45

I WAS NEARLY SHAKING WITH ANTICIPATION BY THE TIME WE reached the palace. It was a strange experience being brought to the front entrance in a carriage instead of directed around back by the guards, and to ascend the wide stairs rather than be let in at the servants’ entrance by the housekeeper. I wasn’t here as a guest, I reminded myself—I was here to undo what I’d done and try to save the king. A man, I realized, I had never met, only seen from afar at public events. A figurehead in a golden crown presiding over festivals and New Year’s celebrations at the cathedral. The profile on the coins I used to buy biscuits and bolts of cloth. A person so distant I hardly thought of him as a person—until I had met Annette and Mimi and understood him not only as king but also as a father and husband.

Still, the scene inside the courtyard within the palace walls nearly took my breath away. It trickled to a thin white stream in the air. Ice sculptures, some twice as tall as me, populated the interior courtyard. A trio of half-translucent ice women in ancient dress danced around frost-dusted flowers; a pair of frost-lions wrestled on the flagstones; a unicorn dipped its horn into a frozen pool. Anchoring the scene was a frozen fountain, the ice rivulets mimicking flowing water carved all over with flowers as though it were spring in the middle of winter.

White paper lanterns hung on crisscrossed lines across the courtyard, plain candles suspended in each, and the trees edging the grounds were draped in sheer white net with silver spangles, to catch and reflect the light.

“Is it like this every year?” I whispered.

Theodor took a tighter hold on my arm. “Yes, but it’s never been so beautiful.”

Inside, footmen took our cloaks and escorted us to our table. Quietly, hastily, they added a plate for me, apologizing for the inconvenience. I flushed red—I knew full well that the mistake was not theirs—there was no lost response indicating that the First Duke of Westland was bringing a guest.

Our table was toward the back of the ballroom, and I quickly spotted an entrance used by the servants and flanked, mercifully, by a large pair of statues. The corner behind one huge statue dipped away into an obsolete shadow. There was a clear line of sight from the hidden corner to the dais where the royal family would sit. I nudged Theodor and pointed toward it. “I can lift the curse from there,” I whispered in his ear in answer to his questioning look. I smiled—this plan could work. I was finally confident that it would work. It had to.

I watched as Viola arrived, and others I knew from her salon. She saw me across the ballroom, and grinned as she recognized me. Others, perhaps, would not be so amenable to a common seamstress accompanying the second heir to the throne to a royal celebration, but I felt somewhat comforted that Viola was, at the least, amused rather than scandalized. Our table was populated with lesser nobility—first dukes and duchesses like Theodor, the sons and daughters of the dukes and duchesses who sat nearer the dais in the center of the room, and counts and countesses. I tried to listen and smile and attempt, fairly successfully, to dodge questions about myself.

Still, I heard some nasty comments. The nobility all knew one another, and we had failed to create a backstory explaining my presence. “One of the First Duke’s playthings,” someone whispered snidely at a nearby table. “Would think he’d know better than to bring such people here,” another whispered in answer.

Normally, this would have stung, but tonight I didn’t care. I wasn’t here trying to horn in on the nobility, usurping a place for myself at their ball. I wasn’t even concerned with Theodor’s clearly controversial suggestion that a marriage to a common woman was possible and perhaps even favorable. I lifted my chin and let Theodor slip his hand through mine under the table. Probably a horrible breach of etiquette—I smiled to myself—but I was grateful for the reassurance of his touch.

Instead of talking to my tablemates, I looked around the room, especially at the dome above me. I probably looked like a poor country relation, gaping about the ballroom, but I wanted to see if I could spot any hint of Pyord’s plans in action. The dome was enormous, white stone arching to a center point of windows where I could just glimpse the winking light of stars outside. The ballroom was beautiful—and looked completely safe. The single entrance to the ballroom—the grand staircase I had seen on my first visit to the palace—was guarded by dozens of soldiers, and I knew that more were stationed outside. Poison was still a possibility, but I wondered how possible it was to infiltrate the royal kitchens. I sighed. There was no way to guess what might happen. I had a single job to do, and that was pulling the curse off the queen.

