Winterspell (38 page)

Clara was almost too astonished to respond. “I don't understand.”

“And you don't need to,” Anise snapped. She moved to Clara's legs, cleaning them roughly. Clara bit her tongue to keep from whimpering. She did not want to lose this moment between them, this fragile, strange moment. She simply watched as Anise continued her ministrations. Anise paused at the sash of Clara's tattered gown, and her eyes flickered up, as though asking for permission. Clara did not react, breathless to see where this progressed and understand what it meant, and Anise looked away, peeling the fabric aside to tend, ever so gently, the cuts on Clara's belly.

The air between them was a symphony of tension, and Clara's skin crawled with repulsion—at Anise's nearness, at the intimacy of her touch, and, if she were honest with herself, at her body's own fascinated response.

After a moment Anise threw the dirtied cloth to the ground and stalked away. “Surely you understand why I did it.” She waved her hand dismissively, adjusted her hair. But Clara saw her fingers tremble. “And I'll do it again if I have to. It's expected. And of course I
want
to do it.”

Clara drew her torn dressing gown closed, turning these paradoxes over in her mind. Anise wanted to hurt her—and yet, a moment before, she had said she
didn't
want to. The queen had been so furious in court today, so unabashedly violent, whereas now she could be described as ashamed, even loving. Her soft touch on Clara's body had been the furthest thing from cruel.

With some effort, Clara rose. “Why did you bring me here? Why did you take me from my cell?”

Anise stopped at the window, her expression a muddled storm. “Because you're like me.” She opened her mouth, closed it, and turned away, but before she did, Clara caught a glimpse of bright eyes and a mouth twisting bitterly.

Clara's blood slowed with the weight of this admission.

“Salt of the seas, don't just
stand
there.” Anise threw herself furiously onto the bed. “I'll take you back to your cell early. No one will know you were gone.” Her lips curved into a roguish smile, but it was strained. “Except for us. It'll be our secret, we two.”

Mutely Clara nodded, let Anise slip the torn, bloodied robe from her shoulders and replace it with a clean gown—airy, virtually transparent, spangled with tiny jeweled designs that kissed her skin like rivulets of water. It was vulgar by any tasteful standard, and yet exquisite; Anise cooed in delight and guided her into bed. They did not touch after that. In fact, the queen seemed determined to keep herself as far away from Clara as possible, but that did not change what had just happened, and as Clara lay there, unspeakably awake, listening to Anise breathe in and out, she put a word to her revelation:

Lonely.
Anise was
lonely
. And that was how Clara would beat her.

T
he next morning before dawn Clara awoke to the feeling of eyes upon her. She jolted upright and found Anise standing at the foot of the bed, watching her.

The queen smiled, toying with her own hair. “You're pretty when you sleep. Like a doll.”

Clara wasn't sure what she thought of that remark and almost drew the sheets up to her chin in automatic defense, but instead she stopped and sat up straight, not even adjusting the shoulder of her nightgown when it slipped down her arm. Anise's eyes flicked to the revealed skin, and back to Clara's face. Her smile had frozen.

Such a lot to be learned from that expression, but Clara was too nervous to feel triumphant.

Anise turned away, fetching Clara's tattered gown and delicately wrinkling her nose at it. “Come. It's back to your cell with you, little prisoner.” They did not speak again, but before Anise left her on the other side of the Door, she let her fingers trail down Clara's arm and catch, softly, on her palm.

Their eyes met, and Clara felt a taut line of danger between them. Then Anise stepped through the Door and was gone.

* * *

Clara had roughly calculated the time. She figured that it was now her fourteenth day in Cane, and at this realization her blood churned with
new urgency. Fourteen days here, three days and six hours at home. Too much time had been wasted in this palace; she would have to move more quickly.

