The Unnaturalists (32 page)

My teeth chatter with tension. “I can’t! I—”

The door opens, and his mother pokes her aristocratic nose around the door frame looking for him.

“Bayne, we need your signature now,” she says, eyeing me.

He turns away without another word or look.

I make my face as cold as I can. I bend and pick up my tray and say icily, “Good day, my lord,” as I make my way to the kitchens. But it is as though I am walking on a thousand teacups all made of the pieces of my heart.

On the day of the wedding, I am up before dawn being trussed and pinched and perfumed. My hair is so tall I’m afraid I won’t be able to get through the doorway. I’m exhausted because I haven’t slept at all between Lucy’s tantrums over a fault in the wedding favors, avoiding Bayne and Charles, and thinking about what I might do to free myself of these wretched, wretched spells. Short of trying to sneak away after this wedding, I have no solutions. And somehow, with both Charles and Lucy watching me like hawks, I have the feeling I won’t get very far.

The maids cluck at the circles under my eyes, my puffy eyelids. They powder my face even whiter than usual to account for it; I look like a ghost.

But there’s no time to worry over it. I must help Lucy in her chambers with the ancient Virulen wedding gown and escort her down to the chapel, as she has no mother of her own to do so. We have this loss in common, but with so many maids at her disposal, I’m hard-pressed to see why Lucy even has need of me. Except that I’m the reason she’s getting married in the first place.

I sigh. Last night, a note was slid under my door, eversealed with
the Wyvern seal of Grimgorn. I threw it in the fire unread. It’s bad enough that I am a witch without magic, but even the accusation of being my new lord’s mistress, whether true or false . . . I shudder at how fast Lucy would most likely have me sent to the Waste for that, despite all her charming smiles. I can’t bear to read whatever accusations he might levy against me, or even kind words. Nothing can happen between us.

And yet, as I hurry up and down stairs and through everlit corridors packed with servants and guests, I wonder again if perhaps somehow Bayne would still help me, if I could only explain to him what happened, if I could make him understand that I literally have no magic to free him. Would he understand and forgive me? Would he put aside his hurt to help me free the Manticore? Could he, bound as he is by a spell I can’t release?

I find Lucy holding tight to her bedpost and cursing the maids cinching her into the corset that looks more like a torture device than an undergarment. Her black hair straggles around her shoulders and her cosmetics still aren’t on.

Lucy is determined to have an eighteen-inch waist because she is eighteen, for reasons that elude me. But all the rich cakes with tea have taken their toll. Though she looks natural and healthy to me (and my waist size hovers above hers—though only just), she has had many a tantrum over the failure of the maids to cinch her properly these last few days.

“Ah,” she gasps, “there you are! Help the maids with the dress, will you? Where is that saints-bedamned hairdresser?” she shouts to no one in particular.

I hurry to help with the ancestral wedding dress of Virulen. It has been used by every Virulen woman since the New Creation,
and is so ancient that its once-vermilion silk has aged to deep claret. It was spun from the silk of a now-extinct shadowspider. We’ve a few preserved at the Museum—ghastly, leggy, shriveled things. But their silk is flawless and beautiful as none other. This dress alone is worth a fortune.

It’s so heavy that it takes three of us to lift the thing over Lucy’s head. It smells of musty roses, but it slides on with a sigh, as if it knows the blood of its mistress.

Lucy can barely breathe, much less sit, when the hairdresser finally enters and waves her over to her vanity. He is foppish and odd.

Lucy stares at me in the mirror. The hairdresser is teasing her hair upward—soon it’ll be even taller than mine. He affixes hothouse blood roses into the weave and across the shoulders of her dress.

“I’ve noticed something has been awkward about you lately. You’re so quiet . . . and clumsy. What is it? You can tell me, I assure you,” Lucy says.

But I know I can’t. My lips are still sewn shut.

“I haven’t asked anything further of you, you know,” she says. “I should think you’d be grateful.”

She pouts a little, fidgeting with the roses about her bodice.

I nod.

“Now,” she says, “when the time comes for heirs, that might be a different story.”

The hairdresser’s lips quirk. He pulls her hair and she yelps and glares at him. “Do that again and your fingers will never touch hair again. Or anything else for that matter,” she says.

A bright spot appears on his cheek, but he murmurs, “Yes, my
lady,” in a voice as smooth as the pomade he applies.

I hope that I will either be dead or far from here before I’m called to conjure up heirs for Lucy and Bayne.

At last, the hairdresser finishes his work and we carefully install the shadowspider veil over Lucy’s hair. I lead her from her chambers and down the back stairs to the family chapel where her father waits for her. She says nothing further to me about heirs or magic or my demeanor.

Because of the large number of guests, the wedding is to be held in the Great Hall. A makeshift altar is draped in cloth-of-gold on the Lord’s dais. The bishop waits in his white robes beneath the oriel window of the Saints praising the Ineffable Watchmaker’s winged clock. At the sight of us in the chapel, the musicians strike up the procession, and everyone goes silent. I snatch the bouquet of flowers waiting for me and march down the aisle. Bayne is already waiting at the altar. He turns when I arrive. I look away from the mute appeal in his eyes.

From the crowd, Father and Aunt Minta catch my eye. Lucy invited them as a special favor to me. I smile, but I know my smile is strained. Then I see Charles. He’s staring at me, a slow smile growing on his lips as if he knows my thoughts. I turn my attention to another window, the one in which Saint Pasteur smites the Demon Byron for his licentious poetry. I stare at it until the image is burned behind my eyelids—the great Saint in his armor piercing the loathsome Dragon-tailed poet. My stomach growls for want of food.

