Faith confessed her history with Emmett to me our second night in the cottage. I was outside watching the sunset in the rose garden when she stomped out and said something under her breath about longing for some air.
I stole two flutes and a dusty bottle of something from the kitchen and settled down with her on an old stone bench that was crawling with moss. “You look like you need someone to spill your guts to,” I said. And she did. I wasn’t lying, but I also wasn’t about to pass up the chance to be close to her. Since the moment I first spotted her in profile the morning of the Pact Parade, I was... enamored. Yes, that’s a word. Let’s go with enamored. She felt so familiar to me, like there was a string tied directly to my heart, and every time I saw her face, an invisible force tugged at it.
“I thought I could love him,” she explained that night in the garden. “That feels silly now.”
“I don’t think love is ever silly,” I replied.
“Is that why you’re here?” she asked. “Because you think you could love Bram?”
“Oh no,” I answered honestly. It was quite the opposite, though I didn’t tell her then.
“Is that whyyou’rehere,” I asked her in turn. “For revenge?”
She sighed, like the weight of the world was pressing down on her narrow shoulders, and shook her head. “No, Emmett doesn’t loveme like that. I couldn’t get that kind of reaction out of him if I tried.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“What Emmett and I had... it’s hard to explain. We needed each other.”
That I understood, at least a little. “If you’re not here for Emmett, then why?”
Faith worried her lip again, I was afraid she’d draw blood and I’d be forced to do something chivalrous, like produce a clean hanky and dab at the wound.
“My father told me I had to enter the season, and I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. My father would have made me accept the first offer that came my way just to make me not his problem anymore. I figured Bram was my best option. What a cliché, right?”
“I think you’re more than a cliché,” I said, too honest.
Faith smiled. I wanted to keep making her smile. “You might be the only one who does.”
I thought I was so clever when I signed up for the competition for the prince’s hand. The subject of my match has been a conversation at the Thorne family dinner table for as long as I’ve been alive.
Queen Mor’s England is deeply isolated from the rest of the world. Other than tightly regulated, necessary economic trade, there is functionally no contact with the outside world. It’s said that on a sunny day in Dover, you can see all the way to France. The light is supposed to be beautiful as it reflects off the remnants of the wall they built four hundred years ago to keep Mor out.
Every country seems to have its own explanation for Queen Mor and her eternal rule. Angel or demon, depending on who you ask. To my father’s people, she was a monster. There was no other reasonable explanation for a woman who lived forever. You don’t gointo the forest on Thursdays, and you certainly don’t leave your home to sail to England. But as my father tells it, drought had dried up his family’s land in Ghana, and he was out of options. So he boarded a boat with others who believed that demons were the stuff of myth, and he crossed an unfriendly ocean.
Per the Royal Decree of 1597, all who are brave enough to make a bargain with Queen Mor are made citizens.
He was just eighteen when he knelt in front of her and bargained for one hundred bolts of fabric and a sewing machine.
Within the year, he’d become the most sought-after tailor on Savile Row. A year after that, he used his profits to open a department store. He now controls half of London’s shopping district in the West End. He changed his last name from Agyapong to Thorne, like slipping on a new coat that he didn’t like half as well as the last one.
Queen Mor took from him the ability to dream. He once told me that if he could dream, he’d dream of home.
An incredible storyteller and ruthless businessman, he quickly became a favorite at court, and the queen granted him a dukedom in less time than it took to buy his first two-story storefront.
The summer he turned twenty-three, he met my mother, a prim and proper English girl who grew up on an estate near Cornwall, and they were wed two months later. I came along the following winter, and the scheming began immediately. He might have been a duke, but he hadn’t been one for long, and he knew he needed to secure his family’s legacy. That meant marriage. That meant me.
My future always felt like a pit filling with sand. There was nothing I could do to stop it. I stitched samplers that said nice things about being a nice girl. I learned to play the pianoforte, became awizard at whist, and could identify all the plants growing on the edge of the forest that bordered our family’s estate.
My little sister, Este, was my shadow, my partner. Our governess and tutors drilled us like little soldiers, and by ten and twelve we could plan a banquet, balance a household’s budget, and dance a perfect quadrille.
We were good girls, so we could become perfect wives.
After our lessons, I had to go for long walks to cool myself off, until I stopped feeling like I needed to claw my way out of my own skin.
When I was fifteen, I kissed a girl for the first time at Lady Richfield’s spring equinox tea party, and then I threw up in a hydrangea bush. Penny Richfield was two years older than me, and she blushed when our hands brushed over the clotted cream. She married the second son of a viscount last fall and now pretends not to know who I am.
My future became a grave filling up with dirt.
