Brietta turned and I followed. We walked through the much wider hallway that was lit with gently burning sconces. Polished wood trim and marble floors lined the halls.
A low, slow buzz filled the air.
“Then what is our fate?” Brietta gestured to her left. “This.”
The buzz came from a snoring man who rested on a small bench in the hallway and was using a woman’s rear end ashis pillow. The woman’s hair was tousled, her lip paint was smeared, and her bosom was half-exposed over her tight bodice.
Was she even breathing?
“Constant parties until the next full moon,” Brietta grumbled as she started down the hallway again. “Where the men trade wives like they are just another bottle of wine to pass around.”
I slowed my pace, eyeing a sleeping woman on the floor who was smashed between two unconscious men. “Surely Derrick has not—”
Brietta snorted. “No. He makes his obligatory appearance at every party and then retreats to the North tower.”
I let out a relieved breath. Of course Derrick would never treat Brietta with such disrespect. He only loved me, but he was still not that cruel.
Brietta stopped at a large tapestry of hunters with spears surrounding a doe. “But if you think Derrick is a beacon of decency in this depraved morass…” She pulled back the tapestry, revealing another door. “…you are wrong.”
She pushed the door open. Brietta’s candle lit up a small room with a row of four plush leather chairs. All four chairs faced a series of windows that led into…
I held in a gasp. It was a window into the dressing room that we prepared in before the Presentation.
Riyan had confessed that he had seen me before the Presentation through magic mirrors, but were they really magic? My Nordingaard crystal warmed in my fist and I threw out a quick sweep of my power over the glass.
Nothing responded.
I walked over and touched the glass. It felt completely ordinary. How was it possible to be a window on one side and a mirror on the other?
“They pile all the suitors in here and tell them these are magic mirrors that will show them our true selves.” Disgust drippedoff Brietta’s voice as she stepped into the room. “All bullshit, Freya told me everything. The mirrors are not magic—it is just some trick with metal. Duke Hyton just tells them the mirrors are cursed so that the suitors’ cocks will fall off if they ever tell a woman about them.”
I tapped the glass with my fingernail, trying to figure out the trick.
I used to be an alchemist’s apprentice. Master of illusions.
Daigen. He had said he performed services for the former Dukes of Lycaster—the mirrors had to be one of his illusions.
Brietta kept her distance from the mirrors. “All the suitors have watched every bride at her most vulnerable for hundreds of years. While we sweat about the biggest moment of our lives, they leer at us and theylaugh at us.”
I stared at the exact spot where I had dressed mere days ago and a shiver crawled up the back of my neck.
Her voice broke. “I always knew we were property. Being slaves to our husbands made sense when Freya explained it…but I never realized how powerless we were until I saw this room. They will not even let us have privacy. We solely exist for their use, for their entertainment, and for their consumption until we finally give up and die.”
I ran my thumb over the ridges of my crystal as I looked at the worn vanity tables and stools. Riyan had watched me. He had…participated in all this.
He was too large to fit into any of the chairs, so he must have just sat on the floor behind them, watching the entire spectacle like it was cheap theatre.
He had watched me backhand Annalisa and order Camille and Dinah to help me fix Brietta’s dress. He had told me I impressed him, that I was so commanding and strong that he had to marry me.
What had Riyan thought while Brietta cried because Ilsa’s dress did not fit her? He was supposed to choose her, but did watching her tears make him select me as his bride instead?
No, Riyan had said he wanted me from the moment he saw me through the mirrors. I looked through the window at the row of white doors in the dressing room. My eyes locked on the door that I had stepped through not even two weeks ago.
There. That was when he first saw me. He had knownofme, the younger sister of Erik and Endre Ravenwood, but he did not know me. He could have never known me or seen me had it not been for the centuries-old trick of glass and metal.
Such a strange duality. The opportunity to spy on the brides so the suitors could see “our true selves” was infuriating and unjust…but had Riyan really seen my true self through those mirrors? Was I truly commanding and strong?
Riyan certainly thought so, anyway.
