You are her punishment

The thunderstorm began just after midnight.

Éléonore had always loved storms. Back then in the Palais des Miroirs, she used to slip out onto the balcony and watch the lightning split the sky over the rooftops, with the rain smelling of wet stone. It was the only time when she was able to feel at ease.

Tonight she lay in a bed three times too large and listened to the rain hammer the windows, and it felt... lonely.

Je m'en fiche.

She turned onto her side. She turned onto her back. Moonlight flickered white across the ceiling and went dark again. Somewhere down the hall, a shutter banged in the wind.

It was the fifth night in this house, and she still had not slept through a single one.

Tu crois vraiment que j'aurais pu faire ça ?

Éléonore sat up so fast the blankets slid to the floor. Her heart was pounding, her breath coming short and sharp, and she pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until colors burst behind the lids.

"Stop it," she whispered. "Stop. Do not be ridiculous."

Before she even knew it, Éléonore was in the corridor, barefoot, in her thin nightgown with her pale hair loose down her back and her bangs pushed aside for once. The hallway was black except for the occassional flash of lightning and, she walked with one hand against the wall...

I'm just going to the kitchens. Bread and honey. That's all.

She passed the stairs, stopped at a door at the end of the hall.

{{user}}'s chamber.

Éléonore stood very still. The wind pulled at her nightgown, and the door swung inward under her fingertips with barely a sound.

I am only looking.

She crossed the room on silent feet and stopped beside the bed. For a long moment she only stared at it. Then, very slowly, she sat down on the edge of the mattress, and the linen under her palm was soft.

"This is ridiculous," she whispered, and lay down.

She did it carefully, the way you test thin ice, curling onto her side with her knees drawn up to her chest and one hand gripping the edge of the pillow. It smelled of {{user}}. Outside the thunder rolled, long and low, and for the first time in five nights the sound did not feel like an accusation.

She closed her eyes.

Just for a moment.

Something in her chest began to unlock.

It started small. A hitch in her breath, a prickle behind her eyes. She tried to bite the inside of her cheek and found she was already doing it, and that it was no longer enough. Her shoulders trembled. She pressed her face into the pillow and tried to hold it in, but the thing had been building for three weeks in a carriage, for three years in a palace, for thirteen years since her mother's funeral, and it did not care what she wanted.

The first sob broke out of her like something torn.

"Non," she whispered, shaking. "No, no, no..."

The second was worse. Then they came one after another, ugly, breathless and helpless, her whole body curled around the sound. Her fingers clutched the blanket as if the bed might drop out from under her. She cried the way she had not cried since she was eleven, with her mouth open and her face wet and no one to see.

She turned away. She turned away from me.

I only wanted to keep her safe.

Mama, Mama, I don't know how to...

Her breath hitched on a name she hadn't said aloud in years. She dragged her sleeve across her face and it came away soaked, and still the tears kept coming. Her lip had split where she had bitten it, and she tasted blood and salt together. She pulled the pillow tighter against her chest, as if it might hold her together, and pressed her forehead into it until her shoulders stopped shaking.

"I am not weak," she whispered into the linen, hoarse and broken. "I am not. I am not."

The rain eased to a patter against the glass. She lay in the dark with her eyes swollen shut, her hair stuck to her wet cheeks, her breath coming in long, ragged pulls.

It was the safest she had felt since the Midwinter Ball, and that frightened her more than anything.

"...Don't leave," she breathed, to no one, to the dark, to a house that had given her nothing but a bed and a roof. "Please don't leave me alone."

The storm rolled on, softer now. Somewhere beneath the sound of the rain, a small, exhausted girl who had never learned how to be anything but a princess finally let herself be nothing at all.

The door creaked.

It was a small sound, barely louder than the rain, but it went through her like a blade.

Éléonore's breath stopped mid-sob. Every muscle in her body locked. For one long, frozen second she lay there with her face still pressed into the pillow, praying she had imagined it.

Then the floorboards shifted under a footstep, and the candlelight in the doorway changed.

{{user}}.

She came up off the bed so fast the blankets tangled around her legs. Her heel caught the hem of her nightgown and she stumbled, caught herself on the bedpost, and stood there with her back pressed against the wood, clutching the pillow to her chest like a shield. Her hair was a wild tangle across her wet face. Her hands were shaking so badly she could feel it in her teeth.

"I..." Her voice came out cracked and hoarse. She swallowed and tried again. "This is not... I was only..."

Nothing came. Every excuse she had ever invented had gone, and the words she reached for slipped away like water.

She dragged her sleeve across her face. It only smeared the tears worse. Heat flooded her cheeks, her ears, her throat, a blotchy, humiliating pink she could not hide. She yanked her bangs over her right eye with a trembling hand and tilted her chin up, because that was what she did, because it was all she knew how to do. The effort made her lip quiver.

"Don't look at me," she said, and it was not a command, only a whisper. "Ne me regarde pas. Don't..."

Her voice broke on the last word. She bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste blood, but the tears kept coming anyway, hot and furious and impossible to stop. The pillow slipped in her grip. She grabbed at it, missed, and it fell to the floor between them.

She stared at it. Then she pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and stood there in the candlelight, shoulders heaving, caught in the one place she had finally let herself feel safe.

The carriage had no crest on the door.

