Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream, the things you feel.
Deep in your spirit let them rise
akin to stars in crystal skies
that set before the night is blurred:
delight in them and speak no word.
How can a heart expression find?
How should another know your mind?
A thought once uttered is untrue.
Live in your inner self alone, for
within your soul a world has grown,
the magic of veiled thoughts that might
be blinded by the outer light,
drowned in the noise of day, unheard...
take in their song and speak no word.
Fedor Tyutchev
The mask she wore today was pretty, of that there was no denying. The cheekbones were hollow, the skin smooth and bronze, the hair silky and dark, lightless. Angular eyes, like a fox, and very sharp cuspids, like little serrated daggers, made the visage look very slightly frightening - almost threatening, without meaning to be so.
She didn't like it.
But.
The unfamiliar girl looked back at Minette from the train station mirror, and when she tried a smile, her reflection seemed unwilling to cooperate. It was still her, beneath the veil of Other, was still Minette Chastain and her fear and her uncertainty and her wavering, unwilling caution.
There was still time to turn back. Whatever lay ahead of her could get her killed, she knew that, a wrong word or a step out of place or even a dash of bad luck could leave her blue-lipped in the river or with an arrow in her back, but she didn't have to face that: she could still change her mind, change this mask for an anonymous one, and slip back into the background hum of the world, allow the revolution rage without her, let Yegor find some other doll to play the parts he scripted, let them fight and bleed and die without her...
...and the knowledge that she could do that, but wouldn't - the knowledge that she was choosing this path-less-travelled, willingly so - was enough to carry her away from the mirror and out the door and towards the street, absently brushing down the dark navy fabric of her dress, leaving the stars imprinted there undulating and flickering in the dim light of the dusk drawing down.
Yegor had told her only the minimum needed to identify her rebel contact, which left her feeling rather as though she were in a pit of snakes and trying to pick out from intuition alone how to identify those that would bite and draw blood, and those that would bite and rot with venom. And now she glanced askance at those pushing past her, in the street, those sitting on low concrete walls beside the station waiting for a train, those browsing and bickering and bartering at the street-side stalls, for the sparse details Corbeau had offered her.
She didn't have to search for very long. It wasn't hard to spot the man, as it turned out. He was sitting at a table outside one of the many cafes lining the alley perpendicular to Station Road, a black boot propped up on one knee, lazily turning pages in a small leather book imprinted with small New Asian characters: 大灰狼. He wore a soldier's coat. Blood stained one cuff.
He wasn't looking at Minette as she changed course towards him, flicking open the silk fan she had concealed in the sleeve of her dress and fanning away the moths and midges that darted to bite at her exposed skin while she moved to sit at the chair opposite him. He didn't look up for a long moment. Turned another page.
She studied him, silently, for a moment - unshaven and shadow-eyed, like he was in dire need of sleep or just after waking, dark charcoal hair and eyes that were-not-quite-black. Beautiful, in the same way that a fire was beautiful.
She said, perhaps a little too softly for him to hear, like the words had withered into dust even as the syllables settled between her teeth, "My crown is in my heart, not on my head; not deck'd with Indian stones-"
"Diamonds."
She blinked, unfamiliar coal lashes brushing against unfamiliar high cheekbones.
"I'm sorry?"
"Not deck'd with diamonds," the man said again. "Not deck'd with Diamonds, and Indian stones: Nor to be seen. Yegor never seems to get that right. I don't think he actually likes the play very much." He shut his book, and offered her the second half, addressing his teacup rather than her face. He said: "My crown is call'd content - a crown it is, that seldom kings enjoy."
He glanced up at her for the first time and Minette was taken aback by the sheer look of disgust that flickered across his face as he caught sight of her. She could not deny it - she was accustomed to having looks like that thrown at her, from people on the streets, from those she had to interact with, even from those members of the revolution who had not been warned of her particular condition, but she had a mask on, didn't she? A beautiful one, at that - and yet, Levi looked away from her, a tendon in his jaw moving slightly, like her appearance had personally offended him. That left her feeling uncomfortably like he could see beneath, through the layer of the mask, to the face and the burns and the ugliness below, and the fact he reacted to could not but make her angry.
"Listen," she said, but before she could finish her sentence he had risen from his seat and tucked the book into his jacket, his face unreadable, his eyes dark. He picked up the umbrella he had left under the table, and flicked it open, shaking away stray droplets of water, before he silently offered her his arm. Uncertainly, Minette rose also and took it. Neither of them spoke. She wasn't sure what she would say if she could.
