The Belles Read online

  “No.” I remember how the boy made me laugh. The memory rushes through me.

  “Well, you should’ve been. It’s forbidden,” Amber says.

  Hana scrunches her nose like she’s tasted a lemon.

  “Be quiet, Amber. What did he look like?” Edel leans over the edge of her chaise toward me. “And someone wake up Valerie. She needs to hear this.”

  Padma walks to Valerie’s chair and jostles her shoulder. She rolls over and releases another snore. “She’s going to whine about missing everything.”

  Amber crosses her arms against her chest. Her flush matches the deep ginger of her hair. “Why does it matter what he looked like? She shouldn’t have spoken with him. She should’ve called for the guard or joined us. It’s unsafe.”

  “He was handsome,” I say. “Very much so.” Padma, Edel, and Hana burst into laughter.

  Edel’s eyes stretch wide. “He wanted to kiss you.”

  Amber scoffs.

  “No, he didn’t,” I say.

  “I’ve heard about it. Some people think it’s lucky to kiss a Belle. That it’ll bring good fortune to their houses. A daughter of the Goddess of Beauty is the luckiest person in the kingdom of Orléans. That’s probably what he was after,” Hana says.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Amber says.

  “A kiss wouldn’t be terrible, would it?” Hana jumps up, pretending to kiss someone and dance with them across the room. Edel joins her. They morph into a tangle of pale arms and legs. Everyone laughs except Amber.

  “It would be catastrophic.” Amber throws her hands in the air, and her eyes fill with angry tears. “We’re Belles, not courtesans. They already have plenty of those girls at court—ready to be kissed—tripping over themselves and their high pianelles to get to titled courtiers from high houses.”

  I reach over to touch Amber’s arm to get her to relax, but she brushes me away.

  “Maybe he’s fallen in love with you.” Edel presses back into her chair, staring dreamily at the ceiling. “I’d give anything to feel something else, to see something else.”

  The curiosity of love and being kissed fills me with a blush so deep, sweat beads form along my brow. It’s intriguing, but I don’t know if I want to experience it.

  “Don’t be fools. You can’t have both. Who wants love when one can be powerful?” Amber says.

  “I just spoke to him. That’s all,” I say. “It was a great night. Let’s talk about that instead.”

  “Remember what happened to Rose Marie? The Belle from the past generation who tried to marry?” Amber speaks as if she’s a Belle historian, when we all know the same information. Du Barry had warned us that Rose Marie caught a sickness that plagues the Gris. When Rose Marie returned home from court, we’d just had our fourteenth birthday. She rarely left her room. We used to dare each other to get a look at her, and see what was under her veil. First one to get closest would earn glory, and be entitled to each girl’s dessert at dinner. No one ever won.

  “It was the son of Madam Bontemps, House Reims, one of the queen’s ladies-of-honor. They were caught together—”

  “We know, Amber,” Edel says.

  “They put him in one of those starvation boxes,” she adds.

  Padma jams her fingers in her ears. “I don’t want to hear about this. You know I can’t handle it.”

  “Amber, I didn’t say I wanted to fall in love—”

  Amber yells out an exasperated scream and leaves the room.

  “What’s happening with her?” Hana asks.

  “She cares too much,” Edel says.

  “It’s all the stress of the night. Has to be.” I gaze behind me, looking for her outline in the corridor. I stand to go after her, but nurses flood through the door before I can leave.

  “Sit, please,” one says to me. Dread sinks through my gut. No matter how many times I’ve been pricked, I never get used to it. I wish Madeleine was here to do it, because at least she’d tell me all the house gossip—how the courtier guests argued over color choices or traded insults after beauty appointments—and by the time she’d finish, the whole level check would be done.

  Each nurse bears the same unenthusiastic expression. The women divide themselves between us with trays. My nurse takes my left arm, bunching the wide sleeves of my night robe, and ties a red string around my bicep. I invent a story about her life and pretend I’m telling Madeleine. Her name is Jacalyn, and she has two little girls in the Silk Isles, and they drink rose lemonade and lie in hammocks on their private beach overlooking the Bay of Silk. Jacalyn’s husband is a scoundrel who left them to run off to the Fire Isles.