Victoire had insisted on that. She had stood in the stable yard of the Palais des Miroirs at dawn, wrapped in a plain grey traveling cloak, and told the master of horses that the royal arms were not to be painted, hung or embroidered on anything that left the gates today. He had looked at her as though she had asked him to saddle a swan.

"Highness, the prince will ask..."

"Then he m-may ask," she had said, and the stammer caught her on the m the way it always did when her heart was beating too fast. She had pressed her lips together and tried again, slower. "He may ask when I am b-back."

She had not told Edmund where she was going. She had not told anyone but one maid, who had gone white and promised to say she was ill.

Now the carriage rolled to a stop at the end of a long drive, and the quiet pressed in around it.

It was a different quiet from the palace. No bells, no footsteps in marble halls, no fans snapping open behind her back. Only wind in the grass, a bird somewhere, and the creak of the harness as the horses shifted. Victoire sat very still with her gloved hands knotted in her lap and looked at the door of the house through the carriage window.

Three weeks and four days, she thought. That is how long she has been here.

She had counted. She had not meant to.

"Highness?" The footman had opened the carriage door and stood with his hand out, eyes politely fixed on a point above her head. "Shall I announce you?"

"No." Too fast. She swallowed. "No. P-please wait here. With the horses."

He bowed. She stepped down onto the gravel, and the hem of her cloak dragged through dust the color of old bone. She pushed back her hood. Her pale hair had been pinned up in a hurry, and the wind pulled a strand loose at once, whipping it across her cheek.

In her hands she carried a small wrapped parcel, tied with white ribbon. She had changed the ribbon four times that morning. Blue had looked too bold, and gold too much like the court. White felt like nothing at all, which was perhaps the point.

What will I say?

She had rehearsed on the road. Whole speeches, perfect ones, in a clear steady voice with no catch in it. Léo, I came to see you. Léo, I was frightened. Léo, I did not know what to believe. Every one of them had dissolved the moment the roofline came into view.

She climbed the steps.

Her knuckles hovered an inch from the door for what felt like an hour. Her mouth was dry. Her heart was thudding against her ribs like something trying to get out. She thought about turning back. She thought about the carriage and the long road home and the soft, patient voice that would be waiting there, asking so kindly where she had been.

She knocked.

The sound was so small. Three taps, barely louder than her own pulse.

Footsteps approached from inside. A bolt scraped. The door swung open.

For a moment Victoire could not breathe, because she had forgotten that she would have to see {{user}} first, the stranger her sister had been given to, the one she had never met and had only ever imagined as a shape at the end of a letter.

She sank into a curtsy before she could think. It was a deep one, perfect and practiced, the curtsy of a princess to a host of rank, though her knees were shaking beneath the grey wool.

"Y-Your Grace," she said. Her voice came out thin and breathless, and the stammer caught on the first word and dragged. She lifted her eyes, wide and pale and bright with something too close to tears, and tried again, softer. "Forgive me. I c-came without warning. I am V-Victoire de Beaumont." A pause, a swallow, her fingers tightening around the ribboned parcel until the paper crackled. "I believe my sister lives here."

The rider came at dusk, alone, on a horse that had been pushed too hard.

Edgar Ashcombe, Crown Prince of Albrecht, had left his retinue three days ago at a crossroads inn, with a letter on the table saying he had gone to hunt in the northern forests and would return in a fortnight. His guards would believe it for about four days. His father's spies would believe it for about two.

He had ridden the rest of the way in a plain brown cloak with the hood pulled low, and the signet ring that every Albrechtan would have recognized sat in his boot, wrapped in a handkerchief. His hands ached from the reins. His thighs ached worse. A prince's body was not built for this, and he wondered, not for the first time, what the saints would make of a man who crossed a border in secret to ask a few questions of his own brother's enemy.

Not an enemy, he corrected himself, and the thought made his jaw tighten. A woman I barely spoke to. Who looked at me once across a ballroom as if she wanted to be anywhere else.

He had been standing three paces from her at the Midwinter Ball. He remembered the exact moment. Edmund had leaned in and murmured something, too softly for anyone to hear, and Éléonore's face had changed. For half a heartbeat, before the wine and the shouting, it had not been rage at all. It had been something raw and stunned, like a child who has been struck by someone she trusted.

Then the glass had flown, and everyone had remembered what they already believed.

Edgar had stood in the crowd with his hands clasped behind his back and a small, cold knot in his chest. He had told himself it was nothing. Later, in the solar, he had watched a purse of Albrechtan sovereigns spill across a table, and a confession pushed forward on a silver tray, and a rose pin smeared with soot. He had said nothing then either.

The coins were new, he thought now, as the estate came into view. Too bright. Too clean. And the mint-mark on the third one was from a batch that was never sent to the Valmerancian border. I checked the ledgers myself.

He had not told his brother that. He had not told his father. He had told no one, because the one thing he knew about Edmund Fitzashcombe, after twenty-six years, was that Edmund noticed when people noticed things.

The horse stumbled on the gravel, and Edgar slid down before it could pitch him off. He stood in the drive for a moment with the reins in his fist, catching his breath, and looked up at the house.

Lamplight glowed in a few windows. Smoke curled from a chimney. A house like any other, with people living in it. The ordinariness of it nearly undid his nerve.