Lord Virulen limps down the aisle beside Lucy. He brings her to me, and I take her up on the dais because it’s too difficult for him to manage. His shuffling gait reminds me of the poor wraiths—all those souls stolen by Charles for his hideous jar.

Then, Lucy weights me down with her giant bouquet. I pass both hers and mine to the maid nearest me, and then escort her up to Bayne. Her gown slides like a heavy, red snake behind us.

The line of his shoulders is tense as he takes her hand from mine. Our fingers touch for just a minute. What I see in his eyes makes it difficult to breathe. But I lay her hand in his, and I turn and go back to my place. I barely hear what the bishop says nor their responses in return. I seem to hang somewhere suspended beyond it all, drifting above the ceremony like a little, dark cloud.

The end comes before I’m ready for it. Lucy’s train slides by me and I realize I must pick it up. I direct the maid nearest me to grab the other end; we follow the couple down the aisle, showered with blood roses and good-fortune ribbons. My ears buzz with the ringing of the chapel bells. I stand in the receiving line, while person after person congratulates the newlyweds. I’m itching to get out of this dress, even though I know I will just be exchanging it for a ballgown for this evening’s masque. I greet people mechanically, a smile so false plastered across my face that it’s a wonder my lips don’t fall off.

At last, though, familiar hands press mine.

Father and Aunt Minta come to tell me how beautiful I look, to chastise me for not writing more often. Lucy allowed me to invite them as a special favor to me, for all that I’ve done for her, she’d said. I look at Father, my throat full, longing to tell him everything, sure that if he only knew the truth, he’d change course or at least banish Charles from the Museum. He’s looking at me with consternation, as if trying to read my thoughts and wondering why he can’t. I open my mouth, but then comes that stumbling block, the stuttering.

“You will come to see the unveiling of the Grand Experiment, won’t you?” Father says. “Charles here says you’re getting on splendidly. Surely they’ll let you come away for a day?”

And then there he is, The Wad himself, decked out in all his ridiculous finery. I can’t figure out how a mere Scholar like him could afford such, but I’m sure a person who can suck out people’s souls has no trouble finding the resources to procure a fine suit. He’s wearing more brocade than Bayne!

“I’m certain I can manage to steal her away. But she’s such a busy little thing, aren’t you? So busy in so many things. Hopefully soon she won’t have to be quite so busy,” he says, leering. Again, that terrible odor washes over me. I can’t figure out how anyone can endure the smell, but no one else seems to mind. He’s making fun of me. I back up without getting too far out of line and nod.

They’re swept along down the line, but not before Father gives me that worried look again.

After the receiving line, I’m called to attend Lucy as she’s changed into her ball gown. Late afternoon sunlight blinds me from the end of the hall as I hurry through the wing reserved for the Grimgorns. My ankle caves and my shoe goes flying just as I mount the stairs toward Mistress Lucy’s chamber at the end of the hall.

Bayne comes down the winding stairs, ostensibly having escorted his new wife to her chambers, just as I’m bending and sliding my foot back in my shoe.

“My lord,” I murmur.

“Miss Nyx,” he says, moving past me. And then I catch at his sleeve.

He stops, presenting me with a glacial, lordly gaze.

“I’m sorry,” I say, the words scraping from my throat. I drop my
hand from his arm as though I’ve touched a neverdoor. He nods and sets his foot on the next stair, but my voice pulls him back.

“Must it be this way between us?” I ask. “I wanted . . . that is . . . I had hoped . . .” I frown and shake my head. “I didn’t know it was you; I swear it!”

The sorrow in his eyes hurts. I have no idea how I’ve managed to cause so many catastrophes in such a short period of time, but this is almost the worst of them. He looks down at his shoes.

“I did not do this to hurt you,” I say.

“Then, why . . . ?”

I try once more to say the words, to tell him what Charles has done to me, but all that comes are tears.

He pushes away from me clumsily, saying, “My lady, I must beg your leave. My new wife awaits you in her chamber.” My face burning with shame, I curtsy and hurry up the staircase until the turn shuts him from my sight.

Mistress Lucy is shedding her wedding dress and petticoats like a musty chrysalis when I enter the room.

“So?” she says, catching my hands. “What do you think of him?”

“Hmmm?”

“Come, come now,” Mistress Lucy says, collapsing on the bed in her chemise while the chambermaids struggle to pull off her stockings. “I want to know!”

“What do
you
think, my lady? You’re the bride, not me.”

Mistress Lucy crooks her arms behind her and stares into the puffy canopy overhead. “He seems a bit shy . . . rather inept, as if he’d never been around women at all.”

“He does have three sisters,” I say, casting about for something to occupy me. I start by picking up bits of wedding finery from the floor.

“Yes, but that’s not the same thing. Oh, leave all that, will you? Come sit for a moment.” Lucy raises on her elbows, patting the bed beside her.

I comply, though my stomach may crawl up my throat and betray my nervousness at any moment. For once, I am glad of not having had any breakfast.

“I mean, I wonder . . . do you think he kisses well?”

I choke, but instantly cover it with a fit of coughing.

“Oh, dear,” Mistress Lucy says. Her head nods under the weight of its coiffure like a listing ship. “You’re not taking ill, are you? I suppose you have been forced to exert yourself a good deal lately. You’re terribly flushed.”

I shake my head and manage what I hope is not a weak smile. “Just so much excitement! Your wedding and . . . the masque . . .”

And remembering past kisses with your husband
. I choke again in absolute horror at myself.