Hotel Magnifique(6)

Even now, I could perfectly picture the tight rows of houses that turned lemon yellow in the winter sunsets. I knew exactly when the poppies would bloom, and where our next dinner would come from. I had friends there—friends who worried about me. It felt like I hadn’t taken a deep breath for the past four years, but in Aligney I could breathe with every corner of my lungs.

My only constant these days was the ache in my chest to return.

“I loved my village. I only brought my sister here after our mother died. I planned to go back when—”

“So your mother is dead.” She cut me off. “What about your father?”

Maman never told us specifics. “He was a farmer.”

“And where do you live now?”

I started to tell her about Bézier Residence until she fluttered a hand, dismissing me with a wave. “I’ve heard enough. Send in the next person.”

Zosa shot up when she saw me. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I lied. “Don’t keep the woman waiting.”

My sister dashed in back while I scrubbed tears from my eyes. It was foolish to let myself hope. I traced the hard outline of a coin in my pocket, left over from the newspaper. At least I could buy Zosa a tin of pastilles when she was through, help sweeten the rejection.

Minutes passed. I heard her muffled singing through the door. Eventually Zosa burst into the front, a blank look on her face.

“Well?”

She held up a sheet of parchment and my mouth went dry. The page curled at the corners, archaic compared to modern foolscap. A black line at the bottom told me exactly what it was.

One contract. For a single job.

Yrsa sauntered up. “I offered your sister a position. She’ll be paid ten Verdanniere dublonnes a week singing for our guests.”

Ten dublonnes was triple what I made. I had to bite my tongue to keep from tearing up. Of course Yrsa would think Zosa was extraordinary, especially compared to her lackluster sister.

Zosa couldn’t go alone. If Maman were here, she’d be poking me to do something. But Zosa was grinning like the sun itself had risen inside of her, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say that wouldn’t break her heart.

Yrsa placed a bronze-nibbed pen and purple inkwell on a table. Pulling out a golden pin, she pricked my sister’s finger. A perfect bead of ruby blood welled.

My hands shot up. “What are you doing?”

“It’s part of the contract. Even our guests sign something similar.” Yrsa tilted the drop into the inkwell. Purple ink hissed while Zosa’s blood dissolved. Yrsa dipped the pen and pressed it between my sister’s fingers.

My eyes darted to the contract. I expected the page to be drafted in Verdanniere—the language of Verdanne and a fairly common tongue across the continent. This contract had a smattering of Verdanniere, but most paragraphs were in languages I’d never seen. At the bottom was an X.

Zosa’s cheeks were flushed. “I’ve never had anything this exciting happen to me. Jani, I did it.”

Jealousy swept through me. My fingers curled with a swift desire to grab the contract and sign it myself. I turned to Yrsa. “My sister is barely thirteen. She can’t go by herself. We could share a room and I could work doing whatever you needed.” Let us both go.

“Afraid that’s not possible,” Yrsa said. “I offered her the job. Only guests and staff can pass the threshold.”

The threshold: that wall made of nothing. There wasn’t a way to get past it together.

“It’s all right,” Zosa said. “We’ll speak to someone. It’ll all work out.”

She didn’t understand that I couldn’t go unless they hired me, too. I put my face in my hands. When I looked up, Zosa had lifted the pen nib to the parchment and scrawled her name across the bottom of the page.

I leaped forward and knocked over the inkwell. Purple splattered on the table as I grabbed the pen and gave it back to Yrsa. I glanced down and almost gasped aloud. The purple well wasn’t spilled or knocked over. It was capped. But I’d seen the ink spill, I was sure of it.

It had to be magic.

“Your sister will report to the hotel by six o’clock.” Yrsa tucked Zosa’s signed contract down her jacket and left.



* * *





“There’s no way you’re going,” I said, putting my foot down, right on top of an old nightshirt Zosa was reaching for. The seams ripped when she snatched it, while pretending I wasn’t there. “Hello. Right in front of you.” I poked her forehead and she glowered. “See. Not so invisible, am I?”

Continuing to ignore me, she stuffed Maman’s old sheet music down a grain sack filled with more of Maman’s mementos. A spider hopped from the burlap onto her finger. She shrieked, flinging it off then flipping around to face me. “You never let me do anything I want to do.”

“That’s not true. Besides, I made a promise to watch over you.”

She rolled her eyes. “That was before Maman died. I’m thirteen now. You weren’t much older when you took the job at the tannery.”

“Do you think I had a choice? Now I’m seventeen and know better.” I waved a hand around the cramped room. “I pay for all this. I have a say.”

“The soot, you mean? The beetles and smell of rotting teeth? You don’t spend your days pulling out your hair, wishing it was your skin, so you didn’t have to feel the itchy dirt. With ten dublonnes a week, I could send some back. You could move out of the vieux quais by next winter.”