The Fallen Sequence (107 page)

“Now aren’t you glad I made you take a bath?” Bill asked. “One less bottle of eau de reekette punching holes in l’ozone.”

Luce didn’t answer. She had entered a long hall of mirrors, and in front of her, a pair of women and a man
were crossing toward the entrance of a main room. The women didn’t walk, they glided. Their yellow and blue gowns practically swished across the floor. The man walked between them, his ruffled white shirt dapper under his long silver jacket and his heels nearly as high as the ones on Luce’s shoes. All three of them wore wigs a full foot taller than the one on Luce’s own head, which felt enormous and weighed a ton. Watching them, Luce felt clumsy, the way her skirts swung from side to side as she walked.

They turned to look at her and all three pairs of eyes narrowed, as if they could tell instantly that she had not been bred to attend high-society balls.

“Ignore them,” Bill said. “There are snobs in every lifetime. In the end, they’ve got nothing on you.”

Luce nodded, falling behind the trio, who passed through a set of mirrored doorways into the ballroom. The ultimate ballroom. The ballroom to end all ballrooms.

Luce couldn’t help herself. She stopped in her tracks and whispered, “Wow.”

It was majestic: A dozen chandeliers hung low from the faraway ceiling, glittering with bright white candles. Where the walls weren’t made of mirrors, they were covered with gold. The parquet dance floor seemed to stretch on into the next city, and ringing the dance floor were long tables covered in white linen, laid with fine
china place settings, platters of cakes and cookies, and great crystal goblets filled with ruby-colored wine. Thousands of white daffodils peeked out of hundreds of dark-red vases set upon the dozens of dining tables.

On the far side of the room, a line of exquisitely dressed young women was forming. There were about ten of them, standing together, whispering and laughing outside a great golden door.

Another crowd had gathered around an enormous crystal punch bowl near the orchestra. Luce helped herself to a glass.

“Excuse me?” she asked a pair of women next to her. Their artful gray curls formed twin towers on their heads. “What are those girls in line for?”

“Why, to please the king, of course.” One woman chuckled. “Those
demoiselles
are here to see if they might please him into marriage.”

Marriage?
But they looked so young. All of a sudden Luce’s skin began to feel hot and itchy. Then it hit her:
Lys is in that line
.

Luce gulped and studied each of the young women. There she was, third in line, magnificently wrapped in a long black gown only slightly different from the one that Luce herself was wearing. Her shoulders were covered with a black velvet capelet, and her eyes never rose from the floor. She wasn’t laughing with the other girls. She looked as frustrated as Luce felt.

“Bill,” Luce whispered.

But the gargoyle flew right in front of her face and shushed her with a finger to his fat stone lips. “Only crazies talk to their invisible gargoyles,” he hissed, “and crazies don’t get invited to many balls. Now, hush.”

“But what about—”

“Hush.”

What about going 3-D?

Luce took a deep breath. The last instruction he had given her was to take Lys by the hand.…

She strode over, crossing the dance floor and bypassing the servants with their trays of foie gras and Chambord. She nearly plowed right into the girl behind Lys, who was trying to cut ahead of Lys in line by pretending to whisper something to a friend.

“Excuse me,” Luce said to Lys, whose eyes widened and whose lips parted and let a tiny confused sound escape her mouth.

But Luce couldn’t wait for Lys to react. She reached down and grabbed her by the hand. It fit into her own like a puzzle piece. She squeezed.

Luce’s stomach dropped as if she’d gone down the first hill of a roller coaster. Her skin began to vibrate, and a drowsy, gently rocking sensation came over her. She felt her eyelids flutter, but some instinct told her to keep holding fast to Lys’s hand.

She blinked, and Lys blinked, and then they both
blinked at the same time—and on the other side of the blink, Luce could see herself in Lys’s eyes … and then could see Lys from her own eyes … and then—

She could see no one in front of her at all.

“Oh!” she cried out, and her voice sounded just as it always had. She looked down at her hands, which looked just as they always had. She reached up and felt her face, her hair, her wig, all of which felt the same as they had before. But something … something had shifted.

She lifted the hem of her dress and peeked down at her shoes.

