“Vanja!” The dame’s voice breaks through my thoughts. I hate that I jump to attention on reflex. From the look on the dame’s face, it’s not the first time she’s called for me. She holds up her empty teacup, mouth pinched.
“Right away, m’lady.” When I get to the table I notice the serving plates have been shuffled around. I remember this move: Dame von Falbirg would always rotate all the sweets gradually out of Gisele’s reach, even if she’d had just one. I guess old habits die hard.
She says loftily as I refill her teacup, “I hope you haven’t been easy on her, Gisele. She’s just going to get lazy.”
I meet Gisele’s gaze and see her jaw clench. There’s a sting to her anger, the same in mine: A year softened our memories of this to an ache.
But it was always this poisonous. And it burns coming back up.
Then Gisele does something new. She sets her own teacup down with an indelicate clatter of porcelain and says, “Don’t talk about Vanja that way.”
The prince and dame stare at her, mystified.Prinzvon Falbirg is the one to find words first. “She’s your servant,” he says, like he’s explaining which way is north.
Like Ragne, when she told me she helped because that’s what people do. Like Emeric, when I asked what it would cost to save me, and he said I owed him nothing.
Too late, I realize the dame’s teacup is overflowing. She leaps to her feet as tea spills onto the table. A few drops land on her velvet skirt.
“You clumsy littleoaf—” the dame snarls, drawing her hand back.
Gisele’s chair falls over with a thud. A tide of emerald silk crashes between me and Dame von Falbirg as Gisele catches her arm. “NO.”
The pearls lie on the floor. Without them, Gisele’s even taller than her mother now.
“Put the pearls back on.” The dame wrenches her arm free. Her breath is coming faster, but her voice and poise stay icily calm. “You don’t want anyone seeing you like this—”
Gisele returns frost with frost. “I’m not afraid to be seen as I am. Like I seeyoufor what you are. You used Vanja every day she was under our roof. You bought the von Hirschings with her blood. You have no right to raise a hand to her. Theleastyou owe her is respect.”
The prince rises from his chair, face darkening. “We took her in when she had nowhere to go. We gave her everything she needed. Didn’t we, Vanja?”
I have spent so many hours thinking of exactly what I would say to just this question. What witty, devastating insults I could unleash, what cutting observations I could carve into them. But in the end, only the unvarnished truth spills from my lips.
“You paid me because I worked for you,” I say, matching Gisele’s chill. “And you worked me to the bone for pennies, so I couldn’t afford to leave.”
The dame’s face twists, that ice growing perilously thin. “You ungrateful littlewretches. Do you know how lucky you are? The margrave is a true nobleman, andImade you his bride. Look at this—” She slashes her hand at the parlor. “Do you think you would have any of this without us? Without those pearls?”
“You sold us to a monster,” Gisele returns. “You didn’t ask if he was kind, or if he was honorable, because you knew he was neither and you didn’t care. You just cared about his money.” She snatches up the pearls and heads for the door.
“We’re not done,”Prinzvon Falbirg blusters. “Get back here this instant.”
Gisele clasps the pearls back on as I catch up to her. “No, wearedone, because I say so. It’s my castle.” She opens the door, then shuts it most of the way again and turns, eyes glittering with a ferocious kind of joy. “Oh, and by the way: I’m not even interested in men. Not that you ever asked.”
Then she breezes through the door. I follow with a broad, feverish grin, and can’t help anentirelyinappropriate mock-salute as I slip into the hall.
We rush to the bedroom in the stiff, frantic walk of people who need to hurry and are pretending they don’t. Once the door shuts behind us, I say numbly, “Scheit. You just did that.”
“I just did that,” she echoes, eyes wide. Then she grabs my arms. “I did that!”
“You did that!”
And suddenly we’re both laughing and crying and jumping in place. It feels like a curse has broken, one older and bitterer than Eiswald’s.
It’s not just that Gisele defended me. It’s that some part of me needed to see it, to understand that the prince and damecouldbe cracked, and we could both walk away.
“What did you do?” Ragne asks, sitting up on the hearth. She’s dressed herself again, this time in a shirt tucked into riding breeches.
I grin through my tears. “She told her parents to get stuffed.”
“I just,” Gisele gasps, “after everything, I couldn’t keep lying to myself about how awful they were to you—”
