Cosima's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

The path under the rose led to a wing of the castle where the air smelled of beeswax and cut flowers. A servant opened a door and told Cosima these were her chambers now. The room was larger than the farmhouse. A four-poster bed stood against one wall. A trunk of clothes she had not packed sat at its foot. Cosima stood in the doorway and did not step inside. She thought of Eleanor in a cell somewhere below her feet, and she thought of the four names in the red book. She had picked the rose path because a rose seemed least likely to cut her. She did not yet know if that was true. The housekeeper arrived first. Lizbeth Thorne wore a ring of iron keys at her belt and a plain apron. She walked the room once, opened the wardrobe, checked the water pitcher, and turned to Cosima. "You eat at the hour the bell rings," she said. "You answer to no one in this room but yourself. If a maid comes in without my say, you tell me." She paused at the door. "Court is full of kind hands. Watch the ones that reach for you first." Then she left. Cosima sat on the edge of the bed and did not know what to do with her own arms. Princess Rosalie came an hour later, alone, without announcement. She carried a folded gown over one arm. Her hair was the color of wheat and her eyes were steady. "I'm Rosalie," she said. "One of the four. I thought you'd rather meet me here than in a hall." She set the gown on a chair and sat across from Cosima without asking. She asked about the farm. She asked what Cosima had grown, what she had eaten that morning, what her mother's hands looked like. Cosima answered in pieces. She let the quiet do half the work. Rosalie did not push. After a while, Cosima reached up without thinking and touched the chain at her neck, the way she always did when she was tired. Rosalie's eyes followed her hand. "May I see it?" Cosima drew the pendant out from under her collar. A teardrop emerald in a silver setting, vines around the stone, small marks etched into the edge. Eleanor had put it on her as a child and told her never to take it off. Rosalie went still. "Where did you get this?" Rosalie asked. Her voice had dropped. Cosima told her the truth, that her mother had given it to her, that she had worn it as long as she could remember. Rosalie did not touch the pendant. She looked at the marks along the edge. "These are old letters," she said. "My tutor showed me drawings of them once. They belonged to the first queen of Eradonia. There's a story that her line carried a stone like this, passed from mother to daughter." She lifted her eyes to Cosima's. "My father has never seen this on you. Has he." It was not a question. Cosima closed her hand around the pendant. She had walked the rose path to learn one sibling. She had learned, instead, that the necklace under her shirt was older than the king on the throne, and that Rosalie had known what it meant the second she saw it. The choice was no longer only about a husband or a wife. It was about who in this castle she let see the stone next.