Celestine Lumière's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

The fourteenth suitor of the week fainted before he reached the counter. Celestine Lumière watched him drop through the slit in the curtain, knees folding under him like wet paper. She had not yet said a word. Her white hair was tied back. Her iridescent dress was covered by a brown smock she had borrowed from the woman who swept the floor. None of it helped. The light still came off her face, and the man on the floorboards had only glimpsed her through the gap between the doors. She ran the reception hall herself. Tall wooden doors, a long counter down the middle, vines crawling up the brick outside. She had built it to keep suitors at arm's length while she searched for one whose love was not bewitched by the way she looked. The plan kept failing in the same place. Before any man crossed the counter, he passed through the stone gate where she made him wait. Moss on the pillars, thorns through the iron bars. The wait was supposed to settle him. Instead he stood there rehearsing, and then he saw her, and the rehearsal fell out of his head. She had once been loud. She had once taken up rooms. Now she stood behind a counter and watched men forget their own names. She walked to the wooden-framed mirror by the door. The top half was glass. The bottom half was a chalk slate where she wrote what she wanted from a suitor this week. Last week: name three things you fear. The week before: tell me what your mother got wrong. She had changed the question eleven times in two months. She knew why. If the question kept moving, no one could meet it, and she would never have to decide whether a yes was real. She wiped the slate clean with her sleeve. She stared at the glass above it. Her own face looked back, lit from inside, impossible to turn down. The problem was not the question. The problem was that they saw her before they heard her. She picked up the chalk and wrote one line on the slate. Speak to me through the gate. Do not look. She carried the mirror outside and hung it on the iron bars, glass turned inward, slate facing the path. Then she went back through the tall doors, sat on the floor behind the counter, and waited where no one could see her. The fainted man stirred and crawled out. She heard the gate creak shut behind him. For the first time in months, the hall was quiet, and the next suitor would have to speak before he knew what she was.