The day my stepmother arrived, golden-skinned and dark-haired, mysterious and beautiful, everyone had been as delighted with her as they had been with our newfound ties to New York, a kingdom home to more shipbuilding magnates than any other on the East Coast. Alessandra was second cousin to the wife of a prince, born of a wealthy family.
I wasn’t sure if we had reaped anything from the connection. As a child, I hadn’t cared. I’d only felt the formal angles in her embrace and known she wasn’t my mother.
My pale skin, green eyes, and freckles told everyone we weren’t blood. Her coldness told them we weren’t family.
“Of course, darling. You can approve them right now.” Alessandra rested one manicured hand on Daddy’s arm and swept the other at the three strangers, still noiseless to one side of the table. The soft-looking one tipped his chin agreeably, but the iron-haired man and the tanned, long-lashed one didn’t budge.
I stiffened. I hadn’t expected the pieces of her plan to be right here in the Roots, ready and waiting across the table from me.
My thoughts slowed, growing sluggish. I felt sick.
“Have you assembled your crew, Captain Lang?” asked Alessandra.
I was startled when the youngest of them spoke, pushing one tanned fist into the opposing palm. Both hands were smudged with ink, or pencil. “Gentlemen of the Council, Seneschal and Esteemed Consort, Seneschal-elect: I’m Captain Andrew Lang. This is our ship’s navigator, Homer Maionides.” He tipped his head first at the rugged man to his right.
“You may already know Sir Perrault, my appointed protocol officer,” Alessandra added. She waved a hand at the man with the face like a portrait. “I’ve known Sir Perrault since we were young. He grew up at court in New York, as well.”
Captain Lang seemed to shift away from Sir Perrault. I felt myself draw back a little, too, my insides twisting.
Perrault and my stepmother were old friends.
And here he was, ready and waiting.
“I don’t want to,” I burst out. “I don’t want to go!”
Alessandra cocked her head. “You dismissed Sir Perrault’s suggestion of further talks with the Janesleys. This is your remaining option.”
The captain glanced once at me, eyes and lashes the color of midnight beneath dark brows, then looked back to Alessandra. “The Beholder is ready to sail tomorrow, per your request.”
“Tomorrow?” Daddy frowned.
“It’s a long trip, dear,” said Alessandra. “Why delay?”
Horror clenched me between its jaws, gnawed my bones with its teeth.
Alessandra had set us all up like game pieces, just waiting for her opening move. The Council. These strangers. And me, rejected and out of options.
She’d planned it all so, so carefully, for who knew how long, and I hadn’t seen any of it.
“Where?” I breathed, able to manage just the one word around the fear choking me. Sir Perrault studied me like a museum piece. “Where am I going? Who am I meeting?”
Alessandra smiled at me. Her relief at her victory rendered the expression more like a baring of teeth. “It’s a surprise.”
I stared at my father, wordlessly begging him to ask Alessandra why she’d maneuvered behind his back. To tell her that my leaving was not up for discussion. That I was his girl and I needed some sleep.
But my father only watched the candles melting at the center of the table, staring into the flames.
I fought tears. My voice cracked when I finally spoke. “Daddy, aren’t you going to say anything?”
“Maybe you should take this chance, sweetheart,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. “Don’t you want to be happy?”
“I’m happy here, at home, with you.” I pieced my thoughts together like a broken mirror; my voice was jagged. “Don’t you want me here?”
“Maybe I don’t know what’s good for us anymore,” he said slowly, meeting my eyes. “I think you should listen to your momma.”
Your momma.
The words sucked the breath from my chest.
Half a mile away, the clock in the tower at the Church of Saint Christopher warned of midnight’s fall. I stood and backed away from the table, stumbling over my chair and over the Roots that grasped at the dark.
I would not be unmade in front of these people.
Alessandra’s voice stopped me, low and tight as a hand around my throat. “The harbor, tomorrow, dawn.”
I glanced from my blank-faced father to the uneasy councilmembers to the young captain, whose unsettled gaze told me he was sorry.
My stepmother was breathing hard, very nearly through her teeth, like winning our fight had sapped her strength. Her arms were wrapped around the child inside her womb. Around the brother or sister whose birth I might not be home to see.
Without replying, I fled.
I tore up the pallid stone stairs and through halls as white as a bloodless face. I’d nearly reached one of Arbor Hall’s back doors when I tripped, losing a shoe as I crashed to the floor.
For a moment I didn’t move, my shoulders shaking as a sob split my chest. The clock clanged again and again, brazen, unfeeling. When I gathered myself off the snowy white tile, I hissed at the throb in my knees that told me twin purple bruises would bloom there, like lilacs beneath my skin.
Up-down, up-down. I limped toward the door, my remaining shoe slicker than glass against the marble floor. I had to get out.
Up-down. I had to get to the graveyard.
6
Tears and makeup and moonlight blurred my vision as I flung myself in front of the hazel tree and my mother’s headstone. Esteemed Consort Violet Savannah Potomac. Beloved.
I dragged my fingers over the words and leaned my forehead on the stone, my hand clasping the sapling at its side. I’d planted it from a cutting of Momma’s favorite shade tree when Alessandra had it torn up. It had been our place in the summer; she’d sit and read to me from her book of fairy tales for hours, until the sun grew low and the earth cooled and the air grew thick with dusk and magic.
I clung to the tree and the seven-years-cold headstone, and I sobbed.
My world had burned to cinders when my mother died. And now Alessandra had lit another match.
Something rustled close by, and I glanced up, tensing. “Who’s there?”
But a familiar face emerged from the shadows. “Selah, it’s me.”
I gave a ragged sigh, eyelids sinking closed, but Godmother Althea patted me on the back. “Eyes open, sweet girl. We don’t have much time.”
I rose, stumbling breathlessly after her white habit through the big double doors of the Church of Saint Christopher. “Godmother—” I blurted, confused. What did she know? And how?
After all, I’d been caught completely unawares.
“Shh.” She baptized a handkerchief in a nearby font of holy water and wiped my tearstained cheeks. “Come on, now.”
My godmother led me from the nave through a small door, down two flights of stairs and into a room smelling faintly of dust and incense. Candles came to life in their sconces as she circled the room. “We need to talk. Still, best to keep in the light.” She ushered me to a table in the corner, and I sat heavily. “Now, to begin at the beginning. I heard what happened tonight, and I find Peter’s turning you down more than a bit odd.”