Unfortunately, she had very little time to herself before she was once again fetched and brought before Anise and her gleaming court. Interrogated again, tortured by the queen's ruthless assaults again. But it seemed to her—as Anise hurled questions at her about Nicholas's whereabouts, his intentions, his companions, as she sent the mechaniks nibbling at her and let Borschalk strike her in the gut when Clara would not answer—that the queen took no real joy in what was happening. The courtiers cheered when Clara fell, they jeered when she stood up again, and Anise grew increasingly silent.

Clara kept it up for as long as she could, spitting weary defiance at the cruel, leering Borschalk, letting herself be thrown to the ground by Anise's hot bursts of magic. She did not release her own power. Instead, when she felt herself becoming so laden with pain and fear that it began to build, stinging her palms, she took a moment to huddle on the cold floor and tried to decipher it.

How did it feel, seething inside her?

Like a scream ready to explode from her lips—except instead of her lips it was her entire self, and instead of a scream it was a thousand silver arrows made of wind and cold and ancient power. It was rebelling against this abuse. It wanted her to defend herself.

What would it take to release this power?

She focused her mind to hold on to the sensation, imagining her strength as an object she could seize, turn over, and examine. She could release it right now with minimal effort; it was that difficult to fight. But to draw it out a particular way, to shape it into what she wanted it to be, to control it, would be like assigning form to an ocean wave.

A hand grabbed her face, wrenched her up from the ground—Anise, eyes bright. With fury, or with something else?

“What is the prince's plan of attack?”

Clara met her gaze unflinchingly. “To kill you.”

A murmur through the gathered faeries. Anise's smile was hard. “How will he do it?”

“Bloodily, I would think.”

Anise slapped her across the face. She slumped, but Anise would not let her fall, cradling her close in a parody of affection. “Who is he traveling with?”

“An army,” Clara said. “Ten thousand strong.”

Anise let her drop then, and ordered her returned to her cell.

“We can do this every day, Clara!” she cried as Clara was dragged away. “Until your mind breaks, or your body does. It's no matter which to me!”

But that night Anise came to fetch her once again, and when she did, she looked small, remorseful, and maybe even afraid. Once safely through the Door and in her chambers, she fell with Clara to the ground, for Clara was weak with fatigue, and when Clara feebly smiled up at Anise and whispered, “You came for me, like I hoped you would,” Anise's face lit up with unfettered joy. She kissed Clara's brow, and her cheeks, sore from Borschalk's blows. Clara was treated to a night lying on the queen's cool sheets, sipping a hot drink that eased her body's aches. Anise was as gentle and solicitous a nurse as any Clara could imagine, rubbing ointment into Clara's skin, and for a moment, as she drifted toward unconsciousness with the queen's anxious eyes upon her, she felt a flicker of guilt.

For Anise could not know that Clara clearly saw what their nearness meant to the queen, how eager Anise was to please her without being obvious, and how Anise hated herself for it.

And Anise could not know that Clara, alone in her cell since midday, had fought through her pain to practice her magic.

* * *

At first it had been difficult to focus. Clara had never experienced such pain in her life, and for a few minutes all she could do was sob, there in
her dark cell, hugging her poor, pummeled midsection.

But the screaming that would occasionally pierce the quiet of her cell, and the wailing and pleading—the
whimpering
—made Clara think of her father, and silenced her. It could easily be him screaming, couldn't it? If not here, then somewhere else in Cane—and maybe it
was
here, and she was wasting time feeling sorry for herself. At least she still had her wits about her. At least she wasn't being tortured right now like these other poor souls.

She tried to picture her father's face—his and Felicity's, and certainly no one else's, because that would hurt too much. She had to concentrate solely on her goal. There could be no distractions, no fear, and certainly no princes.

In the image of her father's and Felicity's faces, she found a solidity, buried in the pain, and grabbed hold of it.

It was like a rope out of the abyss, and, determined, she climbed it. And then she realized that the solidity was her power, ready and waiting for her to use it.

How startling to realize that this strange, potent thing was now living inside her, and even more startling, that her mother had lived with it too. Godfather had called the sour young Leska powerful. The thought disturbed Clara, and also gave her comfort, for as Leska's daughter, shouldn't she be powerful too?

