The Masked Prince

Scene 1: The Coming-of-Age Ceremony The great hall holds its breath. Torchlight licks the vaulted ceiling, painting the ancient beams in gold and shadow, and Wren Snowe stands at the edge of the dais with a coil of pale blue ribbon clutched in her fist, her knuckles gone white. The ribbon is the exact color of the winter sky above Whitecrest, the kind of blue that makes your teeth ache if you stare at it too long. Her grandmother wove it for her last week, fingers moving through the thread with the unerring precision of the blind. Agathe had said nothing as she worked, her milky eyes fixed on some middle distance, her mouth a flat line of concentration. Wren had sat cross-legged on the floor beside her chair, watching the ribbon take shape and wondering, not for the first time, what her grandmother saw when she closed her eyes. Not the world. Something else. Something the old woman refused to name. "Stop fidgeting," someone hisses from behind her, and Wren unclenches her fist. The ribbon unfurls slightly, a pale tongue against her palm. The hall is packed. Every soul in Whitecrest has turned out for the spring tying—the young men clustered near the eastern wall in their best coats, the girls arrayed along the western benches in dresses of every shade, their hair braided and pinned and crowned with early blossoms. Old women perch on stools near the hearth, passing a flask between them. Children dart through the crowd until their mothers collar them. The air smells of beeswax candles and pine resin and the particular musty sweetness of a building that has stood for three hundred years in the same spot, collecting the breath of generations in its stones. Wren adjusts the cuff of her sleeve. The dress is simple, the blue of a shallow mountain lake, and she had sewn a small pocket into the seam last night—a rebellion against tradition, a practical consideration. Inside it rests a vial of clear liquid that may or may not produce a satisfactory puff of smoke if dropped. She hasn't tested it yet. Her grandmother would call it frivolous. Wren calls it insurance. "Next," calls the elder at the center of the dais, a woman with a voice like gravel being poured down a hill. Her name is not important. What matters is the iron circlet on her brow and the way the crowd goes quiet when she speaks. Elise steps forward first. Elise with her honey-blonde hair and her dimples and her laugh that sounds like someone shaking a jar of pennies. She holds a ribbon the color of fresh butter, and when she reaches the edge of the dais, three boys shift forward at once. Elise chooses the tallest, a broad-shouldered boy with a thatch of dark hair, and ties her ribbon around his wrist with a flourish that suggests she had practiced in a mirror. The crowd applauds. The boy's ears go pink. Elise returns to her bench with the satisfied air of a woman who has completed a transaction exactly as planned. Wren watches and tries not to chew the inside of her cheek. Mara goes next. Her ribbon is deep green, forest-dark, and she doesn't hesitate. She walks straight to a slender boy near the back who has been studying his boots for the past ten minutes, and when she ties the ribbon around his forearm, he looks up at her with an expression of such n***d relief that several people in the front row sigh audibly. Mara smiles—a small, private thing—and the boy's shoulders drop two inches. They return to their places side by side, not touching, but the space between them has changed quality. It has become intentional. One by one, the girls of Whitecrest step onto the dais. Ribbons of coral and lavender and dusty rose pass from small hands to larger ones. Some girls choose quickly, with the confidence of long-standing understanding. Others pause, surveying the row of young men with the focused assessment of a general reviewing troops. There is laughter, once, when a girl ties her ribbon to a boy's boot instead of his wrist—a joke that dissolves the tension for exactly seventeen seconds before the next girl takes her place. Wren's stomach is doing something complicated and unpleasant. She has rearranged the vial in her pocket three times. She has counted the beams in the ceiling (twenty-seven). She has recited the properties of common mountain herbs in alphabetical order. Nothing helps. It's not that she expects no one to choose her. It's that she expects the wrong someone to choose her, or worse, someone out of pity, and the prospect makes her skin crawl. She is the Oracle's granddaughter. She is the girl who blew up the stillroom last autumn trying to distill something her grandmother called fool's courage. She is the one who set the chicken coop on fire two summers ago—accidentally, mostly—and then put it out with a mixture of her own devising that left the hens slightly blue for a week. She can stitch a wound closed in the dark. She can identify forty-three varieties of mushroom by smell alone. She has read every book in her grandmother's house twice, including the ones Agathe told her not to touch. These are not the qualities that make a young man step forward at the spring tying. "Wren Snowe," calls the elder, and the sound of her name hits the air like a stone dropped in still water. She steps onto the dais. The torches gutter. Someone coughs. The elder's iron circlet catches the light and throws it back in a thin, cruel line. Wren stands at the center of the platform with her pale blue ribbon and her lake-colored dress