Painted Devils, page 17
I want it to be true, and yet—“Is that really something you can just do?” I push, trying to stifle the tremor in my voice.
“It’s not in any prefect code, any charter, anything formal.” Emeric’s chin stiffens, stubborn as ever. “I looked through them all in January to be certain. This, us, is too important to me to throw away for a bad tradition. I’d rather force them to change it than … lose you. Again.” He swallows. “But I was afraid that might be too much to put on you, too fast.” When I don’t respond after a moment, he starts knotting his hands together once more. “Please say something.”
With tremendous effort, I squeak out, “January?”
All this time, he’s been ready to fight. To stay with me. And all I did was run.
His ears turn pink. “I—I thought you would be there soon, and the Finding wasn’t supposed to take this long, and—oh.” He stops short as I collide with his chest, my hands balling up in his lapels.
“I’m sorry I said that stupid thing about ditching me,” I say into his krebatte in a rush. “I’m—I’m sorry I left you in Helligbrücke—”
“No, you told me what happened and I threw it in your face.” Emeric’s arms wind around me as he huffs a short tense laugh. “Much like the dung you threw at me this afternoon.”
“Oh. Sorry for that too.”
“You absolutely are not.”
“I’m really not,” I confess. “It was hilarious.”
“Agree to disagree,” he says dourly. Then he pulls back to look me in the face, concern stealing over his. “There’s something else. You said you’re not good enough for me, and, Vanja, I have never thought that.”
“The first week we met, you recited the specific prefect chapter and verse that says you’re better than me,” I fire back. “‘Something something association with miscreants, something something taints your character’ ring any tainted bells?”
Emeric mutters, “Charter of the Prefect, Article Seven,” under his breath. “Fair point, and I almost immediately learned how wrong I was. But for as long as we have been together, I have never thought you’re not good enough for me. And I think you know that.” His voice turns tentative, careful. “I think the real issue might be … you don’t believe you’re good enough.”
It’s the kind of truth too painful to deny, even worse to own, and all the more terrible to hear someone else say aloud. I squeeze my eyes shut and lean my forehead against his sternum, trying to keep my face from crumpling. It’s enough of a confirmation, even without words. The weight of his chin settles between my braids a moment later.
“I don’t know how to help that,” he whispers, “but, High Gods and Low, I’m going to try. Starting here.” There’s an odd crinkle, then paper is pressed into my hands. I open my eyes.
It’s a folded page, a muted stain along one edge, that lets off a whiff of coffee when I peel it open. Words scrawl before me, familiar even though I read them only once, months ago. I know bravery is real because I see you choose it every day.
Emeric wrote this to me in Minkja, when everything seemed lost and all we had was hope traced onto mirrors.
If you want me to chase you, I will chase you. If you want me to find you, I will find you.
“I want you to keep this, so anytime you feel that way, you will know I couldn’t disagree more,” he says fiercely. “I want you to remember that, as long as you’ll have me, I will choose you every time.”
I can’t—I can’t find the words, because for so long I have lived afraid of feeling like this, like roots might grow through my skin instead of thorns, and I wonder if roses, too, fear the moment the petals break through the bud. But bloom they must, and answer I must, so I lift my face to the sun, feeling the tempo of his heart quicken as my lips brush his.
I don’t know if he’ll be able to just ignore tradition, written or not; I don’t know if I can find it in me to believe I’m worth the trouble I bring to the door. But when he returns my kiss, it feels like a promise, and for now, that is enough.
I let myself be still a moment, let myself be held the way he does it, like letting go means losing something. Finally I mumble, “You’re not going to let me say I don’t deserve this, are you?”
“I am not,” he says archly, his arms tightening. “I might not let go until you say you do, in fact.”
“Hm. Terrible disincentive.” Then I hold up a fistful of ribbon I found while rummaging through his pockets. (Old habits, you know the saying.) “Now what is this for?”
Emeric’s eyes widen, and one arm peels free to make a frantic swipe for the ribbon. “That’s not—you weren’t supposed to—”
I flick my hand out of reach, grinning, and take a better look. It’s not one ribbon but two, tablet-woven, fern green, laced with a pattern of leaves in cream thread, dotted periodically with red roses. Then I connect the dots. “Is this for me?”
“I, er.” Emeric appears to be going into rigor mortis, apart from his ears turning a distinctly vibrant crimson once again. “You always pick the Queen of Roses for your card, and I saw it in a store this morning, and I—I thought it might—look nice with your hair—and then I went into a sort of fugue state, and when I came out I had two lengths of ribbon and one less sjilling. So yes. It’s for you.”
“But you were mad at me this morning,” I say, confused.
He shifts in place, the flush spreading to his cheeks. “I can be upset and still think you deserve nice things.”
I look from him to the ribbons and then back. I can’t quite wrap my mind around it, him buying something just because I might like it.
“Please don’t look at me like that,” Emeric says wretchedly. “I already want to die. This was a terrible idea. Forget I—”
I hand him the ribbons. “Will you tie them on?”
