Rosamund Hodge: Cruel Beauty

Back at the house, Astraia was crying. My only sister, the only person who’d ever loved me, ever tried to save me, was crying because I had broken her heart. All my life I had bitten back cruel words and swallowed down hatred. I had repeated the comforting lie about the Rhyme and tried not to resent her for believing it. Because despite all the poison in my heart, I knew it was not Astraia’s fault that Father had picked her over me. So I had always forced myself to pretend I was the sister she deserved. Until today.

Five more minutes, I thought. You only had to hold on for five more minutes, and all the hatred in your heart would never have been able to hurt her again.

Hidden by the veil and the clamor of the wedding, I finally cried too.

When the sacrifices to the gods were finished, Aunt Telomache dragged me off the stone and packed me into the carriage with Father. Normally the bride and groom would stay for the feast—as would the father of the bride, who hosted it—but getting me to the Gentle Lord took precedence.

The door closed behind us. As the carriage rattled into motion, I stripped the veil off my head, glad to be rid of the suffocating heat. My face was still sticky with tears; I rubbed at my eyes, hoping they weren’t too red.

Father looked at me, his gaze even and impassive, his face an elegantly sculpted mask. As always.

“Do you remember the sigils?” His low voice was calm, even; we might have been discussing the weather. I noticed his hands clasped over his knee; he wore the great gold signet ring shaped like a serpent eating its own tail: the symbol of the Resurgandi.

I knew what was inscribed on the inside of his ring: Eadem Mutata Resurgo, “Though changed I rise again the same.” It was an ancient Hermetic saying, long ago adopted as the motto of the Resurgandi because they sought to return us to the true sky.

I was not riding to my doom with my father. I was riding to my doom with the Magister Magnum of the Resurgandi.

“Yes.” I clasped my hands over my knees. “You’ve seen me write them with my eyes shut.”

“Remember the hearts may be disguised. You will have to listen—”

“I know .” I clenched my teeth to keep back all the poison I wanted to snarl at him. I might not be able to hurt Father, but I still owed him my duty and respect.

Some people distrusted the Resurgandi’s secrecy, the way that dukes and Parliament consulted them; they whispered that the Resurgandi practiced demonic arts. In a way, that was true. By dint of long study and careful calculations, the Resurgandi had come to believe that while the bargains of the Gentle Lord were accomplished by his unfathomable demonic powers, the Sundering was different. It was a vast Hermetic working, whose diagram was the Gentle Lord’s house itself.

This meant that somewhere in the Gentle Lord’s house must be a Heart of Water, a Heart of Earth, a Heart of Fire, and a Heart of Air. If someone were to inscribe nullifying sigils in each heart—so the theory went—it would disengage the working from Arcadia. The house of the Gentle Lord would collapse in on itself, while Arcadia returned to the real world.

The Resurgandi had known this for nearly a hundred years, and the knowledge had availed them nothing. Until me.

“I know you will not fail her,” said Father.

“Yes, Father.” I looked out the window, unable to bear that calm face a moment longer. I had spent my whole life pretending to be a daughter glad to die for the sake of her family. Couldn’t he pretend, just once, to be a father sad to lose his daughter?

We were driving through the woods now as we began the slow ascent up the hills atop which sat the Gentle Lord’s castle. Between the tree branches, I could glimpse scraps and pieces of the sky, like shredded paper tossed among the leaves. Then we suddenly drove through a clearing and there was a great foolscap folio of clear sky.

I looked up. Father had installed, on account of Aunt Telomache’s claustrophobia, a little glass window in the roof of the carriage. So I could see the sky overhead and the black, diamond-shaped knotwork that squatted at the apex of the sky like a spider. People called it the Demon’s Eye and said the Gentle Lord could see anything that passed beneath it. The Resurgandi officially scoffed at this superstition—if the Gentle Lord had such perfect knowledge, he would have destroyed them long ago—but I wondered how many secretly feared that he might know their plans and be drawing them into one of his ironic dooms.

Was he watching me now from the sky? Did he know that fear was swirling through my body like water running out of a tub, and was he laughing?

“I wish there had been time to train you more,” Father said abruptly.

I looked at him, startled. He had been training me since I was nine years old. Could he possibly mean that he didn’t want me to go?

“But the bargain said your seventeenth birthday,” he went on, so placidly that my hope wilted. “We’ll just have to hope for the best.”

I crossed my arms. “If I try to collapse his house and fail, I’m sure he’ll kill me, so maybe you can marry Astraia to him next and give her a chance.”

Father’s mouth thinned. He would never do such a thing to Astraia, and we both knew it.

“Telomache told me that Astraia gave you a knife,” he said.

“She has only herself to blame for that,” I said. “Or was it your idea to tell Astraia that story?”

I still remembered the day that Aunt Telomache told us about the Sibyl’s Rhyme—Astraia’s muffled sniffling, the hard ache in my throat, the sudden stab of wild hope when Aunt Telomache said that I might not have to destroy my husband by trapping myself forever with him in his collapsing house. That I might kill him and come home safe to my sister.

It can’t be true, I had thought. I know it can’t be true —and yet that night I had still nearly wept when Aunt Telomache told me it was a lie.

“She was a child and she needed comfort,” said Father. “But you are now a woman and know your duty, so I trust you have already disposed of it.”

I sat up a straighter. “I’m wearing it.”

He sat up too. “Nyx Triskelion. You will take it off right now.”

Instantly the words Yes, Father formed in my mouth, but I swallowed them down. My heart hammered and my fingertips swirled with cold because I was defying my father and that was ungrateful, impious, wrong —

“No,” I said.

I was going to die carrying out his plan. Against that obedience, this little defiance could hardly matter.

“Are you actually deluding yourself—”

“No,” I repeated flatly. That had been another part of my education: the history of all the fools who tried to assassinate the Gentle Lord. None succeeded, and all died, for even if they stabbed the Gentle Lord in the heart, he could heal in a moment and destroy them the next. I had long ago given up hoping that any mortal weapon could kill a demon.

“I don’t believe in the Rhyme, and even if I did, I wouldn’t bet our freedom on my skill with a knife. You trained me too well for that, Father. But this is the last gift my only sister ever gave me, and I will wear it to my doom if I please.”

“Hm.” He settled back in his seat. “And have you thought how you’ll explain it to your husband, when the time comes?”

His voice was once again as calm as when he read me the story of Lucretia. The euphemism was dry and bloodless as dust on the old book. When the time comes. Meaning, When he strips you naked and uses you as he pleases.

In that moment I hated my father as I never had before in my life. I stared at the loose skin of his neck and thought, If I were really like Lucretia, I would kill you and then myself.