Page 39 of A Treachery of Swans

A Foggy Midnight

“No!” I scramble for the edge of the dock, ready to jump into the water after them, but Marie grabs me quickly, her hands warm and firm on my waist. “Odile. Odile!”

I shove at her, despair screeching through me. What if one of those pages had the answers I needed? Worse, what if it could help me get the Couronne? I pull myself out of Marie’s grip. “No, let me go! I need them!”

“There’s nothing you can do!” It’s the first time I have heard her raise her voice, and it is such a stark contrast to her usual sultry warmth that it stuns me into stillness. I turn to stare at her, tears of disappointment pricking my eyes.

“They were barely wet. I could still have saved them!”

She steps away from me, sweeping loose curls out of her face. “I doubt it. And it isn’t worth risking a horrid cold.”

“A cold.” My laughter comes out of me in a bitter wheeze. “Youthink I care about acold?? That journal had magic all over it! There’s no telling the knowledge I just lost.”

“Odile—” She reaches out as if to soothe me.

It’s petulant, but I don’t care. I slap her hands away. “No. No, I should have known better than to ever involve you. You’re just a spoiled princess, gifted with the perfect clothes and the perfect life. You could never understand. You’re worried about a cold? My brother is imprisoned and there’s a monster in the palace and the Mothers are gone andI have no magic.”

I stumble back, clutching what’s left of the journal to my chest. Part of me knows that I’m being unfair toward her. But if I let go of my anger, nothing waits behind it but tears, and I refuse, utterlyrefuse,to cry.

I look up at Marie once more, and that is a mistake. She’s staring at me, brows tilted up in regret, and there’s a soft, apologetic light to her eyes that I hate, hate more than anything. Because it taunts me, sayingI’m sorry,sayingI know it’s not your fault.I whirl on my heels and storm off toward the Château, my teeth clenched and eyes stinging, the remnants of brittle paper clutched tight in my fingers.

Only once I am stowed away in the Dauphine’s apartments do I dare to open the journal once more. I sit by the vanity, my own reflection hovering, pale and windswept, in my periphery. I light a single candelabra with shaking hands, the three candle flames winking like dying fireflies. Beneath their hesitant light, I inspect what remains of the paper.

What I find is a scrawled mess, great loops of writing that I can barely decipher. Between them—my heart leaps—are drawings of spiderwebbing spells, the lines labeled with letters so small, I cannot make them out. Sorcery. These are notes—no,musings—on sorcery. And thanks to my own foolishness, my own impatience, I might have lost precious information to the lake’s greedy waters.

My eyes droop. Two sleepless nights have begun to weigh on me, pressing heavily on my eyelids. And yet I can’t seem to stop. I find a drawing of a spell that seems relatively legible, and my heart speeds up with excitement.A simpler way to transform a whole into pieces,the author begins. A smaller scrawl in the margin’s notes:May be useful.

Beneath, the spell-threads intersect in a hexagon, a small paragraph beside each thread instructing how to form each one.Envision the material,says one.Envision an object of said material in pieces, says another. The line in between instructs the sorcier to carefully imagine their object of choice shattering.

I look up at the mirror before me, stretching out my palms. I envision raw golden magic pooling in my palms. In my imagination, I use no goddess-gold—onlytrue magic summoned from Morgane, just as the youngest Mother taught the Golden-Blooded Girl to do. I draw each spell-thread in the air, focusing my thoughts.Mirror,I think, imagining the looking glass before me, silvery and whole. Thenshards, a razor-sharp sliver pricking my thumb. Finallybreak, a pane of slick glass splintering outward.

A childish part of me hopes to hear the musical peal of shattering glass. But the mirror does not break. Nothing happens at all. There are no sticky spell-threads hovering before me, no sage and iron acrid against my tongue. There is no magic for me to call on at all, because Morgane is gone.

I clench my hands into fists. My words to Marie at the lake, though embittered, were true. I’m tired of creeping around in the shadows, of being starved of magic, of sustaining myself on Regnault’s promises. I wantthis. What’s in this journal, in my blood.

If I’d had magic when Damien left me, I would not have cared about his betrayal. If I’d had magic when my mother died, I would not have mourned so deeply. If I’d had magic when Regnault threatened to cast me out, I would have left him with my head held high.

I would have called on Morgane and let her fill my every crevice, gorged myself on power.

With magic as my timeless companion, I would never be alone.

Stomach tight, I swipe my hand across my eyes and flip idly to the end of the journal. There the very last words remain, unstained, written in a bold hand, every arch and dot pregnant with determination.

… We long for freedom. Should all go as planned, we will gain the authority we have always deserved, yet never been given. We will have endless power, endless potential. No more limits. No more fear.

Something inside me lurches at the words. There’s an odd, disfigured familiarity to them, like the wavering face of a stranger seen only in a dream. With frantic motions, I flip back to the front cover, searching all the places an author might sign their name.

And then I find it:

Property of Bartrand de Roux.

It is scrawled, crookedly unassuming, on the back of the cover.

For a moment I forget to breathe. My pulse surges in my ears. This isn’t just the journal of some court sorcier—it’s the journal of the man who attempted to assassinate the King. The man whose actions cursed his own kin, saw their livelihoods ruined, forced them to hide their veins filled with golden blood. My father’s ancestor.

And yet, when I touch the faded ink, I feel reverent.

After all, no one truly knows what happened that night. Had Bartrand de Roux attempted to stop the King from going mad? Had he seen something no one else saw? The creeping of insanity already at the edges of the King’s words, his movements, his actions?

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