ONE
People are drawn to death. They flirt with it like the bayou moths that draw too close to our red sill-lanterns, coveting the heat, only to burn themselves alive in the candlelight.
Orléans is that moth now; the rooftops of Trianon flicker like ignited wicks, and three guards lift a dead courtier on a stretcher out of the Chrysanthemum Teahouse. Windy-season rain soaks her lace veil. I watch as one of her arms flops out, grayish in color and haggard, a broken branch at her side.
You’re supposed to feel something when a person dies, when the light in their eyes is snuffed like a candle. A twinge in your stomach. A pinch in your heart. A fallen tear skating down your cheek. But after watching my sister Valerie die and since burying Amber and Arabella, nothing inside me moves. Maybe it’s better that way.
Noelle, another Belle at this teahouse, rushes to my side. “Did she really fall from the balcony?”
My eyes remain fixed on the dead woman and the crowd of agitated onlookers. “She attacked Kata during a beauty session. Ended up falling from the tenth floor.”
“But why?”
“Wanted more treatments than her ration token allowed. Thought she could bully it out of Kata. When she didn’t get what she wanted, she cast herself off.”
Noelle presses a hand to her waist-sash. “They usually just throw tantrums. Spit and curse. The attendants force them to calm down. I can’t believe she’d do this.”
“I can,” I reply.
Anguished faces press against the teahouse windows from outside. The citizens do this across the kingdom every week when the teahouses open for ration appointments. Their fists knock; their hands wipe away streaks of rain to have a better look at the Belles. The handles of their parasols clobber the glass until cracks spread like lightning bolts, eager to storm in.
I should be afraid. Their energy hums with anger like bees in a kicked hive. They want a return to the old way—Belles in the teahouses and unlimited beauty work for those who have the right amount of spintria. But the banged-up windows will be immediately replaced, the rowdy visitors fined or jailed.
An imperial attendant shouts to the servants: “They’re at it again! Sill-lanterns out. Windows and
doors double-locked. All Belles to the main salon!”
Iron shutters stamp out the morning light, while day-lanterns blaze like trapped stars.
Guards flood both sides of the staircase. Those outside use clubs to beat back the bodies. People plummet to the ground. I hear bones crack and the screeches of pain. Shackles and cuffs are slapped to ankles and wrists. Others scatter in all directions. The prison wagons line up, carting off the newly detained to provide more company for Sophia in her prison, the Everlasting Rose.
A hand finds my shoulder, and I jump. “Don’t touch me!” I holler, then immediately regret it. Noelle’s face is crumpled with upset. Her third eye sheds a tear. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I was stuck in my own thoughts.” I take her hand. “Let’s go.”
After three years, I’ve come to love the hidden Belles of the teahouses, those kept secret by the Du Barrys, forced to work as second-class citizens. They are anything but. Now they’ve become as much my sisters as those I was raised with.
Noelle and I walk together into the main salon. There, twenty Belles hover around a weeping Kata. I pull her to her feet. Tears drop down both her noses. “No scratches?” I ask. She nods and hugs me. “We’ll try to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
“But how?” She sniffles. The deep red of her skin never fades.
Violaine is pacing in front of a roaring windy-season fire. “It’s getting worse, Edel. They’re more and more aggressive. My morning client slapped me.” She lifts her veil to show me the handprint splayed across her translucent flesh.
“And the circuit-phones have been a mess,” Ava adds. “Even with my extra ears, I had to take them off the hook. We’re still working through the appointment ledger, and the waitlist isn’t moving. And when we turn them down, they get angry.”
“You have to push the queen and her ministers, Edel,” Larue says. “Things have to change. That Belle’s Bureau is supposed to set laws that help us—not make things worse.”
“The palace attendants came yesterday and said we have to carry tracking pins on our cloaks,” another adds. “For our ‘safety,’ they claimed. These Belle Laws have just turned into more restrictions.”
“When I went to the Market Quartier this morning, vendors refused to take leas from me. Said my money wasn’t welcome,” Daruma says.
“I know. I know.” I pull a parchment pad from my work apron, and a nearby servant hands me a quill. The thick pad spills over with my proposal for Queen Charlotte. I add their latest to the list of grievances and listen to their harrowing stories for the next few hours.
When Charlotte was first coronated, Belle amendments were passed, granting us freedom from the teahouses. Belles were registered and given rooms and a wage for honoring the beauty work ration tokens. We were given the promise that we’d be taken care of and protected.
That hasn’t happened. Instead, I’m caught in a storm, pulled in a thousand directions.
The sky windows fill with gray light, scattering rays through the room. Servants slip from behind silk screens and push back papered wall panels. They wheel in afternoon carts with modest sandwiches and pots of tea. I remember how they used to brim over with raspberry cream puffs, sugar-dusted madeleines, beignets, honey croissants, and snowmelon slices. The kitchen made food as pretty as the world expected people to be. Now even that’s changed.
