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I stood. “You’ve proven yourself an ally of the highest value. Thank you.”
He bowed his head but did not rise as I stepped around Camille’s toys. The girl was parading her doll from one dollhouse to another but stopped to wave at me as I started to leave. I could sense Lord Winster’s sullen gaze boring into my back, but I felt only excitement at the ease of the meeting. I’d come prepared to fight. Instead, I’d been given tea and left victorious without a struggle.
Camille was speaking, “Come along, Gaia. We have a party to go to.”
Without thinking, I whirled around, looking for my sister queen.
“Okay, let’s go,” Camille replied in a higher voice. She danced two dolls around a three-story house with blue windowsills and yellow flowers painted on the side.
My heart skipped a beat. The dolls had familiar tattoos on their foreheads and seven earrings in their ears.
“Is that me?” My voice sounded breathy. I couldn’t guess which one was Gaia and which was me, but Camille held up the doll with the ruby red-dress and the longer hair, just as I’d looked at my coronation. The other doll wore a silver gown that sparkled from every angle with its hair in three braids wound together.
“I love my Mortal Queens,” Camille declared.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from myself as a doll. It was more frightening than flattering.
“Do you just have two?” The question came before I could stop it.
Camilla paraded the dolls into the house “Of course. The others are dead. I only keep the dolls for the living queens.”
A shiver spread down my spine. I took slow steps away.
That wouldn’t be me. Thanks to her father, I would be the one doll Camille could keep forever. As the door closed behind me, I heard Camille’s pretend conversation. “Here, Gaia. We’ll have one last party before you die.”
Two crates of dresses, one for each Mortal Queen, arrived with the morning stars. It took both me and Odette to haul mine up the stairs, where we unhinged the top to an avalanche of ribbons, laces, and pearls.
Odette gasped. “I want to be a Mortal Queen and have”—she fished a note from the pile and read it—“Lord Madrid send me more gowns than I could ever need.” She plucked a deep-red gown from the center and held it to her chest. “It clashes with my hair, but look how pretty it is!”
“You would drown in that. We’d need a month to find you among all those layers.”
That only pleased her further.
I selected one as deep a blue as Bash’s cloak, lined with silver. “Should we be touching these?” I wondered aloud. “What if it’s a trap?”
Odette brought another dress to her face and sniffed it, then laughed at my appalled expression. “Talen routinely checks for traps, so if this is here, he must have allowed it through. Still, I like to be certain.”
I stroked the blue one. “As long as it passes your, um, test. You can keep that one.”
A delighted gleam lit her eyes. “You might change your mind about that because”—her voice dropped into a whisper—“there’s a hat.”
I was already halfway through buttoning the blue dress around me, which squeezed my ribs hard enough to tighten my breathing. Odette donned the hat and spun around. “When you’re gone, I want all of these.”
The tightness in my chest wasn’t from the dress anymore.
Odette looked up, a frozen look on her face, as she lowered the hat. “I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s fine.” I turned for her to do up my last buttons, gathering my hair over my shoulder.
“When you die, it’s going to be like a part of me dies with you,” Odette said as she finished buttoning and came around to face me. She gathered my hands in hers. “I mean that. Your death will kill me.” She’d changed quickly from the girl doting over gowns into a friend more serious than I’d ever seen her.
She continued. “You’ve no idea how hard it is to give our hearts to the queens just to lose them again and again. It’s torture of the worst kind. It’s the cruelest part of this realm.”
I squeezed her hands back before she could start crying on me. “I’m going to be okay.”
Her head tilted, and her hair fell to one side like an auburn river. “You’re so brave.”
“I mean it.” I pulled my hands from hers. “I’m going to be just fine.” My mouth opened to tell her of my idea to become a fae. She could be of great help deciding what I, as queen, should look like when I was no longer mortal, and how I could reveal my new power to the realm. She could celebrate then. Instead of having only a year and eight months left, we’d spend centuries as sisters.
