Princess of Glass - Jessica Day George [62]
Rionin got up from his throne and crossed to the edge of the dais. He leaned down, bringing his face close to Poppy’s. “Before you wake up, allow me to clarify one thing: you may toss your head and stamp your foot all you like, but you cannot fight us.
“Just like Eleanora, you are nothing but prey.”
He pushed her away with a finger that seemed to pierce the center of her chest like an icicle. She fell and fell until she woke with a lurch in her own bed.
The violet and silver gown lay in a shaft of moonlight, and her nightrobe was damp with sweat as always. She lit a lamp and wrote everything that she had seen and heard in her diary, just as she had been doing for the past few weeks. Then she wrapped herself in a shawl and went to sit by the window. She wouldn’t be getting any more sleep that night, so she might as well finish another bracelet.
She decided she would prefer that her dreams not come true.
At breakfast, Lady Margaret was reluctant to put on the strange bracelet that Poppy offered her. So reluctant, despite her normally gracious attitude toward any gift, that Poppy suspected magical intervention. But in the end Poppy got it fastened around Lady Margaret’s upper arm, and was pleased to see the change that began to overcome the older woman.
She still looked confused, however, so Lord Richard offered her a tumbler of Roger’s strange potion and convinced her to toss the glass into the fireplace. It was such a dramatic gesture that Poppy had a hard time not shouting, “Cheers!” whenever someone did it.
“Do you realize that Lady Ella is our own Ellen?” Lady Margaret looked around, astonished, to see if anyone else had come to that same conclusion.
“Not Ellen, my dear, Eleanora,” her husband corrected her.
And then, with Marianne and Poppy talking over him and one another to make certain no detail was forgotten, they explained the situation.
Poppy braced herself for an explosion when Lady Margaret discovered that her husband had himself made a deal with the Corley in order to recover his fortune. But when he came to that part of the tale, she merely nodded. After all the explaining was done, she appeared only half-surprised.
“Did you know about the Corley?” Poppy asked.
“Not her name, but I suspected that Richard’s luck was more than, well, mere luck,” Lady Margaret admitted. “I suppose I didn’t really want to know the details.” She made a face. “Of course, if I’d known that our daughter’s future lay on the line as well, I might have intervened sooner.”
“You know I would die before I would let either of you come to harm,” Lord Richard said. He lifted his wife’s hand from the white tablecloth, and kissed her wrist.
Marianne sighed dreamily, and Poppy found herself stifling a similar noise. Imagine being so cherished. It was never something she had really thought about, until she had seen her oldest sisters with their husbands, and now Lady Margaret with hers.
She doubted very much that she would have been cherished like that by Prince Blathen.
Thinking of her erstwhile partner from the Midnight Balls, she drew herself up. They needed to solve this problem, and quickly. The masked ball was only days away.
“What should we do about the royal masquerade?” Poppy picked up her fork and pressed some lines into the tablecloth. “I suppose I need to go now.” She winced. It had sounded like torture before there was a curse involved.
“And Dickon still needs a bracelet,” said Marianne. “It looks like we have to have both. Roger’s given him the potion four times now,” she said to her plate of kippers and toast.
“I’m working on it,” Poppy assured her. “Also, Roger’s trying to find a Far Eastern herbalist he knows. It’s possible that he could help us.”
But when Roger came to the manor a few hours later, he shook his head in answer to their eager inquiries. The house at the address he had for Lon Qui was empty, and he had left a message with the landlady, though she did not know where her tenant was or how long he would be gone.
“You’d think if this Lon