There is screaming as the residents of Blackthorn wake up to the thick clouds of ash floating over the walls of the Borderlands, toward the castle. The forest is on fire. The queen sees the two girls’ bodies outlined in plumes of dark smoke as they try to run from here, run from her. She reaches out, clinging to the visitor’s skirt.
They hate her. And she deserves to be hated, to be loathed, to be left.
“I’m sorry,” she croaks quietly, though the visitor can’t hear her. She chokes on the smoke. “I’m sorry,” she repeats, falling to the floor as she continues to cling to the young woman’s dress, holding her back.
Those two words unleash a flood of memories suppressed for so long they make her sick with dizziness. For she is sorry—always has been. She’s been sorry since she was seven years old, and her parents gifted her the enormous golden wheel from a distant eastern country, one that, with just a little magic, could not only spin wool into yarn but gold and silver into thread—and too, she learned, dreams. But that would come later.
Sorry, because her sister was unhappy that the spinning wheel had gone to her. Malfleur would stare at Belcoeur’s fingers, their agility as they danced by the rapid flier, never once getting pricked by the sharp-ended bobbin, and Belcoeur could feel the unhappiness in her dark gaze. Belcoeur had never wanted to compete, had never believed her magic was in any way stronger than her twin’s. There was an ease to it, true—it came to her naturally. She never studied, as Malfleur did. She never practiced. As a consequence, her magic was softer around the edges. It never quite felt like it was in her control, and she didn’t mind that. But her twin did.
Though Malfleur never outright accused her, she must have held Belcoeur to blame when they discovered at a very young age that Malfleur simply couldn’t dream. While Belcoeur experienced lustrously imagined, richly vivid sequences of memory, emotion, and sensation when she slept each night, Malfleur sank only into an infinite blank. It didn’t take long for their parents to conclude that Belcoeur’s gift—her desire, the source of all her magic—had to do with dreaming. Even without learning how to perform a tithing, Belcoeur had somehow absorbed her twin’s ability to dream while they were tangled together within their mother’s womb.
She had tried to make it up to Malfleur in so many ways over the years. Sometimes it felt like all she ever did was compensate for this original sin. She spun nothing with as much love as the threads she used to weave garments for her sister. And when Malfleur was caught causing mischief and sent to bed without any supper, Belcoeur always slipped her food from her own plate.
There were times when she simply couldn’t protect her sister, though. She’ll never forget the day they snuck out to collect flowers for their mother’s birthday tea party. Malfleur had wanted to find violets—their mother’s favorite—but they didn’t grow in the gardens, and she had gotten lost wandering into the vast fields beyond the castle grounds. Belcoeur was forced to return alone to their mother, who was worried and upset beyond belief. Her tea party had been ruined, left out cold and untouched while she sent a search party to find Malfleur.
When they finally brought Malfleur home, Belcoeur, in her effort to make everything better, brewed her mother a fresh pot of tea, hoping they could start over and salvage the day, but by then their mother’s distress had picked up speed like a summer storm and morphed into fury. Their mother, cruel as ever, grabbed the gilt cup from Belcoeur’s tray and splashed still-scalding tea into Malfleur’s face to teach her never to wander again. A white scar remained across her sister’s eyelid and cheek—and that’s when a stain of darkness, Belcoeur is sure, began to settle into her sister’s heart.
Still, Belcoeur continued to accept the blame for her sister’s misdeeds as often as she convincingly could. She even came to enjoy taking her sister’s place in the “punishment chair” positioned in the corner of the parlor room in their summer cottage. Her sister, during the many hours she spent supposedly atoning for the trouble she’d made, would scratch clever limericks and poems into the wall there. It became a secret way for the girls to communicate, for Belcoeur to read and decipher the messages and to feel like she was a part of Malfleur’s world, even as her sister increasingly snuck away without telling her.
It hurt, the idea of Malfleur keeping secrets. Belcoeur wanted more than anything to be her twin’s confidante. And so she was delighted by little phrases, such as The secret boy—we almost kissed—he won my jewel—in a game of whist! Belcoeur guessed what her sister was referring to: the night Malfleur had “borrowed” their mother’s pearl necklace and slipped silently out of the guest quarters at Blackthorn to play cards with the older visitors.
It was only a couple years later and after several more visits with the Blackthorns, both at their castle and at hers, that Belcoeur began to suspect just which boy Malfleur had almost kissed. It was Charles Blackthorn himself. And she could see he was smitten with her by the way he seemed especially attuned to Malfleur’s tenor of sarcasm, was always ready with a reply and a twinkling gaze that seemed to suggest a wink, even where there wasn’t one.
