Serving breakfast is a relief. In the kitchen, I must smile and sing and dance through my tasks, because if I don’t like my tasks, Mother may get angry at the ones who set them. In the breakfast room, I need only stand silent in the corner, hands clasped and head bowed, because Stepmother gets angry if I am too cheerful.
I nestle into the curtains. They used to be stiff and scratchy, but last year Stepmother squandered nearly a month’s income to buy cascades of soft, frothy white lace. We had to eat bread and pickled fish for a week. And I watch my family from under my lashes.
Stepmother sits at the head of the table, wrapped in a moth-eaten dressing gown that was crimson once but has faded to a dirty purple. She spears her sausage with a fork, then holds it up and sniffs, her eyes half-lidded. I think she’s trying to show she has demanding and refined taste, but she only looks like a pampered lapdog trying to decide if a table scrap is worth the bother of chewing.
“Maia,” she says, setting the sausage down again, “you know I don’t like them cooked this crisp.”
“I’m sorry, my lady,” I murmur.
Thea looks up from her plate, where she’s cut her sausages into twelve pieces and pushed them around without eating a bite. She doesn’t like heavy food in the morning any more than I do.
“It’s my fault, Mother,” she says. “I asked Maia to make them crisp. I love them this way.” She stuffs four pieces into her mouth, then looks pained.
Thea is kind and impulsive and very stupid. I’m not sure, sometimes, why she is still alive. Or why she thinks she can love and be loved by everyone in this house. She even thinks that the two of us can be friends, and she is forever trying to drag me from my chores and make me drink tea or practice dancing. No matter how much either of us gets punished, she never learns.
“You’re too kind to her,” says Koré. She’s the older of my stepsisters—seventeen, like me—and even eating breakfast, she manages to look like a statue carved by a master artist. Partly it’s her perfect posture, but there’s no denying the gods gave her beauty—wide dark eyes and high cheekbones, a face of pure symmetry framed by night-black hair. She looks worthy of a hundred statues, and it’s a testament to Stepmother’s foolishness that she’s never had a single suitor.
“But I love them,” says Thea through the mouthful of sausage she still hasn’t managed to swallow. It makes her look like she’s only ten instead of fourteen. It also makes her look even more like a lackluster imitation of Koré than she usually does: she has all her sister’s lovely features, but smudged and softened from beauty down to mere prettiness.
“You are making excuses for that girl like you always do.” Stepmother’s voice is suddenly thin and harsh with loathing. “The honor of our house demands—” She pauses, wincing, and puts a hand to her forehead.
Without either of us meaning to, Koré and I meet each other’s eyes grimly across the table. It’s never a good sign when Stepmother starts talking about the honor of our house. Stepmother loved my father more than reason; this ramshackle building and our half-disgraced name are all she has left of him. When she starts talking about the honor of our house, at best it means that she’s going to squander more money on curtains and silverware, and be more strict than usual with the three of us. At worst—
“Don’t just stand there, you lazy girl,” says Koré. “Go check the morning post.”
The morning post never brings us anything except letters from creditors, and those are not going to calm Stepmother. I go anyway. Someone has to smile and desperately placate Stepmother, and better Koré than me. Koré actually wishes that Stepmother would love her. For all her attempts to look dignified, she’s just as foolish as Thea. As foolish as Stepmother, as my own mother, as everyone who’s ever lived in this crumbling, dusty house where demons crawl through the laundry chutes and nothing ever changes.
But today something changes.
When I open the front door and reach into the letterbox, there’s a big envelope of thick, velvety paper. It’s addressed in flowing cursive with extra loops and curls:
Lady Parthenia Alastorides
The Misses Alastorides
13 Little Lykaion Way
Fine penmanship, not the neat, blocky letters or hasty scrawl that tradesmen use to address their bills. It’s the handwriting of an aristocrat, or his secretary. I can faintly remember the parties from before Mother died—the silk dresses, the glasses clinking, and the soft, refined laughter—but no one of that world has acknowledged our family’s existence for years. Not since Father died and Stepmother . . . changed.
I take the letter back to the breakfast room, where Stepmother has forgotten her anger and is telling Thea how a proper young lady should sit at the table. “In accord with the honor of our house,” she says, but the words don’t have the desperate edge they did before.
Then she sees the envelope in my hand.
“Give me that,” she says, and tears it open.
We wait for her to read it. Thea leans forward, curiosity written across her face; Koré is perfectly posed as always, but her jaw is tight.
Stepmother draws a breath, flushes, and looks up at us. I don’t remember when I last saw her smile so brightly.
“Duke Laertius himself has invited us to a masked ball in honor of his only son’s nineteenth birthday,” she says, and while it’s fine that the lord of our city still has us on his list of nobility somewhere, that doesn’t explain her joy. Then she leans forward and says, “And at midnight, Lord Anax will select his bride from the ladies present.”
“I know it will be a lot of work getting ready for the ball,” I tell my mother the next day, “but I really think it would be delightful if Koré married Lord Anax.”
I’m sitting in the garden, beneath the apple tree. Our house lies on the outskirts of the city, beyond the Old Wall, where the city frays into countryside, where you can find foxes on your doorstep and hear owls hooting at night. So our walled garden is huge, nearly an acre, and once it was an exquisitely ordered wonderland, with little stone paths looping among slender birches and carefully sculpted rosebushes. There was a pond full of great gold-and-silver fish, with a marble statue of Artemis bathing at the center; there was a marble bench beneath a pomegranate tree, and a trellis covered in blackberries.