and the vial of questionable liquid burning a hole in her pocket, and she waits. No one moves. The silence has weight. It presses against her ears, against her ribs, against the backs of her knees. She can hear the individual pops of sap in the torches. She can hear the soft exhalation of the woman on the front bench, a sound halfway between sympathy and embarrassment. She can hear her own heartbeat, which is doing something alarmingly arrhythmic in the region of her throat. Five seconds. Ten. A girl near the back whispers something to her neighbor. The whisper travels, a current through cloth, and arrives at Wren's ears as a shapeless hum. She keeps her face still. She has practiced this expression in the mirror too, though for different reasons than Elise. She has practiced looking like a cliff face in a storm: unmoved, unmovable, giving nothing away. Fifteen seconds. Twenty. The elder clears her throat. "If there is no—" Wren sees it before she hears it: a shift in the shadows at the back of the hall, near the narrow door that leads to the storage rooms. A figure detaches itself from the darkness. He is tall, or tall enough, and thin in the way of young men who haven't yet grown into their frames. His coat is plain, dark wool, worn at the elbows. His hair falls across his forehead in a way that suggests he cut it himself with inadequate tools and minimal patience. He moves through the crowd without hurrying. People step aside for him not out of deference but surprise—he is not where he is supposed to be, and his presence in this particular moment has the disruptive quality of a wrong note in a familiar song. He reaches the dais and bows. Not a shallow nod, not the quick, perfunctory dip of the boys before him. A bow from the waist, deep and formal, his eyes on the floorboards at Wren's feet. When he straightens, his face is composed in a way that suggests he has thought very carefully about what it should be doing and has settled on neutrality as the safest option. He holds out his hand. Wren places the ribbon in his palm. His fingers are cold. She can feel the ridges of old calluses, the particular roughness of someone who works with his hands in the cold. He does not look at her face. With methodical care, he pins the ribbon to the lapel of his coat. Not around his wrist, not around his forearm. On his chest, just above his heart, the pale blue stark against the dark wool. His fingers are steady. The pin goes through the fabric with a soft, definitive sound. The hall erupts. Not in applause. In gasps—sharp, collective—and then whispers that rise like steam, filling the vaulted space until it seems to tremble with the force of them. Someone says, too loudly, "But he's—" and doesn't finish. Someone else makes a sound that might be a laugh hastily converted into a cough. An old woman near the hearth sets down her flask with a thud that echoes. The boy from the shadows meets Wren's eyes for the first time. His are a color she cannot immediately name—not quite gray, not quite green, the shade of the sea on a cloudy day, if the sea were something she had ever seen instead of something her grandmother described in stories. He holds her gaze for three seconds. Then he steps back, returns to the shadows at the rear of the hall, and stands with his shoulders against the wall as if he has been planted there. The elder closes her mouth, which had fallen open. She looks at Wren. She looks at the space where the boy had been. She looks at the crowd, which is still making the particular rustling sound of a hundred people trying very hard not to say what they are thinking. "The ceremony is concluded," she says, and her voice has lost its gravel. It has acquired something thin and uncertain, like ice that hasn't set properly. Wren steps down from the dais. No one speaks to her. The crowd parts around her as she makes her way to the benches, and she feels the absence of contact like a physical thing—a pocket of air around her body that no one is willing to breach. She sits. She folds her hands in her lap. She does not look at the shadows at the back of the hall. Later, when the torches have burned low and the great hall has emptied to a handful of stragglers drinking by the dying fire, Wren finds her grandmother waiting for her on the steps outside. Agathe sits with her hands folded on her cane, her face tilted toward the night sky as if she can read something in the stars that the sighted have missed. "You didn't have to come," Wren says, sinking down beside her. The stone is cold through the thin fabric of her dress. "I heard," Agathe says. Not I heard what happened. Just I heard, as if the event had produced a sound specific enough to travel through walls and find her waiting ears. Wren picks at a loose thread on her cuff. "The one from your dreams?" Her grandmother's mouth tightens. Agathe's dreams are not for discussion—not with Wren, not with anyone. They are the province of the Oracle, and the Oracle has made it clear that some burdens are not meant to be shared, especially not with a granddaughter who asks too many questions and builds things that explode. "No," Agathe says finally. "That one is still coming." They sit in silence. Above them, the mountains are black cutouts against a sky pricked with stars. Whitecrest huddles in its valley, invisible from the outside world, a secret kept by stone and snow and the stubbornness of the people who have chosen to live in a place that the maps have forgotten.