Autumn Rose: A Dark Heroine Novel (6 page)

Autumn

T
he next morning brought the prospect of first-period English literature with the prince. As though I had swallowed a cherry pit whole, I felt a knot of dread work its way down my throat into my stomach as I counted up the members of his already-established entourage in the class. They made up more than half the group. The knot grew.

My routine had been much the same as the day before, except today there was no fussing mother. The top button of my blouse remained undone, my skirt folded twice at the waistband, makeup lining my eyes. I’d had no choice but to fly to school that morning: no one was there to drop me off at the ferry and I was running too late for the bus.

For the second day of the term, the school was very much alive. The buses had arrived and it looked as if every member of the student population had tried to cram themselves into the quad. They hung from the railings lining the steps leading up to the quad, or else had seated themselves on the benches, odd blossom petals settling in their hair. Most stood. As I weaved my way between the groups, chattering animatedly, it didn’t take long to work out why. Leaning casually against the edge of one of the picnic benches was the prince, surrounded by his followers and, to my disgust, my friends.

He spotted me before they did and it was he who broke the silence.

“Fallon,” he corrected in advance, anticipating what would have been my next words. I did not respond, but curtsied; grateful he had not used my own title.

Insulted at being cut off mid-sentence, Gwen huffed and turned back to him, trying to engage him once more in conversation. If he heard her, he did not acknowledge her efforts, his eyes transfixed in a steadfast gaze at me, as though I was a problem to be unraveled and solved.

“Your sword. You carry it always?”

“Occasionally.”

“May I see it?” He held out his hand expectantly, but I did not fulfill his request, feeling my hand tighten around the grip of its own accord. The puzzled look returned before his expression cleared and he reached down to his own belt, offering his sword in return for my own. I did not hesitate this time and he took it, weighing it in his hands.

“Light, very light. Too wide for a rapier, yet too long for a small sword.” In my hands I did the same with his sword, though I refrained from speaking my thoughts aloud.
Too heavy and stout for my liking. Rapier, though sharpened entirely along both edges, much like my own.
“Swept hilt, very intricate. The grip is engraved with your coat of arms. Your grandmother’s sword, I presume?”

A familiar fire started to flicker into life along my breastbone. I swallowed. “Yes.”

“I thought it must be. It was transferred to you on the day of her funeral, wasn’t it? I remember it being blessed atop her coffin.”

I didn’t pause to consider the stupidity of what I was doing as I found myself raising his sword to rest under the curvature of his jaw, my breathing shaky, my hand steady. His look turned to complete confusion, as though he could not work out what he had said to offend, before it returned to one of calm assuredness.

“I suggest you lower that.”

I did not move. His voice was soft, yet the authority clear as he spoke again. “Remember who I am, Duchess. Lower it.”

I know you know.

“That’s an order!”

Behind him I could see the breeze stirring the uppermost petals of the cherry tree, snatching them from the branches to the ground, to be trampled beneath the feet of the students aware that the bell had rung.

Beyond that tree there was a sea of black; rough, weathered stone slotted in at odd angles between them. Among those dark pillars, motionless, was a girl, caught in the transition between child and adult, wrapped in a black shift and veil, concealing the tears that would not fall. Behind her was the family tomb that would not shelter her grandmother’s corpse, because she was afforded the honor of being laid to rest in the Athenean cathedral. Instead, the oak coffin stood atop the plinth in front of the tomb’s entrance, draped in Death’s Touch and a royal blue velvet cloth bearing the Al-Summers coat of arms; the late duchess’s sword and dagger there, too, alongside some of the prettier tokens left by mourners during her lying in state.

“Is there a death? The light of day at eventide shall fade away; from out the sod’s eternal gloom the flowers, in their season, bloom; bud, bloom, and fade, and soon the spot whereon they flourished knows them not; blighted by chill, autumnal frost; ashes to ashes, dust to dust!”