They were magenta. With diamond-shaped high heels, and tied at the ankle with an elegant silver bow.

What had she done?

Then she realized what Bill had meant by “going three-D.”

She had literally stepped into Lys’s body.

Luce glanced around her, terrified. To her horror, all the other girls in line were motionless. In fact, everyone Luce looked at was frozen stiff. It was if the entire party had been put on Pause.

“See?” Bill’s voice came hotly in her ear. “No words for this, right?”

“What’s happening, Bill?” Her voice was rising.

“Right now, not a whole lot. I had to put the brakes on the party, lest you freak out. Once we’re straight on the three-D business, I’ll start it back up again.”

“So … no one can see this right now?” Luce asked,
waving her hand slowly in front of the face of the pretty brunette girl who’d been standing in front of Lys. The girl didn’t flinch. She didn’t blink. Her face was frozen in an unending openmouthed grin.

“Nope.” Bill demonstrated by wiggling his tongue near the ear of an older man, who stood frozen with an
escargot
poised between his fingers, inches from his mouth. “Not until I snap me fingers.”

Luce exhaled, once more strangely relieved at having Bill’s help. She needed a few minutes to get used to the idea that she was—was she
really—

“I’m inside my past self,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Then where did I go? Where’s my body?”

“You’re in there somewhere.” He tapped at her collarbone. “You’ll pop out again when—Well, when the time is right. But for now, you’ve slipped entirely inside your past. Like a cute little turtle in a borrowed shell. Except it’s more than that. When you’re in Lys’s body, your very beings are entwined, so all sorts of good stuff comes with the package. Her memories, her passions, her manners—lucky for you. Of course, you also have to grapple with her shortcomings. This one, if I recall, puts her foot in her mouth with some regularity. So watch out.”

“Amazing,” Luce whispered. “So if I could just find Daniel, I’d be able to feel exactly what she feels toward him.”

“Sure, I guess, but you do realize that once I snap my
fingers, Lys has obligations at this ball that don’t include Daniel. This isn’t really his scene, and by that I mean, no way the guards would let a poor stable boy in here.”

Luce didn’t care about any of that. Poor stable boy or not, she would find him. She couldn’t wait. Inside Lys’s body she could even hold him, maybe even kiss him. The anticipation of it was almost overwhelming.

“Hello?” Bill flicked a hard finger against her temple. “You ready yet? Get in there, see what you can see—then get out while the getting’s good, if you know what I mean.”

Luce nodded. She straightened Lys’s black gown and held her head a little higher. “Snap to it.”

“And … 
go.
” Bill snapped his fingers.

For a split second, the party snagged like a scratched record. Then every midconversation syllable, every whiff of perfume being carried through the air, every drop of punch sliding down every bejeweled throat, every note of music from every player in the orchestra, picked up, smoothed out, and carried on as if nothing in the world had happened.

Only Luce had changed. Her mind became assaulted by a thousand words and images.
A sprawling thatch-roofed country house in the foothills of the Alps. A chestnut-colored horse named Gauche. The smell of straw everywhere. A single long-stemmed white peony laid across her pillow. And Daniel. Daniel. Daniel. Coming
back from the well with four heavy buckets of water balanced from a pole laid across his shoulders. Grooming Gauche first thing every morning so Lys could take him for a ride. When it came to small, lovely favors for Luce, there was nothing Daniel overlooked, even in the midst of all the labor he did for her father. His violet eyes finding her always. Daniel in her dreams, in her heart, in her arms
. It was like the flashes of Luschka’s memories that had come to her in Moscow when she’d touched the church gate—but stronger, more overwhelming, intrinsically a part of her.

Daniel was here. In the stables or the servants’ quarters. He was here. And she would find him.

Something rustled near Luce’s neck. She jumped.

“Just me.” Bill flitted over the top of her capelet. “You’re doing great.”

The great golden doors at the head of the room were eased open by two footmen, who stood at attention on either side. The girls in line in front of Luce began to titter with excitement, and then a hush swept the room. Meanwhile, Luce was looking for the fastest way out of here and into Daniel’s arms.

“Focus, Luce,” Bill said, as if reading her mind. “You’re about to be called into duty.”

