“When my father went mad, it felt like the end of the world.” Selene sat down beside Gigi. “It feels like this. And I’m sorry we’re both here. I wish none of this had happened.”
“You don’t talk about him. Or any of your life before.”
“What happened with my father—it’s all tangled up. Victor, the palace, the king. It’s hard to unravel part without unraveling the whole.”
Victor had pressed his fingers against her skin. He had looked into her eyes. Spoken to her. And he had not known her. She was a stranger to him, and she supposed he was a stranger to her, too. He was no longer the boy who’d known how to make her laugh and fill the hours with mischief. No longer the boy who’d been her escape from her worries about her father, a refuge in the complicated world of palace life. He’d been everything to Selene, once.
And now, he was nothing.
The rhythm of Madame’s cane sent Selene’s heart racing. Gigi pulled away from her, smoothing her hair. Posture perfect. Eyes bright with hope.
“Girls,” Madame Giroux said. There was a weariness to her that Selene had seldom seen. This was her loss, too. “It’s time to prepare for the Unmasking Ball.”
“Oh.”
Anguish washed through Selene. She hadn’t taken the stage by storm, as she’d planned. If anything, her capture of Benson hurt her chances. That was magic used beyond the scope of art. What little hope remained came at the cost of her friend.
“I can’t.” Gigi pressed her hands to her face. “I don’t think I can do this.”
“You must.” Madame’s voice was fierce, almost violent. “You all know the risks. I taught each of you.”
There was a moment of deep despair in Madame Giroux’s face, before the curtains closed and she seemed like stone.
“Come on.” Gigi fought a losing battle against her tears.
“First.” Madame put her hand on Selene’s shoulder. “A lesson.”
Chapter 18
Selene tried to keep the startled expression from her face. “Yes, Madame.”
“You’ll have time enough to get ready.”
Gigi cast a long, lingering glance at the two of them before disappearing with the empty cups of hot chocolate.
Selene followed Madame to her office. They’d stopped their regular lessons in the last few months, allowing Selene to focus on her aria. Madame could not help her write her performance piece. It was all up to Selene.
She stood beside the piano. Back straight, heart pounding in her chest. Madame struck a chord.
“Sing through E.”
She nodded and began, moving up the scale, and then chromatically through the next key. E was a tricky vowel. It was unforgiving, revealing every weakness and break in the voice. They worked up, up, up to the G above high C, and then came back down.
“Messe di voce.”
Selene matched the note played on the piano. She crescendoed and decrescendoed on that same pitch. Moving up the notes of the scale and back down.
Simple, easy warmups she did almost every day to wake up her voice. Would she miss this, the way she missed her days at the palace? It was bittersweet. She loved music; she loved the push to greatness and the endless possibilities in between the notes. She would not miss feeling like her life was about to start and she was doing it all without her father.
She wished she could talk to him, wished she could ask him why he’d pushed himself so far. He already had everything. The title of the King’s Mage and a second tenure, a daughter, a life. What could have pushed him to the edge? Selene could answer that for Benson, but she didn’t have answers from her own father.
Her eyes caught on a tiny brown speck, marring the black lacquer of the piano.
A seed.
A few hours before, she’d gone without one. She’d made a seed out of blood and sorrow. But magicians needed more than that. They carried seeds and sang them into trees and flowers and other beautiful things. Her father had often marveled over the whole of creation captured in the tiny hull. A seed was a whole world. It contained everything it needed to live.
A seed was a heart and a whole and it did not bleed. That was all she needed. She could go back in the mirror and offer the ghost a seed.