The blessing called and the mourners swayed in the light breeze, the faintest trace of water in the wind, as the clouds angered at the slow service, so endless for those whom it hurt the most.

“Come, Autumn, you must sprinkle the earth now. Step up, that’s it, so they may see you.”

With trembling knees and a lip clenched between her teeth, the girl stepped forward, taking a handful of dirt from a silver bowl and letting it drift onto the roses, and then repeating the gesture twice more as the master of ceremonies called, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Earthern carn earthern, ashen carn ashen, peltarn carn peltarn!
”

With those words, the pallbearers came forward as the girl gave a final deep curtsy; the late duchess’s son and five of the elder Sagean princes lifting the coffin high into the air and beginning the slow procession through the fallen fields to the cathedral, just visible beyond the treetops. As it passed, the onlookers, hundreds in total, bowed, King Ll’iriad Athenea joining them in a show of unity that only a state funeral could bring.

Behind her veil, the young duchess let a tear slide down her scarred cheek.

“Autumn?”

The sound of my name snapped me from my trance. My eyes refocused, finding the glinting tip of the sword pressed to the crimson scars of his upper jaw.

“Autumn, don’t force me to hurt you.”

He didn’t need to worry, as my rigid arm was already slackening; he took the opportunity to raise his left arm and tentatively, like I was a wild animal that might pounce at any moment, to press his fingertips to the blade and push it away from his neck. I didn’t resist.

“Autumn, I didn’t mean to offend—”

I cut him off as I forced his lowered sword into his hands and took back my own, sliding it into its sheath. I tried to mumble something resembling an apology, but the words would not come, and instead I fled, humiliated and desperate to work out why I had let my emotions get the better of me.

Fallon

S
he didn’t say a word to me throughout homeroom. It was as though she was making every attempt to blot my very existence from her mind.
Why?

When the A-level English class started, she stuck her hand out for the pages that had arrived on the desk, just as I did the same. When our hands brushed, I thought for a moment that a flint of fire from my fingertips had caught her knuckles and that I had burned her—there was a spark of a very different sort traveling the length of my arm—because she nursed her hand to the deep V of her blouse like I had hurt her. Yet there was no expression of pain in her face—not the physical kind, anyway. Instead, her lips parted in an O, her eyes widening.

She turned away quickly, and I thought she breathed, “Idiot.”

I recoiled in shock but didn’t say anything. I just couldn’t reconcile the image of the emerging woman with that of the twelve-year-old girl who, even then, had managed to stun the court with her looks and stage-managed character.

Where is the granddaughter of the old duchess, who would never even speak against a superior, let alone press a sword to their throat?

“In pairs, I want you to analyze the soliloquy I have assigned to your table. Off you go,” Mr. Sylaeia said.

I turned my attention away from her and to the sheet.

“To be, or not to be, that is the question . . .”

I groaned as I read through Hamlet’s dramatic contemplation of the pros and cons of suicide, before my gaze returned to her. Her gaze flicked toward me.

“What?” she snapped. “Why do you keep looking at me?”

Fates above, is it illegal to look at her now?!

I thought fast and scanned the page. “Disease imagery.” My pen hovered above the paper. “There.”

“I don’t need help,” she insisted, despite her blank-looking page.

My eyebrows lowered a fraction. “He said analyze in pairs.”

She bowed her head and hid behind a curtain of hair and began scribbling across the page.

So she’s not going to share, then? Fine.

I adopted the same tactic.

She said very little once we had finished with the soliloquies, only answering questions when she was called on. As the bell sounded, she repeated her ritual of slowly, even sluggishly, packing her bag, as though very tired—or in the hope I would leave before her. But I did not leave (I did not fancy throwing myself to the hordes), hovering beside the door as Mr. Sylaeia called her over to his desk. She dragged her feet, hand clutched so tightly around the strap of her bag that her knuckles whitened. She seemed to know what was coming.

