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Clara first noticed the girl as she was talking to one of the doctors about a child with an inflamed appendix. The face seemed familiar, but she had too much on her mind to pay close attention to the stranger.
Will had not slept again, and he still didn’t want to talk about what was really keeping him awake. He found excuses, for her and for himself. The moon. Something he ate. A book he’d wanted to finish. He tended to hide worries, wishes, or feelings he was ashamed of from himself and others. It had taken Clara a long time to see that. Her invisible Will. So hard to pin down. Sometimes she imagined a locked room deep in his heart, which even he never entered. Except in his sleep.
But it wasn’t just Will. These past weeks she’d felt quite strange herself. As though someone had been inside her head and had taken something away. The feeling was particularly strong when she looked in the mirror in the morning. Sometimes her own face seemed alien to her, or she felt as though her childhood face, or that of her mother, was looking back at her from the misted glass. She’d started to remember things she hadn’t thought about in years. Her entire past life seemed to be coming back to her, as though someone had stirred up the tea leaves of her memories. She had not told Will, of course, or anyone. What could she say? Someone was inside my head and stole something—a ridiculous diagnosis for a would
-be doctor.
Still, she’d been tempted to talk to Jacob about it. It was silly how much she looked forward to seeing him. She tried to tell herself it wasn’t Jacob she missed, but the life he lived and the world he lived in, but it was no good. It pained her that she couldn’t hear enough of the stories Jacob and Fox told her and Will. Didn’t she do everything to avoid reminding Will of the other world? Hadn’t she wished the mirror to hell a thousand times over? And yet far too often she caught herself sneaking into that dusty room when Will was out, staring into the glass as though it could show her the world waiting on the other side like a forbidden fruit. Did Will feel the same? If he did, he didn’t show it.
Clara was sitting at the nurses’ station, finishing some charts the doctors would need the next morning, when the girl she’d noticed before was suddenly standing right in front of her. Clara hadn’t even heard her approach.
“Clara Ferber?” The girl smiled. Clara noticed she was wearing gloves, even though it was a hot day. They were made of pale yellow leather. “I’m to give this to you. From an admirer.”
The girl took a box from her bag. She opened it before offering it to Clara. On a bed of silver fabric lay a brooch in the shape of a moth, the wings fashioned from black lacquer. Clara had never seen a more beautiful thing. Before she knew it, she was holding the brooch in her hand. She could barely resist the temptation to pin it to her scrubs.
“What admirer?” she asked. Will would never buy her anything so expensive. They barely had enough money for their apartment. Will’s mother had left it to her sons, but with a hefty unpaid mortgage.
The pin pricked her finger as she returned the brooch to its box. “I cannot accept this.”
“Clara.” The girl pronounced the name as though she was savoring its sound on her tongue. How did she know Clara’s name? Of course. The name tag on her scrubs.
The girl took the brooch and, despite Clara’s protests, pinned it on her. “I wish I had a name,” she said. “Sixteen. But that’s just for those who came before me.”
What was she talking about? Clara saw a drop of blood on her finger. The needle had gone surprisingly deep. Heavens, she was suddenly so tired. Too many night shifts.
She looked up.
The girl had her face.
“It’s just as beautiful as your name,” she said. “I have many faces.” She became the girl again. Yes, Clara remembered that face. It reminded her of a photograph Will had of his mother. She tried to get up, and her knee hit the desk.
Her legs buckled. Sleep. She just wanted to sleep.
“Spindles. Thorns.” The girl sneered. “A brooch is so much better.”
The Bloody Crib
The woman was hysterical. Donnersmarck didn’t understand a word she was muttering in her peasant dialect, her bloody hands stretched toward him. The two Goyl soldiers who’d found the screaming nursemaid in the corridor were visibly disgusted by so much human lack of restraint, yet even their faces showed some of the horror the woman was screaming into the palace.
“Where is the Empress?” Donnersmarck demanded.
“In her dressing room. Nobody dares to tell her.” The soldier who’d answered had the same carnelian skin as his King. Amalie allowed only guards with her husband’s skin to attend her.
“Nobody dares to tell her.” And so they’d come to him. God knows, Donnersmarck would’ve rather delivered different news to his former employer’s daughter, especially just after Her Imperial Majesty Amalie had taken him back into her service despite his weeks of unexplained absence. He’d told her about the Bluebeard but had kept all other details from her: the terrible wounds the stag servant had inflicted on him, the weeks at the child-eater’s. Leo von Donnersmarck, adjutant to the Empress—even the merchant’s daughter whom he was hoping to make his wife this coming fall didn’t know about the scars on his chest. He didn’t want to explain why the fingerprints of a Witch were burned into the skin next to them. His chest looked like the churned mud of a battlefield, yet that wasn’t the worst. In his dreams he changed into the stag who’d wounded him. Nearly every night found him pleading with the god protector of warriors and soldiers to let him keep the body his bride had fallen in love with.
The chambers of the Moonstone Prince lay far away from his mother’s so the infant wouldn’t disturb Amalie’s sleep. That’s why this morning’s dark news had indeed not yet reached her.
The young Empress was sitting in front of her mirror, which supposedly had been crafted by the same glazier who’d made her grandmother’s infamous speaking mirror. “Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” If Amalie’s mirror answered such questions, it probably would’ve given her the answers she wanted to hear. The golden hair, the flawless skin, the violet eyes—there was but one woman whose beauty compared to that of Amalie of Austry, and she was not human. The day and the night. Since his wedding, Kami’en, the King of the Goyl, preferred the day, and his Fairy lover bore her own darkness like a veil, mourning the death of her love. It had to be bitter that the beauty that so enchanted Kami’en had been granted by a Fairy lily.
The lady’s maid who daubed Amalie’s hair every morning with naiad tears shot an irritated glance at Donnersmarck as he entered. It was too early. Her mistress was not yet ready to face the world.
“Your Highness?”
Amalie did not turn, but her eyes met his in the mirror. She’d celebrated her twenty-first birthday barely a month ago, but Donnersmarck still felt he was looking at a child who’d gotten lost in the woods. What good did the crown or the golden dress do if even her face had been bought by her mother because the one she’d entered the world with had not been pretty enough?
“It’s about your son, Your Highness...”
The darkness of the world made no distinctions; it entered its palaces as it did its huts.