They started their walk down the street. He was tall, lean - beside him, the slender, elegant Minette felt almost delicate, but they touched each other so lightly as to not touch one another at all. Her fingers ghosted against the fabric of his sleeve - they walked side by side, but maintaining a single inch between them so they did not touch. It must, she thought, resemble a particularly stilted, cold courtship. She kept her fan waving gently, just to give her hands something to do.
They turned onto a street lined with shops and long, clear windows, and Minette could not help but pause and gaze into each store as they passed, an odd kind of fascination fluttering behind her breast, a hummingbird trapped beneath her ribs, at the mannequins and empty-eyed masks and silk-diamond-lace dripping dresses that filled each display. All of the colours in the world were represented here - and as she watched, a mannequin in the shape of a faceless girl unfolded herself abruptly from her ballerina pose and moved quickly towards the window as though to grab at Minette, leaping at the glass.
Minette jerked back abruptly as the mannequin landed short and leaned back, looking pleased without a face or mouth or eyebrows to express it. She turned back towards her position, and was still once more. A tacky illusion, but one that left Minette no more settled than she had been.
She took Levi's arm again, and they continued. At the end of this road was a little stone bridge, augmented by wooden struts spanning the narrow width of a silver thread of river winding its way through the city's Old Town, separating seedy from dilapidated, unsavoury from ruinous. On either side of the river, trees were growing, slender and tall, of differing colours each side of the river - New Town had pink and white cherry blossoms, in bloom despite the wintery bite to the air and the late hour of the season, while Old Town glowed with the ghostly skeletons of hydrangea bushes dripping only the flowers, absent leaf or greenery.
Minette put unfamiliar brown hands against the wall of the bridge and leaned forward to peer into the dark water beneath. The girl who looked back from the water was pale and blonde, a round face and big blue eyes, and Minette refocused her attention on the mask she wore, pulling all of the threads together more tightly so they coalesced more smoothly, until not even her reflection knew the truth.
She looked back to Levi. "Where are we going?"
He was silent for a moment - she didn't think he was going to answer for a long, drawn-out second, and then he said, quite simply, "Safe house in Old Town."
The masked girl paused, and observed him for another moment. He was studiously keeping his gaze away from her, towards the other side of the bridge, but she had a feeling that the second she allowed her eyes to stray he would be watching her once more. Was her ugliness such a fascination?
She had heard much about this man. She respected him - she knew better than not to. And she knew he had some reason to act as he did: a team assembled by Yegor Corbeau would doubtless be unlacking in iniquities and vices, some more deadly than others. Maybe she could learn a thing or two from this lone wolf act of his.
The night was falling, but gradually, almost reluctantly, dying the sky slowly grey and dousing the streets in gauzy gasoline ghostlight as they moved the rest of the way across the bridge. Here, the shops were empty, those that still had whole windows, of course. Instead, each alley was crowded with people, their stalls, their little wooden boxes upon which they displayed yellowed envelopes containing the name of your true love and ice flowers that would never melt, candles that would never die, and vials of poison to craft and change and destroy and burn. Lilting voices called out across the streets, in languages familiar and not-so.
"Are we in a hurry?" Minette asked Levi.
"The opposite," he said, quite honestly. She didn't like that. Associates of Yegor Corbeau had no business being honest.
Nonetheless, she approached the nearest stall, piled high with little music boxes, some coloured pastel and pale like little cakes and others crafted of a rich wood, fretted with gold and bronze around the edges. They had little keys to match, small golden ones and long silver ones, each unique and engraved with little letters too fine and tiny to discern in the dim light. The narrow-faced man running the stall saw Minette looking, as called over to her, "The voices of those you have forgotten, and songs you have never heard outside of your dreams! A true piece of wondrous magic - try it for yourself!"
Minette laughed, a sweet sound, and thanked him, and choose a key after some musing - a small, iron shape no longer than her pinkie finger. It matched a small wooden box, and she set the key into it and wound it, carefully, until she could wind it no more. Than she gently lifted the lid of the box, and waited - and a song poured out of it, impossibly beautiful: a woman's voice, low and husky, mournfully, liltingly so -
"...yī zhǐ dúláng, yī zhǐ dúshé, ài jiéchéng, dào jiéchéng..."
Levi pushed the box closed. "I don't think that's yours," he said, but his voice was not unkind. He looked tired, but not angry - his hands were surprisingly light, almost gentle, as he moved them back across the table for a moment and at length made a slightly different selection. He offered a different key - wrought, elegant and golden, and indicated the music box to which it belonged. Minette looked at him, uncertain, but accepted this new key, and tried again.
