Page 51 of The Scarlet Ball

I saw her consider, and then concede.

“An alliance with a lord comes most surely through marriage, but it can also come through blood and name. After the White Ball, the lords are the closest to this plane that they can be without crossing over. You and the other girls called them, and there are families, ones without a suitable daughter, waiting for them as well.”

“Families with unwanted sons,” I said without thinking, and Mrs. Howard gave me a patient smile.

“Unwanted? No. What demon lord would consent to exist in this world as a younger son, or an ugly one, or one disabled? I won’t say that every son offered up is the most loved—there are quite a few wastrels and whoremongers who reform to an astonishing degree after marriage to the right girl—but we give our best, our daughters and our sons both.”

I thought of the jokes in Paris and London, young rich Americans running away to avoid a marriage back home. How spoiled and silly we’d thought them. Maybe they’d been right to run if this is what they suspected they were running from.

“The real Sebastian Rowe—”

“The real Sebastian Rowe is the one who brought you back from the Snowflake Festival, who batters down our door with treasures you will rightly keep turning aside.” At my mutinous look, she sighed. “What you saw—it does not usually happen quite that way. As I told you, there’s never been one like him. Christine, that is, Mrs. Rowe, was always too fond of that boy. She had no intention of involving him in this, and her the daughter of Eleanor Janssen, who married a glacial flood. But she would not have imagined he could be taken without her offering—and he should not have been. He should have been safe.”

“No such thing,” I said without thinking, and I blinked as her hand came down hard on her book, the slap echoing through the room.

“There is for us.” She gathered herself, took a breath. “I am done answering your questions. Will you stay, or will you leave?”

“And if I leave?”

“You may have some money. I am not cruel, and nor am I insensible to the work you have done for me so far. But our contract was until my granddaughter came home or until I dismissed you, and I have not dismissed you yet. But, Judith…”

It was the first time she had used my name.

“I do not think you will leave. I think you will stay, and I think you will stand, and I think you will be chosen.”

Twelve

The dress for the Rose Ball emerged from the carved cedar chest like steam rising from a hot bath, lifting up from a billow of white tissue paper into Mielle’s hands as I watched. It was beautiful, but I had come to expect beauty, and luxury as well. I was growing immune to it, knowing that when I danced, I wore the days taken off the lives of seamstresses across the sea.

At first I thought the dress was like the gown I had worn for the White Ball: glacial white and even plainer without any real adornment at all. It was merely acres of white satin, bleached past bone into snow, and I was almost disappointed until Mielle turned it in the light. Suddenly the palest rose suffused the white as if the dress itself was blushing, and when she turned it further, it brightened to a deep pink stain, cherry juice soaking through from beneath.

I made a sound of surprise, reaching out to touch it. It was such a living color, I expected it to be warm, but instead it was chilly as unworn satin always was.

“It’s shot silk,” Mielle explained. “White in the warp, a good dozen shades of rose in the weft to create some uncertainty in the effect. He will love it on you.”

She’d been tightening my corset by increments for the last two hours. The fabric warmed then expanded, and every fifteen minutes or so, she would have me stand so she could take up the slack. Now the edges of the corset were near to touching, and I couldn’t bend down if there was a fortune in gold on the ground. I sat up very straight and watched Mielle’s back as she patiently smoothed out the folds of the skirt, coaxing them to fall in perfect folds to the ground.

“You think I should have declined.”

“I don’t think anything.”

That did make me laugh, because I wasn’t sure I had met anyone who thought more than Mielle did. I rose from the chair and came over to put my arms around her from behind.

“Come on. You have something to say. Say it.”

She turned in my arms, not pulling away from me.

“You want so much,” she said, her breath warm against my lips. “It is always more with you. More and more and more. All of you. At first it is enough if you make it to the next minute, and then the next hour. Then the next day, and the next week. And if you have a moment with enough to eat, it’s only enough for that moment. One day it is clay, and the next it is gold. Clay was good enough to begin with, why must you have gold?”

“Why don’t you want it?”

She stared at me, and I tightened my hands around her waist, keeping her close.

“Why shouldn’t you want more than you have?”

She dropped her gaze as if it was too much to look at me just then. “Come on, darling,” I said softly. “Tell me. Tell me what you want, and maybe you won’t be so unhappy with me for wanting a chance to win rather than survive.”

Her lips parted; she was going to tell me or kiss me, and then she did neither. She shut her mouth and stepped back.