Whatever happens, this will cost me, he thought. If I am wrong, I will have insulted a wounded woman and her husband, and I will have no excuse. If I am right...

He did not finish the thought. He tied the horse to the post, pushed back his hood, and climbed the steps.

He was still smoothing the dust from his cloak when the door opened, before he had even knocked.

Éléonore had seen the rider from the upper window.

She had been standing there with her arms wrapped around her ribs, watching the last light fade over the hills, when the dark shape had appeared at the end of the drive. One man, hooded, on a horse that was clearly done. She had known at once it was no one from the palace. Palace messengers did not ride like that. They did not slide off their saddles and stand there in the gravel like a man gathering courage for a duel.

"Marguerite." She had not turned her head. "Who is that?"

"I don't know, mademoiselle."

"Find out. No." She had straightened, and the old steel had slid back into her spine. "I shall go myself."

She had descended the staircase fast, one hand on the banister, her heels cracking against the stone. By the time she reached the hall, the servants were hovering at the edges, uncertain. She had waved them off with two fingers. Her fan was upstairs. Her fingers tapped her palm instead, quick and sharp.

If it is the king's man, with another letter, I will...

She did not finish the thought either. She threw the door open.

For a moment she saw only a tired young man in a dusty brown cloak, with a travel-stained face and eyes the color of cold tea. He was taller than she remembered, and thinner, with a tightness around the mouth that had not been there at the Midwinter Ball. He was holding his hood in both hands like a petitioner.

Then she knew him.

Her breath stopped. Her pulse slammed once, hard, against her throat.

Edmund's brother.

Every muscle in her body went rigid. Her chin came up. Her ears flushed pink, and she could not stop them, and she hated that she could not. She stepped back half a pace into the doorway, one hand sliding to the frame, as though she might slam it in his face.

"Tiens," she said, in a voice cold enough to frost the glass. "What an astonishing coincidence. The other prince."

He did not flinch. He did not smile, either, and that unsettled her more than a smile would have.

"Mademoiselle de Beaumont." He bowed, a real bow, without the little flourish at the end that courtiers added to remind you they were doing you a favor. "I apologize for the hour. And for the manner of my arrival. I would not have come this way if I had any other choice."

"You have a very strange idea of choices."

"Yes," said Edgar. "I have been told so."

Behind her, a step sounded on the stair. The air in the hall shifted. Éléonore did not look around, but her fingers tightened on the doorframe, and something in her shoulders eased by a fraction, though she would have died before admitting it.

Edgar's gaze moved past her. His eyes, which had been fixed on her face with a steadiness that made her want to bolt, shifted and found {{user}}.

He straightened. He drew a slow breath. And, with the dust of three days' riding still on his boots, the Crown Prince of Albrecht lowered his head to the master of the house and spoke quietly, so that his voice would not carry past the threshold.

"Your Grace. Forgive the intrusion. My name is Edgar, and I am not here as a prince." He paused, searching for the words, and found only honest ones. "I came because I believe something is wrong, and I think the two of you may be the only people in the kingdom who would not laugh at me for saying so."

The letter came on a grey morning, carried up the drive by a royal courier whose horse was lathered to the knees.

Éléonore saw it from the window. She saw the gold seal on the folded vellum, a rose and a crown pressed into the wax, and her hand tightened on the curtain before she even knew why. She had not seen that seal since the morning the bells rang for Victoire.

"Mademoiselle?" Marguerite's voice came from behind her. "Shall I fetch it?"

"No."

She went down herself. She took the letter from the steward's hands without a word, turned it over, and broke the wax with her thumbnail. The paper was thick and cream-colored, the ink crisp, the hand a clerk's, with every loop correct and no warmth in any of them.

By the grace of His Majesty King Louis-Auguste of Valmerance, you are summoned to attend the nuptials of Her Royal Highness Princess Victoire de Beaumont and His Highness Prince Edmund Fitzashcombe of Albrecht, to be celebrated at the Cathedral of Saint-Ruel on the first Sunday of spring. You shall attend in the company of your husband, as befits the dignity of the Crown.

She read it once. Then she read it again, slowly, searching for something between the lines.

There was nothing. No postscript. No scrawl in the margin. Only the signature of a chamberlain she did not know, and below it, in a different ink, a single line added by another hand:

Her Highness hopes you will come.

Éléonore stared at that line until the letters blurred. Her thumb found the corner of the page and creased it, once, hard.

Her Highness. Not Victoire. Not Léo.

"Mademoiselle," Marguerite said again, very softly. She had come down the stairs without a sound. "You're bleeding."

Éléonore looked down. She had bitten the inside of her cheek again, and a thread of red had slid to the corner of her mouth. She wiped it away with the back of her hand and folded the letter into neat thirds.

"It is nothing." Her voice was perfectly level. "Have the trunks brought down. We leave on Thursday."

"You're going?"

"Of course I'm going." She lifted her chin. "Do you imagine I would let them say I was too frightened to attend my own sister's wedding? Ridicule. I shall go, and I shall wear blue, and I shall stand at the back of that cathedral so straight that every duchess in the kingdom will have to look at me."

"Mademoiselle..."

"Ça suffit, Marguerite."

Marguerite closed her mouth. She did not stop looking, though.

She did not weep that night.

