Page 39 of As Many Souls as Stars
Esther gently extracted her hands. Something about the way he’d touched her had made the hair on her arms stand on end. She told herself that was an instinct borne of the curse. She couldn’t let herself grow too close to Thomas, couldn’t allow him any sort of intimacy, or else she would lead him to disaster. At least this offer of friendship, as futile as it was, showed he had offered his guardianship in good faith. ‘Thank you.’
‘I sincerely hope you will be happy here.’
Her throat tightened. ‘As do I,’ she said, and suddenly she was utterly overwhelmed. ‘Excuse me, I must rest before supper.’
She entered the bedroom and shut the door in his face before he could reply.
Her room was lime green: lime-green wallpaper, lime-green furnishings, lime-green sheets and curtains. It made her feel queasy. The servants had laid out her cases, and she went to open one, removing one of her books—the first volume of Machiavelli’sThe Art of War. It was familiar to her, comforting. She sat on the bed to read. On the opening page, an ex libris had been pasted in, with the three-headed hawk of their family crest.
‘Past, present, future,’ Esther murmured, and then she turned the page.
Something moved on the wall opposite her. She knew she shouldn’t look, that granting it attention would only encourage it—darkness was childlike, in that way, poking and whining at her to elicit a reaction. Still, Esther glanced upwards. Two shadows were engaged in a curious play upon the wall. One had taken the form of an odd sort of beast—feminine and humanoid in shape, but with the feet and wingsof a bird. The other was a smaller woman in a wide-skirted gown. These silhouettes performed a fluid dance about each other, spinning up and down the walls, until the bird-woman suddenly widened her wings, grew a long beak, and swallowed her partner whole.
Esther felt her heart speed up with anxiety, but she was accustomed enough to the shadows that—although she feared them—she didn’t flee. Since she had first understood her curse, and first understood her father’s refusal to either acknowledge or aid her, she had learnt to make use of the dark; to bear the pain of her powers, albeit in small doses, so that she could make her miniature miracles. She tolerated its presence as best she could, and she told herself that one day, she would be rid of it entirely.
The shadow-figure paused. The bird-woman unhinged her jaw, and the woman in the gown crawled out of it, miraculously whole. She raised her hands to her throat as if in pain. In response, Esther felt her own throat close, a strange, burning ache growing at the skin there, as if it was bruised—she gasped, and then gasped more, horrified at how the air caught in her throat, as if she were suffocating.
‘Go away,’ she pleaded to the shadows on the wall, her voice hoarse, panicked. ‘Shoo now. Please. I do not know what—what is happening, but it hurts. Ithurts.’
The darkness hesitated—and then, chagrined, faded away.
The pain disappeared. Esther took a deep breath, relieved at the ease of it, and she put Machiavelli aside. She closed her eyes.All is well, she told herself.You are well. The shadows can’t touch you. Not unless you allow them to.
Once she had calmed, she opened her eyes again. Staring up at her ceiling, she found—curiously—that she had a melody stuck in her head.
‘For I am still thy lover true,’ she murmured, half singing, half whispering. ‘Come once again and love me.’
12
It wasn’t that Miriam had expected to gain much from her repeated visits to Esther Harding; in fact, she knew there was nothing to gain from them at all. There was only one thing that was required of her, and that was to wait until Esther’s time was up. Miriam wasn’t concerned that Esther would find a way to break the curse. That had never even been a consideration.
It would have been amusing, perhaps, to speak to her in human form—but Miriam was wary of reminding Esther of her past lives, of accidentally removing whatever mortal obstruction had prevented Cybil’s memories from resurfacing. By the time of her death, Cybil had been extremely powerful; now Esther was even more so. Once she realised that attempting to break the curse was futile, who knew what havoc she could wreak in search of an escape from the deal? No. Miriam had all she needed this way, watching her as a crow from the windowsill. She saw Esther’s pleasure, her pain, her confusion and regret. The deal had done its work well: Cybil and Esther were physically indistinguishable, save for the absence and presence of a few scars, and a slight gain in height that a more varied diet had afforded the latter. Now Esther was grown to the same age as Cybil had been, they were the same woman entirely. Perhaps Esther was somehow now evenmoreherself than she had been as Cybil, her soul reaffirmed with a second light, glowing even brighter than it had before. The shadows rejoiced in her presence, swarming to sip from the power that leaked through her skin.
