Page 13 of A Dance of Lies

“We both know it’s a useless cause,” I spit, wrenching my arm from Brigitte’s grip. “Look at me.” She can see it as plainly as I can. We both know I can’t perform the way I need to. Not for King Illian,and certainly not for the elite environs of the Crowns’ Gathering.

Freedom slips from my fingers like wax melting beneath a candle’s flame.

But Brigitte grabs me roughly by the shoulders, shaking them as if to startle me from a nightmare. “You listen to me,” she says, eyes so sharp I feel as if I’m being held at the tip of a blade. “I have a daughter your age. A scrawny thing like you. Life got the best of her, too. Her bastard of a father set fire to our house with us in it. He left us to burn. We escaped, Vasalie, with nothing but our lives. Our home, our land—it was all gone.” She slides back her sleeves, revealing white ripples of scar tissue banding her arms. “Marian, my daughter, got the worst of it. Her whole body.”

I stare at her, words caught in my throat like stones.

“She loved cooking,” Brigitte continues. “Loved it so much it’s all she could think about. Even after that—after being burned—she did not fear the fire. But no bakery would hire her. No one would even look into her eyes. I didn’t earn much, but I took two jobs, then three, and with every quatra left over after our rent, I bought Marian a stove. Spices, ingredients, anything I could get my hands on, though it wasn’t much. In our tiny corner of a kitchen, she baked. And baked. She had no training except what I could give her. But she had talent, brains, and swiftly discovered a method to refine millen into flour, and a fine one at that. Finer than any you have ever seen.”

Impressive, I can admit. Millen grows plentifully in Miridran, but its tough stalk had once made it all but unusable.

“But when she went to the market to sell her samples and goods,” Brigitte continued, “no one bought them. They avoided her, looked the other way. But still she went each day, determined.

“Then one day, a man from East Miridran sampled her scones. He liked them so much that he purchased her entire basket, then came back the next day after sharing it with his convoy, asking herwhat she used. When she told him about millen, he made her an offer. Turns out he was King Anton’s closest friend, and now she works for aking.Not even King Illian can convince her to return, much less devise her process, and now he must settle for purchasing millen flour from the east in heftily priced trades. And my daughter? She lives in a palace. I’d be with her now if it weren’t for . . .” She trails off, shaking her head. A pained breath leaves her lips. “She triumphed. That’s what matters.”

I don’t know what to say, so I stare at her, my thumbs curling into my palms. It’s quite the tale, but I still feel so numb.

“Your story is not a kind one,” Brigitte says, kneading my hands softly between her own. “But though you’ve suffered your own fire, child, you won’t always smell of smoke. And yes, it may have burned you,” she tells me, and I lift my gaze. “But scars are powerful things, because they show your resilience. So rise from your ashes, my dear. Do not crumble alongside them.”

With that, she leaves. But her words . . . They wash over me again and again until I fall to my knees and sink my head into my hands.

I thought I had made it. That I had escaped the horrors of my past. My father, his abuse. The man he planned to sell me to under the guise of marriage. I had escaped, because Emilia bought me that chance, and then I came here. Danced until my feet bled. I earned my place—and my peace. My hardships should have been over. Years of striving, almost starving, and I’dmadeit. I was King Illian’s chosen.

Until everything was ripped away like a thatched roof in a heavy wind.

I think of Brigitte, of Marian. I’d give anything to have a mother. Or even a sister. Emilia, even if we weren’t related, was the closest I had. Another hole opens within me, widening, fraying. I see Emilia’s face again, and like a blow to my barely beating heart, I remember the pitch of her laughter, how it sounded like a song. The way I’d find her twirling in a pool of sunlight at the earliest hint of dawn.

Emilia had performed at the Gathering one year. It was the reason I had wanted to see it one day, if only to feel close to her once more. See what she told me so much about—the wonders of the palace, the splendor of such an event.

I tug the glove from where I’d hidden it under my mattress and graze it along my lips. “I failed you,” I breathe. “I failed you so badly.” But I know what she’d say.Survive.It’s all she asked of me before I left.Survive and be free, my darling girl.

But the cost was losing you.

I press the glove against my eyes until it’s soaked with my tears. My heart throbs painfully in my chest. Long minutes pass until the tears run dry, until the scent of cinnamon rises from the tray Brigitte left behind. A small scone like the one she described is nestled next to my cup of tea.

I take it, lift it to my lips, and pause.

Sugar. Flour. Cinnamon. This pastry, pressed and kneaded with an elaborate flourish, is made from simple components, and only when it is baked together does it form the scone in my hand. I pull it apart with my fingers. It breaks easily, flaking onto the tray like ash. It must be made from millen flour, Marian’s creation. Light as air, thin as mist.

Rise from your ashes, my dear. Don’t crumble alongside them.

An idea crafts itself in my head, small at first, but it grows like dough baked with yeast until it forms into something larger—

I pick myself up and race from the room.

Chapter Four

My first dance for the king comes at the break of dawn.

King Illian’s guards lead me to a throne room in the entertainment wing. It’s a small one, intimate, unlike the large one where he holds court, and this choice . . . it feels deliberate.

This was the location of my last performance.

It was the night before I was arrested. The night I thought everything would change—just not for the reason it did. Because after I had danced for King Illian and his courtiers, he asked me to do it all over again, except this time away from the crowd. In the privacy of this room. And he watched me with such ardency, such . . .zeal,that I thought he would break whatever it was that kept him from pursuing me.

“You are everything,” he had told me, his hand planted on the doorframe above my head, just before he bid me good night and pushed away.

How close I had been to taking his hand. To pulling him back. If only to thank him, throw my arms around him. I was so enamored with him—not by lust but by gratitude. And even if ithadled to more, I might have welcomed it.