She wished her mother had confided in her. Maybe Clara's power would not have manifested if she had never come to Cane, but it would have been a secret they could have shared, a treasure to whisper about as they lay curled up beneath Clara's quilt on cold nights when her father stayed late at Rivington Hall. Felicity, too—the thought was a slice of sorrow through Clara's heart. Did Felicity also have this power inside her, dormant? Would Felicity ever know of their mother's true past?

“Not if you don't get back in time to save her, she won't,” Clara said, and the words granted her something of a calm. She wiped
her eyes and pulled herself upright, ignoring the pain.

Getting out was the most important thing. Clara could not go searching the palace from inside her cell. She had seen two people open Doors—Borschalk, in her father's bedroom, and Anise, right where Clara was standing now. She approached the cell door, traced her fingers around it. Was it important to have a true opening in sight to focus upon? Borschalk had had the window; Anise, this door. But that seemed unnecessarily restrictive, and someone could come fetch her at any moment. Perhaps her interrogation for the day was not yet over. Perhaps Borschalk would convince Anise that he had not thrashed her severely enough.

Sweat stung her eyes, and she brushed it away. She needed to concentrate, to push everything out of her mind but the image of opening a Door. She closed her eyes and remembered how both Borschalk and Anise had punched the air with open palms and then pulled back, clenching their fingers into fists. That seemed simple enough, and Clara assumed she had sufficient power within her to do it. But surely there was another trick to it. It could not be so easy.

She paced, her twisted ankle making her gait uneven. What was it like to open a door? Such an everyday occurrence that you didn't think about it. You put your hand on the knob, turned, opened, stepped through. And the principle with these Doors seemed similar.

What do you think about when opening a door?

She stopped pacing.
Ah.
That was it.

You think about what awaits you on the other side. You may not realize you're thinking of it, but you would certainly be disoriented if you stepped through a door with the expectation of emerging in one place and instead emerged in another.

Abruptly nervous, Clara moved to the far side of the cell. It was too risky, perhaps, to attempt going from room to room on this, her first try. But perhaps from one
side
of the room to the other . . .

She stood there, memorizing the opposite wall and its door until
she could have sketched every detail of it. Without putting her full concentration into the act, she ran her arm through the motions—thrusting her palm through the air, drawing back, and letting her fingers close on the withdrawal. Thrust, draw back, close. Over and over she practiced, and when her arm began to ache from it, she reached for the cord of her power—she had been imagining it, this entire time, as taut wires in her limbs, her ropes out of the abyss—and opened her mind to it. She
was
her power, and it was her. When she thrust her palm into the air this time, the full weight of her concentration behind it, lights appeared before her—thin, wan even, but they were there.

Clapping a hand over her mouth to hold the laughter in, Clara fell back against the wall. When she had recovered, she reached an arm toward the Door she had created. Would it work? Lights in the air were pretty but useless without a way through.

She closed her eyes, held the image of the other side of the room in her mind, and stepped into the lights.

It was not a smooth passage. She landed hard on her knees in front of the opposite wall, the world spinning and full of stars.

But it had
worked
, and she sat there laughing quietly.

Then she got up and did it again. And again, and again, twenty-seven times in total, and by the time Anise came for her that evening, Clara held the knowledge of Doors hard in her mind and heart.

* * *

It was difficult for Clara to hide her elation and her strength—for the day of working with her power had restored some of the latter—but she managed it that night, trembling in Anise's arms, exaggerating her weakness.

When the queen smoothed a rag dipped in ointment across the backs of Clara's bruised thighs, Clara tried to look suitably afraid. She couldn't allow Anise to suspect what she had done, not for a moment guess that Clara knew how deeply alone two-blooded Anise felt up here in her grand, glittering tower, a queen of people who feared her,
who were not like her, and who loved her only for the safety that doing so afforded them.