When Belcoeur questioned her sister about her budding romance with Charles, Malfleur always brushed it off as a flirtation. But Belcoeur could see what her sister would not admit: that the bubbling, exciting, yearning intensity between them was mutual. They had some sort of understanding, that much was clear—even when, at sixteen, Malfleur left their father’s lands to learn more about her magic and traveled for three years abroad, without offering Charles any overt promise of her affections. He would wait. That was what everyone thought.
Though Belcoeur missed her sister terribly during those three years, she took pleasure in receiving the packages Malfleur regularly sent home to her: precious knickknacks and odd inventions from all around the world, like a clock with a bird’s face that popped out to chime the hour, a beautiful birdcage, a delicate silver teapot, a hairbrush and filigreed hand mirror.
She was surprised when Charles began to come around more frequently—at first to compare letters from Malfleur’s travels and to marvel at the gifts she’d sent, but then, more and more often, he visited simply to talk. And the more he spoke, the more he let slip. He confessed that he had proposed to Malfleur, and she had rejected him outright. Though she continued to send him letters, she’d made it clear that she was more interested in her own magic than in him. And besides, Malfleur was fond of reminding him that the fae frequently outlived humans by whole lifetimes or more.
Belcoeur could see he was devastated by her sister’s refusal. Which was why she did what she was always doing, whether for her sister or her mother or, in this case, Charles. She offered sweetness and consolation in uncountable small ways.
And in performing these modest acts of love, she grew to inhabit that love. She fell for Charles. His broad chest and perfect posture. His light brown hair cropped at the shoulders and almost always a bit disheveled from his latest ride. The thin beard he had newly grown, emphasizing the squareness of his jaw. The modest, simple crown he wore—a circlet of gold with no jewels. But more than these things, she loved the way he reminded her of Malfleur: his quick wit, his fiery laugh, his fiercely perceptive gaze.
She didn’t mean to fall, and certainly didn’t expect any reciprocity. But, same as her magic, love blossomed easily and naturally—it was beyond her control. She was helpless to stop the feeling from growing and expanding until it got to the point where the spiky, poisonous vines that often choked the trees in the royal forest would spontaneously sprout purple flowers as she walked over them.
And so it was that on the day Malfleur was to return from her travels, Charles found Belcoeur alone, head bent over a gift she was making for her twin: a dress woven from gold. It was July, so she was at the summer cottage on the outskirts of the royal forest, which afforded their father better hunting, and the Blackthorns were visiting. Having changed her mind several times about the style of the sleeves, anxious to get the dress just right, Belcoeur realized she had run out of gold thread. She had just rethreaded the bobbin and begun to tap the foot pedal, causing the great wheel to spin. As usual, she became lost in the sparkling whir of the metallic filaments through her fingers, and hardly noticed a shadow cast into the room until she heard a quiet cough and looked up. Charles Blackthorn was standing in the doorway.
“I could watch you work all day,” he said, and she flushed, feeling sick with the effort of not smiling more broadly, not letting her affection have its name. He was leaning against the doorframe in his riding gear, and he seemed to be concentrating very hard.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “You seem . . . perplexed.”
“Malfleur returns today,” he said, as though the knowledge hadn’t been tormenting her for days—and nights—both with excitement and uncertainty. She desperately wanted everything to go back to the way it had been. But a voice inside her reminded her that the love between them had been fraying invisibly for years, like the frizzy hair of a much-held doll, and one day the bald truth would be revealed. Was all love like this, she fretted—a covering, a craft, a transient softness impossible to regrow once shed?
Even as she clutched the imaginary doll harder, she wore it down to its porcelain bones.
But all she said was, “Yes. As you can see, I’m hurrying to finish her homecoming gift.”
“I do see,” he said, casting his glance at the single-sleeved dress hanging over the side of the wardrobe, studying it with that same expression of consternation. “It is sure to look lovely on her,” he added.
“Of course,” she replied awkwardly, hating the dress instantly, and hating herself.
“Then again,” he said, “it would be very beautiful on you.” And though he wasn’t making eye contact with her, she understood. She panicked. She should beg him to stop talking, but she was frozen as he went on. “All it would need is a veil, and it would make a suitable wedding gown. No . . . not suitable. Stunning.”
That’s when he finally lifted his eyes to hers, and she shook, snagging her index finger on the tip of the bobbin. “Ow!” she cried, the end of the golden thread flying from her hands.
