It is the petals that she notices first.Stalking through the hallways with their needlessly high vaulted ceiling, Bexley is nearly to the courtyard when she notices the first one. It floats in from behind her on a breeze that smells like rain, and comes coasting to the marble floor at her feet with the laziest of ballerina-twirls. It comes in with purpose, almost like an omen. It is a princess-pale color, glittering somewhere between pink and purple; Bexley draws to a stop and regards it with suspicion, for it is a color, curl and shape of petal she has seen more than once before.
It makes her think—keenly—of a girl she once loved, a tryst that took place so many years ago it hardly seems real. The knowledge of it has stopped her in her tracks. The crowd splits around her, tired of waiting; then they rejoin to keep flowing around the girl who stands in the middle of the hall, staring down at the floor, perfectly still except for the flow of her platinum hair. The world has stopped. All that is left is the petal, looking back at her, and the rough beat of her heart, keeping time with the violin that seeps in from the courtyard.
She almost wants to leave. How many of her old friends have died? Acton is gone, and Florentine she hasn’t heard from in years; perhaps this petal, lonely as it is, is some ghostly sign of a girl long gone.
But then some particularly careless guest comes crashing into Bexley’s shoulder, and all at once she’s startled out of her trance. The music comes rushing back in at its real volume. The blood seeps back into her chest, where it’s meant to sit; and suddenly, almost aggressively, Bexley snaps her head back up and forces herself to focus on the world of the living once more.
It is a perfectly Solterran night—inky and hot, straining at its seams with the suggestion of mischief. And a perfectly Solterran party, brimming with more possibilities than any one attendee would know what to do with it. Despite the ghostly petal that Bexley blows out of her path, and the brief sting of melancholy that accompanies it, life today feels almost normal.
What wicked games they have here.
Florentine slips out of the crowd like a sword slips from its hilt. Or a leopard from the jungle—easy, practiced, smooth.
So smooth, in fact that Bexley almost does not realize how strange it is to see her, does not remember that just a minute ago she thought the girl-queen dead: everything about Florentine, from the petals that trail her to the wind-tangled hair to the bright, breathless smile, is familiar. Like a trail blazed a hundred years ago. A poem committed to memory.
“I think,” Bexley says softly, with a trickster’s smile, “that we have played far more wicked games ourselves.”