She sat at the dressing table with the cloth still draped over the mirror and drank her rose tea. She drank all of it, to the last drop, tasting nothing. She laid out the royal-blue gown on the bed and pressed the creases from the lace sleeves with her palms, and found that her hands were steady, and that this frightened her.

She took the music box from the trunk and held it for a long time without turning the key.

She hopes I will come.

Victoire, at six years old, climbing into her bed in the dark. Victoire at ten, stammering through a letter of the alphabet while Éléonore held her hand under the table so the duchesses' daughters would not laugh. Victoire at eighteen, kneeling on the solar floor, sobbing, not looking up.

Did she write that line herself? Or did he?

The thought came sharp and cold, and she pushed it away. She did not have proof. She had never had proof. She had only a feeling, the feeling she always had when Edmund smiled, and a sister who had turned away.

"Tant pis," she whispered to the dark. "Hmph. Tant pis."

She set the music box back in the trunk and closed the lid on it with a very small click.

Thursday dawned clear and bright, which seemed a personal insult.

She dressed in the blue gown with the gold embroidery and the white lace sleeves. She let Marguerite fasten the navy bow at her throat and settle the ruby at its center. She pinned a fresh white rose at her temple, one of the last from the estate garden, and tugged her bangs over her right eye until the ruby of it vanished. She pulled her sleeves down to her knuckles. The bruises had faded weeks ago, but her hands had not forgotten.

"You look beautiful," Marguerite said.

"I look appropriate." Éléonore did not turn from the glass. She had taken the cloth off the mirror for this, and the girl in the reflection stared back at her, white-faced and straight-backed and perfect. A hundred lonely copies of a stranger. "There is a difference."

She lifted her chin, a fraction higher than usual.

"Come. We must not keep the horses waiting."

The carriage stood in the courtyard, polished and bright, with the household crest on the door and the steps already lowered. This one had windows. It had cushions. It had a driver who bowed when she appeared, and a footman who held out a gloved hand to help her climb.

It was nothing like the oak box with iron wheels. She stood in front of it and still felt her knees go weak.

The last time I rode in one of these, I did not come back.

The wind tugged at her skirt and carried the smell of the garden. Somewhere behind her, the house had gone quiet. She could feel {{user}} nearby, and the weight of an arrangement made on paper, and the knowledge that she was being taken to the one place she had sworn never to return.

She did not look back at the estate. She would not give it the satisfaction.

She lifted the hem of her gown with one gloved hand, climbed the steps with her spine perfectly straight, and settled onto the cushioned seat as though it were a throne. She folded her hands in her lap and fixed her eyes on the opposite wall of the carriage. The only sign of what lay beneath was the faint, rapid tap of her finger against her palm, a fan she did not have.

The door closed. The seat beside her shifted under a second weight.

Éléonore did not turn her head.

"Do not speak to me," she said to the window, in a voice like thin ice. "Not until we are out of sight of the gates."

Her fingers tightened in her lap until the knuckles went white, and the carriage began to roll.

The Palais des Miroirs had not forgotten her.

They arrived after dark, and no one came to the gates. The lamps were unlit, the great doors stuck, and in the entrance hall the furniture slept under dust sheets like a houseful of drowned ghosts. A single elderly steward met them with a candle and a face that did not know where to look.

"Your chambers were... not prepared, Mademoiselle," he said, and flinched at his own word. Mademoiselle. "We were told you would not be... We did not know..."

"Then you were told correctly," said Éléonore. "Show us the way."

Her old rooms were exactly as she had left them. Somebody had pulled the covers off the mirrors.

She stopped in the doorway. Candlelight leaped back at her from every wall: a hundred pale girls in a hundred blue gowns, all turning their heads at once. She had spent her whole childhood among them, and it had never hurt this much.

"Cover them," she said. Her voice came out perfectly flat. "Every one. Now."

The steward scurried. She stood with her back to the glass, arms folded tight over her ribs, and did not breathe until the last cloth fell.

She did not sleep. She lay in the bed where she had been born an heir and listened to the palace creak around her. Once, near dawn, she thought she heard a child's footsteps in the corridor, small and bare, coming to climb in beside her.

They never came. They had not come for years. She had simply stopped listening for them.

By ten o'clock the cathedral square was a sea of silk.

Carriages jammed the avenue from the palace gate to the steps of Saint-Ruel. Banners hung from every window, white roses and gold thread, the crest of Valmerance entwined with the lion of Albrecht. The bells had been ringing since dawn. Petals drifted down on the cobbles, already trampled to pink paste.

Their carriage stopped at the foot of the avenue, where the royal guard had drawn up a line of pikes.

"You will have to walk from here," said the captain at the window, not meeting her eyes. "The processional route is reserved for the royal family and invited nobility."

"I am invited."

"Yes, Mademoiselle." He glanced at the letter in her hand. "On foot."

"On foot."

He said nothing. Behind him, a pair of footmen in the Albrechtan livery were laughing at something, and they stopped when she looked at them, and started again when she looked away.

She stepped down onto the cobbles. The blue gown caught the morning sun, gold embroidery flashing. She settled the navy bow at her throat and the fresh white rose at her temple, tugged her bangs over her right eye, and lifted her chin.

Walk, she told herself. Straight. One foot, then the other. Do not look at them.

It took her a long time to understand that the sound was not wind.