“They think their beauty scopes will be back any day,” Kata grumbles.
Ena races through the door, struggling to hold a bunch of hate post-balloons with her extra hands. She clutches their angry red tail ribbons. “How are these getting into the mailroom?” she asks. “The servants?”
“What is it this time?” I ask.
“Death threats. Beatings. Burning down teahouses,” she rattles off. “The usual.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t get mail at all,” someone says. “The only post-balloons we need are from Edel.”
“I’ll ask for more guards and mail surveillance,” I say, scribbling another note down. “The Glass Isles teahouse just put out a fire last week. We need to take these threats seriously.”
“I think it’s the Jolie Society. They’re loyal to Sophia, and they all wear pins like the emblem on these nasty post-balloons.” Ena shakes the balloons, and the emblem flares; a white fleur-de-lis encircled with a red snake. “They want everything back the way it was.”
The room erupts with upset.
“Everyone hates us. Feels like it’s the whole world.”
“They can’t do that to us again. I won’t work like that.”
“I refuse,” one shouts.
“Me too,” another replies.
I walk over to Ena and the hissing, hateful post-balloons. I stab them with the quill. They sputter to the floor, and Ena throws their hateful letters into the fire.
“I won’t let that happen,” I tell them.
After that, the room settles. Still, as we eat sandwiches and sip our tea, an anxious thread tugs among us all—I gaze at them, taking an account. As I look at everyone who is here, I notice who isn’t.
“Where’s Delphine?” I ask.
“She left,” Ena replies. Everyone shifts uncomfortably. “When the collectors from the Imperial Bank came to pick up our rent and taxes, she said she was fed up. Called it no better than the spice plantation and their overworked Gris.”
I swallow an angry scream. Another Belle leaving the teahouses to live on the streets or peddle her wares in the underground markets across the kingdom. There have been others—three or four whose disappearance I’ve heard word of, and then no more. My heart knocks around in my chest. “Where’d she go?” I ask.
Silence is my answer.
“I love her just as much as you all do. Even though I didn’t work alongside you in the same way.”
No one will look me in the eyes.
“I’m not going to send the guards after her,” I say. “But she could be in danger.”
“We shouldn’t have to pay money to the queen for doing beauty work,” Violaine finally says. “We used to be tortured. That should be enough. We shouldn’t have to pay another lea for the rest of our lives.”
“I’m trying to make sure—”
“You have to tell them we’re unhappy. You have to tell them no,” Violaine says. “You can’t blame Delphine or the others for deserting—from what I hear, they’re being offered shelter and good currency. The teahouses aren’t synonymous with safety anymore.”
Other voices pipe up then, everyone chiming in to share their discontent, their fear, their anger. It’s too much.
“I can’t think,” I reply, and dart up the stairs away from all their voices.
On the tenth floor of the Chrysanthemum Teahouse, I’ve transformed our Belle-product storage room into my experiment lair. Small blimps float overhead, carrying clusters of day-lanterns, dusting my worktables with light. Leeches cluster on the edges of porcelain bowls, while dried herbs sit in a mortar and pestle. Drawers expose their contents—bei powder bundles, wax blocks, skin paste pots, rouge-sticks, pincushions bursting with needles. The potbellied stove warms irons and tiny cauldrons and porcelain teapots.
I take a deep breath. I can’t run away from my duties downstairs, but I can distract myself for a while. My experiments are laid out, ready for me to resume mixing—some days I have more faith in these elixirs to change the Belles’ circumstances than I do in Queen Charlotte and her ministers.
I collect three skin paste pots, the deep colors now stronger when mixed with dye and herbs, and my newly developed contour cream. I use tweezers to pluck newly developed eye films from a shallow basin of water. I fill a small box with a variety to show Charlotte, including the liquid that began as my sister Camellia’s elixir. I’ve been toying with it, using my arcana like a scientific instrument. With a little more tweaking, I think it could be something special—special enough that perhaps the people who flock to Belles for beauty work would embrace this instead.
“Tailor-made elixir,” I whisper to the tiny glass bottles. “Maybe we open a shop in each city. Issue modification boxes. Each bottle specially crafted for the user.”
Camille was focused on the blood—neutralizing the arcana. But why should we have to change? Instead, I want an elixir that will change the Gris. If they want to adjust themselves, that’s their business—leave us out of it.
“Excuse me, Lady Edel,” an imperial attendant calls out into the room.
I look up. “I’m not to be disturbed in here. You know that.”
She enters anyway. A glittering gold-and-white post-balloon hovers above her left shoulder. “An urgent message,” she says. “From the queen.”
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