He was right. The voice that came out this time was gentle, sweet and soft, and hers. Her mother's voice, just the hum of it - low and wordless, like Minette was lying in bed at night and catching only the mere sound of her parents speaking downstairs, the rise and fall of meaningless words.
Only four years. It had been longer, hadn't it - the illness had wasted her mother's body first, and then her voice, then even her eyes, but never, never, her mind, her heart. How long ago that seemed! Had she forgotten the sound of her mother's voice so soon? And yet it was unfamiliar, blissfully so, like rediscovering what the night sky looked like, like seeing a sunrise for the first time after a thousand years of darkness. Her mother's voice slowly faded and then surged back to life, a laugh, and she heard, quite clearly, the words:
"How kind heaven is, to let me speak to you again, my dear daughter."
And then, silence again - the music box had spoken its piece. Minette reverently closed it again, very gently moving her hands across its golden surface, and looked at the narrow-faced man.
"How much?"
She would have paid any price, but that, it soon transpired, was hardly necessary. The man at the stall seemed a little taken aback at how eager she was to part with her money, and they parted ways equally content, Minette with the box clasped in her hands, her arm looped rather lazily through Levi's. She could care less how unhappy he seemed at the situation - her arm settled upon his rather than remaining distinct.
"Thank you," she said.
"Thank you?"
"For showing me," she said. "I might never have found it otherwise."
She smiled at him, and he seemed rather ill at ease, and looked away once more. He would have to get over it. Minette had a suspicious inkling that killing the king would take some time, and they would probably have to spend rather a while together as an unfortunate result. He would grow accustomed to her unmasked face.
Her curiosity was like a splinter lodged in the strings of her heart, pushing her to ask with every step she took. She said, "if it didn't belong to me, who did that song belong to?"
The corner of Levi's mouth curled, whether in pleasure or displeasure, she could not tell in the dim evening light. Overhead, a gasoline lamp was spitting into life; grey fog swallowing them was turned slowly silver by its wan light. He said, "Whose face are you wearing?"
Minette had not considered that. Did it make sense? She thought so. If she could confuse even her own reflection, it seemed unsurprising that she might unsettle a piece of cheap magic such as those music boxes. But even as she thought those words, she wanted to swallow them back again.
Her mother's voice was hardly cheap magic.
"I don't know," she admitted, "Yegor gave it to me - I don't know why."
But Yegor always had reason for doing as he did.
Levi made a noncommital sound under his breath, and they followed the winding street around a final corner. The voices of the night market had drawn faint behind them, the strains of music indistinct, and Minette didn't have to ask which building they were approaching because wasn't it obvious? It was a peculiar shade of verdigris, that blue-green burnish of faded copper, and three large, tall wooden doors set into the face of it, overshadowed by balconies with wrought iron railings framed by high, narrow arches fretted with delicate plaster artwork. The doors were rotting, scraped away at the bottom where they had encountered the cobblestones too many times over too many years, and the window nearest Minette had a small fracture wound in it, cracks spiralling away from a perfect circular hole that looked as though it had been shot there. It was an old, decrepit building and she rather loved it.
There was a dark haired woman outside with pale olive skin, looking rather recalcitrant, as she held a lamp aloft, its silvered light spilling across the street as they approached. She was sitting on an overturned wooden box, her boots trailing loose laces, and seemed to have been peeling a red, red apple with a very sharp silver knife before they arrived - they lay in her lap still, glittering with the faint undercurrent of a half-promised threat. Minette didn't have to ask the identity of this woman. Yegor's right-hand woman was easily recognised, and just as easily mistrusted: his stalwart, his defender, his tame wolf, and to some unkinder tongues, his myrmidon.
"By heaven," Taja Sweeney said. "By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap to pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon."
She looked expectantly at the pair but Levi moved free of Minette's arm and simply said, "If you're waiting for her to quote Shakespeare correctly, you'll be waiting a while."
He shut his umbrella with a snap and disappeared into the building, leaving behind only the sound of his boots upon the steps as he walked up to the rebellion's little last sanctuary, the rotten rooms from which they would plan how to kill the false king.
"Where fathom-line could never touch the ground, and pluck up drowned honour by the locks."
Taja Sweeney looked at Minette with one eyebrow arched, looking slightly impressed, and even more slightly amused at the girl's mutinous expression.
"I do," Minette said. "Know it."
"You do," Taja agreed, unsmiling.
Looking in the direction Fallon had gone, Minette said, uncertainly, "I don't know what I've..."