He ran to her—both the desired and feared effect—and without her perceiving how it had happened, he was kneeling before her, clutching her hands, kissing the injured one, then the other. He turned her hands over and kissed the inside of each wrist. His lips against the tender skin there caused her to tremble again. Stop! her mind shouted, but her heart leaped into her throat, and instead she breathed his name aloud. “Charles.” Tears ran down her cheeks, but she didn’t have the will to pull her hands back and wipe them away.
Though he was normally equipped with a variety of clever phrases and compelling arguments, he was silent now as he slipped one hand to her bent knee and one to her damp cheek, and then, pushing her long blond hair out of her face, he took the kiss she had forbidden herself to imagine.
His lips told the story of how true his love was, that it had not been all hers but had been theirs for some time. His mouth was so human against her own, and without meaning to, she breathed in his deepest dreaming, and dreamed—right in that instant—that they were fated to be together. He pulled away, bewildered. Maybe he knew—could feel—that an unspoken contract had been signed, and with it, her magic had taken something from him.
Or maybe he had no idea yet. It didn’t matter anyway. She felt that first sparkle of guilt, the one that caused her to glance up—and then she gasped as she realized what had happened, as she saw what had been inevitable from the start: Malfleur, still in her travel cloak, entering the room, dropping a gift of glass, which shattered like a scream.
It would have been better if Malfleur too had screamed. Anything would have been better, Belcoeur thought, than the look on her perfectly sculpted face: its scar blazing white like a star, her cheekbones high and proud, her pretty mouth—thinner than her twin’s and more sharply defined—mute with comprehension.
That moment, full of such ugliness and such beauty, became a thorn wedged permanently into Belcoeur’s chest. She would never breathe again without feeling the pain of it.
And still, there would be worse to come.
Her vow never to love. Her promise to shun Charles forever.
The long months of begging for forgiveness. Of being ignored over and over as Malfleur returned to her travels, leaving Belcoeur to feel as though one half of herself had died. The terror of watching her twin become darker, more remote, changed, until Belcoeur’s only source of consolation was her dreams, which she had begun to collect and, using her magic, weave into elaborate tapestries where she would spend days trying to forget, forget, forget, only to return from them panting, air racing into her lungs like angry hornets filling her with the sting of the life she no longer wanted to live.
She called this body of her greatest work “Sommeil.”
More time passed, and the wounds began to scar, the dreams a kind of salve—a salvation, really. They replaced her life, a prettier version of only the best times, while her waking existence took on the form of a blurred memory fading with each day. She had never used her magic so much as she used it then. It got so that she couldn’t enter a room without sapping the power of dreaming from everyone in it.
In the sliver of twilight between waking and dreaming, she sometimes saw herself for what she had become: the type of faerie whom humans misunderstood, dreaded, abhorred.
Some nights she saw Charles again, despite her promise not to.
But she couldn’t say if any of these nights, and the agonizing ecstasies they contained, were real or imagined.
There is no way to know now. Not after what happened. Not after . . .
Belcoeur gags on smoke, the fumes strong in her nostrils. There’s the scent of old things burning:
Lace fire.
Flower fire.
Bone fire.
This young woman who struggles to free herself from her grasp is a stranger, not her sister. Her sister has not come.
And that’s when the final piece of her abandoned life comes back to her. It was a short time later—less than a year after the incident—when Belcoeur began to notice a different kind of change. Her belly had grown round and hard, swirling with beginnings: the kick of a foot. The hiccup of tiny lungs. Someday soon, she realized, a child would be born.
Desperate, she wrote to her sister, begging her to understand. Begging her to forgive, so that Belcoeur might be free to love Charles again. Her wish came true when Malfleur responded.
Everyone deserves true love, my dear sister, she wrote. And the child will know its father.
Accompanying the letter was a magnificently carved chest—in and of itself one of the finest gifts her sister had ever sent her. With trembling hands, Belcoeur took the key that had been wrapped in the letter and used it to unlock the lid.
The first thing she saw inside the trunk was a flash of gold—the peaks of the Blackthorn crown Charles wore every day except when riding.
Then she noticed the blood. . . . And the meaning of her sister’s words came crashing down like an ax.
Belcoeur screams now as she screamed then, yanking the oversized crown she has worn for over a century off her head and throwing it to the ground before the visitor.
Her vision is blurred by tears over all she has lost—her child, her sister, her love.
For what she sees within the crown before her is the final memory, the final truth: Charles Blackthorn’s severed head.