“Kill him already,” Alice hissed. “Stop mooning around.”
And, indeed, Vance was leaning toward Cecily to seal their vows with a kiss. She pulled back at the last moment, so that his mouth merely brushed her veil, then tried to smile in apology. As she turned to depart the ceremony with her new husband, she saw her father in the crowd. He nodded once in her direction.
At the party following the wedding, one of the guests remarked to Cecily how good it was that her father was taking an interest in society again, after falling out of favor with the King.
“He seldom talks to me about politics,” Cecily said. “I did not know he was ever a friend of his Majesty.”
The woman who had said it looked around, seemingly torn between guilt and gossip. “Well, it was when the King was only the youngest Prince. No one expected him to take the throne, because his father was so young and his two older brothers so healthy. But illness took all three of them, one after another, and once his Majesty was on the throne, your father was well favored. He was given money and lands beyond most of our—well, you know how vast and lovely your father’s land is.”
“Yes,” Cecily said, feeling very stupid. She had never wondered where these things came from. She had merely assumed that there had always been plenty and there would always be plenty.
“But after the Prince was born, your father fell out of favor. The King would no longer see him.”
“Why?” Cecily asked.
“As if I know!” The woman laughed. “He really has kept you in another world up there!”
Later, she went to a large bed chamber and changed into a pale shift that was still, somehow, darker than her skin. She stared at her arms, looking at the tracery of purple veins, mapping a geography of paths she might take, a maze of choices she did not know her way out of.
“You look cold,” Vance said. “I could warm you.”
Cecily thought that was a kind thing to say, as though he was more interested in her well-being than in her vermillion-painted mouth or the sapphires sparkling on her fingers. She didn’t have the heart to stop him from taking her hand and pressing his lips to her throat. Lying beside his cold afterward reminded her of sleeping with her sisters before they were only shades. The chill touch of his skin comforted her.
In the morning, the whole house wept with his sudden death. Alice and Mirabelle wept too, because although he was dead, he did not live on as they did. They could not catch his spirit as he passed.
She rode in a fast coach with her father and Liam was dead before word reached the household of Vance’s burial. The second boy was much easier than she expected. At this wedding, her name had been Alice. In their bedchamber, he’d barely spoken; only torn off her gown and died. There was no time to steal out to the gardens. No time to bury her sisters.
Cecily’s father was so pleased he could barely sit still as they pressed on to the palace. He ate an entire box of sweetmeats, chuckling to himself as he watched the landscape fly by.
He had brought something for her to eat too, a familiar mix of herbs that she left sitting in their bowl.
“I don’t want them,” she said. “They make me sick.”
“Just eat!” he told her. “For once, just do as you are bid.”
She thought about throwing the bowl out of the window and scattering the herbs, but the smell of them reminded her of Mirabelle and Alice, who barely smelled like anything now. Besides, there was nothing else. Cecily ate the herbs.
She could still taste them in her mouth when the carriage arrived at the palace. She half expected to be clapped in irons and as she passed whispering courtiers, Cecily thought that each one was telling the other a list of her evil deeds.
We first met in the library. I was tall and plain, with pock-marked skin. Yes, I’m the prince in this story. Did you guess, Paul? Cecily later told me that when I first smiled at her, I still appeared to be frowning. What I remember was that she had the blackest eyes I had ever seen.
“This is your betrothed, Cecily,” Cecily’s father told me.
“I know who she is,” I said. She looked very like the picture I had been given. Most girls don’t. Your mother certainly didn’t.
That afternoon, Cecily washed the dirt of the road off her clothing and went to walk in the gardens of the palace while her father made the final arrangements. The gardens were lush and lovely, more beautiful, even, than those of her father. Plants with heads full of seeds, large as the skulls of infants, lolled from thick stems. She touched the vivid purple and red fronds of one and it seemed to twitch under her fingers. The lacy foliage of another seemed like the parsley plant of her salad. Crushing it produced a pungent, familiar scent. It was like the breath of her sisters. She bent low for a taste.
“Stop! That’s poisonous!” A gardener jogged down the path, wearing steel and leather gloves like those that belonged to her father. He had hair that flopped over his eyes and that he brushed back impatiently. “You’re not supposed to be in this part of the garden.”
“I’m sorry,” Cecily stammered. “But what are these? I have them in my garden at home.”
He snorted. “That isn’t very likely. They’re hybrids. There are no others like them in all the world.”
She thought of the woman at her wedding telling how her father had once been close to the king. He must have taken cuttings from these very plants.
She began walking, hoping she might leave the gardener behind and be about her burying business. He seemed to misconstrue her wishes, however, pacing alongside her and pointing out prize blooms. She finally managed to put off a lengthy explanation of why the royal apples were the sweetest in the world by pretending a chill and retreating into the palace.
That night there was a feast in Cecily’s honor. She sat at a long table set with crisp linens and covered with dishes she was unfamiliar with. There was eel with savory; tiny birds stuffed with berries and herbs, their bones crunching between Cecily’s teeth; pears stuffed into almond tarts and soaked in wine; even a sugar-coated pastry in the shape of the palace itself, studded with flecks of gold.
“Oh,” Mirabelle gasped. “It is all so lovely.”
But Cecily realized that no matter how lovely, it disgusted her to bring the food to her mouth. She looked across the table and saw her father in deep conversation with the king, not at all behaving as if he was out of favor.
That night, Cecily left her room and went out to the garden. Her walk with the gardener had revealed where he kept his tools and she stole a spade. With her sisters fluttering around her, Cecily looked for the right spot for them to rest. In the moonlight, all the plants were the same, their glossy leaves merely silvery and their flowers shut tight as gates.
“Be careful,” Mirabelle said. “You’re the only one of us left.”
“Whose fault is that?” Cecily demanded.
Neither of them said anything more as Cecily finally chose a place and began to dig. The rich soil parted easily.
That was what I saw her doing as I walked out of the palace. I had been looking for her, but when I found her, digging in the dirt, I almost didn’t know what to say.
She saw me standing there and crouched. Her fingers were black with earth and she looked feral in the dim light of the palace windows. I don’t think she knew it, but I was afraid.
“Please,” Cecily said. “I have to finish. I am digging a grave for my sisters.”
I thought she was mad then, I admit it. I turned to go back to the house and get the guards, thinking that my plans were in shambles.
“Please,” she said again. “I will tell you a secret.”
“That you have come to kill me?” I asked her. ”Like you killed Vance and Liam?”
She frowned.
It was then that I told her the part of her story she did not know and she told most of what I have said tonight. I will summarize for you, Paul. I know how tedious you find this sort of thing.
When he was a prince like yourself, my father had hired hers to kill those before him in line to the throne. He was very efficient; no one doubted but they had merely fallen ill. Mother told me this much before her death and I told it to Cecily.
Apparently, it was my birth that made Father send Cecily’s father to the country. It made him uncomfortable to look at his own son and to consider the sort of son he had once been.
As I got older, however, he grew increasingly certain I was planning his death. He wrote to Cecily’s father
