Nameless

about lotusfeet girls. Charmed cloths around a baby’s tiny feet, and the deformity, a chosen Twist.

To make them more beautiful. Was that what it took?

You do, too.

The snow was blank, featureless, deceptively smooth. Unbroken, it poured over the gardens—or, no. Not unbroken.

Someone had trudged through the snow. She could tell because of the line of footsteps, their edges chipped free of a layer of ice forming on the drifts. She could also tell because he was still there. A sword of darkness against all the white, his leather jacket inadequate against the cold, his hair a wild blue-tinted blackness. His breath plumed, and he looked up at her window.

Even at this distance, his gaze was a dark fire.

Cami’s breath fogged the glass. She lifted her right hand, pressed it against cold translucence.

Tor lifted his. Five fingers, spread, just like hers. A star of flesh. The frozen glass burned, and she found herself shaking. A thrill all through her, Potential rippling like heat-haze. Or maybe it was an ordinary electricity, like the natural, predictable stuff lightbulbs burned.

What is he doing?

There was no way to ask him, and he turned and trudged back the way he’d come, stepping carefully from footprint to footprint. The fog of his breath turned to ice, falling with tiny flashing tinkles. How cold was it out there?

The sound inside her head was a deep chanting, voices lifted in a sea-swell of ecstasy. She smelled fresh-cut apples, and salt, and a peculiar heavy incense. It scraped the inside of her skull clean, filling her with cotton. Whatever name they were singing, she couldn’t . . . quite . . . hear.

Cami turned. The sun’s red rim lifted over the horizon, and she could almost feel it, as if she was Family. Directionless blue winter-morning light pushed past her, filling the white room to the brim. The gauze over the mirror fluttered, and she found herself stepping gingerly across plain carpet.

She tore the scarf down. The mirror, clear and flawless, was a blank screen, not even reflecting her.

Not a mirror. An eye.

A gleam in the depths of the thin glass. Trembling, Cami lifted her right hand again.

There was a snap, felt in the chest more than heard through the ears, and the white room glared at her from the mirror’s surface. She blinked, and found herself standing, fists curled, her hair messed by the restless tossing she’d done instead of sleeping, her face hectic with color and her eyes blazing blue.

It was there, standing and not-quite-thinking, her brain humming with the sharp edges of a puzzle forming around her, that Cami had a very odd thought.

I need an apple.

The kitchen was curiously deserted. Marya was not humming near the hearth, nor was she at the stove. She could be anywhere in the house, dusting or flitting from room to room, engaged on whatever charms a house-fey used at dawn. The important thing was she wasn’t here, and the copper-bottom pans hanging shiny from their rack were still and quiet.

The fridge was tomato red, its door fluttering with yellowed photographs—a shyly smiling nine-year-old Cami in white eyelet lace, Nico glowering behind her in his small but exquisitely tailored suit, his hair slicked down. Papa with Cami on his lap in a white silk sundress, squinting slightly in the garden sunshine, and Nico tall and straight- faced at his left shoulder. A baby Nico, with a rare smile, lifting up a dirt-clotted bulb of garlic from the herb garden and shaking it. Papa, younger and solemn, straight as a poker and holding the hand of a smiling young mortal woman with Nico’s proud tilt to her head. Papa and three of the other Seven, their mouths all the same straight line.

The pictures of Cami herself were newer, and they fluttered uneasily, interlopers against the red enamel.

She found what she needed in the crisper. She pulled out the cutting board, selected Marya’s favorite wood- handled butcher knife. Placed it, gleaming-sharp, next to the scarred block of oiled wood and weighed the apple in her hand. Satiny and red, it was too heavy. She set it down and looked at it, her brain still caught in that peculiar humming, head cocked, ink-black hair a river down her back.

Tip it over.

So she did, one trembling finger touching the apple until it toppled. It was not perfectly round, so it rolled with a bump and lay there, as if it knew a secret.

It does. Are you sure you want to know one, too?

Her fingers curled around the knifehilt. She blinked.

Cloven horizontally, the apple fell open. She saw the seeds, each nestled in its own hollow, making a five- pointed star. Deep foulness bubbled up in the recesses of her memory. A screaming, a hissing, gouts of perfumed smoke that filled the cup of the skull with cotton numbness, and the crisp scent of a just-sliced apple all mixed together.

That’s what she smells like. Smoke and fruit. Because she’s the Queen. Shudders rippled down Cami’s back.

Not just any queen. The White Queen. The shaking was worse. It held her in its jaws, snapping her back and forth. The knife clattered against the counter, and her left hand smacked the apple halves and sent them flying.

It was too late. The knife’s poison-polished blade flashed, a dart of white cruelness straight into the center of her skull, and Cami let out a soft birdlike sound. She couldn’t scream because she couldn’t breathe, it was too bright, there was smoke in her throat and the chanting was full of nonsense syllables instead of meaning and she couldn’t . . .

Her legs gave out. Her head clipped the edge of the tiled counter on the way down, and the brief starburst of pain turned into wet warmth. The knife spun, teetering on the edge, then fell with another chiming sound. It missed her nose by a bare half-inch, but she never knew.

Her muscles locked, and the sound wouldn’t stop. It was a child’s voice too broken to scream any further, and its chirping made words as she curled into a ball on the russet floor.

“Mommy no Mommy no Mommy no Mommy noooooooooo . . . ”

TWENTY-ONE

“SHE PASSED OUT.” NICO, BUT . . . DIFFERENT. LIKE there was something caught in his throat.

“Are we sure that’s what it was, sir?” Stevens, now. Dry and reedy, his throat needed oiling. Would he be Nico’s consigliere too, a glove for Nico’s consciousness, the well that a new Vultusino would drop secrets into?

What secrets would he have now that he couldn’t tell her? Plenty. Even Papa had sometimes sent her to Marya, when things were happening a little girl shouldn’t hear. She’d been able to guess around the corners, but to be the Vultusino was to have secrets. Lots of them.

Bad secrets.

Are mine bad too? They must be.

Cami sighed. She was warm, and it was soft around her, and the noise had stopped. All of it, even the roaring and the barking dogs. Her head was only full of ringing silence.

They were quiet, and she kept her eyes closed. Her breathing came in deep even swells. She was so glad she wasn’t choking that she just kept doing it, drawing the air in, letting it out.

“If you have something to say, Stevens, spit it out.” Nico still sounded different. She couldn’t figure out just how. The question kept her occupied much as breathing did.

“Black as night. Blue as sky. Red as blood.” Stevens paused. “White. As snow.”

“We’d know, if she was—”

“Would we? Would you?”