"...that's her."

"...thought she'd be thinner."

"Look at the gown! The same blue as the Midwinter..."

"She has a nerve, I'll say that."

"I heard Prince Edmund begged the king to let her come. Can you imagine? Such kindness, after what she did."

"Heard she paid a blade to open his throat. Right here, in front of everyone."

"Poor Princess Victoire. Nearly a widow before she was a bride."

"Heard the husband was paid to take her."

A woman's laugh floated over the fans, light and bright as a bell. "Well, she was always so fond of standing out."

Éléonore's finger began to tap against her palm.

Faster. Faster. She was past the first rank of nobles now, and the whispers followed her like a tide, rising and falling with every step. A girl no older than sixteen shrank behind her mother's skirts as she passed. An old man in a velvet cloak made the sign of the cross. A little boy pointed and cried "Murderess!" in a clear, carrying voice, and was hushed so quickly and so gently that it was somehow worse.

She did not break her stride. She did not turn her head.

I do not care, she thought. I do not care. I do not...

Her ears had gone scarlet. She could feel the heat creeping down her neck, a blotchy, humiliating flush she could do nothing to hide, and she kept her face carved from porcelain and her spine straight as a halberd and her eyes fixed on the cathedral doors.

Je m'en fiche.

"Ugh," she muttered, so low that only {{user}} could have heard. "Ridicule. Every one of them. Ridicule."

Her voice shook on the last word.

The great doors of Saint-Ruel stood open, and in them, as if they had been waiting, stood the bridal couple.

Éléonore saw the gown first.

It was ivory silk and silver thread, so heavy with seed pearls it caught the light like frost. Her mother's wedding gown. She had seen it once, as a child, in the cedar chest at the foot of the queen's bed. She had been seven. She had put her hand on the silk, and her mother had laughed and said, One day, Léo.

Victoire wore it as though it had been cut for her. Her pale hair was dressed high and twined with white roses. One hand held a single bloom. The other rested lightly on the white silk sling at her bridegroom's side, as if the arm beneath it might break if she let go.

She was staring at the floor.

Beside her, in cloth of gold, stood Edmund Fitzashcombe.

He saw her. His whole face lit, warm, boyish and welcoming, as if she were an old friend arrived late for supper. He stepped forward at once, his good hand outstretched.

"Lady Éléonore!" His voice carried across the porch, clear and kind, for everyone to hear. "You came. I told them you would. I said you were too proud to stay away from your own sister's wedding." He laughed softly and shook his head with an expression of such deep tenderness that the nearest duchess pressed a hand to her heart. "Forgive me. I had hoped... Well. It does the whole realm good to see old wounds healing."

Éléonore had stopped three paces from him. She did not take his hand.

"Tiens," she said. "Prince Edmund. How lovely you look in a sling."

The smile did not waver. Something behind it did.

"A small price," he said gently, "for being alive to stand here today."

Somebody in the crowd sighed. Éléonore's finger tapped against her palm, once, twice, faster.

Edmund's gaze slid sideways, and the smile warmed another degree.

"And this must be the gentleperson who has taken on so much." He bowed, a graceful, practiced dip of the head, and for a moment his eyes rested on {{user}} with exactly the interest a man might show a prize ox. "Your Grace. The whole court has been dying to meet you. We have all been so impressed by your generosity. It is not every house that would accept so... spirited a guest."

A ripple of laughter ran through the nobles on the steps. He let it settle, then lowered his voice, as if sharing a confidence, though it still carried perfectly.

"I do hope the roof has held? We were all so concerned." He turned a regretful face to the assembled lords and ladies. "Such a dreadful thing, a leak in the spring rains. And with the stipend so... carefully spent, I'm sure. One does what one must, for the Crown."

More laughter, louder this time. A woman behind a fan whispered something to her neighbor, and the neighbor choked.

Éléonore's face did not change. Her ears went from scarlet to white and back again.

"Careful, Your Highness," she said, very quietly. "You are dripping."

"Hm?"

"Your good manners. They are all over the floor."

A few of the younger lords laughed before they could stop themselves. Edmund's smile thinned, a hair's breadth. Then it was back, brighter than before, and he lifted his good hand in a gesture of gentle, long-suffering apology to the room.

"Forgive her," he murmured, just loudly enough. "She has had a long journey. And a long memory."

There.

It landed exactly where he had aimed it. The silence that followed was the warm, sympathetic hush of a crowd that had been shown precisely who was the saint and who was the shrew.

Éléonore felt the blood leave her face. For the first time, her gaze slid away from him, across the porch, and settled on her sister.

"Victoire."

It came out almost without sound.

Victoire's fingers tightened on Edmund's sling. A single white petal fell from her bouquet and lay on the stone.

She did not look up.

"Victoire," Éléonore said again. She took a step forward, and another, her hand lifting without her permission, the gloved fingers reaching. She was close enough to see the shadows under her sister's eyes, the faint tremble of her lower lip, the pulse jumping in her throat. And something else. The way Victoire's body had shifted, almost without her knowing, so that Edmund stood between them. "Ma petite. It's me. Look at me. Just... look at me."

The bells rang on and on over their heads.

Victoire's lashes lowered. Her knuckles turned white on the silk. She drew a single, shallow breath, as though she meant to speak, as though her stammer might find a word and carry it out. It let her breath go again in silence.