  The nurse pops two fingers in the crook of my arm and inspects the veins there. The green channels rise beneath the brown. She removes a needle from the silver tray and shows it to me before piercing my arm. I still hate how it breaks through my skin so easily, like the spot is no tougher than a tract of silk.

  I grimace and clench my fingers. She taps my hand to tell me to release them. Blood snakes through a long tube. She takes three vials. One for each arcana. She unties the red string. The needle retracts. The piece of cotton she presses on the prick feels like a tiny cloud. When she lifts it, the wound heals as if she never stuck me.

  “The arcana meter,” she says.

  I take the small machine from her tray and hold it as she fits each vial into one of three separate compartments. My blood swirls inside the meter’s different chambers, churning, separating the proteins related to each arcana, determining which ones need rebalancing. I run my fingers over the brass body of the machine, feeling the vibrating hum of the gears working, and the indentations of the numbers that will soon fill with light to reveal my levels.

  Above the first compartment, the word MANNER is illuminated, as if a flickering candle is nestled inside. Perfectly balanced, as it should be for an unused gift. She repeats it for the second vial. The word AURA shines. I touch the letters. It’s my favorite gift. The number three shows.

  The nurse’s eyes bulge a little with surprise. I look up at her. She presses it again. The same number fills with light. She makes a strange, shocked sound, and notes it in a ledger book. In our lessons, Du Barry said our bodies all adjusted differently to using the arcana. She warned that if the levels dipped close to zero, a Belle could faint, sicken, or even die. We must be careful not to abuse our gifts. What the Goddess of Beauty gives, the Goddess of Beauty can take away.

  Edel peeks at my meter. “That’s low. Du Barry said it would only dip to four and a half after the carnaval.”

  “What was your lev—”

  “Shh.” My nurse taps my arm. “You aren’t supposed to comment on each other’s levels.”

  “Don’t tell us what to do.” Edel rises up.

  “Calm down,” Padma says.

  “The reading will be over in another minute,” Hana says.

  I reach for Edel.

  She pushes my hand away. “Aren’t you tired of it? Always being ordered around.”

  The word yes booms inside of me.

  “You are not a nurse,” the woman tells her. They argue back and forth until she calls for the servants to take Edel from the room.

  “Just listen,” I tell her.

  “I’m done listening.” She swats at the encroaching servants, but she’s restrained and dragged out, kicking and screaming. When we were younger, Edel would explode like a firework if she didn’t want to read the pamphlets and books Du Barry assigned, or go to bed before the first night star appeared, or eat the blood-strengthening foods made by our chef.

  My nurse doesn’t react. Her face bears no trace of what just happened. She presses the final button on the arcana meter. The word AGE glows and the number five appears. Amber marches back into the room holding an arcana meter. I wonder if her levels were similar. I wonder if she’s calmer now.

  Servants wheel in carts of porcelain jars with perforated lids. They lift them and reach silver tongs inside to retrieve black leeches out of freshwater. T
he sangsues. They wiggle and writhe, their suckers opening and closing, exposing tiny sharp teeth, as they’re placed on trays and presented to each of our nurses. Empty diamond-shaped vessels dot their backs. My insides twist with disgust. I should be used to them by now. We tended to the sangsues as children, mating them, learning how helpful their species is to Belles, discovering how they help keep our blood clean.

  “These look different. Bigger. Why the diamonds?”

  The nurse lifts one above my wrist. “They’re the same. Just bred to be larger and take more blood.” She pushes the leech near me. “The vessels help the sangsues filter and share more of their purifying secretions with you.” She dangles the leech over me.

  “No, I’ll do it,” I say. She hands me the silver instrument. “Only two.”

  She shakes her head and shows me four fingers. “Madam Du Barry’s orders. You broke protocol and your arcana level is low.”

