“Graces!” Mistress Lavender sails into the room, clapping twice. “That’s quite enough.”
“It’s her fault. Look at what she did to me!” Rose bares her inky teeth. Her tongue looks like a garden slug.
Mistress Lavender sighs, beleaguered. “Alyce, really.”
“This is intolerable,” Rose continues. “I cannot be expected to work in a house that—”
“Rose, go and clean up.”
“But—”
“I trust you have your schedule from Delphine. You don’t want your patrons to see you looking like that.” Mistress Lavender straightens her bodice. “I’ll deal with your sister.”
“She’s not our sister.” Rose flings her napkin onto the crumbly pastry remains on her plate, pinches Marigold’s elbow, and stalks away, her dog trotting at her heels. Laurel follows mutely behind them, shooting me a sympathetic look.
“I don’t understand you, Alyce.” Mistress Lavender perches in the always-empty seat beside me. Her gaze—silver now that she’s Faded—is tempered with accusation. “Why do you insist on making a target of yourself?”
“Me?” My blood begins to heat. “Rose hates me. All of them do. I’m too…different.”
The word presses against my eardrums and my temples begin to throb. My “sisters” are Graces, able to grant hundreds of prized attributes with mere drops of their blood. I study the reptilian green veins marring the backs of my hands. Next to the Graces, I’m like the sludge staining Rose’s teacup: a nuisance someone else has to clean up.
“That may be.” Mistress Lavender risks a tentative touch on my arm. The amethyst ring on her first finger, denoting her status as housemistress of Lavender House, glints. “But you earn your keep in this house. You have value, Alyce.”
I snort. “Curses?”
“All magic has a purpose.” A refrain I’ve heard a hundred thousand times. As if it’s possible to somehow gloss over the fact that the purpose of my magic seems to be to do harm. “And it isn’t as if you lack for patrons. Lavender House rose three rankings once you Bloomed. Surely that’s worth something. Even to you.”
I clench my fingernails into my palms. It isn’t.
There are about twenty Grace houses in Briar, each with anywhere from three to thirty Graces. Every year, the Grace Council—a handful of noblemen selected by the king and tasked with regulating the Grace system—determines the rank of those houses based on a number of factors: the tabulation of each house’s yearly earnings, accuracy and precision of its Graces’ elixirs, growth from the previous year, patron loyalty, and a hundred other things, it seems. Official rankings are announced at the Grace Celebration thrown at the palace each spring. High-ranking houses accrue royal favor and increased patronage. Exceptional Graces and housemistresses are recognized with gifts and more desirable house placements. Mistress Lavender, obsessed with earning a position at a more prestigious house, drills our weaknesses into us at every opportunity.
“I don’t give a dragon’s ass—”
“Mind your attitude, my dear.” Mistress Lavender squeezes a warning into my shoulder. “That’s no way to speak of your house. You earn triple the coin of your sisters. Why don’t you spend some of your wages on…well…” She looks around the room, like the answer might be written on the floral-papered walls. “Perhaps you’d like to wear something a trifle more…becoming?”
Yes, because a change of dress would instantaneously reverse the ostracism I’ve endured for twenty years. But at least Mistress Lavender didn’t suggest letting Rose try to alter my appearance or Marigold school my manners with one of their elixirs. My childhood was riddled with excruciating failed attempts to conceal my macabre blood, resculpt my bones, and cool my temper. They all slid off me like oil from water, leaving me exactly as I am now: stringy, jet-black hair that refuses to stay in any sort of passable arrangement; dry, tissue-thin skin; a figure as flat and bland as dry toast; and a temperament that’s only festered over the years.
“I don’t need new clothes.” I’ve no patience for such fripperies. And, in truth, I think my patrons enjoy seeing me this way. A hideous half-Vila in stained, musty clothes.
“Well.” Mistress Lavender pats a stray silver ringlet back into place. Before she Faded, our housemistress was gifted in wit. And I know she’s trying her best to access the dregs of that power and sway me to her side. But the attempt is useless. I’ll never be like the others.