Page 49 of The Scarlet Ball

“You son of a bitch, you mangy, monstrous—”

A moment later, he lit me up from the inside straight to my skin. Hell, I thought I felt it in my hair. I thought it would burn me out, render me insensible to this life or the next, but it only drove me to the brink and pushed me off. I was howling, grabbing hold of Sebastian with both hands, and banging my head against the ice.

I had shifted so that my head rested far over the balustrade. All I could see was the mother forest, the impenetrable branches, the trees moving with no wind. The shocks, one after the other as Sebastian fucked his fingers deep into me just as I directed, overwhelmed me, sent me spinning and moaning as if I was possessed.

At first, I didn’t know what had happened. If I thought anything, I thought I truly was falling, but I was so exhausted from what Sebastian had given me that I didn’t care. I could fall. I could strike the earth and break into a million little pieces, and each one would still be crying his name.

Then I realized, no, we really were falling, Sebastian gathering me to him and all around us chunks of blue ice following us down. When he had me he pushed away from the path of the scree, our toes brushing the tops of the trees before he straightened out and flew right. Now I was in his arms, and despite it, I couldn’t take my eyes off the ruin behind us.

My heart broke briefly for the palace, it had been so beautiful, but then a new voice emerged in my head, my own, proud and shaking with pleasure.

I can have it again, she said without a hint of doubt. Whenever I want, whenever I tell him. I will keep him fed, and he will be mine, and when I wish, he will build me palaces.

Over Sebastian’s shoulder, I saw the last of the palace crumbling and falling into the forest below. Soon it would be as if it had never been there at all. I buried my face in the crook of Sebastian’s neck.

Somehow, I must have slept, because suddenly it was dawn, and Sebastian and I stood at the back entrance to Howard House. It suddenly struck me that this was how it had all started, and I began to laugh.

“What’s the matter?” Sebastian asked, and I was spared from answering when Mrs. Howard appeared in the door. In a matter of moments, Sebastian had been sent away, and she gave me a shove toward the stairs. The scullion raking out the coals from the cookstove had been altered and she paid us no mind when I shoved Mrs. Howard back.

“Don’t do that,” I told her, aware that my voice was slurred with exhaustion and the memory of pleasure. If I concentrated, I could bring up the faintest ghost of Sebastian’s shocking touch.

To my surprise, Mrs. Howard directed the scullion to send a plate of bread and fruit after us, and then she ushered me upstairs to her bedroom. With the door locked, she fixed me with a slow reptilian displeasure that nonetheless was threaded through with panic.

“I won’t ask what you’ve been doing—that is altogether plain. But here you are, alive and with all your limbs so far as I can see. You survived him alone for what must have been hours. Tell me how.”

I nodded toward the closed door that joined her bedchamber to Mr. Howard’s, a private passage where the servants could not see who slept where and when. We could hear Mr. Howard’s familiar step and the scrap of song he sang under his breath, preparing for another full day.

“You survive him every day of your life. How do you do that?”

She had no answer to that, or none that she would give me, and so I took myself off to bed.

Eleven

The next day, there was an elegantly attired Desi man at the door with a bullyman by his side and a card declaring him a Mr. Anil Lal. In the front parlor with my false face attached with a quick basting stitch, I sat as he carefully measured my finger and selected a gold ring with an empty setting.

As I watched, he used a series of small picks and files to place a stone within the setting, bending the tiny prongs to hold the gem in place, smoothing them down with great care before handing it back to me to try on. I shouldn’t have let him do the work; properly, I shouldn’t have let him in the door. Sebastian was permitted flowers, perhaps candy so long as he made sure to bring enough for every woman in the household. This was too much, but I couldn’t resist the chance to wear something pretty, even if I knew I would have to give it immediately back.

The ring fit perfectly, and when I held up my hand to the light, I gasped. I had suspected diamond or ruby, but this stone was one I had never seen before. It was smooth-faced like jade and so dark at first I thought he had chosen poor onyx for some reason. Then I shifted, and the darkness was shot with color, there and gone again, so vivid it made me stare.

“Black opal,” Mr. Lal said with satisfaction. “Not so common on these shores, precious even where it is found.”

I wanted nothing more than to put it in my pocket or perhaps even my mouth, hide it and carry it away to some secret place where I would be able to look at it for hours, but reluctantly, I returned it to Mr. Lal.

“It is beautiful, but I am afraid I cannot accept this. Please convey my thanks and my refusal to Mr. Rowe.”

Mrs. Howard wasn’t there to approve of the propriety of my behavior; she had taken to her bed yesterday morning after my return from the Snowflake Festival. She let on that she was exhausted, which sounded like a trick of some kind before I remembered her true age. It was startlingly easy to forget that she was nearing seventy, and no amount of wildfire would change that.

She did not emerge from her rooms for the rest of the week, but she sent word through Mielle as to where I should go and when. I was surprised to be allowed out on my own, even to attend entirely staid affairs where the worst I would encounter would be society matrons, not demon lords. I kept half expecting Sebastian to show up at some soiree or entertainment, and felt both grateful and disappointed when he didn’t.

He continued to make his presence felt. Almost every day, there was another knock on the door, another tradesman with something for me in a bag or a box. There was a mechanical bird that sang with a human tongue, an enamel brooch in the shape of an eye that winked and blinked most becomingly, jeweled snakes that wanted nothing more than to slither up my arms and nestle sweetly with their noses pressed against the crook of my elbows. At the last, a round-faced woman in a violet walking dress presented me with a covered basket.

When I lifted the cloth, there was something a little like strips of silk and a little like water inside. At first I thought they were snakes again, but then I saw that they were something else. Hesitantly, I reached into the basket to trail my fingers through the shifting mass, and when I touched them, a mist rose up in my mind.

Suddenly I knew what it was to wear a costume that was mostly rhinestones and feathers and to step onto the back of an enormous white horse as if it were a table. Suddenly I knew how hot a circus tent was in summer in Italy, and I knew what it was like to leap from the back of one horse at a full gallop to another. I felt the flex of enormous muscles and the warmth of coarse horsehair under my toes, and I sighed before reluctantly putting the memories back and closing the basket.

“Do they not please?” the woman asked with a frown. “If you are interested in something a little more exciting, I might also find you the memories of an Italian adventuress who dressed as a man and seduced a pair of nuns from a convent. She sold the lot to us last year, and they are proving very popular with the young ladies in Paris and London.”

I smiled faintly while thinking what a shame it would be to seduce two nuns and then not be able to remember it.