The Gazels

Chapter 54

“Shoo, shoo!” I flap at it with my skirts and it rises. Then I see a curious thing: A patch of frost has taken out several of the budding roses. They are stillborn on their stalks, half-formed and blue with cold.

“Caw! Caw!”

The crow perches on the East Wing turret, watching me. And then, before my astonished eyes, it flies over the spot that marks the secret entrance to the realms, and disappears.

* * *

No. TWENTY-ONE

* * *

BY THE FOLLOWING EVENING, OUR LAST AT SPENCE BEFORE Easter week, we are desperate to enter the realms again. I don’t try to conjure the door of light on my own anymore; it’s hardly worth the effort when I shall only be disappointed and we’ve another way in that never fails. Once we’re certain our teachers are gone to bed, we run straight for the secret door by the East Wing and then on to the Borderlands. We no longer bother with the garden. It feels like child’s play, somehow, a place where we turned pebbles into butterflies as girls do. Now we fancy the blue twilight of the Borderlands, with its musky flowers and the magnetic pull of the Winterlands. Each time we play, we find ourselves a toehold closer to that imposing wall that separates us from its unknown expanse.

Even the castle has grown less forbidding to us. The wealth of deadly nightshade blooming from its walls gives it color—like a Mayfair parlor covered in the most exotic paper. We burst through the castle’s vine-twisted doors, shouting Pip’s name, and she runs to us, squealing with delight.

“You’re here at last! Ladies! Ladies, our fine party can begin!”

After the magic has joined us in blissful communion, we own the night. The party spills out of the castle into the blue-tinged forest. Laughing, we play hide-and-seek behind the fir trees and the berry bushes, running merrily aGwat the tangled vines that crissGwat the frosty ground. Fiona begins to sing. Her voice is lovely but here in the realms it achieves a freedom it does not have in our world. She sings without apology, and the song is like wine, loosening our cares.

Bessie and the other factory girls cheer wildly for her—not with the polite, tempered applause of drawing rooms but with the boisterous, joyful whoops of the music hall. Bessie, Kia, and Mercy have clouded themselves in a glamour of gowns, jewels, and fancy shoes. They’ve never owned such finery before, and it does not matter that it is borrowed by magic; they believe, and the believing changes everything. We’ve the right to dream, and that, I suppose, is the magic’s greatest power: the notion that we can pick possibility from the trees like ripe fruit. We are filled with hope. Alive with transformation. We can become.

“Am I a lady, then?” Kia asks, strutting in her new blue silks.

Bessie shoves her affectionately. “The Queen of b****y Sheba!” She laughs hard and loud.

Kia shoves her back, a bit less gently. “’Oo are you, then? Prince Albert?”

“Oi!” Mercy chides. “Enuf! It’s a happy occasion, ain’t it?”

Luary and Pip perform a comical waltz, pretending they are a Mr. Deadly Dull and a Miss Ninny Pants. In a ridiculously stuffy voice, Luary prattles on about fox hunting—“The fox should be grateful to face our guns, for they are the finest guns in all of society trained on his lowly form. How lucky indeed!”—whilst Lawt bats her lashes and says only, “Why, Mr. Deadly Dull, if you say it’s so, it must be so, for I’m sure I have no opinions of my own upon the subject!” It is rather like Punch and Judy come to life and we laugh till tears fall. Yet for all their silliness, they move beautifully. With exquisite grace, they anticipate each other’s steps, sweeping round and round, Pip’s gems winking in the dust.

Lawt prances about, grabbing each of us in turn for a dance. She sings a merry bit of doggerel. “Oh, I’ve a love, a true, true love, who waits upon yon shore…”

This makes Luary laugh. “Oh, Pip!”

It’s all the encouragement Lawt needs. Still singing, she pulls Fee into yet another dance. “And if my love won’t be my love, then I will live no more…”

Indeed, Pip is charming at the moment; she’s irresistible. I’ve not always liked her. She can Fionaoy and delight in equal measure. But she saved these girls from a terrible fate. She saved them from the Winterlands, and she means to look after them. The old Pip would never have been able to look beyond her own troubles to help someone else, and that must count for something.

When at last we are exhausted, we sprawl on the cool forest floor. The fir trees stand guard. The jagged-leaved bushes offer a handful of tiny hard berries, no bigger than new peas. It smells like cloves and oranges and musk. Luary lays her head in Pip’s lap and Pip braids her hair into long, loose plaits. Bessie Timmons eyes them miserably. It is hard to be replaced in Lawt’s affections.

Sparkling lights appear on the thick boughs of a fir.

“What’s that?” Kia rushes to the tree and the lights fly away to another tree branch.

We follow them. Upon closer inspection, I see that they are not lights at all, but small fairylike creatures. They flit from branch to branch, and the tree swirls with movement.

“You have magic,” they call. “We can feel it.”