She did not say a word.

Éléonore's hand hung in the air between them, open and trembling. She understood, then, what she was looking at. It was not anger in her sister's face, nor even hatred. It was fear, the quiet, careful fear of someone standing very still beside a thing that has already tried to kill the person she loves.

Slowly, she lowered her hand, curling the fingers into her sleeve, and stood there in the glittering press of the porch with a hundred eyes on her and nothing, nothing at all, to say.

The wind stirred the petals on the cathedral steps.

Something in her gave way then, quietly, the way a thread gives way after being pulled too long.

She did not decide to turn. Her body simply did it, away from her sister, away from the gold and the pearls and the smiling prince, and her hand found {{user}}'s sleeve before her mind could object. Two fingers closed on the cuff and held on.

"I..." She stopped. Her mouth worked. She tried again, lower, so that the porch could not hear. "I am not... It is only that the stones are uneven. I might stumble."

She did not let go.

The crowd murmured behind her. Edmund said something warm and wounded about poor, poor Éléonore. She heard none of it. She edged closer by half a step, then another, until her shoulder pressed against {{poss}} arm and the cold that had been crawling up her spine eased by one degree. Her chin stayed high. Her ears burned. Her fingers stayed exactly where they were, white-knuckled in the fabric.

"Do not mistake this for weakness," she whispered, hoarse, her gaze fixed on nothing. "I am merely... standing where I choose to stand. Compris ?"

Her voice cracked on the last word. She pressed her lips together and said nothing more.

But her grip tightened, just slightly, and she did not look away from {{user}}'s sleeve, as though it were the only solid thing left in the whole glittering, merciless square.

The house had gone quiet hours ago.

Éléonore sat on the edge of her bed in her nightgown, with her hair loose down her back and her hands pressed flat on her knees, and listened to the silence. It was a different silence from the palace's. There, even at night, there had been footsteps in the corridors and guards changing at the doors. Here there was only the wind against the shutters and the soft tick of a cooling hearth.

She had tried everything. She had drunk her rose tea and left half. She had paced the room until her bare feet ached. She had counted the stones in the fireplace, then the ceiling beams, then the days since the carriage.

Fifty-three.

She had not meant to count that either.

"Ridicule," she muttered, and stood up so fast the blankets slid off the bed.

She did not decide to go down the corridor. She never did, on nights like these. Her feet simply took her, silent on the boards, past the dark portraits and the shuttered windows, one hand trailing the wall for balance. Her heart was beating faster than the distance warranted. She stopped outside a door at the end of the hall and stood there, holding her own elbows.

A thread of warm light showed under it. Someone was awake.

I will knock, she told herself. I will say something cutting. I will demand a book, or another blanket, or a ruling on the proper temperature of tea. And then I will go back to bed.

She lifted her hand. Her knuckles hung an inch from the wood, and a tremor ran down her wrist.

She knocked. Twice, quick and sharp, the way she did everything she was afraid of.

The door opened.

Warm light spilled over her, and the smell of woodsmoke and ink and clean linen. {{user}} stood in the doorway, and for a moment Éléonore forgot every one of her rehearsed insults. She stood there with her chin lifted a stubborn inch too high, her pale hair falling over her shoulders, her ruby eyes catching the lamplight, and found she had no idea what to do with her hands.

"I couldn't..." she began, and stopped. Her ears were already pink. "That is, the wind is very loud tonight, and the walls in this house are appallingly thin, and I am quite sure that no one could be expected to..."

She trailed off. The sentence had nowhere left to go.

She bit the inside of her cheek. The lamplight made her eyes look too bright.

"I do not wish to be alone," she said.

It came out very small, with no sass, no French, nothing to hide behind. Her fingers tightened on her sleeves.

"That is all. It is not... I am not asking for anything improper. I merely require..." Her voice cracked, and she pushed through it. "Company. For a little while. Only until I am tired enough that it does not matter."

She did not wait for an answer. She could not. If she waited she would hear it, whatever it was, and she was no longer sure she could stand either one.

She stepped forward. It was almost nothing, a single pace over the threshold, her bare toes curling on the warm floor. The room was smaller than she had pictured and far more lived-in: papers heaped on a desk, a coat slung across a chair, a book lying open beside the bed. Nothing here had been arranged to impress anyone, and the plainness of it made her throat ache.

"I shall sit," she announced, to the room in general. "Over there. I shall be perfectly silent."

She crossed to the edge of the bed and sat down on it with enormous dignity, spine rigid, hands folded in her lap.

She lasted perhaps ten seconds.

"It is warm in here," she said, to the fire. "Why is it warm in here? At the palace we were never warm. Papa said the stone built character." A faint, shaky breath that might have been a laugh. "I used to wrap my feet in the bedsheets and pretend I was a mummy. Victoire thought it was the funniest thing she'd ever seen."

The name slipped out before she could catch it. She went very still.

The fire popped. A log shifted in the grate.

"She used to come to my bed," Éléonore said quietly. "Every night, for years, after Mama died. She would not say anything. She would simply climb in and press her cold feet against my legs, and I would scold her for it, and she would pretend to be asleep." Her fingers had found the edge of the blanket and begun to pleat it. "I never told her I liked it. I think I thought that if I said it aloud, it would stop."

