Eli used to wonder what it felt like to dance to death. Were they happy at the end, those mortals who collapsed on bleeding feet and rose to join the spectral host? Or did they weep, sobbing quietly as their bodies moved against their will?
He never found an answer. Eli’s father died before Eli had the chance to ask, his spine broken on a hunt in a forest not far from Duciel. Eli had been there that day, waiting in a stranger’sdrawing room for his father to return. He never even saw his body.
The storybooks remained on their high shelves. Eli’s older brother Sabre disappeared into his room and refused to eat, and his mother threw off her mourning veils as soon as she came inside and would bang her fist on Sabre’s door until they were both half screaming at each other. Eli would crawl under the bed in the nursery, clap his hands over his ears, and pray that his father would come back to fix it all, but he never did. There were no brave and noble knights like the ones Eli’s father would pretend to be when he taught Sabre history or told Eli stories of old Staria. There weren’t any kings who were good and kind, no more fathers who stroked their children’s hair and whispered bad dreams away, and no wild dances in hidden fields and valleys. It all disappeared with Eli’s father, and nothing was ever right again.
Sometimes, Eli dreamt of walking in an empty field at twilight, with fireflies rising from the tall grass as a figure watched the horizon on the other side of the field. Every time Eli had the dream, he would spend the entire time trudging through the grass, desperate to reach the figure, but he never seemed to come any closer. When he asked his mother what it meant, she told him to stop being childish, and that dreams meant nothing.
Eli’s mother turned to Eli when Sabre proved too recalcitrant to cooperate. She taught him to dance. He learned to waltz and curtsy, bow and smile, and spent hours getting fitted for frilly little dresses with bows on the front. He tried to explain that he wasn’t actually a girl like everyone thought, but as soon as he said it, his mother’s face crumpled.
“Can’t I have one thing?” she wailed, as Eli stood there in shock, unsure what to do. “Arthur got everything,everything. He had Sabre, he had the queen, he had the king. I had one girl, one little girl who could be mine!”
“I’m sorry,” Eli said, softly, and reached out to stroke her hair, just as his father used to pet his when he was upset. She slapped his hand away, and Eli jumped back, breathing hard. He didn’t understand his mother—she wasn’t soft and kind like his father was, and she didn’t laugh or smile easily. Still, he wanted her to love him, so he remained quiet, bearing through the endless dress fittings and dance lessons.
“Maybe I can be a boy now,” he said when he was twelve, waltzing with her across the empty family ballroom. “Now that you’re used to me.”
But that wouldn’t do. Aline de Valois had plans, and if Eli came out, that meant disrupting them so he could be presented to society all over again. No, she insisted. It was best to wait another year.
But then the next year, Aline came to Eli with a note crumpled in both hands and promises that everything would change, soon. The king had killed Eli’s father, she said, and now she finally had a plan to take him down—with Eli’s help.
“When it’s all over, you’ll be queen,” she said, clutching Eli to her chest.
“King,” Eli said, but Aline didn’t hear him. No one had listened to him since Arthur de Valois died, but maybe soon, that would change.
“They call it dancing,”a guard said on Eli’s sixteenth birthday, as he hauled Eli up the wooden steps to the gallows in the main square. “What your body does when it falls.”
“Don’t speak to her like that,” Sabre snapped. He was being secured to a noose at Eli’s side, and his fingers tensed and flexed as Eli passed like he wanted to reach out for him.
“Be silent,” their mother said.
Eli looked over the crowd of people who’d gathered to watch them die and thought of the storybook covered in dust in the unused nursery. The illustrations of the Wild Hunt had seemed like this, the revelers’ faces caught between glee and malice, storm clouds roiling on the horizon.
He could dimly hear Sabre begging the guards to let him hold his hand.
Did you love me?he wanted to ask.All this time? Or are you only afraid of losing me?
The king sent a page to the gallows, and even though Eli called out to Sabre as he was taken back to the king, he knew it was no use. He seemed so small, for a man with the body of a fighter. The palace loomed over him, its shadow falling over where the king sat. A pang of betrayal squeezed Eli’s heart as Sabre got to his knees. But then, he’d always been loyal to the crown. That was no surprise.
“Traitor,” Aline hissed.
They call it dancing,Eli thought, watching the crowd move about like waves on the shore.
A tremor rippled through the gallows like a hammer blow, and the floor beneath Eli fell away.
“You can be whatever you want when we have the crown,” his mother had said once, but it was just a lie. It had all been a lie, all of it—his mother’s plans would have always led them here, to the gallows, twitching and gasping, dancing themselves to death.
Eli was going to die in a shift, with his hair curled and the wrong name read by the king’s heralds. After everything he did, after following orders and being dutiful and good and ruthless while writing to mercenaries and flirting with the Chastains, no one would ever call him by his true name. His mother would never love him.
What was there left to love? Just a body at the end of a noose.
Eli strained against the coarse rope around his neck, and the heat of the crowd rose as it surged toward him and his mother. He could hear the desperate, hideous sound of his own body struggling not to die as it thrashed in the air. The sky tilted and dipped, dark buildings rising like jagged teeth to consume him.
In the crowd, a man met Eli’s gaze.
He wasn’t particularly unusual. He was just a young man, rather slight, dressed in black in a crowd of people laughing and gasping at Eli’s body as it swung. However, there was a hunger in his eyes that Eli recognized. There was an echo of that hunger in what Eli felt every time Sabre went riding with Adrien, every time Eli had to force himself into a gown or be sick in a washroom because men kept touching his waist and calling him delicate and lovely, the hunger that had him screaming into his bedding so no one else could hear.
Don’t let me die,Eli thought, as his tongue swelled and something collapsed in his throat.Don’t let me die, don’t let me die.
The man smiled, and darkness fell over Eli with the suddenness of a neck snapping.
