Page 81 of The Scarlet Ball

Did I want him, or did I just want to win? Sebastian meant victory, and they were so intertwined there was no separating them. There never would be.

“Yes.”

Unexpectedly, she reached for me. Anyone else in the world, including that storm rolling over us, and I would have flinched. For Mielle, I stood still, my face turned up for her work.

She was fast but gentle, pulling out the remaining stitches that held the false face over my real one. They’d been torn so they required no cutting, but they were sunk deep. When she finished, I stepped out into the rain, wincing as the cold water cleared out the cuts. At least they were no longer bleeding.

“We can have the scars removed when they heal,” Mielle said.

“No,” I said. I liked my face pretty, but I found the thought unaccountably distasteful; I felt possessive of the wounds I had received. “I think I’ll keep them for at least a little while.”

“Suit yourself.”

“I always do.”

She gave me a look to say that she was not amused, and then she approached the dead mare.

“Come here, pretty girl,” she murmured softly. “Rise up. One more run, and then you will be free. One more, that is all we ask. Rise.”

The horse that rose up at her call was a lean and lovely thing, pure black despite the dead mare’s white nose and fetlocks, velvet black, black like a hole in the night. She was bridled but not saddled, and when I looked closer, I saw that the bridle was sunk into the bone of her skull, as much a part of her as her pert ears or her deep eyes. She danced in place—perhaps she had been a circus horse before this—and Mielle stepped back.

“If we must,” she said, and I grinned.

“You know you don’t have to, not anymore. Whatever contract held you to this bad business died with Mrs. Howard.”

“Judith.”

“Yes?”

“Whether contract, obligation, morbid curiosity, or misplaced gratitude holds me to you, you should not question it.”

“Then what should I do?”

“Say thank you, Mielle and get on the horse.”

“Thank you, Mielle.”

In my previous life, I was something of a favorite with military men; I had been on a horse at least a few times. It did not bother me to use the block to mount her, nor did it bother me to sit astride with my skirts hitched up around my waist. Securely aboard, I could reach over and haul Mielle up behind me. She came reluctantly and then clutched me around the waist so hard I laughed.

“Hold on tight,” I told her. “I do not know what the road ahead of us may be, but I cannot imagine you wish to fall off.”

Out of some half-remembered lesson, I clapped my heels to the mare’s sides. I wasn’t sure how to urge her forward otherwise, and I was glad when she lifted up one foot and then the other. She marched in place, and I blinked dizzily because while she wasn’t moving it seemed as if the world did, spinning under her feet, going faster and faster until it was all a blur. Either we were moving or the world was, and there was a vast shifting beneath the mare’s hooves.

New York fell away, and then America did. Why had I never noticed before how small these places were? They were like paddocks or barns, designed to keep you contained. Beyond them, there was space enough to stretch, space enough to run, and the mare did just that. I whooped with excitement while behind me, Mielle held on tighter.

The world rolled away, and then the moon did too, the mare’s shod hooves striking its silver surface for only a heartbeat before they struck the soft gold of Venus and then the red glass of Mars. The stars whirled giddily above us, and I imagined them laughing at what strange and terrible creatures we were with our fast hard lives. The stars would never descend, they would never see what we could make with our lives, and I laughed back at them.

I could have ridden forever, and I might have if Mielle hadn’t yelled in my ear.

“Ahead,” she called. “Ahead and close.”

My head buzzed like a wasps’ nest. My vision blurred as if my eyes were filled with tears, and then it resolved in front of me, a gleaming white palace with spires as high as the sky, a Bavarian wonder with ornamentation as lacy and delicate as dew on a cobweb, and—

“No,” Mielle said. “Look again.”

I did, and in a panic, I hauled on the mare’s reins, nearly sending us tumbling off. It wasn’t a palace at all, but a series of thick trunks, living trees denuded of leaves and with their branches lopped off and sharpened to cruel points. On these points, people had been impaled like grasshoppers on thorns, and they gnashed their teeth and wailed, for there was no help for them, and—

“No,” Mielle insisted. “Look. Please look, or—”