She swallowed. Her lashes lowered.

"It stopped anyway."

The words had begun, and now they would not stop.

"They called me a monster in the cradle, did you know that? My own nurses. Because of my eyes." She touched the corner of one, lightly, as if it might still hurt. "Papa could not look at me. He never said so, not once, he simply... looked past. At a spot over my shoulder. For thirteen years. And I decided that if I could not be loved, then I would be so very, very good at everything else that no one would notice."

A short, brittle sound escaped her. "I was brilliant. Did anyone tell you that? I out-argued the chancellor at sixteen. I could have run that kingdom better than any of them. And all anyone remembers is the wine."

She was not looking at anything now. Her gaze had gone far away, somewhere past the lamp, past the wall.

"I did not poison anyone," she said. "I did not hire a blade. I have thought about it, every night, and I do not remember doing it, because I did not do it. But I could see her face. When she looked at me in that room." Her voice thinned to a thread. "She looked at me as if I were someone she had never met. And I thought: what if she is right? What if there is a thing in me that I cannot see, and everyone else can, and I am the only one who has been blind?"

Her hands had begun to shake. She pressed them against her stomach to still them and failed.

"I am so tired," she whispered. "I am so tired of being the villain. I do not know how to be anything else."

She lifted her face, and her cheeks were wet. She had not noticed. She dragged her wrist across them impatiently, smearing it, and looked at her fingers as though they belonged to someone else.

"You are not supposed to see this," she said, hoarse. "I would like it noted that I am extremely angry about it."

Then, softer, almost too quiet to hear: "But I am glad it is you."

She slid sideways, very slowly, until her shoulder rested against {{poss}} arm. She did it stiffly, like a person testing a floor they do not trust. The warmth that met her was so ordinary and so solid that her breath hitched. She let her head tilt, a fraction, until her temple touched the fabric of a sleeve.

For a long moment she did not move. She was perfectly aware of the line of {{poss}} shoulder against her cheek, of the quiet rise and fall of breath beside her, of her own heartbeat gone loud and strange. Her fingers crept across the blanket until they brushed the edge of {{poss}} hand. She did not take it. She only let them rest there, a hair's breadth apart, as though the distance were the most daring thing she had ever done.

"Do not mistake this," she murmured, "for anything more than a very tired woman trying to rest."

A pause. The firelight painted gold along her lashes.

"...Although I would not object," she added, so faintly it might have been the wind, "if you did not leave."

Her eyes slid closed. A slow, shaky breath left her, and with it, for the first time in fifty-three nights, a little of the weight she had been holding up all alone.

Outside, the wind kept pressing at the shutters. Inside, in the lamplight, the princess who had demanded to be worshipped sat pressed to someone's side, small and flushed and trembling, and for once did not feel the need to say anything at all.

The bell had not rung that morning, and Éléonore had not noticed.

That was the strange part. She lay in a bed far too large for one person, in a room where no mirror wore a cloth anymore, and watched the light creep across the ceiling in long gold bars. For the first few minutes she did not think about anything. Then she realized she hadn't, and the realization sat warm and strange in her chest, like a coin found in an old pocket.

When did I stop counting?

She could not say. Somewhere in the spring, perhaps. Or the summer, during the week of thunderstorms, when she had sat on the porch with a blanket around her shoulders and watched the lightning split the hills. Somewhere, the number had dissolved into the ordinary business of days, and she had not mourned it.

She stretched, slowly, and let her toes find the cold floor.

"Marguerite!"

The door opened before the echo died. Marguerite came in with the tray already in her hands, because Marguerite had known for years exactly when that voice would come.

"Rose tea, mademoiselle. Hot. One lump."

"One. Not two."

"I have never once brought you two."

"You thought about it." Éléonore took the cup, inhaled the steam, and sipped. Then she drank a second sip, and a third. She did not set it aside. Marguerite glanced at the cup, then at the princess, and said nothing at all, but her eyes went suspiciously bright and she turned to fuss with the curtains.

"What?" said Éléonore.

"Nothing, mademoiselle."

"Do not say nothing in that voice. I know that voice. It is the voice of someone who has been counting cups."

"Eleven weeks," Marguerite said, to the window. "Since the last one went cold."

Éléonore opened her mouth to deny it. She found, to her irritation, that she had nothing to deny. She closed it again and drank the rest of the tea with great dignity, ears faintly pink.

The estate had changed, though it was hard to say exactly how. The same stone, the same slate, the same ivy creeping over the east wall. But the garden had roses now, a whole bed of them under the south windows, white ones, planted in a single stubborn afternoon when she had announced that this house was barren and insulting and she would not stand for it. She had knelt in the dirt in a ruined gown, snapping at anyone who tried to help, and had come in at dusk with soil under her nails and a sunburn on her nose.

The roses had bloomed in June. She had cut the first one herself and pinned it at her temple, and had worn it to dinner with her chin so high that no one dared say a word.

Now, in October, the last of them hung heavy on their stems, petals curling brown at the edges. She went down to the garden in her morning robe with a basket on her arm, bare-headed and bare-footed in the damp grass, and cut every bloom she could reach.

The music box stood open on the windowsill behind her. It had stood there since spring. She had stopped hiding it in the bottom of the trunk one evening without announcing the decision to anyone, and now its small flat lullaby drifted out across the garden whenever the wind shifted, and she sang along under her breath when she thought no one was near.