  I squirm, just like the leech stuck in the grip of the tongs. I bite my bottom lip. The quicker I do it, the sooner I get to go to bed. Then it will be morning, and one step closer to when the favorite will be named.

  “Do I need to get the arm straps?” she asks.

  “No.” I hold my breath and place the creature on my left wrist. It stretches out, hooking around my wrist like a bracelet made of black pearls. Its bite feels like a pinprick. The tiny suckers pull at my skin and the vein beneath. A bloom of red glows under its thin black body. The diamonds fill with my blood. I set a second one on my neck, and it leaves behind a slimy trail like a streak of paint as it finds the thick vein right under my jawbone.

  “No more,” I tell her, and drop the tongs on the nearest side table. Padma whines about the biting. Hana starts to pant as three leeches affix themselves to the crook of her arm. Valerie sleeps through it all as they climb the flesh of her thigh.

  The nurse shakes her head at me, removing another pair of leeches from the porcelain jar. She puts one on my right wrist and the other on my forehead. I close my eyes, take deep breaths through my nose, and try to relax as the tiny creatures fill themselves with my blood and inject me with proteins to help increase my blood flow, reset my arcana level, and drain away the excitement of the day.

  8

  All night I drift in and out of dreams where I’m a child again and Maman is telling me stories about the Goddess of Beauty. I hear Maman’s voice and am swept into our old room. The red sill-lanterns flutter in the windows and bathe the walls with ruby light. Younger versions of Maman and I are curled up like sweet-rope bread in the bed.

  “Tell me about her?” asks a tiny me.

  Maman’s long hair falls in waves across the pillow. She pulls me closer, almost burying me in it. We don’t look like mother and daughter. The mothers and daughters in fairy tales match like a pair of socks, but we are opposites. Her skin alabaster, and mine golden brown. Her hair cherry red and straight; mine chocolate brown and curly. Her thin lips, my full ones. Whenever I ask why we look so different, she says, “We fit like puzzle pieces,” and reminds me that our eyes are the same amber hue. The only part that matters.

  “Why did Beauty create the Belles?”

  “At the beginning of the world, the God of the Sky fell in love with the Goddess of Beauty, which was easy to do. To call her beautiful would be too small a word.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “She would change herself. One day she might look like you, and another day, me. This entranced Sky. He liked all her incarnations. It made him feel like he was with a new woman every night. He wanted her all to himself, so he gave her compliments and promises and kisses, all that her heart desired.”

  “What did she want?”

  Maman rubs my cheek. “Beautiful things,” she says. “Clouds, a sun, a moon. And he told the God of the Ground to make delicious fruit in her honor.”

  “The pomegranates,” I say.

  “Yes.” She wraps one of my frizzy curls around her finger. “With his love, Beauty birthed all the children of Orléans and spent her days making them look perfect and unique from one another. But she started spending more time with them, leaving her beloved in the sky alone for long spells of time. He called her home, but she was busy tending to their children. She’d always tell him, ‘Soon, I’ll come.’ She lost track of time. So finally, he sent storms and rain and lightning down in anger. The land flooded. Many died.”

  “She should’ve just stayed up in the sky with him.”

  “Love isn’t a cage, petit,” she says. “It’s more like a post-balloon—sent off in a specific direction, but allowed to make its own path.”

  “A red post-balloon,” I say.

  “Of course, little fox.” She kisses my nose. “Shall I continue?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Beauty returned to her husband full of grief, and noticed he wasn’t sad. She discovered he’d troubled the skies over Orléans to lure her back, so she left him.” Maman pauses, lengthening her words like sweet dough, as my eyes grow wide with wonder. “She told him her only and true love was beauty. In furious anger, he cursed all of their children. He gave them skin the color of a sunless day, eyes the shade of blood, hair the texture of rotten straw, and a deep sadness that turned to madness. She would have had to work hard to restore them.”

  “Did she try?”

  Maman shushes me. “Do you want me to finish the story?”

  “Yes,” I whisper into her shoulder. “Please tell me.”

  “The hours she spent trying to fix her beloveds stretched into eternity after eternity, until . . .”

