And if I was going to gather myself enough to beg an audience with Their Majesties, I needed air.
I set myself toward the garden doors. The pinprick nervousness of having been so close to the prince lingered.
It mixed with the terror of holding my family’s fate.
The air through the open doors washed the heat from my face. It brought the kiss of night flowers and the clean smell of the moon.
“I suppose there’s no accounting for taste,” came a voice as tart as a green apple.
My pride rose to meet her tone. It broke through the brittle shell of fear between my dress and my skin.
“Do you mean my taste,” I asked, glancing first down at my dress, then into the ballroom, “or his?”
A woman, younger than my mothers but not by much, stepped into the light of a garden lamp. The yellow of her hair matched the shade of her gown.
She surveyed my gown, and suddenly it felt pieced together from scraps of ribbon.
“You’re one of these country people fleeing into our kingdom, aren’t you,” she asked. It was worded as a question without being spoken as one.
I lifted my chin, meeting her eyes.
“Oh, calm yourself.” She let out a tinkling laugh as she set a wineglass to her lips. “I have a proposition I think you’ll like.”
I didn’t reply.
She seemed undeterred.
“The first thing you should know is that the true currency of court is not money, but favors.” She took another sip of wine. “And I would call in a few I’m owed to ensure your family’s lawful place in this kingdom. That is, should you decide to do a favor for me.”
My throat tightened. “What would you want from a country person?”
I wanted my voice to match hers, as brisk and sour as an underripe plum.
“The prince seems taken with you,” she says.
I bristled at how wrong she was. The prince had chosen to dance with a girl who seemed ill at ease. He had been kind, not interested.
“All you need do is dance once more with him,” she said, “let him say whatever ridiculous things boys his age come up with, and then”—she waved a ring-jeweled hand—“let’s say at midnight, when everyone is still here to witness it, flee from him, and the palace, and never see him again.”
I should have been flattered that she was so threatened by a single dance that she couldn’t wait to be rid of me. Did they believe such cuentos de hadas in this kingdom? Stories of princes gazing across ballrooms and falling, instantly, in love?
Maybe it was something smaller and sharper than that.
Maybe this woman simply couldn’t stand having her kingdom’s prince near a girl like me.
It was a tiny mirroring of la corrección.
As tolerant as la nobleza seemed to be of a prince who had once endured a wrong name and now had a true one, a prince who did not bind his chest under his shirt, maybe that was all it was beneath the polite posturing. Tolerance. A begrudging acceptance. They probably considered him unusual enough (and they probably would have used a word like that too—unusual, said with a mild sneer). It would be too much for them to see the prince also show interest in a brown-skinned girl who did not know better than to wear a red gown.
What this noblewoman asked was not meant to dissuade him from wanting me. It had little to do with me, and more with what I was.
What this noblewoman asked was meant to show the prince that girls like me were inconstant, deceitful, cruel even.
And it was meant to cure him of any interest in us.
“But how would any of that help you?” I asked. There must have been more than her wanting to give the prince a morality lesson.
“I don’t see how that’s your business,” she said.
“It is if I’m putting my family’s survival in your hands,” I said.
Something glinted within her, like the edges of the jewels at her neck.
Respect, in some small measure.
She inclined her head toward the glow of the ball.
“My daughter”—she gestured a delicate hand toward a girl in an ice-white gown—“she would make a fine princess, don’t you agree?”
The girl had the willfully bored look of so many noble daughters. She was sighing and glancing around, as though waiting for some signal that would allow her to leave.
“And how would this help her?” I asked. “Even if I’m gone, I’m sure there are dozens of other girls waiting.”
“A little heartbreak at just the right moment can be good for a man,” the woman said. “It can bring on an instinct to settle down. And if I know the moment that instinct is to come, how much better for me and my daughter? While so many other girls who would love to be princesses are standing around being sour about you, my daughter will be patient, and ready.”
A small protest bucked within me. Not so much the thought of being used by la nobleza; la corrección was proof that the nobility of my kingdom used its own just as thoughtlessly.
It came more from the idea of leaving this cut on the prince’s heart. Not because I owed him anything. But because he seemed the kind of prince who would never let la corrección stand in his own kingdom.
My hesitation sank beneath all I would gain. Safety for my family, without ever having to approach the king and queen. Because who knew if that would come to anything anyway? I could so easily err in my speech and ruin the only chance my family had.
No. This was the way of the world, how things came to be. Not by kneeling before sovereigns, but by small bargains made, with those who wanted what little I had to give.
“And what assurance do I have that you’ll keep your word?” I asked.
“A very simple one,” the noblewoman said. She did not seem insulted. “I need you to remain vanished forever. Never approach the palace or the prince again. If I should fail my side of the bargain, you wield the threat of reappearing. And should you reappear…” She inclined her head.
I caught the edge of the threat, like knocking my hip on the corner of a table.
On her way back toward the doors, the woman eyed the glittering glass on my feet. “Lovely shoes.”
Later, when the prince approached me again, my guilt was weighing down las zapatillas de cristal. But I let my skirts sweep over it as he drew me into his arms.
And I trod it down when, at the clock’s twelve chimes of midnight, I slipped from our dance and dashed from the ball.
I sprinted for the garden doors, the thought of my family humming in my chest. Yes, we would live as strangers in this kingdom, but we would live, together, free from la corrección. I would bring the news home, and it would burn bright enough to keep the shame of my own cowardice off my skin.