It’s his turn to be rendered speechless; he only blushes a bit harder and nods. He draws my right braid over my shoulder, slides the simple string tie off the end, and deftly winds one ribbon into a neat bow in its place. He takes a bit more time with the left one, letting the braid run through his fingers before undoing the tie, and as I watch his hands work, I suddenly wish we were at the inn so he wouldn’t stop with the string.
Emeric pulls the second bow taut just as the ghastly creak of Saint Willehalm’s voice rasps from off to one side, “I can come back later?”
Both of us jump nearly out of our skins. “Saints and martyrs,” I gasp.
“Present,” Willehalm says with the air of someone who has been saving the joke for a special occasion. “I have a way for you to access any record in my library from anywhere in the Blessed Empire. I would like you to meet Lady Ambroszia.”
He drifts over and, to my utter dismay, gently places the ceramic doll from the foyer into Emeric’s hands.
“Oh,” Emeric says, all but vibrating with discomfort. “… Thank … you.”
Up close, the doll is even more unsettling. Tailors use dolls like this to mock up and advertise clothing without committing to the full garment, and it’s not uncommon to give them to local children once they’re damaged or out of date. Lady Ambroszia is a particularly enthralling combination of both. She’s wearing a black gown that would have been the height of fashion fifteen years ago, and her yellow horsehair curls have faded to a dingy oatmeal hue that still clashes with the rosy red blotches painted onto the apples of her bone-white cheeks. One blue eye is weighted and painted, so it should slide shut when she’s laid down, but it rolls and darts like a real eyeball. I’d say the other eye is less upsetting, as it’s just an empty black hole in the porcelain, if not for the single pinprick of steady white gazing out.
Her faded pink painted lips do not move, but a woman’s reedy voice says clear as day, “I apologize for this unworthy vessel. In life, my pulchritude was the subject of great renown.”
Emeric almost drops the doll.
“Lady Ambroszia is an old friend of mine who knows these records nearly as well as I do,” Saint Willehalm chuckles. “She has always wanted to see more of the world, and while she is in this vessel, I have granted her the power to show you any document within the library at your request. She will be your link here while you travel.”
Emeric’s brow furrows. “I didn’t know this was possible.”
“Unique circumstances,” Lady Ambroszia chirps. “Most of us are inherently connected to the place where we … became unalive. With sweet Willi’s help, I can use that connection to summon a projection of anything in the library, like thus.”
A blinding beam of light bursts from her empty eyehole, shining directly into Emeric’s face. He does drop the doll this time, swearing.
I swoop to catch Lady Ambroszia before her porcelain can shatter on the floor. She blinks the light off. “Apologies, again. I will have full control of this vessel’s movement eventually, but at present, certain … regulations are beyond me.”
“Not a problem. One key question.” It’s decidedly weird to address a doll in my hands, so I sit her up on a stack of books. “You died here?”
There’s an uncomfortable pause. Saint Willehalm coughs, sheepish. “We … didn’t always have railings for the shelves.”
“You’re not planning on venturing to great heights anytime soon, yes?” Ambroszia asks. “It’s rather a thing for me.”
Emeric’s still rubbing his eyes. “We’ll figure something out. Thank you very much, Your Hallowedness. This will be immeasurably helpful.”
“Thank the God Daughter,” Saint Willehalm says. “She aided me when none else could. Now, if you’ll excuse me, the reshelving’s backed up atrociously while I’ve been gone. You know where to find me—unless someone steals the goblet again. Then it might be something of a treasure hunt.”
He waves a hand. Ambroszia floats over to us as the bookstack takes to the air and trails Saint Willehalm out of the rotunda.
“You may carry me in your satchel,” Lady Ambroszia announces imperiously. “Keep me away from your silver knife, though. And make certain my head clears the top so I can see.”
“As her ladyship wishes,” Emeric says, a little strangled, only to have to pass her off to me when it turns out his cloak blocks her view. Once I’m done arranging the doll in my satchel, Emeric holds out his hand. “We never did get that walk.”
“Better late than never.” I take it and let him lead us out.
There’s a strange current between us as we step into the night under the watchful eye of a full moon. It’s not as if we haven’t held hands before, but I’m unnervingly aware of his thumb running along my knuckles, of the simmer in my belly, of the moments I glance up and see his eyes lingering on me too.
I don’t know what I want when we get back to our room at the inn. I think—I think I want more of him than before. I might want all of him. I still know wanting and getting are not the same.
But if there were any time I believed we could be wholly, dangerously vulnerable with each other, it might be tonight.
We detour by a night market so I can grab something to eat, but don’t speak much beyond humming vague acknowledgments as Ambroszia exclaims over the changes to Dänwik since her time. The butterflies in my stomach only swell in number, and by the time we see the morning glory–spangled face of the Book and Bell, I’m afraid to open my mouth lest they come bursting out.
The evening’s still young enough to have a respectable number of people in the dining room, though it’s nowhere near last night’s crowd. Before we make it to the stairs to our room, I hear raised voices from another table. When I look, I find Helga arguing with a woman I don’t know. All I catch is Helga’s snarl of “… you to wait!” before her gaze lands on me.