"Haven't looked in a mirror, have you?" Taja said, and set her lamp down again. "Yegor's sense of humour isn't appreciated by all, it must be said."
Sense of humour? Minette's eyes flashed, and she snapped, "This was some kind of joke?"
"It was a test," Sweeney replied, just as quickly. "Yegor is right to be cautious."
"I don't need to be tested, I've proven myself as loyal as any of you..."
"Which is hardly loyal at all," a voice said from behind her. Speak of the devil, and he shall appear, and the devil in question was approaching them, cane clicking against the cobblestones like a deathwatch beetle counting down the seconds to disaster - Yegor Corbeau himself, looking somehow at home in the mist and smog that wreathed him. "Present company excepted, of course," he continued, his voice like crushed velvet, as he glanced at Taja. Taja's smile was very bright, and very white, in response. Yegor said, rather lazily, "Where's Levi?"
"Upstairs," Taja said. "Probably looking for liquor..."
"We'll need his help to carry her upstairs," Yegor said, and before Minette had time to flinch in anticipation of some violence against her, the air beside the dark-haired revolutionary flickered and wavered like a heat haze, and then the sharp lines of the buildings blurred like they were being erased, as though they had been drawn on, covering something that had been painted there before.
A girl flickered into being beside him - no, Minette corrected herself, two girls appeared. One was holding the other up, and struggling with the endeavour - a small blonde with an unhappy smile and a lean red-haired figure with pain etched on her features and broken cuffs on her wrists. "The prison break went as well as could be expected," Yegor said. "Which means it didn't go well at all. Taja, darling, we're going to need a pot of tea, some bandages, and somewhere to put the bullets."
He could see some of the Selected flickering in front of the window, like moths in a clear jar fluttering gauzy wings against the glass, ignorant of the impossible, invisible magic that kept them there.
Like butterflies in a box, beautiful and thousand-colored, realizing very slowly that air holes had not been provided.
They had arrived gradually over the course of the last few days, as they were pulled from their homes, from their families, from wherever they had called safe, to dwell in poisonous gardens and gilded, golden cages. And they did indeed flicker - were there, and were gone. Beautiful, of course. They always were. Despite the fear on their faces, the pain in their eyes, they were falling stars who knew their fate and found themselves shining all the same.
No. They were burning. Very, very slowly.
And they knew it, too.
Well, fire had a habit of catching.
The palace would burn soon enough.
If Oliver Tyrrell had been given his way, it would be nothing but ashes right now, but the devil Corbeau worked in mysterious ways, and still the castle stood, and sometimes it seemed as though it always would.
Yegor Corbeau was infinitely patient, Oliver Tyrrell only very slightly less so, and so he had stayed here, and waited, and watched, just as the revolution asked him to. Having charmed his way with silver and honeyed words to this vantage point, he had silently observed the Selection unfold, and wondered precisely when Yegor was going to strike.
Would he really let these girls die rather than begin his game of chess a little prematurely?
The doors to the palace opened slowly, allowing a little of the light and shadows within to spill out and play upon the stone balcony upon which his gaze was fixed, and he wondered exactly what was going on. People said that before the tyrant Xisuthros had stolen the crown and the throne and all they carried, the Selection had been televised, and every household in the kingdom invited to watch and marvel at proceedings. Certainly that was the case no longer - the Selection swallowed girls whole now.
Adelaide.
He could not imagine it was a pleasant process at all.
One of the girls appeared for the briefest moment, silhouetted against the gold and silver light of the ballroom within, no more distinct than a shadow - her face, her eyes, indistinguishable from the darkness. She was like something very breakable made out of porcelain, her hair raven, and her lips red indeed. She was not looking towards Oliver, nor at the ballroom, nor even at the stars - but at the darkness beyond the balcony.
Something told Oliver she was thinking about jumping. That would be one way for a star to fall. He doubted she would be the first to try it, or the last, or that the king would permit that simple motion allow her to escape his clutches if he did not wish for it to be so.
Oliver returned his eye to the little spyglass in his hand.
She wavered.
He waited for her to jump.
And then, very suddenly, all the glowing lights of the palace died, submerging everything into lightlessness, and the girl was lost to the dark.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter! Thank you to those who have submitted, or are planning to submit, and espeically to those who left a review on the last chapter! It means a lot to me that you took the time to give me your opinion.
Please don't hesitate to leave a review - I'd love to hear from you, whether that's your thoughts on the plot, the characters, the writing, the pinterest...! Constructive criticism is not only accepted but encouraged and welcomed. What do you want to happen, what do you think will happen, is that the same thing?