A bright fanfare, and the king and queen arrived, ascending the wide steps of the dais to join the courtiers they had selected to sit with them. I could see the curse in the queen’s shawl glinting like crystallized night. Princess Annette, in the icy blue court gown my atelier had crafted, herded two younger children—the Princesses Beatrix and Odessa—in front of her, both wearing sweet and completely impractical white silk gowns. I bit my lips—I had expected Annette to be here, but not the two children. I wished, fervently, that they were wearing the charmed shifts I had made. Likely they believed they were. Before I could panic at the thought of children being killed by Pyord’s plan, a nursemaid appeared and hustled both girls off to bed.

I breathed relief, but it was short-lived. The black sparkle seemed to emanate off the queen, gathering her husband and daughter and the courtiers nearest to her in a dark cloud.

I couldn’t attempt to draw the curse sitting at the table, and fortunately no one questioned my leaving. I slipped away to the corner behind the statue, the hiding place I’d picked earlier. The statues were bronze centaurs; they trained their metal eyes toward the ballroom as though guarding me from prying eyes. The light danced between molded flanks and immobilized tails.

I focused on the darkness in the queen’s wrap, on one stitch. She moved, and I lost my mental hold on it. I blinked and found another stitch, picking it apart with my thoughts, plucking it from the moorings of fabric that held it to the queen. She laughed, oblivious to the danger she was shrouding herself in.

I took a steadying breath, trying to focus not on the entire mass of darkness woven into the shawl, but on one stitch—just one first. The weight of what I had done, and of all the plans Pyord could have in place, crowded my thoughts. I glanced back at Theodor, sitting stiffly at our table, trying to have a polite conversation with the gentleman to his left. If assassination succeeded tonight, who knew what danger Theodor was in? His position as an heir, so long a distant possibility with a young and healthy king whose daughter was ready to marry and have children in the king’s line, would be suddenly not only very present but very dangerous. The gaping pit of worry in my stomach began to contract around that one thought.

No, I reminded myself. One thread at a time, one countermove to Pyord at a time. Pulling the curse from the shawl was my only concern right now. I finally tugged the first stitch loose, and a thread of dark hung in the air above her. I was already exhausted, and feared the process of picking the rest of the curse free, but I found that the next stitches came loose far more easily, and then the entire dark line unraveled at once and hung in the air above her. I exhaled, a short burst of triumph, and kept spooling the curse out from the fabric.

Then the queen stood up and clapped her hands. I almost reeled back in surprise. The dark line crept back toward the shawl. It wanted to stay embedded in the fabric. I recalled the stains of curse and charm I had left on my first practice removals. Panicking, I started to pull back on the charm, but it was like wrangling a living thing, a snake that writhed every inch of itself at once, worming itself back into the cloth.

In a rush, I thought of something I hadn’t tried before. Imagining, as foolish as it seemed, a giant pair of scissors above the dark line, I drew the line taut and severed it. The darkness I had pulled recoiled back up into the air above the queen. I breathed, slowly, deliberately, and began again. One stitch. I tried to ignore the servants ferrying trays to the tables, the clearing of empty dishes that marked the swift passage of the time I had to work. I repeated the process with each string of black sparkle, each line of stitches I’d worked into the shawl. The loose cloud grew larger until all the darkness had been plucked and unraveled from the shawl.

Now what? The curse hovered above the dais, winking like splinters of dark jewels. I had to dissipate it, but it was too far away. Even though I waved my hands wildly, it barely fluttered. I tugged the darkness, drawing it toward me. It slowly edged toward me, and I tugged more.

The darkness moved more quickly. It roiled like waves overtaking each other on the shore and crested toward me. I swirled my hand and the wave nearest to me faded slightly, its edges blurring. It was coming too fast. The dark began to roll toward me, plummeting quickly downward.

I coughed a ragged breath, still trying to diffuse the darkness, and in my other hand, gathered a tiny net of light, weaving it between my fingers. Maybe I could catch it or stall it. Maybe.

It collided with me, the net in my hand insufficient to hold it. The glittering dark ballooned around me, and with a dim awareness of roaring in my ears and utter blindness, I collapsed.