"Don't joke."
"If I don't joke, I'll scream, and I don't want to scream. The the curse isn't finished with us yet."
"What do you mean?"
"The condition isn't that love survives the seeing. It's that true love, freely given, survives the seeing. We've seen the truth. Now we have to survive it. And I don't think surviving means living through the fever. I think it means something else." Her eyes were closing. The fever was pulling her under, and he could feel it in the heat of her skin, the way her body was burning through whatever reserves it had. "I think surviving means choosing each other after the truth."
"I choose you. I have always chosen you."
"Not like this. Not with the mirror's truth between us. Not with the purchase laid bare and the chains visible and every ugly thing that brought us here lit up and undeniable." Her voice was slipping, the edges dissolving into the fever. "When the curse says freely given, it means given with full knowledge of the cost. Including the cost of how we started."
Her eyes closed. Her breathing changed, the rhythm shifting from the measured control she'd maintained since the corridor to something shallower, faster, the breathing of a body beginning to fight an invader it couldn't see.
Anatole held her hand and felt the seventh platform waiting in the room below.
JEANNE
THE CABIN DISSOLVEDinto somewhere else, replaced by rooms she'd never been in and faces she'd never seen. She was lying in her nest, she knew this, she could feel the mattress beneath her and the blankets over her and his hand gripping hers, but her eyes showed her a different room entirely.
She was in a bedroom in a house on land with whitewashed walls, and a window looking out onto a garden. A dark-haired woman sat in a chair with her hands folded in her lap.
Marguerite.
Not the preserved body from the room below. The living woman. She wore an expression that held more grief than a young woman should have been capable of carrying.
"Can you hear me?" Marguerite asked.
"Yes." Jeanne's voice came out strange, doubled, as if she were speaking in two places at once, the cabin and this phantom room overlapping.
"Good. We don't have much time. The fever moves fast once the visions start." Marguerite stood. "I need to tell you what I couldn't tell the others."
"Why couldn't you tell them?"
"Because they were alone when the fever came, and by the time the visions connected us, the mirror had already done its work. They were broken before I could reach them." Marguerite crossed to the phantom window and looked out at the garden. "You're different. Whatever the mirror showed you, you're still coherent. Still here." Marguerite turned back and sighed. "I didn't know. None of us did. We all told ourselves stories about why we were there, and the mirror stripped those stories away, and without the stories, the love collapsed."
"What was your story?"
"I told myself I loved him. And I did, in my way. He was kind and fierce and nothing like the wolves my mother kept around her. But the truth the mirror showed me — the truth that killed me — was that I chose Anatole to escape my mother. Not purely because I loved him. Because he was the fastest route away from Morvenna's island and Morvenna's control." She held Jeanne's gaze without flinching. "My love was real, but it wasn't free. It was fueled by desperation. By rebellion. I married him in secretbecause secrecy was the only power I had against my mother, and the bond I formed was more defiance than devotion." A pause. "The mirror showed me that, and I couldn't survive seeing it, because I'd spent my whole brief marriage believing our love was something it wasn't."
"And the others?"
"Celeste told herself she was strong enough to conquer the curse. The mirror showed her that her strength was irrelevant because her love for Anatole was rooted in the challenge of the curse. Isabeau told herself she was clever enough to outwit it. The mirror showed her that cleverness and witty banter wasn’t love. Our love wasn't strong enough to stand on its own." Marguerite shook her head sadly. "The curse's condition is true love, freely given and freely received. A love that exists for love only."
"Is that what Anatole and I have?"
"That's what I can't tell you. I can tell you what killed us. I can't tell you whether your love is true enough to survive." The phantom room was beginning to dissolve, the edges going soft and transparent. "But I can tell you this, the mirror has never shown Anatole anything before. Whatever you did by bringing him into the room, you introduced a variable the curse wasn't built for."
"I don't feel like I changed anything. I feel like I'm dying."
"You might be. The curse doesn't care about variables. It cares about love." The room was almost gone now, Marguerite's face the last thing visible, dark eyes and dark hair and an expression that was equal parts sorrow and jealousy.
"I hated him at first, but then I grew to love him. He called me his mate. I think he’s my destiny."
"Then hold onto that. Not as a feeling. As a decision. The fever will try to take it from you. It will burn through every layer of what you've built until you die. But if there's somethinggenuinely real, then the fever can't burn it, because truth doesn't burn." The last thing Jeanne saw before the vision dissolved was Marguerite's mouth shaping words she couldn't quite hear, and then the phantom room was gone and the cabin was back, solid and real.
"Jeanne." His voice. Her mate. "You were talking. In the fever. You were talking to someone."
"Marguerite." Her throat was raw, her skin burning. The second wave was building, she could feel it gathering behind her sternum like a storm front. "She spoke to me."
