Greer Trummer
When my mother first told me that I couldn’t speak to Ivy anymore, I cried for a week. Then she sold my second favorite horse and told me she’d sell the other if I let my blubbering get in the way of preparing for the season, so the tears dried up quick. There was no winning with Mama. After eighteen years, I knew it well enough. She’d mostly stopped hitting me when I turned sixteen, but sometimes I wish she’d start again. Her psychological games are worse because they’re so much harder to predict.
Mama never liked the Benton sisters. They were so completely themselves, and I think that scared her, because Mama didn’t want me to be anything but her perfect little soldier. I didn’t know what a family looked like until I sat at the Bentons’ dining table and watched them gossip and debate things like art and philosophy. No one was told to lower their voice—that surprised me most.
Ivy would sometimes make biting comments about how she lived permanently in my shadow, but I was jealous of her too. Our jealousy fed on itself until it tangled into the very fabric of our relationship.
I wasn’t entirely surprised when Lydia ruined her family. She’d lived with the recklessness of someone who’d been told her wholelife she was perfect. She didn’t fear missteps, because every step she’d ever taken had been met with applause. She was good at this life of ours. She loved being on display, living as if she were on a stage and this was all some big game. When I was small, I thought I hated her; now I have enough self-awareness to know what I was feeling had another name: envy. It doesn’t matter much now, there’s no use in dwelling on it.
But something changed the year of Lydia’s debut. Ivy would turn up at my house with a worried look on her face and stories of whatever had happened the night before. Lydia wasn’t getting any callers, let alone any offers.
Between that and Lydia’s lack of a public bargain, it was an embarrassment, a blight on the family, and I pitied Ivy because she didn’t seem to realize it yet. She was too busy being worried about her sister to be worried for herself.
Everyone always thought Lydia would marry Percival Chapwick. The day she refused his proposal, Ivy came over and wept in my bed all evening. “She promised,” she wailed. I’ve never been good with people crying.
I wasn’t like the Benton sisters. I’ve always known exactly what my bargain would be. Mama and I decided it together when I was ten and it became clear I wasn’t going to grow into my nose. I’d spend hours looking at myself in the mirror, Mama just over my shoulder. She’d stroke her pinkie over the bridge and say “just there.” It felt something like love. It was the only way she knew how to take care of me.
The Benton girls had none of our practicality.
It’s why Ivy made a good best friend. She always had stories about faerie kings, or she wanted to make little houses out of leavesfor the ducklings. I loved living in her world with her. I relished evenings at the Benton home, where no one was screaming. Her parents seemed to really like each other; I didn’t even know that was possible until I met them.
Friends are tricky in this business of ours.
It hurt to leave her behind, but I knew why I had to do it. I snipped the threads that bound me to her like I was finishing an embroidery. I loved Ivy, but not enough to let her ruin me.
I learned at my mother’s knee how to shove feelings deep down until I couldn’t reach them anymore. Ivy fit well in that dark place.
Her absence in my life left a hole in more ways than one. I’d lost not only a confidante and a friend, but also a way to fill my time. The hours I’d usually spend with Ivy were suddenly freed up. I took to going to the stables early in the morning, before fittings or etiquette lessons or promenades around the park. I was mostly avoiding my mother, but it was nice to stroke my horse’s neck and braid her mane.
It was there that I first started talking to Joseph again.
We’d been friends when we were young, and he used to let Ivy and me torment him. We’d chase him down and tie ribbons in his hair until he squirmed away from us. But he’d grown into nearly a man. I didn’t even realize he still worked for our family, thought maybe he’d gone away to school or something.
But there he was, in the dappled morning light of the stables, an apron on and a farrier’s file in his hand.
“Milady.” His voice was so deep it made me jump. “I didn’t realize you were here.”
I startled, which startled the horse, who whinnied and bucked. I stumbled backward and tripped over the hem of my dress. I wouldhave gone flying into the stone floor of the mews if Joseph hadn’t caught me.
I remember looking up at him and realizing I’d never really seen him at all. “I’ve got you” was all he said, and I fell in love right then and there.
I went to the stables every morning after that. We’d sip tea together on bales of hay, and he taught me how to polish the tack. He was the first person who had truly listened to me since Ivy.
I scrubbed my hands raw so Mama wouldn’t see the black smudge of polish under my fingernails. We all laughed at Olive’s bargain, which left her with no nails, but honestly, she may have been smarter than the rest of us.
Joseph was too polite to kiss me, even though I’d hinted at it for weeks. In the end, I’m the one who had to lean in. It was a gray morning, misty with rain, and I raised up on my toes and pressed my lips to his in the doorway of the barn. He was so startled he didn’t move, and I thought I’d misread everything. I pulled back, and he looked at me with his big blue eyes, then lifted me off my feet and confessed he’d loved me all his life. It was everything I’d ever wanted.
We met in secret for months. Joseph begged me to run away with him, said he’d use his bargain for a carriage fast enough to carry us to the Scottish border, or to have both our families forget we ever existed, so we could live in peace, but I wasn’t brave like him. I looked at my nose in the mirror and stuck to my mother’s plan.
Mama caught us on the morning of the Pact Parade. It was reckless, I knew that, but I needed to say goodbye. He’d made me promise to show him my old face one last time. I didn’t tell him then, but I had it all worked out. I’d marry some stodgy old widower andhire Joseph to work in our stables. We could live a life together, even if it was only in the shadows.
Mama barreled into the stables and caught us just as the sun rose. The fury on her face screwed up her features so intensely, for a moment I didn’t recognize her. She dragged me by my hair back up to my room, and Joseph knew well enough not to stop her. She hit me on my stomach so the bruises wouldn’t show through my Pact Parade gown, used the heels of her hands so the blows landed sharp and precise. My father watched, his arms folded across his broad chest, and told me it was all my fault, that I should have known better.
I think maybe my mother dragged me to the dais to compete for Bram’s hand because she wanted an excuse to take a knife to me, to watch me bleed. But the joke was on her. I didn’t feel a thing when she cut me.
When I entered the queen’s throne room to make my bargain, I was so numb I couldn’t think, so I asked for what Mama and I had always planned. I regret that now.
I was surprised when Queen Mor looked down at me with a quirked head and asked, “What is it you are most afraid of, Lady Trummer?”
