“And admit what I’ve done? Admit what I allowed him to do? To those girls—to me?” She shook her head. “No, Verity. No.” She grabbed the bottle and took a long swig directly from it.
“Why did you let him?” I asked quietly. “You must have known all those medicines, all those shots…they weren’t normal.”
Dauphine hummed in agreement. Her skin, normally so lustrous, had a slightly green pallor to it and her eyes were vague and unfocused. “I knew,” she confirmed. “I knew everything he was doing and I let him.” She swallowed back a cry. “I let him because I was a stupid, young girl and I believed in him. I believed in everything he was doing, everything he sought to achieve.” She let out a short laugh. “I was so, so stupid.”
“But what is he trying to do? We found some of his papers. We know he wants to talk to the gods, but why?”
She stared at me, a look of disgust crossing her face. “He’s not trying to talk to the gods, Verity. He’s trying to create one.”
My stomach lurched, remembering the babies in the jars. The gills. The horns. “That’s impossible.”
“Not for Gerard. Not with all those golden women. He just needed to find the right combination.” She looked at me meaningfully.
A shudder ran through me and I finished off the last of my glass, wanting to slip into the wine’s hazy embrace and let it dull everything into muted shades of apathy.
This was all so much bigger than I feared. Bigger than I could handle.
I wanted to get back to Chauntilalie.
Back to Alex.
I didn’t want to be the only one with this knowledge.
“Gerard had a little sister. Did you know that?” Dauphine asked, her voice sounding dreamy and distant.
“I didn’t.”
“Emilee.” She continued on as if my answer meant very little to her. “His father was a very devout man. Allister worshipped Arina with single-minded reverence. To him, the gods were without fault and could do no wrong. For all his piety, he was a very cruel man. He turned a blind eye toward the suffering of others. He said it was their fault, that if they’d only been more devout, more pious, sorrows wouldn’t plague them.”
“What happened to Emilee?” I asked, cringing from her answer even before Dauphine spoke.
“She was born without hands. Rather than let the people in town wonder what the great and mighty Allister Laurent had done to displease Arina, Gerard’s father drowned Emilee in the koi pond before she was a week old. She’s buried down by the lake, in the grove where Gerard planted the red buds. He said their blooms reminded him of her little pink cheeks.”
“That’s horrible,” I whispered.
“Gerard stopped praying to the gods that day.” Dauphine sipped the wine with a glassy stare. “He saw them as flawed beings, neither omnipotent nor infallible. He noticed all of the ways our world—the world that they created—was wrong. And he wanted to right it.”
She set the wine bottle on the table.
“He started small, tinkering with plants, making little changes to improve their faults, then moved on to bigger things. He met me when I was just sixteen.” She sighed with a smile, somehow still remembering those days happily. “He was so dashing and charismatic. I adored him. I would have done anything he asked.” Dauphine paused. “I did do everything he asked…and it worked. We had three sons and…you should have seen them all when they were born, Verity. They really were golden. They glowed with importance. You could see that these were beings who were going to change the world.”
“But you banished them. You sent Julien and Viktor away.”
She nodded, looking ill. “You can say you want to bring down the stars, but you’ll never understand how their fires will burn until you do.”
She picked up the bottle and drank from it. One swallow. Another. Another after that.
“Bring down the stars?” I echoed, squirming as memories of my dream—my nightmare—rushed over me. A flush of shame burned through my cheeks, as blazing as the fires Dauphine mentioned. “We need to go,” I decided. I’d learned all I cared to and wanted to be done. “We need to go now.”
“There’s no more wine,” Dauphine said, tipping the bottle upside down. Not a drop spilled from it. “We never did learn that girl’s name. Hello?” she said, raising her voice. “Hello out there. Oh, where is she?”
I tried to stop her as she pushed her chair from the table, kicking shards of glass underfoot, but her arms were slippery. Slippery and sweaty and I supposed my hands were too. When had it become so hot?
When Dauphine tried to stand, she crashed back with an ungainly thud. “Oh. That didn’t work right.” Lines furrowed her brow, and for a moment, she looked as ill as I felt. “This…this isn’t working right.” But then she licked her lips and broke into a fit of giggles, her laughs pitched too high, too loud, too much, and then cried out, “Hello? Yes. In here! We need…”
“Help,” I murmured, supplying her with the right word, before the walls tipped all the way over, swallowing me whole. “Help us. Help…me…”
She snorted, shushing me. “We don’t need help. We need more wine!”
Alex’s bed was massive, sprawling out twice as wide as it was long and topped by a coverlet in charcoal velvet. It felt sinfully luxurious as I made my way across it, crawling over the tufted peaks as though I were an intrepid adventurer, climbing an uncharted mountain. Picturing myself outfitted in olive drab gabardine and goggles, I giggled.
Alex stirred.
“Verity?” he whispered, his voice fuzzy with sleep. “Where have you been all day? We thought you’d be home hours ago.”
“I was with Dauphine,” I sang, as beautiful as any nightingale. “We tried on my wedding gown.” Another giggle. “Well. Not we. Me. I tried on my wedding gown and she helped.” I hiccupped. “Alex, it’s so pretty. It’s so pretty and long and white and pretty and you should see it. You will. You will see it.”
He sat up, scratching his hair. It was deliciously rumpled. “Are you…are you drunk?”
“No! No. I don’t think so. Well. There was a bottle of wine. Two. Maybe three? But that was hours ago. I think. What time is it?” The world floated around me, feeling too large and unwieldy to properly focus open. I fixed my eyes on Alex, letting the rest of the room fade into dizzying chaos.
He adjusted the bolster pillows behind him, propping himself upright. “Can you open the curtains? I can’t see the clock from here.”
“It must be late. It feels terribly late,” I decided, doing as he bid. I nearly crashed into a wingback chair that suddenly sprouted up from the floor like a flower. When I pulled open the drapes, rays of sunlight raced into the room, blinding me. “Oh. Or not.”
“No,” he agreed, squinting. “I waited for you and Mother to return all morning. I’ve been so anxious to see what she said.”
“She said,” I repeated. “She said…you’re in bed.” I giggled at my rhyme.
Dark lines creased his forehead. “Another round of muscle spasms.”