  The fire hisses in the hearth. I jump up.

  “She’s listening,” I whisper.

  “She is,” Maman replies, “always listening to us.”

  “What happened?”

  “She made us.” Maman circles her fingernail along my wrist, tracing the path of the vein there. “Her blood is inside you. Her arcana are inside us. She is inside us. We are blessed. We are destined to do the work she could not. We are her vessels.” She kisses my forehead.

  “Camille.”

  I wipe the sleep from my eyes, and it erases my dreams and the memories of Maman. Amber’s pale face looks back at me. She squeezes my hand under the blanket.

  “You awake?”

  “Yes, what’s wrong?” I whisper.

  “I wanted to apologize for earlier.” She smells like the orange-blossom treatment they always put in her hair to bring out the rich coppery color. “I just . . . I don’t understand what happened, and I get so . . .”

  “Worked up?”

  She thumps my shoulder playfully, then traces soft fingers over my forehead. “Yes.”

  “I don’t know what happened either,” I say.

  “You’re my best friend.” She scoots closer and reaches her arm over me. Right now she’s not the girl that fusses with me about the rules, the arcana, and court. She’s not the girl who is always competing with me. She is my sister.

  “And you’re mine.”

  “I just get worried.” She plucks the feeling right out of me, as if she’s listening to my heart. “I don’t want this to change us.”

  “Our whole lives will be different tomorrow.”

  “We have to still be me and you.” Our legs tangle together beneath the covers. “Promise me we’ll be all right.” Her lips tremble and her body shakes. The sobs come hard and fast.

  “We’re sisters. You’re my best friend. Nothing will ever change that.” I squeeze her hand tight. “Just breathe.”

  I take a handkerchief from the nightstand and try to clean her up. We take deep breaths together. The red flush leaves her cheeks.

  “How do you know we’ll ever see each other again?” she asks.

  “I can’t go the rest of my life without talking to you. I need you.”

  She smiles. “I need you, too. But—but—I just feel like this is—”

  “We will all be fine.”

  “But we all want to be the favorite—well, except
Edel.”

  We both chuckle.

  “Your maman was the favorite of our mamans’ generation—”she says.

  “And if I don’t get picked as the favorite, I hope you do,” I blurt out.

  “Really?”

  “Of course. Our mothers were best friends. That’s why we’re best friends. We must always be. That’s what they wanted.” I push away the tears that come with thoughts of Maman. She wouldn’t want me to waste them. She would want me to be happy that my exhibition went well. She would want me to focus on the things to come.

  She sighs. “I just don’t know if I can handle it.”

  “What?”

  “Losing.”

  “But what if it’s to me?”

  She clenches the covers. “I have to be the favorite.”

  “I want to be the favorite, too.”

  Silence coils between us.

  The redness returns to Amber’s cheeks. “You don’t understand.” She tries to roll out of the bed, but I catch her arm.

  “I do.” I pull her back toward me. “Stay. Don’t leave.”

  She sinks back under the covers with me. Her skin is still warm with anger. I roll over and bury my face in the pillow. She hugs me from behind, and twists a few of my curls around her finger like they’re ribbons on a pole. She whispers, “I’m sorry,” and then we’re little girls again, slipping in and out of each other’s beds, full of worries and wishes, falling into dreams of the future.

  I wake to sounds of steaming water splattering into a porcelain bowl. The scent of lavender mixed with rose drifts through my bedcurtains. My eyes flutter. The curtains are drawn slightly.

  “Good morning, Lady Camellia,” a servant whispers. She looks just like the others—pale white skin, brown eyes, rosy cheeks—except she has freckles.

  She helps me out of bed, careful not to wake Amber, who is sprawled out across the covers. I look around the room at the five other beds. The curtains around them remain closed.

  “Wash up, and I will take you to Madam. She’s waiting in the main salon.”

  I wipe the sleep from my face, and slip into the turquoise day dress set out for me. She returns and pulls my hair up into a simple, unadorned Belle-bun, and ties a cream-colored waist-sash around my middle.