. Rows and rows of narrow beds in the cramped lower dormitories. Slowly, and then ever so quick, the beds disappeared. Students who didn’t make the cut. Students who got hurt. Students who couldn’t take the rigor of living and breathing and dreaming music and magic.
“What do you think it’s like at the Asylum?” Gigi spun her cup between her fingers.
Selene suppressed a shiver. She’d heard terrible things. It housed mad mages from all over Mondreves, on the outskirts of the city. It was white and cold and empty. A place to store the refuse of magic. And instead of going home to see his family, instead of finding a position worthy of his talent, Benson was going there to rot.
She should have killed him and called it mercy.
“They’ll take good care of him.” Selene rubbed circles on Gigi’s back. “He’ll have a safe place with people who know what to do and how to help him.”
Gigi took a deep breath. Tears caught in her lashes. “Do you think he’ll ever come back to himself ?”
Selene wiped away one of the tears with her thumb. “I wish I could say.”
“I know magic has its limits. But what if we could sing him whole?”
It was a flight of fancy, a dream without mooring. Selene had imagined it more than she’d ever admit. She’d conjured up a world in which she’d struck her father with a cure instead of lightning. Enough to bring him back. But it was all fantasy. Better magicians had tried over the last hundred years. The madness was absolute.
Or so they’d been told.
Selene wondered how much blood it would take to restore Benson. What kind of pain she’d have to relinquish to dispel the madness. Selene took a deep breath, elated and terrified by the possibilities.
“Maybe.”
Selene looked up, catching the dregs of sunlight as they passed through the windows. They glistened on the edge of a gilt frame. She’d passed it a thousand times. She’d never looked at it, not really. It was part of the background. Another beautiful thing in this beautiful place.
It was a painting of Prince Renard, standing in the space that would become the Opera Magique. He had a jewel-encrusted shovel thrust into the earth. His teeth had been painted without a sheen, so it must have been when he was young, before they’d been replaced with pearls. The king had his hand on Renard’s shoulder. Adrik, the famed mage and theorist, stood to his right. The rest were inconsequential. Faces forgotten to time.
Except for one.
A boy with dark hair and a sharp jawline and eyes so blue that the artist had taken the time to thin out the paint he’d used for the sky.
She knew that face. That stance. The way his lips tilted up into half a smile. Daring her.
Selene stood up.
“What is it?”
“That painting.” Selene pointed. “I never noticed it before.”
“That’s when they broke ground on the opera house.”
“Do you know who that boy is, the one with the bluest eyes?”
Gigi shook her head. “All I know is that the Opera Magique was a gift to the prince. Can you imagine? No trinkets or books or colored paper, but a whole opera house.”
Victor would have been grateful for trinkets or colored paper,she thought.
But how could she say that? It wasn’t her sorrow to share. It wasn’t her pain. She wondered what magic Victor could conjure from his gilded neglect, all that abuse wrapped in pretty packaging. She’d seen the bruises, tended the wounds. More secrets, more parts of her she didn’t know how to share. She looked down at Gigi, huddled on the stairs, the cooling cup of hot chocolate in her hands. Selene could do with one less secret.