The strings of the orchestra began playing the baroque opening chords of the
Ballet de Jeunesse
, and the whole room shifted its attention. Luce followed
everyone else’s gaze and gasped: She
recognized
the man who stood there in the doorway, gazing out at the party with a patch over one eye.

It was the Duc de Bourbon, the cousin of the king.

He was tall and skinny, as wilted as a bean plant in a drought. His ill-fitting blue velvet suit was ornamented with a mauve sash to match the mauve stockings on his twig-thin legs. His ostentatious powdered wig and his milky-white face were both exceptionally ugly.

She didn’t recognize the duke from some photograph in a history book. She knew far too much about him. She knew
everything
. Like how the royal ladies-in-waiting swapped bawdy jokes about the sad size of the duke’s scepter. About how he’d lost that eye (hunting accident, on a trip he’d joined to appease the king). And about how right now, the duke was going to send in the girls whom he’d preselected as suitable marriage material for the twelve-year-old king waiting inside.

And Luce—no, Lys—was an early favorite of the duke’s to fill the slot. That was the reason for the heavy, aching feeling in her chest: Lys couldn’t marry the king, because she loved Daniel. She had loved him passionately for years. But in this life, Daniel was a servant, and the two of them were forced to hide their romance. Luce felt Lys’s paralyzing fear—that if she took the king’s fancy tonight, all hope of having a life with Daniel would disappear.

Bill had warned her that going 3-D would be intense,
but there was no way Luce could have prepared for the onslaught of so much emotion: Every fear and doubt that had ever crossed Lys’s mind swamped Luce. Every hope and dream. It was too much.

She gasped and looked around her at the ball—anywhere but at the duke. And realized she knew everything there was to know about this time and place. She suddenly understood why the king was looking for a wife even though he was already engaged. She recognized half the faces moving around her in the ballroom, knew their stories, and knew which ones envied her. She knew how to stand in the corseted gown so that she could breathe comfortably. And she knew, judging from the skilled eye she cast on the dancers, that Lys had been trained in the art of ballroom dancing from childhood.

It was an eerie feeling, being in Lys’s body, as if Luce were both the ghost and the one haunted.

The orchestra came to the end of the song, and a man near the door stepped forward to read from a scroll. “Princess Lys of Savoy.”

Luce raised her head with more elegance and confidence than she’d expected, and accepted the hand of the young man in the pale-green waistcoat who had appeared to escort her into the king’s receiving room.

Once inside the entirely pastel-blue room, Luce tried not to stare at the king. His towering gray wig looked silly poised over his small, drawn face. His pale-blue eyes leered at the line of duchesses and princesses—all
beautiful, all dressed exquisitely—the way a man deprived of food might leer at a pig on a spit.

The pimply figure on the throne was little more than a child.

Louis XV had assumed the crown when he was only five years old. In compliance with his dying father’s wishes, he’d been betrothed to the Spanish princess, the infanta. But she was still barely a toddler. It was a match made in Hell. The young king, who was frail and sickly, wasn’t expected to live long enough to produce an heir with the Spanish princess, who herself might also die before reaching childbearing age. So the king had to find a consort to produce an heir. Which explained this extravagant party, and the ladies lined up on display.

Luce fidgeted with the lace on her gown, feeling ridiculous. The other girls all looked so patient. Maybe they truly
wanted
to marry the acne-ridden twelve-year-old King Louis, though Luce didn’t see how that was possible. They were all so elegant and beautiful. From the Russian princess, Elizabeth, whose sapphire-velvet gown had a collar trimmed in rabbit’s fur, to Maria, the princess from Poland, whose tiny button nose and full red mouth made her dizzyingly alluring, they all gazed at the boy king with wide, hopeful eyes.

But he was staring straight at Luce. With a satisfied smirk that made her stomach turn.

“That one.” He pointed at her lazily. “Let me see her up close.”

The duke appeared at Luce’s side, gently shoving her shoulders forward with his long, icy fingers. “Present yourself, Princess,” he said quietly. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

The Luce part of her groaned inwardly, but on the outside, Lys was in charge, and she practically floated forward to greet the king. She curtseyed with a perfectly proper bow of her head, extending her hand for his kiss. It was what her family expected of her.