It blazed enough to lessen the sound of the prince calling after me.
I made my heart as solid as the glass on my feet, so I would not hear him.
It would be better this way, whether the prince knew it or not. He needed to glance less at girls like me. How much better would the noblewoman’s pale daughter, in her pristine gown, look on a prince’s arm?
All I had to do was get far enough into the garden that I wouldn’t be seen. I couldn’t risk anyone watching me stand in las zapatillas de cristal, a swirling mist enveloping me. They might pull me from it before the magic could carry me off. Where I came from, we revered las brujas, but so many lands considered witch a condemning word, and I did not know if this was one of them.
The outside lamps gilded my skin and turned my dress to deep amber. They lit the bursts of roses and neat lines of bulb flowers.
But they did little to show the way out of the maze of hedges. Each tunnel of green looked the same as the one before.
My next step caught on a root, and I felt a sharp giving-out beneath me. It came with the sound of splintering glass. I fell forward to my knees, fine dirt paling the red of my skirt.
I twisted to inspect las zapatillas de cristal.
One of the heels had broken off, leaving a clear, jagged knife behind. The other had a deep crack through the arch that might break the slipper in two if I put more weight on it.
I slid out of las zapatillas de cristal. I chose a path and kept on in my stockings, the broken slippers in my hands.
The leaves flew by. Branches brushed my shoulder and scratched my arms.
I took the dark bend of a corner, and the sight of tulle and satin halted me.
At first, the scene before me gave the effect of a lovely and enormous dessert, an adorned cream puff. A frosted cake set in a nest of fairy floss. It was as though the confections from the ball had come to life and gone out to roam the gardens.
My eyes adjusted to the faint light.
A white gown.
A skirt the color and texture of a storm cloud.
A head of blond.
A braid of brown.
The noblewoman’s daughter, the one she wanted to throw into the prince’s arms.
She was in the cool darkness of the hedges, kissing a dark-haired girl in a dove-gray gown.
I stilled my breath so they wouldn’t hear me.
The way they kissed was so gentle and so fierce that I lifted my fingers to my own lips.
As I stood in the tulip-scented air, I thought of my mothers at this age, the age of these girls, the age I was now. How my mothers, too, had once hidden in the shadows of leaves. Yes, those leaves had trembled from ahuehuete trees and not from hedgerows, but in this light, they were closer to these girls than I ever would have noticed in daylight.
The thought opened into another, of all those who could meet only at night.
Of all the families la corrección rended like worn fabric.
Of the villages where families like ours resisted, their homes burned down to ashes.
I couldn’t usher my own family into the safety of this kingdom’s borders and think nothing for those left after us.
The deepening of the girls’ kiss thickened the guilt in me, until it grew into a current and became something else.
Resolve.
Nerve.
Will.
Las zapatillas de cristal knew my heart better than I did. They had stopped me from fleeing back into their mist.
They had brought me to the palace gardens, and now they would make me carry myself the rest of the way.
I left the enchanted glass beneath one of the hedges.
In my dirt-dusted stockings, I wound back through the hedge tunnels, back past the bulb beds, into the flow of light from the ballroom.
I lifted my skirt so I could dash up the stairs.
I burst through the garden doors.
The ball quieted.
The prince stared at me, looking as breathless as I felt. His gaze pinned me where I stood.
Seeing that kiss in the garden made my lips hot with wanting to be against his, to know what it might feel like. But I folded that thought into the bodice of my dress.
I walked to Their Majesties’ thrones, the crowd’s surprise opening a path for me. The king and queen were on their feet, talking to guards, who, for all I knew, were moments from being dispatched to look for me.
I curtsied as though they were seated to receive an audience. I dropped into a bow so low it set my knees against the marble floor. My skirt billowed around me like the cap of a milk mushroom.
“Your Majesties.” I lowered my head, both in respect, and so, whatever their expressions, they would not unnerve me. “I come here from a land that is being torn apart by what men in power think we should and should not be.” My heart beat in my neck like a moth in a jar. “My mothers live in fear of me being taken from them, and them being taken from each other. Our friends face the choice of losing their lovers or their lives.”
My skirt settled to the floor.
“We beg your help,” I said.
We. The word came out of me, slipping in place of any I.
“We beg you to open your kingdom to us.” I took a few breaths to get the air I would usually get from one. “We are hard workers. We keep at our crafts and our fields as though tending to our own bodies. Everyone like us, we will bring more to your kingdom than we will take from it.”
I meant it as truly as my own name. I would have staked my life on the trueness of those I came from, people la nobleza saw to be nothing more than nuisance.
I could feel the noblewoman’s glare, and the glare of so many others, on my back. They mixed with the puzzled interest of the rest.
Enough silence passed that my own curiosity lifted my chin.
The king and queen were looking not at me but at each other. The consideration on their faces seemed like a silent conversation between them.
I held my breath until the queen moved her attention to me.
“There will come a day when all such decisions will fall to our son.” She cast her eyes to the prince. “And it’s never too early to see how well he takes them in hand.”
The stares of the ballroom met at the young man in the gold waistcoat.
Panic took hold of his expression for only a second before he regained the composure of a prince.
“I think we must ask the opinion of everyone here,” he said.
Confusion crossed his parents’ faces.
Rage-tinted frustration bubbled up in me. Was this the way of this kingdom? Kings and queens passed the burden to princes, and princes passed it on to la nobleza?