“Where is he?” I ask.
“His Majesty is gone, but he asked me to keep you safe.” Keep me locked up, she means.
“When will he return?”
“No one can be sure these days.”
She carries in a tray from the hallway, laden with waxy technicolor fruits, pastries dripping in half-melted icing, and a tankard of fizzy wine. My mouth waters, but I can’t bring myself to touch it. I’ve hungered for the food from the Otherworld for months, craving something I couldn’t name. I’d sneak down to the kitchens in the middle of the night and eat everything in sight, shoveling raw sugar by the handful into my mouth. Nothing would sate me. I know why now.
“Would you like me to stay?” Eloree asks.
“No, I need my rest.”
She nods. “I’ll come later to dress you for the feast.”
The door latches behind her and glows once more. I don’t bother trying the lock, but I race to the window and find it stuck too.
I find the heaviest object I can, the fire poker, and swing it again and again against the glass until sweat is running down my back and I’m out of breath.
He’s enchanted this too.
I collapse in a heap on the floor and bang my head against the stone wall of the tower, cursing myself.
Faerie tales all have the same lesson, really: don’t go searching in the dark. But I’d never listened quite as closely as my sister.
When it came time to make my bargain, I panicked. I saw so many girls my age missing toes or memories, all to ensnare some husband they didn’t even like.
It was a foregone conclusion that I was to marry Percival Chapwick, and Mama never let an opportunity pass to remind me of it.
And for a long time it was fine, really it was. But all of a sudden it wasn’t just some far-off thing. I was nearly eighteen, and it was going to actually happen. I was going to have to leave the home I’d known all my life, my family, and go live in a house with a boy I barely knew.
He lived just down the road. One month before I was supposed to make my bargain, I climbed the garden trellis into his room. He was surprised to find me crawling through his window, and he tried to kiss me, like that’s all it was. I pushed him away, which he took like a gentleman. “I want to talk,” I said.
“About what?” He was puzzled.
“Anything.”
He couldn’t manage it. It was stilted and awkward, and I couldn’t bear it more than a few minutes before I climbed out the window again.
When I thought of living a life boarded up in a house with a man I couldn’t have a conversation with, I felt like I was going to die.
The day of the Pact Parade, my mouth was saying the words before I even knew what I meant. I begged Queen Mor to let me experience something completely new. The mind-numbing existence of my life was going to crush me.
Queen Mor laughed. She told me that she would give me what Iwished, but I would never be able to speak of it. I didn’t realize that meant I wouldn’t remember it. She tricked me. If I were clever, like Ivy, I would have seen it coming.
The Others have to honor the law but not the spirit of the bargain. It’s part of the fun for them. I know that now.
The queen certainly had her fun with me. For two years I bore the shame of having made a bad bargain, one I couldn’t remember. I was supposed to be my family’s shining hope, our way out of rapidly approaching poverty, but in the end, I went and made the exact same mistakes as my parents. Isn’t that always the way?
I had a gut feeling that I shouldn’t accept any courtships, that something else was waiting for me. It wasn’t until this winter that Queen Mor finally held up her end of the bargain.
I awoke in the middle of the night with the strangest sensation, like there was a ribbon tied around my rib cage and someone was on the other end, tugging. I followed the feeling outside and down the street. My feet carried me like I was in a dream all the way to Kensington Park. There I found a peculiar tree, shimmering like a fallen star. I laid my hands upon it and suddenly I was somewhere else.
It was daytime there, that was the first thing I noticed. The grass was softer and a slightly different shade of green than the grass in England. The trees had leaves that were shaped like stars, the flowers smelled of baking bread, and up on a hill was a castle. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen back home, too tall, too sharp, constructed from something like opal that shimmered in the sunlight. I wandered for a while until two palace guards found me. I was so tired and hungry, I thought I imagined the double rows of sharp teeth in their horses’ mouths.
They took me to the castle, where I found a revel raging. There were towers of strange food. The sun was blazing outside, but inside, someone had enchanted the ceiling to look like the inky-black Milky Way.
There were hundreds of Others, twirling in gowns that floated like spider’s silk, playing fiddles encrusted with gems, kissing wildly up against the walls of the ballroom.
