Enchantée(118)

She had no magic brushes to change her face. On the dressing table, among the shards of broken glass, lay a few nearly empty pots of paint, but she didn’t see how being prettier could matter today. Carefully, she reached out to touch one of the pieces of glass. It was long and sharp, an icicle or a dagger.

Dimly, she began to see what she might use her magic to do. Séguin did not want her dead. That knowledge she tucked away, like a weapon. Slipping the shard of glass into her pocket, she went to the window, pulled back the curtains. The trees in the gardens were still only a shadowy suggestion of something yet to come.

She had treated Sophie terribly. Like a child who couldn’t be trusted to make her own decisions. She’d hidden so much from her, worried it would hurt her.

In protecting her, she had rendered her defenseless.

Tomorrow she would tell Sophie everything. She would beg her forgiveness. Camille bit the edge of her fingernail. Sophie might never forgive her. What Camille had done was so terrible Sophie might not want her for a sister.

Camille turned her hands over and held them to the window’s faint light. Up the middle of the palm of her right hand ran the twinned life lines, one of them crossed with a star.

Here are two lines: you and your shadow life. One path is thin, but whole. The other is broken.

When Séguin had read her palm, she’d wondered about his warning. If someone had asked her then which path is the path that is thin but whole, she would have known the answer: her old life, the life in Paris.

But now she wasn’t so sure. It seemed to her that a thin and narrow life was just as unwanted as a broken one.

They came for her hours before dawn.





63


The priest intoned the words of the marriage ceremony, stumbling nervously over the Latin words. His voice echoed around the chapel’s stone walls, slowly at first, and then faster as Séguin tapped his foot on the marble floor.

Camille’s toes were like ice in her thin, beribboned shoes. She focused on the cold, allowing it to keep her awake. Alert. When Séguin and his valet had come for her, she’d greeted them from her dressing table as if she were a great lady taking a social call. In his cobalt suit embroidered with white roses, Séguin had bowed to her, and she’d bitten back her shame and revulsion. Everything hinged on the least amount of resistance.

Séguin had been pleased with the dress she’d conjured. He’d waited, drumming his fingers on the inlaid dressing table, as she put up her hair with another woman’s pins. Her face in the shattered mirror was a ghost’s, smudged with sleeplessness.

“If you won’t work the glamoire for your face,” he said, smoothly, “at least put on whatever powder you can find, mademoiselle.”

Obediently, she lifted pot lids until she found some, then dabbed it on as well as she could with her fingers. She followed with circles of rouge, pushing the paint hard into her cheeks.

“That’s better,” he said, coming closer.

She stiffened. He held something in his hands, and in the strange half-light of the abandoned apartment, it seemed—for a heart-clenching moment—like a garrote to strangle her with. She exhaled when the cracked mirror showed not a wire but a string of gems, which he clasped around her throat: a necklace of pearls studded with tiny diamonds. And then, from a pocket, he produced matching earrings, swaying on their clips. She slipped them onto her ears.

“Beautiful.” He kissed her neck, above the necklace’s clasp, letting his lips linger. Camille tried not to pull away. The dress rustled against her skin, showing her churches and cold rings and years of marriages that had required the strength of every magician who had worn this dress. Wait, it whispered. Be ready.

It speaks? Camille thought with horror.

And then the dress showed her Camille herself, weeping in the locked room, and she understood: it was this last sorrow that had brought the dress fully to life.

“Come, mademoiselle,” Séguin said. “Your sister waits, but now, to church.”

She had protested, begged to see Sophie first, but to no avail.

In the church’s vestibule, Séguin had wrapped her fingers around a quill and, as if she were a child, guided her name at the bottom of a densely written paper. Above her blotted name, he scrawled his own, trailed by a series of titles and houses and estates. Both the sweating priest and Séguin’s valet signed as witnesses and a copy was given to an altar boy who disappeared into the shadows, the white paper winking in his hand. The marriage would be recorded somewhere, copies of that paper made. Even if she ever managed to escape him, that contract would be there, unyielding as a manacle.

The priest reached the end of his recitation and from his pocket Séguin produced two rings, handed one to Camille, and slipped the other onto her fourth finger. An emerald as big as her thumbnail, encircled by tiny pearls.

This is only the form of it, she told herself. You already signed the contract, and your reasons were good ones. The best ones. And now, his ring. She remembered to sway a little on her feet, so that Séguin had to support her by the elbow as he slipped the ring on.

“You have made me happy, Vicomtesse de Séguin,” he said, over the priest’s Latin litany, and pulled her close. As his body pressed against hers, she felt, against her hip, the pommel of his sword.

Everything in Camille wanted to wrench away, to flee down the echoing nave of the king’s chapel, but she told herself to be loose and easy, a doll made of rags and no thoughts.