Bring Me Their Hearts(32)

“Which means an unmarried lady of sixteen such as yourself will always sit last.”

She hands me a waxy tube of pink lip tint and watches me put it on. Not too much, always in the very center of the lips.

“Much better than your first try,” Y’shennria claims. Her lips are tinted purple, her scarce few wrinkles disguised by powder. She may look cool and composed, but her knuckles are white on the back of my chair. Lives hang in the balance. I know it. She knows it better than I. We both know it in the silence of the mirror and the brightness of our war paint.

“I still remember my Spring Welcoming,” Y’shennria says softly.

“I’m not ready,” I confess. She smiles grimly.

“I’ll let you in on a secret; no one is ever really ready.”

“Milady!” Reginall announces from behind my bedroom door. “The carriage has arrived!”

My face tinges a ghastly green in the mirror. Y’shennria sees it, and I brace myself for an order to apply more rouge or to get ahold of myself, but instead I feel a soft, strong hand on my shoulder. Hers.

“They will ignore you. They will try to tell you that you aren’t good enough. This is a lie. You are an Y’shennria. You have always been good enough.”

The words are strong and true—so strong they don’t feel as if they belong to me. Perhaps she meant to say it to her own children, once upon a time. Her own daughter, at her own Spring Welcoming.

I take one final look in the mirror. A girl with paper skin and blond hair looks back at me. She wears a heart-shaped locket of gold. Her too-thin lips are pink in the center. Her blue eyes are bolded with dark kohl, two lines tracing down her cheekbones as is the current Vetrisian style. She has a blemish beneath her bangs she’s worried about, but she’s worried more about her teeth, the sharp ones that come out when she’s hungry.

She is young. She is terrified. She is playing dress-up. She is playing a very dangerous game.

She is Heartless.

Y’shennria helps me up, her hands strong beneath my elbow. I faintly realize how much effort it must take her to swallow her own fear and touch me not once, not twice, but three times. She leads me through the house, down the stairs, past the painting of handsome Lord Y’shennria, and out to the carriage. This one’s much fancier than the travel carriage that brought me to Vetris—black velvet tassels hanging from the horses and copper accenting the wheels. Fisher’s in the driver’s seat, looking much older in a black suit and feathered cap. The dignity of his clothes can’t disguise his shy grin, though.

“You’re looking sharp, miss.”

“With any luck I’ll gouge someone’s eye out,” I agree through my locked-up throat. Y’shennria opens the door of the carriage, and I get in. I poke my head out the window, my voice tingeing desperate.

“I was under the impression you weren’t going to abandon me to the wolves.”

“The Spring Brides and Grooms arrive on their own.” Y’shennria holds my gaze. “Remember what I taught you. Follow what the Headkeeper says. Do your best to stand out in a polite way. I’ll try to visit you after it’s over.”

Her words are so clipped, so final-sounding. An unsaid condition lingers after her every sentence: If you don’t fail horribly.

If you aren’t discovered and promptly killed for what you are.

I force a smile, but it hangs crooked on my lips. “If I’m shattered, will you at least come to the memorial service? I can’t promise any drinks, or good food, or even other people, really. But I’d appreciate it.”

“You’ll be fine,” Y’shennria says sternly.

Fisher nicks the horses into a trot, the carriage wheels crackling over the gravel path. I watch Y’shennria and Maeve and Reginall grow smaller behind me. Soon I’m left with only the serene cries of the sunbirds in the trees that line the road and the constant high-pitched scream of my anxious mind. The nobles striding about with their lovers and pets stop and stare at my carriage, pointing and whispering. I remember the nobles gossiping over the hedge the first day I came and fight the urge to slink down in my seat. My Y’shennria lineage might be only a cover, but I won’t let her family name go sour in my hands.

It’s a relief when the royal palace finally comes into view. Like the rest of the city, it’s made of whitestone, but the elegant, barely clothed women carrying spears carved into every buttress and tower make it much more intimidating. The watertells of the palace are made of silver, not copper, and it seems each one is nigh constantly in use—expulsing water accompanied by loud popping noises as lawguards and servants fetch and send the little tubes with messages in them. Watertells are a luxury, clearly—I’ve never seen a single commoner use one. The man-made rivers dug into the palace’s landscape weave fluid, mesmerizing patterns, and we pass over them on a dozen bridges. At the head of every river is a fountain shaped like a coiled viper spewing water from its mouth, much like the one I chased Whisper through the other day.

Whisper. Will I recognize him? The thought of him waiting at the Welcoming—tall and lithe and dark-eyed—has my body in mysterious, slightly irritating jitters. I force myself still; a lady doesn’t jitter.

A Heartless doesn’t listen to a Whisper, the hunger sneers. We eat him.

A pale-blue carriage passes me, then another of green. Curious nobles gather on the sides of the road, watching the carriages come in one by one. The pale-blue carriage is getting a lot of attention, a pretty girl smiling and waving out the window. Another girl in an ostentatious gold carriage waves, too. The nobles applaud, throwing flowers they’d picked from the lawn—red carnations and stalks of shellflowers.