Now it’s overgrown and gone to seed, the pathways choked with moss and weeds, the pomegranates transformed into a thicket, the blackberries a vortex of thorns. The pond is low and muddy, the gleaming fish replaced by minnows, and Artemis’s pure white face is worn and covered in grime.
But the apple tree is the same: glossy dark leaves, branches swaying gently down as if they longed to embrace me. It’s spring, so the tree is covered in white blossoms, and their sweet scent is thick on the air.
Mother’s bones are laid to rest in the family mausoleum three miles away, shrouded in silk and with golden coins upon her eyes. But this tree, where we played together for long, lazy summer afternoons, where she held me in her lap and sang my favorite song about the bumblebee who was friends with a frog, where she laughed as she kissed all my fingers and toes and said, I love you, I love you, I love you—
This is where her spirit rests.
The air shivers all around me, and it’s as if my whole body is wrapped in her embrace. I close my eyes, and the air presses against my lids, almost like a kiss.
“Stepmother would be so happy,” I whisper, “and, of course, Koré would too. And I would be happy. Even more happy than I am now.”
I can almost feel her fingers on my arms, ten separate little pressures holding me in place. I don’t often feel her touch this strongly. When I do, it’s usually a comfort—however bitter—because the touch feels nearly human, nearly the mother I remember.
But now an icy tide of fear starts to rise in me. Fifteen minutes ago, Stepmother told me again that a stupid, ugly, ungrateful brat such as myself would never go to the ball. I had smiled afterward and whispered, Stepmother tries so hard to protect me, but what if it wasn’t enough? What if my mother listened to Stepmother instead of me, or what if she heard the dull resentment locked inside my head?
I am never sure just how much she hears, or how much I must suffer before she gets angry. All I know is: if I cry, she will avenge my tears. All I know is: I cannot ever let her avenge me again. No matter what Stepmother does to me, she does not deserve what my mother would do to her.
“I’m glad Thea and Koré will be there to represent the family at the ball,” I say. “Otherwise, I’d have to go, and I really don’t want to.”
My heart is pounding. Butter, I think, trying to keep my voice easy. Silk.
“I love dancing, but in front of other people? That would be torture. And the dresses, they’re so pretty to look at, but having to wear one? I would hate to be laced up in a corset and squeezed into tight little shoes.”
The pressure eases slightly. She agrees, I think dizzily. I am almost sure she isn’t angry. My body wants to shake, but I must hold myself trustingly still; it’s only my tongue that rattles faster and faster: “Altogether it’s more fun to get someone else ready for the ball, and isn’t it lucky we don’t keep a maid anymore, so I get to do it all and I don’t have to share and I can’t wait to start working on the dress and perhaps Stepmother will buy some new silk—”
I snap a hand to my mouth, sure that she can hear the panic in my voice. But the air is soft and happy as her presence unspools from my shoulders, winding back into the breeze.
“Talking to yourself like a lunatic again?”
I flinch and look up. Koré stares down at me, her dark eyes narrowed, her arms crossed. She looks warlike and severe as Athena, and if she starts scolding me now, right here with my mother’s spirit watchful and rustling the leaves overhead—
I bolt to my feet and babble, “The garden’s so pretty, I can’t help myself.” I seize her hand and start dragging her down the moss-choked path, back toward the house. “But you must be tired; you had your lamp on all night.” We are three steps from the tree, then four. Five. Six. “Won’t you come inside and have some tea? You can tell me all about how you want to be dressed.” If I can just get her back to the house, maybe it will be all right. “Weren’t you and Thea planning your dresses?”
Koré plants her feet and tears her hand free. “Thea asked if you could come with us to the ball, and now she’s not allowed out of her room until tomorrow.”
Our eyes meet. Trying to stop Thea from befriending me is the one thing on which we have ever agreed.
“That is not my fault,” I say quietly.
Koré shakes her head. “No,” she says, because when Stepmother isn’t watching, she can afford to be fair to me. “But she is being punished because of you, so you will help me. You’re going to take my letters to Lord Anax.”
I stare at her. “Your letters?”
Koré has always been the perfect young lady, every day that I have known her. And it is deeply inappropriate for any lady to write a man who is not related to her. Unless—
“Are you secretly engaged?” I demand.
“Of course not,” says Koré. “But I will be engaged. Publicly. When he chooses me at the ball. And he will choose me over all the richer, more beautiful girls from better families. Because when I dance with him, I will reveal that I am the one who sent him the anonymous letters and courted him while discussing history and literature and Hermeticism. Lord Anax is a scholar. He is always turning down invitations to society functions because he would rather study. Everybody knows that. I will show him that I am the only woman who can match his learning, and he will marry me. He must.” She draws a shaking breath. I have never seen her so passionate. “And you will deliver my letters to him. Anonymously. Today.”
She thrusts the letter at me: thick, creamy paper, folded and sealed with red wax. I take it and feel the hard ridges of the wax; the paper flexes between my fingers.
“Stepmother won’t approve,” I say.
“She’ll approve when I marry him.”
Koré would make her heart beat backward to get Stepmother’s approval. It’s what makes her a fool: Stepmother has never seen her as anything more than an asset to the honor of our house. Is this scandalous plan at last her rebellion? Or just a final, desperate attempt to win the love that Stepmother isn’t capable of giving?
It doesn’t matter. If Koré can convince Lord Anax to marry her, then she will leave this house. Probably she will take Thea with her. Maybe they’ll even convince Stepmother to live at the palace with them, and then I won’t have to protect anyone.
Nobody to protect. I can hardly imagine such freedom.
“I’ll do it,” I say, my heart beating a swift, dizzy song of maybe, maybe, maybe. “I’ll do it.”