Magdala stood abruptly, jerking away from him, and swallowed tears as she ran up the stairs.
Chapter 4
“Magdala!”
Magdala squeezed her eyes shut and stopped, her boots scraping on the pea gravel. Without turning her head, she said, “What, Julian?”
Julian ran up beside her, offering an impossibly white smile. “Are you coming to the ball tonight?”
“Yes. I’m on duty.”
“You’re not going to tell Huxley, are you?” he asked, falling into step beside her.
Magdala hurried, trying to outpace him. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“It was an accident,” Julian keened, jogging to keep up. “Forget what I said about letting the townspeople get at the prince; I didn’t mean it.”
But Magdala was no fool and, unlike Julian, not so easily convinced to believe lies. Pushing his pleas aside, she marched into the house.
Magdala’s charge, Angelonia, was a willowy half-pixie woman with ice-blonde hair, jutting shoulder blades, and a pair of iridescent wings hanging down her back like a cicada.
She sat at the vanity in her confectionery-like room, draped in a translucent pink dressing gown that left very little of her perfect, petite body to the imagination. A maid stood behind Angelonia, pulling her hair severely back from her forehead, which lent her the strange illusion of having no hair at all. This suited Angelonia. Everything suited Angelonia. She was half pixie, after all.
“That, there, see?” Angelonia said, pointing to Magdala. “I want my skin powdered until it is as fair as hers, but without the freckles. Freckles are not fashionable.”
Magdala smiled tightly and held her tongue, as she was trained to do, but she thought,I wonder if being an insufferable little tyrant is fashionable?
Stationing herself by the door, her hands folded in front of her, Magdala was an ornate vase—present but insignificant. Angelonia chatted lazily to the maid, but Magdala suspected that the maid was thinking about other things like, perhaps, an entire evening to herself while Magdala was toiling at the ball, protecting a woman no one would ever dream of harming.
Magdala had seen enough of the gentry to determine they were lazy, fastidious creatures without two brain cells to share amongst them. Last year, the fashion had been blue silk dresses with high waistlines, and so every ball she attended was an ocean of identical blue silk, until the duchess of somewhere or other wore a red dropped waist gown that showed the tops of her breasts, the skirt slashed to her knee, and then the whole assembly morphed into a rose garden of heaving bosoms and knobby knees.
The men wore black or blue coats—turning the smoking room into a giant bruise—shaved their jawlines, and smiled ivory smiles while plotting what to have for dinner or what duchess they might seduce - if they could tell any of the duchesses apart, which Magdala doubted.
Sometimes, Magdala wondered darkly if a war would be good for these people, shake them out of their manor houses and force them to pick up swords and use their minds, or whatever was left of their minds.
A faint knock on the door caught Magdala’s attention. The maid’s hands were full of her mistress’s hair, and so Angelonia said, “Get it, Devney.”
Bodyguards were not supposed to answer doors, but she crossed the room anyway and did as she was ordered. Julian entered with a bunch of pink roses in his hands.
“Hello, Miss Devney. May I come in?” he asked, smiling his most dashing smile. It only annoyed Magdala.
“No,” she said shortly, but Angelonia called, “Oh, Julian, my beloved, I want your opinion on something.”
Smug as a cockerel in a henhouse, Julian pushed past Magdala. “What is it, my precious?”
Angelonia held her slender hands out to him. “Must I bring Devney tonight? It’s not as though I’m in any danger.”
“Of course you must.” Julian shot Magdala a mischievous grin. "What will people think if you attend unaccompanied? Devney knows how to purport herself.”
Angelonia’s eyes drifted languidly over Magdala’s body. “She is so bulky and she gets in the way.”
Magdala’s cheeks warmed.
None of that,she reminded herself. No anger allowed, no fear, no joy. A royal guard was a tree, emotionless. She had no feelings to hurt. That is what Huxley had taught her. She was not Magdala today, she was just ‘Devney,’ the composed bodyguard who was born higher in rank than any of them. But she knew how to do her job and earn her pay.
“You can send her off once we’re there, but you must at least arrive with her, or else the queen-regent will be displeased.”
“Can’t we get her to wear anything other than black?” Angelonia complained. “It’s so dour.”