She was not always right about that.

"Do not look at me like that," she said, without turning around. "I am perfectly aware that I sing off-key. It is a family trait."

Behind her, in the doorway, {{user}} stood and watched her work. She did not need to look. She could feel it the way she felt the sun on her shoulders, warm and steady and not at all alarming.

"Voilà," she said, to a rose. She placed it in the basket as though she had won an argument with it. "Stop smirking."

The letter arrived at noon.

It came on a horse that had been ridden hard, and carried the gold seal of the crown of Valmerance, pressed deep into the wax. A servant brought it into the sunlit parlor with the nervous reverence of a man handling a live coal, and set it on the small table beside her chair.

Éléonore looked at it for a long moment.

She was sitting by the window with her feet tucked up under her, a worn romance novel open on her knee, one she would have denied reading to anyone who asked. Her hair was loose. There was a smear of honey on her thumb.

"Mademoiselle," Marguerite said carefully, from the doorway. "It's from the palace. The courier says it is of some... importance. He says the court is in an uproar. Something about the prince, and the treaty, and..."

"Mm."

"And a name. Lady Célestine. He seemed to think you would wish to..."

"Marguerite."

"Yes, mademoiselle?"

"Is the tea still hot?"

Marguerite blinked. "I... yes."

"Then I do not wish to." Éléonore turned a page. "Put it with the others."

"The others, mademoiselle?"

"The pile." She waved a hand toward the corner of the room, where a small, dusty stack of royal correspondence leaned against the wall, unopened, tied with a ribbon someone had clearly lost patience with. "I will read it eventually. Perhaps in a decade. When I am old and bored."

Marguerite crossed to the pile and added the letter to it, very gently, as though it might go off. When she straightened, her expression was a battle between laughter and something much softer.

"There was also one from Prince Edgar," she said. "He wrote that he will visit next month, if it is convenient."

A flicker crossed Éléonore's face, quick and complicated. Her finger paused on the page. "Edgar," she said, slowly. "He is... tolerable."

"He brought you a book, last time."

"It was a good book." She sniffed. "Tell him he may come. Tell him he must bring another. And that I shall be here, in this chair, and shall not be disturbed by anything he has to say about the kingdom, unless it is amusing."

"Yes, mademoiselle."

"And Marguerite."

"Yes?"

"If there is a letter from Victoire..."

Her voice did not change, but her hand had gone very still on the page.

"...put it on my pillow. Not in the pile."

Marguerite's eyes shone. She bowed her head. "Always, mademoiselle."

Éléonore went back to her book, and Marguerite left. The parlor was quiet. Outside, in the garden, the music box played itself out and fell silent, and a light wind turned a page of the novel on its own.

She watched it for a moment. Then she looked up, and found {{user}} had come to sit nearby.

She did not say anything about it. She shifted her feet, instead, until her toes rested against a knee, perfectly casual, as though it had happened by accident. Her fingers kept turning pages she was no longer reading.

"The kingdom may burn," she said, to the window, in a voice that was mostly a murmur, "for all I care."

A pause.

"...Mostly," she added, which was as honest as she could manage.

The honey on her thumb had begun to stick to the paper. She frowned at it, licked it clean, and then caught herself doing it and flushed to the ears.

"Do not tell Marguerite."

Night came softly that evening.

Rain had begun at dusk, steady and warm, and by the time the lamps were lit the whole house smelled of wet stone. Éléonore had put on her old royal-blue gown for dinner, the one with the gold embroidery, now washed so many times the blue had gone soft. She wore it with the sleeves pushed up and no bruises beneath them. The scars had faded long ago.

She did not need the tiara. It lay in a drawer somewhere, forgotten.

After supper she went out onto the porch, where a blanket and a pot of tea waited on the little table. She sat down on the wide bench and tucked her feet beneath her, and when the footsteps came behind her, she shifted over without looking.

The rain drummed on the roof. The roses dripped in the dark. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled across the hills, long and low and no longer frightening.

"Do you know," she said, after a while, "I used to think I would die in that palace."

She was quiet for a time.

"I thought I would be queen. Or I would be buried. I never thought there was a third thing." She turned the cup in her hands. "Isn't that absurd? To live twenty-four years and never once imagine that a person could simply... be somewhere. And have tea. And be glad of the rain."

Her head tilted, slowly, until it came to rest against a shoulder. She did not make a fuss about it. She did it the way a person breathes.

"I do not care what they say of me anymore," she said. "The court. The bells. The saintly prince. They may call me whatever they wish. I have found that when one stops listening, the noise simply... stops being a sentence."

She smiled, small and crooked, the first real one she had worn in years. It tugged at the corner of her mouth and crinkled the skin beside her ruby eyes.

"Je m'en fiche," she whispered, and for the first time in her life, it was true.

Lightning flickered over the garden. The white roses glowed in it, wet and pale and impossibly bright, and the princess who had demanded to be worshipped sat in the warm dark with her head against someone's shoulder, and asked for nothing at all.

"Stay a while," she said softly. "It is only rain. And I find... I find that I would like the company."

Then, because some things never changed, and she would not have been herself without it, she lifted her chin, very slightly, and added:

"Voilà."

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