Malice, Heather Walter [hardest books to read txt] 📗

Folded neatly on the twisted coverlet of my bed is the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen. It’s onyx silk, overlaid with a sheer, gossamer fabric that shines like spun moonlight. Beads of jet dance in intricate patterns down the bodice. The sleeves are the same silvery fabric as the skirt and cut to fall next to the hem, like long, delicate wings. Next to the gown is a mask, one large enough to cover the wearer’s entire face. Black, silver-dusted ostrich plumes protrude from the forehead and there’s a stiff veil of black and gold netting gathered around the eyeholes, thick enough that it will obscure the midnight color of my gaze.

Beneath the mask, a note:

No one need know.

L

—

It takes several attempts to convince a servant to both help me into this gown and flag down a carriage to take me to the palace. Her name is Lorne, I think. And I can tell by her puckered lips and pinched brow that she doesn’t think I should be going. But after some convincing, her own fear of the Dark Grace wins out and she finally begins unlacing my work dress.

The new gown fits like a glove. Laurel must have spent her own coin to have it made for me. It’s the nicest gift I’ve ever received. The only gift, actually. An unfamiliar surge of emotion swells beneath my breastbone as Lorne does up the fastenings at the back of the bodice. Perhaps Laurel is fonder of me than I thought.

Lorne pins up my hair in a fashion she slyly comments will flatter me, which I take to mean it will hide the oil and dirt I didn’t have time to wash out. Because the style isn’t particularly flattering—just tightly braided and coiled at the crown of my head. She adds a healthy dusting of Grace powder as well. It itches where it sticks to my chest and neck.

By the time she’s finished, the carriage is already waiting. Lorne fastens the mask to my face, then helps me navigate the stairs in my tissue-thin skirts, pausing at the front door. She hesitates, then opens up a closet and pulls out a Grace cloak. One of Rose’s that she hardly ever wears. It’s gold taffeta trimmed with mink. Gems bright as petrified sunlight are studded down the back, patterned in the Grace sigil of a blooming Briar rose wreathed in laurel leaves. I argue with her at first. The powder is one thing, but to wear the sigil feels too close to flouting the Grace Laws.

But Lorne refuses to budge.

“If it’s the Graces invited to the ball,” she insists firmly, “you should go as a Grace.”

She steps away, revealing my reflection in the foyer’s full-length mirror. I don’t recognize the figure standing before me. My green-veined skin is completely hidden by the black, elbow-length gloves and the lace at the neckline of my bodice. Lorne even tied a thick ribbon strung with a pearl pendant to disguise the nest of veins at my throat. And the mask covers everything else, even the black of my eyes. If I tilt my head in just the right way, I could swear they burn gold. Dressed like this, I could be anyone. A real Grace. As much as I despise the Graces’ spoiled, vapid ways, this new identity locks on to my skin like armor.

I stand straighter, shoulders back and chin high, as I’ve seen Rose do countless times. Lorne adjusts the cloak, fluffs my skirts one last time. And then I glide out into the night.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The driver is uncommonly kind to me as he navigates the maze of cobbled streets. The palace waits in the distance. Even from here, I can see the gilt-capped turrets spiking into the stars and the dragon gargoyles roaring from the eaves. When Leythana was established as Briar’s first queen, the early citizens of her new realm decided that the mountain face would provide the best material with which to build her new palace. Over the following decades, they carved out a few modest wings to serve as the royal residence. But as the queens began relegating their duties to their husbands, the Briar Kings soon decided that those old wings were too sparse and drafty for their liking. The palace of the wealthiest realm in the world should be the envy of every foreign ruler. And so they began expanding and refurbishing and constructing, until the only bit of Leythana’s original palace is now a narrow wing that juts off to the side of the newer structure like a stony, sleeping beast. It looks lonely, the dark windows like hollow eyes in the moonlight. Like the eyes of someone else I recently encountered.

“Have you ever met the princess?” the driver asks, snapping the reins.

“No.” A firework bursts above our heads, glittery fuchsia and cerulean ash drifting over gabled rooftops.

“Shame about the curse on her. She’s a pretty thing, as her sisters were. Would’ve thought they’d find her true love by this point.”

My skin tingles, as it always does when there’s talk of the curse. It was a Vila who cast it, taking her revenge on the realm that destroyed her lands in the War of the Fae. All heirs of Briar would die at the age of twenty-one, a curse designed to wipe out anyone living under the protection of the Fae-blessed Briar crown. The Etherians intervened, of course. Unable to destroy the Vila magic, they softened the curse so that it could be undone by a true love’s kiss. Even so, dozens of princesses have met untimely deaths, including the current crown princess’s two elder sisters. I remember their funerals. The first was when I was only a child, hardly able to understand why the heavy bells tolled day and night, or why Briar was draped in black for months. But the second daughter died just five