The Everlasting Rose (The Belles, #2)(2)

“What is it?” I turn away from the maps.

“Watch.” Edel closes her eyes, concentrating so hard she looks minutes from laying a golden egg. Veins swell beneath her white skin and a red blush sets into her cheeks. The pale blond hair at her temples soaks with sweat, which beads across her forehead like a strand of pearls. Her hair lengthens down to her waist inch by inch, then turns the color of midnight.

I scramble backward, smacking into the tiny cage of sleeping teacup dragons. They squeak with alarm.

“We’re not supposed to be able to do that.” I put my hand over my mouth.

“I’m calling it our fourth arcana—glamour.” She takes my trembling fingers and pushes them into her hair. It still maintains the same fine texture it’s always had, but the color is utterly unfamiliar.

“Our gifts are for others....” My heart flips in my chest. My arcana hums just beneath my skin, eager to learn, eager to experiment with this dangerous trick; my mind fills with a thousand possibilities.

“No. This gift... this is for us. This is how—” Edel starts.

“We will outsmart Sophia and her guards,” I interject. “And find Charlotte.”

The possibility of success wedges itself down to my bones and mingles with the anger living there. I’d always built my life on doing the unexpected and wanting it all—to be the favorite, to be the most talented Belle, to shape what it meant to be beautiful in Orléans—and now I’m presented with doing the biggest thing I’ve ever had to do and with the risk of danger far greater than I could ever imagine. All of it breathes life into my ambition.

A full grin spreads across Edel’s face. She takes a deep breath, and the dark shade of midnight in her hair lightens as if morning sun pushes through each strand.

“How did you learn to do this?”

She glances at the door. “It was an accident. Madam Alieas was yelling at me, laying out all the things I’d done wrong. She barked about how I needed to be nicer, and how she’d wished she’d gotten Valerie instead. I was twirling my hair around my finger.” She lifts one of the strands. “Growing angrier and angrier, thinking of our sister, and then it darkened to Valerie’s brown shade.”

“What does it feel like?” I stroke Edel’s hair again, and it shrivels back to its previous shoulder length.

“Remember when we’d sneak up on the roof at home before the first snow? Our fingernails would be purple and blue. Our nightgowns would catch the wind, the fibers almost freezing.”

I nod as the memory flickers through me. All of us on the roof after Du Barry and our mothers had fallen asleep, waiting for the clouds to release their crystals, waiting to catch a snowflake on our tongues, waiting to see the white mounds frost the tops of the dark forest behind our house.

“It feels cold like that. I panicked at first. I didn’t think it was real. Thought my arcana was low, my eyes playing tricks on me. So I experimented with sections of my hair.” She walks in circles. “Adding a wave or a highlight, and testing how long I could hold it.”

My stomach flutters. Trusting untested aspects of the arcana feels like trying to harness a windstorm. “Did it make you sick?”

“Nosebleeds, headaches, the chills.”

“Then maybe—”

She puts a hand up, sweeping away my worries. “That lessened as I got stronger. It just takes practice. I moved from my hair to aspects of my face.”

“Does it weaken you like after we’ve done beauty treatments?”

“Yes. I use the sangsues and chocolate to help me hold a glamour and to feel better after using one.” Edel takes my hand. “Quick. Let me show you.”

I stretch across the thin mattress Edel, Amber, and I share. The springs dig into my back. Maman’s mirror sits just under my breastbone on its chain. I press my hand to it, wanting its truth and wisdom to push down inside me, fill me up, and make me feel like Maman is still here, ready to fight alongside me. What would she think of all this? The things I’ve done. The things I’m about to do.

“Close your eyes,” Edel directs.

A tremor pulses in my stomach.

Edel pushes my curls away from my sweaty forehead. Is this how our clients feel on our treatment tables? Tiny, exposed, vulnerable?

She takes my trembling hand. “Are you afraid?”

“I’m angry.”

“Good. That will make you strong.” Her soft fingers graze over my eyelids, forcing them closed. “Now, think back to when we were little girls first learning our second arcana, and Du Barry made us do all those lessons on visualizing our clients like paintings or sculptures. Remember?”

“Yes.”

“Instead, try to see yourself.”

Du Barry’s childhood warnings are sharp echoes inside my head: “Belles must never be vain, for the Goddess of Beauty shall punish those who hoard their gifts. The arcana are favors from the Goddess of Beauty to be used in service.”

I push her words away, bury them deep down with the rest of the lies.

Edel squeezes my shoulder. “Go back to Maison Rouge. You’ll see.”

I take a deep breath, let my muscles relax. Edel describes the home where we spent our entire lives until we turned sixteen last year. The pale white trees growing out of the bayou like bones, the rose-shaped bars on the house windows, the crimson-and-gold-papered walls leading into the lesson rooms, the Age chambers with their terrariums of dying flowers and bowls of rotten fruit, the Aura rooms with their treatment tables and Belle-products, the nursery full of crying babies, the black forest—a shadow behind our house.