With her father’s death—and wasn’t that fascinating? Esther’s life a dark mirror to Cybil’s, like a clock, hands pointing to the same number at two different times of day—Esther had quit the home of her childhood and found herself replanted within her cousin’s townhouse.
It hardly made much of a difference to Miriam, of course; one windowsill was much the same as any other. But on the first night of her residence there, Esther herself had seemed disquieted, tossing and turning in her sleep, fingers carving canyons into the sheets.
Miriam wanted to take pleasure in her distress, in the beauty of it, the sheer sensuality—but she knew what it forewarned. With each passing year, the weight of Cybil’s memories grew stronger, and Miriam was no longer confident that Esther would live and die without knowledge of her previous life. If it did not risk invalidating the deal, and starting the cycle anew, Miriam would kill her at this very moment: preserve the sleeping elegance of her lashes falling softly against her cheeks, her back arching as she bucked against the dream. But Miriam was confident another rebirth would only lead to disaster. One life was difficult enough to forget, let alone two.
The knob of Esther’s bedroom door turned—so slowly, so gently, that even Miriam almost did not notice someone was entering. But then a knife of flickering light sliced across the threshold. A shined-leather shoe pressed forward, then another; the man that followed had a bright soul, as bright as Christopher Harding’s once had been, although it was no match for Esther’s. He was brown-blond, and hawkish. The candle he held made his face a skull, light eyes lit golden. Miriam concentrated, and a soft touch upon his psyche revealed his name—Thomas Harding—as well as his purpose. Hatred, bitter bright, made his fingers twitch against the candlestick, his brows furrow, his steps stutter. He hated the woman in the bed with such intensity, such passion, that hedesiredher, too—he wanted to conquer her and ruin her. He blamed her for every disaster his life had ever had: the failed Company appointments; the death of his father; the death of his wife. One week had separated them at birth. Because of that week, the family gift hadbecome hers, magic denied to him forever. And that gift had not only been given to Esther, but twisted by her, corrupted ineffably. She was a First Daughter, and she was cursed. The Hardings were cursed.
Thomas crept forward and stood over Esther, watching her as she slept. His face was grim and furious. The candle wobbled in his shaking hand. Grimacing, he took care to right it.
Miriam fed upon the basest elements of humanity: regret, desperation, sadness, lust. For this reason, she had always recognised the darker emotions that had infected her creators. She felt satisfaction at others’ pain, fury at a lost cause, desire and hunger, as much as any person would. And now she saw something familiar in Thomas Harding’s expression, something she imagined was often in hers, in the moment before making a deal. He was uncertain—this was not a calculated visit, merely an impulse of obsession—but still, he remained as capable of destruction as Miriam was. He was capable of touching the candle to the sheet and setting it alight, or lunging forward to throttle Esther as she slept.
Miriam could not allow it. She shifted partly into shadows, making herself intangible, and went to step through the glass—then bounced back, feeling a stinging pain skitter across her feathers.
There was salt laid on the windowsill. Only a line of it, grain by grain, thin enough to be undetectable. But it was enough to forbid her entry. Enough to save Thomas Harding’s life for now.
Was this how it felt to be mortal, to be trapped and impotent, to see disaster approach and accept it as inevitable? Furious, Miriam pecked at the window with her beak, making a loud clunking sound. Inside, Thomas froze. Esther muttered to herself and shifted in her sleep.
Miriam cawed and pecked again at the window. A hairline crack appeared in the glass, and Thomas stepped back, candle shaking wildly in his hands. Miriam was tempted to continue and see the window shatter, but doing so wouldn’t remove the line of salt, or permit her entry. Instead, she focused on making as much noise as possible, cawing and shrieking, clawing at the window with her talons. The glass squealed as if in pain.
Thomas, eyes wide, spun away and ran out of the room. The door slammed shut behind him. Esther bolted up in the bed, gasping in shock, holding the sheet to her chest. She looked at the window.
‘Little shadow,’ she said, loudly enough that Miriam could hear her through the glass. ‘What are youdoing?’
She slid off the bed. Her nightdress, semi-sheer in the moonlight, clung invitingly to the round of her stomach, the lines of her thighs. But Miriam could hardly indulge herself—particularly not with a line of salt between them, and the cousin threatening his return.
