Page 30 of Confounding Oaths
… A gentle blue light filled the air, and from the shadow beneath two trees emerged Miss Caesar. And all eyes turned to her because, as she had wished, she was beautiful.
You mortals like to say that beauty is subjective, but you are, in this as in so many things, wrong. There is a beauty beyond words, beyond physicality, beyond truth itself. When Miss Caesar stepped forward from those shadows she was beautiful like a sunrise. Beautiful like a thunderstorm. Beautiful like a city on fire.
She looked, in some ways, much as she always had. She was notaller or shorter, her eyes and mouth and nose were in the same place as they had ever been. But her whole body was glass. Pure, brilliant, colourless glass that caught the starlight and danced it and amplified it until she seemed to glow from within like angels are meant to but, sadly, do not.
Those who had known her more closely, and who had the wherewithal to see the parts of her rather than the remarkable whole, might have noticed one or two other changes. She looked rather more carved, rather less living. Glass leaves and crystal roses, wound wicked-edged and gleaming through her hair—or the glass that it had become—and twined to her shoulders on sparkling briars. She was robed not in the simple nightdress she had left in, but a gown of some strange vitreous silk, which scattered the light within her enough to allow for modesty, insofar as such things mattered to glass women.
I hated to admit it, but the Lady hadexcelledherself.
The arrival of Miss Caesar seemed to have put all thought of quarrel out of the gentlemen’s minds. Both the major and Mr. Caesar lowered their blades and for a long minute just stared. Mr. Bygrave was, if anything, still more affected, gazing slack-jawed and rapt at the visitation.
“Effective, isn’t she?” observed the Lady.
“Thoroughly. What do you intend to do with her now?”
“Observe.”
In that regard the Lady’s function was much like mine, although she was far more a setter-in-motion than I. Far more a meddler.
Mr. Caesar broke free first, familial affection falling under the same category of exemptions to our powers that covers true love, purity of heart, and seventh sons of seventh sons. Calling his sister’s name, he stumbled towards her, still not entirely in command of his faculties.
“John?” Miss Caesar’s voice, like her face, had changed little but utterly. It was as clear and as cool as crystal, sparkling like sunlight on deceptively fast water. “How did you come to be here?”
“How did you?” he asked.
And Miss Caesar had no reply. She just looked down at her hands as if seeing them—and for that matter seeing through them—for the first time. “I am not sure. I … I believe I made a wish.”
“But are you all right?”
She nodded. “I think so. But”—she turned her eyes up to her brother, eyes that had now no iris or pupil but swirled instead with an endless depth of pearlescent mist. Still, there was hope there, for those who had the skill to read it—“am I beautiful?”
“You have always been beautiful,” replied Mr. Caesar with fraternal conviction.
But this drew only laughter from the lady (the young lady, that is, uncapitalised, not the Lady, who was still watching by my side, although now I make the comparison there were similarities). And her laughter, like her voice, like her body, had become a thing of weaponised marvel. Of lethal delight. “Oh, John.” She reached out a hand and touched him gently on the arm, and though he tried to hide it I saw the tiniest shudder run through him at the coldness of it. “You don’t have to lie to me anymore.”
And before he could protest, or indeed make any reply at all, she turned away to face the three men who remained. “Greetings,” she said. And in my experience she had never been agreetingssort of person before her transformation. But time—even a short time—amongst our courts alters mortals and makes them, in some ways, more like us. Which is to say, more fun.
At the sound of the young lady’s voice, the major and Mr. Bygrave sank at once to their knees. Captain James retained hiscomposure thanks to the other exemption that providence saw fit to weave into our magics, that which protects persons of irritatingly heroic character.
Still at least slightly confused by the sight of four men on a heath at dawn with two swords between them, Miss Caesar asked the pertinent question. “What was happening here?”
In the tangle of his heart, the major knew that something was wrong, but there is a dazzling power to captured starlight, and he was, deep down, a man easily dazzled. “I was to duel your brother,” he explained, almost as though fighting his own lips and larynx. “I had offered you insult, my lady, a choice I now deeply regret.”
Like a saint in an old painting, Miss Caesar approached the major with an air of endless beneficence. Where she walked, stardust sparkled in her footprints a moment. “Rise,” she said.
And he rose.
“You are forgiven,” she told him. “Now go. We shall quarrel no further.”
Somewhere deep in the knot of bile the major called a heart, I could see something rebelling against the power of the Beauty Incomparable. He had known, after all, for certain and for a lifetime that men such as himself were to be deferred to, not defied. But for now, at least, he surrendered to the glory of the Other Court and, averting his eyes, retreated.
“As for you”—she turned her attention to Mr. Bygrave, who was still on one knee and staring fixedly at the grass—“perhaps at our next ball, we shall dance.”
With no further comment she swept past him, her gown a cascade of silver motes inside a shell of nothing. She did not make it far before Captain James interposed himself.
“And where’re you off to now, miss?”
“Town,” she replied with a certainty that surprised even her. “I wish to be among people.”
