TWO
A SOUL AT ODDS
Hours later, Luce leaned her elbows on the sill of the small stone casement window.
The village looked different from this second-story perch—a maze of interconnected stone buildings, thatched roofs angled here and there in something like a medieval apartment complex.
By late that afternoon, many of the windows, including the one Luce leaned out of, were draped with deep-green vines of ivy or dense boughs of holly that had been woven into wreaths. They were signs of the Faire taking place outside the city that evening.
Valentine’s Day, Luce thought. She could feel Lucinda dreading it.
After Bill had disappeared outside the castle, for his mysterious “night off,” things had happened very quickly: She’d wandered alone through the city until a girl a few years older than her appeared from nowhere to whisk Luce up a flight of dank stairs into this small two-roomed house.
“Draw away from the window, sister,” a high voice called across the room. “You’re letting in Saint Valentine’s draft!”
The girl was Helen, Lucinda’s older sister, and the smoky, confining two-roomed house was where she and her family lived. The chamber’s gray walls were bare, and the only furniture consisted of a wooden bench, a trestle table, and the stack of family sleeping pallets. The floor was strewn with rough straw and sprinkled with lavender—a meager attempt to clear the air of the foul smell from the tallow candles they had to use for light.
“In a moment,” Luce called back. The tiny window was the only place she didn’t feel claustrophobic.
Down the alley to the right was the marketplace she’d glimpsed before, and if she leaned out far enough, she could see a sliver of the white stone castle.
It haunted Lucinda, that tiniest tease of a view—Luce sensed this through the soul they shared—because on the evening of the day Lucinda first met Daniel in the rose garden, she’d come home and coincidentally seen him peering pensively out of the tallest tower casement. Since then, she watched for him every chance she got, but he never appeared again.
Another voice whispered: “What does she stare at for so long? What could possibly be so interesting?”
“The good Lord only knows,” Helen replied, sighing. “My sister is laden with dreams.”
Luce turned around slowly. Her body had never felt so strange. The part that belonged to medieval Lucinda was wilted and lethargic, flattened by the love she was certain she had lost. The part that belonged to Lucinda Price was holding fast to the idea that there might still be a chance.
It was a struggle to perform the simplest of tasks—like conversing with the three girls standing before her, alarmed expressions twisting their pretty faces.
The tallest one, in the middle, was Helen, Lucinda’s only sister and the oldest of five children in their family. She was newly a wife, and as if to prove it, her thick blond hair was divided into two braids and pinned in a matronly chignon.
At Helen’s side was Laura, their young neighbor, who Luce realized was the girl she’d overheard the two women gossiping about over the clothesline. Though Laura was only twelve, she was alluringly beautiful—blond with large blue eyes and a loud, saucy laugh that could be heard across the city.
Luce bit back a laugh, trying to reconcile Laura’s mother’s protectiveness with what Lucinda knew of the girl’s own experience—pressing palms with the page boys in the cool recesses of the lord’s wood. What Luce gleaned from Lucinda’s memories of Laura reminded her of Arriane. Laura, like the angel, was easy to love.
Then there was Eleanor, Lucinda’s oldest, closest friend. They’d grown up wearing one another’s clothes, like sisters. They bickered like sisters, too. Eleanor had a blunt edge, often slicing dreamy Lucinda’s reveries in two with a cutting remark. But she had a skill for bringing Lucinda back to reality, and she loved Lucinda deeply. It wasn’t, Luce realized, so different from her present-day relationship with Shelby.
“Well?” Eleanor asked.
“Well, what?” Lucinda said, startled. “Don’t all stare at me at once!”
“We’ve only asked you three times which mask you’re going to wear tonight.” Eleanor waved three brightly colored masks in Lucinda’s face. “Pray, end the suspense!”
They were simple leather domino masks, made to cover just the eyes and nose and tie around the back of the head with thin silk ribbon. All three were covered in the same coarse fabric, but each had been painted with a different design: one red with small black pansies, one green with delicate white blossoms, and one ivory with pale pink roses near the eyes.
“She stares as if she has not seen these same masks every one of her past five years of masquerading!” Eleanor murmured to Helen.
“She has the gift of seeing old things anew,” Helen said.
Luce shivered, though the room was warmer than it had been for most of the winter months. In exchange for the eggs the citizens had offered as gifts to the lord, he’d repaid each household with a small bundle of cedar firewood. So the hearth was bright and cheery, giving a healthy flush to the girls’ cheeks.
Daniel had been the knight tasked with collecting the eggs and distributing the firewood. He’d stridden through the door with purpose, then staggered back when he saw Lucinda inside. It was the last time medieval Lucinda had seen him, and after months of stolen moments together in the forest, Luce’s past self was certain she would never see Daniel again.
But why? Luce wondered now.
Luce felt Lucinda’s shame at her family’s meager accommodations—but that didn’t seem right. Daniel wouldn’t care that Lucinda was a peasant’s daughter. He knew that she was always and ever much more than that. There had to be something else. Something Lucinda was too sad to see clearly. But Luce could help her—find Daniel, win him back, at least for as long as she still had to live.