Midnight Beauties (Grim Lovelies 2)

Anouk reached out and scratched his head. She pulled the jacket up over the both of them, and they lay in the straw and slept a dreamless sleep.

Chapter 12

Late November bled into December, and every morning when Anouk passed through the glass-enclosed hallway outside of the courtyard on her way to prepare breakfast, she saw Duke Karolinge whispering to the coals. At the break of dawn, he would swallow a powder of rosemary and pine bark that he ground himself and then whisper into the piles of firewood. They sparked and smoked. Day after day Anouk watched the wood transform from fresh-cut logs into chunks of blackened charcoal, reducing more and more until they were each the size of her fist. More mules arrived, carrying supplies for the coming Royals and the Eve Feast: Crates of fine wine. Silk linens for the guest rooms on the upper floors. Truffles and lavender soap and argan oil, until the Cottage’s normally sparse pantry was bursting with exotic treats.

She did her best to find time to visit Little Beau. She kept her distance from Frederika, who’d taken to stalking behind her around the abbey like a shadow. She checked Rennar’s mirror obsessively, growing more worried as each day passed and Luc remained a mouse. It occurred to her that maybe the plagues in London were part of the reason why Rennar hadn’t held up his side of their bargain. What if he’d managed to get into the city on his own? What if he’d already faced the Coven of Oxford without her? She found herself worried for his safety, and that made her worry for her own sanity.

She spent long hours trying to discover her crux. Each morning she rose before dawn and ran laps around the courtyard until her muscles ached. She forced herself to stand barefoot in the snow, then hold her hands an inch from the scalding stove. She memorized and practiced ritual patterns of movement that spell-casters used. She locked herself in the Duke’s storerooms, even though Esme told her it was folly, and examined every herb she could find, from dried rosemary to Spanish thyme, sniffing each one, tasting them all, studying the effects they had on her to see if any one of them gave her some special spark. Then she tried the dried flowers that he stored in glass jars, laceleaf and gardenia, lotus and calla lilies. By the third week, she was desperate enough to move on to poisons. She read about each one in the stained old guidebook before carefully placing a drop of it on her tongue, but this only sent her to the infirmary with stomach cramps, where Esme made her a soothing drink of warm goat milk and honey and gave her two contraband pills (smuggled from a Pretty pharmacy in Berlin) for the pain.

“You’re going to kill yourself, going on like this,” Esme said, handing her the warm milk. “If you have a death wish, the Baths will take care of that for you.”

Anouk gulped down the glass of milk and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I have to find my crux. The Baths are in two weeks. Some Pretties came this morning on the mountain path with a delivery of fresh pears—?the Royals are practically on their way.”

She thought of Prince Rennar and felt a stab of pain again. What if he’d given up on her? She bent over and threw up. Esme grabbed the bucket just in time.

“You need to speak with the Duke,” Esme said.

“I don’t trust him.”

Esme hesitated. “Yesterday the Duke asked me—?pointedly—?to carry a load of bandages down to Sam in the laundry room. A bunch of bloody towels spilled out—?Frederika cuts herself a lot while exercising. The bloodstain on one of them formed a ring around a perfect circle of white fabric.” There was a glint in her eye. “I felt like I’d hit my head. The circle of white. I just knew, Anouk. And somehow the Duke had known too. That’s why he asked me to run the errand. I was wrong: My crux isn’t bone. It’s pearl.”

Anouk raised her eyebrows. All the other girls had decided on their cruxes. Frederika hadn’t outright stated that hers was poppy seeds, as Heida had insisted, but she claimed that she knew what it was. Esme had been the only one other than Anouk who hadn’t yet chosen.

Esme rested a hand on Anouk’s shoulder. “You still don’t know what you’re going to carry into the flames. The Duke could help you.”

Anouk wiped her mouth. “You can’t trust Royals.” She hesitated. “There’s a prince . . .”

Esme’s eyebrows arched. “Mmm, I like princes. Go on.”

Anouk looked away, toying with the damp cloth she’d used to wipe her face. “He’s not just any prince. Prince Rennar of the Parisian Court. Head of all the Haute. He conspired with a witch to trap my friends and me. They’re in cages now. He won’t free them until I do as he wants.”

“What a complete bastard. Is this prince coming for the Eve Feast?”

Anouk nodded.

“He’ll be there to watch you walk the Coals?”

“Yes.”

Esme leaned forward. “Then you’d better walk into those Coals as the strongest beastie in the world and walk out of them even stronger—?the most powerful witch any Royal, even your prince, has ever seen.”

Anouk smiled, but only briefly. “You shouldn’t hope for that, Esme. The odds are poor. One out of ten. If I survive, or Marta, or Petra, or any of the girls, your own chance of survival is so much less.”

“That’s not how odds work.”

“That’s how these odds work. Almost every year, only one girl lives. Sometimes not even that. I can count on one hand the number of times in centuries when two have survived.”

“I choose to believe that odds are meant to be defied.” She rested a hand on Anouk’s shoulder. “I’ll let you in on a secret. Tonight, after the Duke retires to his chambers, some of us are going to walk the coals.”

Anouk frowned. “You can’t. The Coal Baths aren’t like striking a match and sparking a fire. The Royals have to light them themselves with a whisper. They aren’t here yet.”

“Not those Coals,” Esme said. Then she grinned mischievously. “Meet us at midnight in the courtyard. Bring Petra too. You’ll see.”

* * *

“I can’t believe you talked me into this.”

Petra stood in the falling snow with her blanket wrapped around her and hooded over her head. The moon was hidden by the storm clouds. Anouk hugged her own blanket around her shoulders, letting the snow land on her bare hair. The courtyard was quiet. The beds of coals that Duke Karolinge had carefully been preparing lay untouched. For a few humiliating moments Anouk wondered if Esme had been playing a joke on her—?get the new girl to stand outside in the snow in the middle of the night.