The other woman twists in her chair. She looks to be a couple of years older than Helga, pale-faced and stoutly built, with deep brown hair and sharp eyes black as coal. Those sharp eyes widen when they find me, her expression awash with apprehension as she gets to her feet. Helga seizes the woman’s arm and says something inaudible. She doesn’t let go until the strange woman nods.
Only a fool would still believe that Helga Ros is helping me solely out of the goodness of her heart.
Then the stranger walks toward me, Helga on her heels. “Vanja?” she asks.
Strange motives or not, I automatically distrust anyone Helga’s suspicious of, considering she knew to distrust me from the moment we met. “Who’s asking?”
The woman stops short, drawing her clenched fists up to her throat. There’s something … odd, I decide, about her face. Not familiar in the comfortable way, or even in the same way as Dieter Ros. It feels like I’ve seen disparate parts of it before, just never assembled like this.
“My name is Eida,” she says, with the slow deliberation of someone waiting for a reaction. “I—I—” She looks over her shoulder to Helga, almost guiltily.
“Don’t—” Helga starts, reaching for her elbow.
Eida knocks Helga away and steps forward, then grabs my free hand in hers. “Vanja, it’s me. Your sister.”
PART TWO:
SCARLET
THORNS
THE FIFTH LIE
DESIRE
Once upon a time, there was a princess, a countess, and a maidservant who grew thorns from her back.
At least, that’s what the maid thought they looked like: briars of welt and scab that branched all over her shoulders and lower, climbing her spine like a trellis. They had been planted in her flesh a week earlier with a whip and a clumsy hand, because the cruel little countess told a lie about the maid, the princess kept the truth to herself, and nothing the maid said made a difference.
The hedgewitch who had treated the maid afterward said there would be scars from the whipping, but that her salves would help. The maid had to take her word for it; the castle’s mirrors were scarce and the time to gaze upon her back even scarcer. Her one friend in the castle, a magician, told the maid what she saw when she helped dress the wounds each night, and most days that had to be enough. The maid told herself no good could come of seeing the ugly marks with her own eyes.
One morning, the maidservant felt the hot itchy pull of a too-tight scab tearing as she scrubbed the floors, felt the sticky damp patch spread between her shoulders, and in the afternoon, she finally had a chance to survey the damage. She had just finished laying down clean rugs in the princess’s bedchambers—rugs were for company, after all; no one of import was to know they used straw for rushes in Sovabin most of the time—when she spied the princess’s small hand mirror on the vanity.
The vanity, too, had a mirror, and the princess was off keeping the countess entertained, and all was quiet in the living chambers, and so the maid decided to take the risk.
She undid her kirtle ties and loosened her shift collar and gingerly freed the linen where it had stuck to skin until finally her back was bare. Then she picked up the hand mirror and faced away from the vanity, and saw what had been done to her.
The whipping gashes were a dull red, still feverish and tender around cracking scabs. The longest of them had split earlier, and the maid was trying to see if the blood had dried when a voice carried across the room: “Hideous.”
The maid froze.
The cruel little countess stood in the doorway, a sad little smile curling her lips. “Don’t move,” she whispered, “don’t speak, or I’ll say I caught you stealing again.”
The maid did not move.
The little countess gamboled over, arranging herself behind the maid, head tilted and lips puckered as she inspected what she had wrought. “Disgusting,” she mused, “like great bloody worms. How are they healing so fast? Tell me.”
The maidservant did not want her salve to be taken away, so she said, in a shaking voice, “I clean them every day, my lady.”
The little countess met her gaze in the hand mirror. Then, to the maid’s surprise, the countess slapped herself, hard. A vivid red mark began to bloom on her pale cheek.
There was something like a fever in her eyes when the little countess said, “I’ll say you struck me, and they’ll hang you like a dog for laying a hand on a noble. Tell me now.”
The maid knew that, or worse, would befall her. She swallowed. “A-a hedgewitch gave me a salve, my lady.”
“I see.” The countess twirled a soft nutmeg ringlet around a finger, one the maid had curled into the countess’s hair with a hot iron this morning. “You know, Father says servants are like hounds. The best ones are loyal, obedient, don’t think themselves clever.” The countess let the ringlet fall away and touched the edge of a scab. “The worst ones—not a sound or I’ll scream”—the hard crescent of a fingernail dug into the maid’s sore back—“the worst ones won’t learn a lesson without pain.”
The countess ripped the whole strip of scab off the maid’s back.
The maid jerked, trying to strangle a cry as best she could as searing-bright agony flashed between her shoulders. A warm trickle seeped down her spine.
“You need to suffer so you’ll learn your place,” the countess hummed with bliss. “You think you’re clever, don’t you? And maybe you’re clever enough for that cow Gisele, but I know what you are. Now your back is as ugly as your front. No wonder you were abandoned here, you’re horrible to look at from every side. It’s what you deserve. No one will ever want a lover who’s covered in worms.”
Quick as a flash, the countess peeled away another long scab. The maid bit her tongue to keep silent, squeezing her eyes shut.
“Look at me,” ordered the countess.
The maid forced herself to obey, meeting the countess’s icy-blue eyes in the mirror once more. The red mark of her own hand had not faded. All it would take was one scream and one more lie, and the countess could end the maid’s life.
