“It’s a curse,” she blurts out. “I purchased it from Madame LeFleur’s shop,” she goes on to explain. “It’s relatively harmless, don’t worry. But once every mooncycle, it’ll have you bleeding for a few days. And in pain.”

As if in answer, my abdomen and thighs throb and ache, like they did throughout the night.

I should be more furious than I am, but at the moment, I’m just glad not to be dying. Besides, Elegance’s words pique my curiosity. If she could purchase a curse that causes me to bleed once every mooncycle, what kind of curses might the Madame be willing to sell me?

I can think of a certain stepmother who might be in need of a curse.

“What do you want?” I ask, ready to accept my Fate at this point.

Elegance strides over to my chaise and sits down. Well, she doesn’t as much sit as she perches. Elegance has a way of making everyday movements seem like a stage production.

“Whatsoever do you mean, little sister?” she says in that sickly sweet tone that she only ever uses with me and her mother. I know that’s not her preferred voice, because I’ve heard her talk to men twice her age in that deep, sultry growl that makes her sound a decade older and wiser.

I place my hands on my hips. “I know you cursed me for a reason. What do you want in exchange for the antidote?”

“Oh!” She makes an exaggerated gesture with her hands, her tacky rings sparkling in the sunlight coming through my window. Elegance glances around my room, taking it in.

My heart deflates.

My bed is lovely, bloodstained sheets notwithstanding. It’s made of glazed oak and has four posts, each of which has a carving of merpeople at the top. The walls of my room are a pleasant lavender, and my mother purchased the pastel, multicolored rug from a Naenden merchant when she was expecting me.

It’s the largest room in the house, next to my father’s.

Elegance claps her hands together gently enough that they make no sound. I wonder if she spends her free time practicing making every motion, every gesture appear as delicate as possible.

I know what she wants before she asks for it.

In the end, I bargain away my room in exchange for the antidote, though Elegance informs me after the fact that it will take Madame LeFleur up to six months to brew.

I don’t feel good about brokering the deal, but what else am I to do? My father is too ill to bother him with it—I’m just grateful he’s lived as long as he has—and Clarissa will probably find the situation to be an amusing prank, “the sort of thing young girls are apt to do and must figure out between themselves.”

That was three mooncycles ago, and though Elegance hasn’t provided me with an antidote yet, and I’m stuck up in the attic (because Clarissa refused to move me into Elegance’s old bed, claiming Chrys needed a room to herself), when I wake two months in a row without blood staining my sheets, I can’t help but be grateful the curse has worn off on its own.

The next time I attempt cooking breakfast for my father, the noxious scent of eggs has me vomiting all over the kitchen floor.

I’m mortified, and once I clean it up, I inform the cook that the eggs must have gone rotten.

It happens again the next day.

By the third day, I’ve determined that our chickens must have contracted a disease.

It’s then that the cook pulls me aside and begins asking me strange questions. Like if the way of women has yet come upon me or if any of the servant men have asked me to do things for them I didn’t want to do.

I don’t know what the way of a woman is, but since I’m a burgeoning woman, I’m too embarrassed to admit to such ignorance, so I give her a vague answer about how all is normal. I’m not sure how to feel about the second question, but I don’t want to talk to her about that either.

It’s not entirely true that Derek has asked me to do things I didn’t want to do.

I just didn’t know I didn’t want to do them until they were happening.

Besides, Derek has tried to pull me into pantries and closets since that one night, but he always lets me go when I make up an excuse for why I have to meet Bruno or the head maid in a few minutes. And his anger with me always subsides by the next day.

So I lie to the cook and say no servant boy has asked me to do anything, and that I don’t know what she’s talking about.

From what I can tell, the cook got with the maid who cleans my bedsheets, and they both went to Clarissa, because now Clarissa is screaming at me and calling me a whore, and I don’t entirely understand why.

I have a feeling it has something to do with Derek, but she keeps mentioning that the maid says my cycle hasn’t come this month, and I don’t know what that is, why the maid would know about it, or what it has to do with Derek.

“You bring shame upon this family,” she says as she paces about my attic room, and I think it’s the first time she’s ever claimed me as family, at least in private.

The rotten floorboards creak underneath her weight, which isn’t very much and likely speaks poorly of the flooring.

I’m too embarrassed to admit that I’m not sure exactly what I’ve done. Rather, I’m not sure how they figured out what I’d done by the vomiting and my bedsheets.

“When we tell your father, it will kill him,” she says, and panic rises in my chest. “His poor heart can’t take it.”

I launch myself from my knobby mattress to my feet. A splinter from the floorboards punctures my bare heel, but I hardly feel it. Not when Clarissa’s voice is reverberating against my skull.

It will kill him it will kill him it will kill him.

“No, please, Clarissa. Don’t tell him. You don’t have to tell him. I’ll fix it,” I say, grasping at her tulle sleeves with such force that they tear. I stand there holding them, my mouth agape, the strands of fabric dangling from my hands like pieces of evidence to convict me.

Clarissa shrieks, grabbing the tulle from my hands. “You’ll fix it, will you? And how do you expect you’ll do that?”

It’s a troublesome question to answer, given that I don’t know exactly what the problem is.

In the moment it takes me to collect my thoughts, she answers for me. “Do you know how expensive of a procedure it is? Even the brew would cost one of my precious daughter’s dowries, and you expect me to spend it on you?”

I don’t expect that at all, actually. I don’t know why she supposes I would.

She almost runs her fingers through her perfectly shaped bun, but she stops herself, as if she realizes what’s she doing. “Well, that’s it. You’ll just have to marry him, then. If it’s done immediately, no one will suspect when the child comes. Well, everyone will suspect, but there will be no proof. Not when babes are born early all the time. And being so young, it’ll be reasonable to assume you’re quite fertile, that he succeeded in his attempts immediately after marriage…”

Clarissa is still muttering, but her words start to slur. Or maybe it’s my ears muffling them, my mind too hung up on a single word to process the rest.

Child.

When the child comes.

My hands creep toward my abdomen and cradle it.

Suddenly, a thousand eccentricities seem to click into place, sorting truths from lies in a way I’ve never found possible. Like there’s a key to determining which is which, and it’s been hidden from me my entire life.

Babies only come to married folk. Lie.

That one I’d known to be false. I’d seen the unmarried women who walked about with bulging stomachs, begging for scraps. I’d heard the whispered murmurs of passersby, that word Clarissa had just used. Whore.

I’d assumed they’d used some sort of dark witchcraft to give themselves a baby. That’s why everyone whispers and treats them like pariahs.

The blood on my sheets was due to a curse. Lie. What had Elegance said when she’d first seen the blood? That my mother hadn’t bothered to teach me anything?