“Precocious. Presumptuous. Insulting.” He handed her back what looked like an essay. Her head drooped. “Not to mention the fact it was far below your usual standard.” He glanced toward me, still hanging out beside the door of the classroom that was now empty except for us. I pretended to become very interested in an explanation of adverbs on the wall. “Autumn, I’m disappointed. I’m the one person in this school that can truly understand your predicament—do you really think it is any different among the staff?—yet you repay me with such rudeness.” I raised my eyebrows to the wall, wondering what on earth that essay contained to affect him to such a degree.

“Sorry, sir,” I heard her mumble.

“You will be sorry after a detention on Thursday evening.”

She inhaled sharply and I thought it safe enough to turn back. “No, sir, please! I have work that evening, and that’s following a twilight textiles lesson anyway.” Her face was aghast and panicky, her eyes wide and shaped like almonds. I was aghast for a different reason.
She has a job?!

“Then your detention will take place after textiles, and you will have to miss work.”

“Please, sir, any other evening, lunchtime even. Please, they are already threatening to sack me!”

“Because of poor attendance?”

Her head drooped again.

“As I thought. I wonder, Fallon, would you mind staying behind on Thursday, too? There’s a lot of summer work for you to catch up on, and Autumn will very quickly get you up to speed.”

I didn’t answer immediately. She wanted to protest, that much was clear, but her manners prevented her mouth from ruining the perfect straight line her lips created. I felt a tiny pang of resentment—
what have I done?
—but nodded. “Sure.”

That resentment increased a notch when the room went silent as they conversed with their minds, leaving me out. Yet it shattered when I caught a glimpse of her lips quivering as she turned away, her hand rushing to her face.

“Fallon, would you mind stepping out of the room for a moment, please?”

I didn’t want to. But then I remembered the pained expression she had worn when holding the sword to my neck. I did as I was told.

Outside the door, which slammed on its self-closing hinge, I tried to demystify what had happened that morning. Yet the deeper I dug, the less it seemed to make sense. We had been friends as children! We had played kiss chase and staged play weddings and bossed each other about. Now it seemed like she hated me.

A few minutes later, the door opened and a blond blur passed without pausing. She had already shot past before I had prised myself away from the wall I was leaning on. I hurried after her down the stairs. She glanced back toward me and her pace doubled as she half jumped the remaining steps.

“Autumn!” She didn’t stop. “Autumn, I was just wondering if you want a lift home on Thursday? It’ll be late—”

I never got to finish my sentence, as she whirled around, mouth agape; lips rolled back slightly; red, puffy eyes narrowed so that they slanted. She didn’t say a word, but her expression said more than words could. She remained like that for a few seconds before she turned back around and left; her movements slow and sluggish once more.

Autumn

H
ow all occasions do inform against me indeed.

Fallon appeared in my history class. The whole A2 class appeared in my history class. The explanation was simple: the usual history teacher was off on maternity leave, and the current unit for both our class and the A2 class was Sagean history, so Mr. Sylaeia would teach both classes together in addition to English. I knew that my look when he entered the room was one of stewed fury and betrayal, firm in the belief that he could not have thought of a crueler punishment than detention with the prince. When the latter arrived, I urged Christy and Tammy to sit on either side of me, walling me in. They didn’t seem too pleased that we had used up all the seats in our row, leaving no room for the prince, but it didn’t matter. He chose to sit on the other side of the room, squeezing in at the far corner of a desk with some of the other A2 students. I was surprised but relieved. Yet the horseshoe arrangement of the desks still meant that we faced him. I inched my chair around to the left, to face the board.

It would be an understatement to say that Sagean history was not a popular topic. A groan circulated through the room when it was announced, and I felt my cheeks flare up in shame. Even the prince’s cheeks tinted pink. He hid it well, resting his head in his hands, his elbows on the desk.

My eyes bounced back toward the desk, cursing myself for looking. There they rested until a textbook arrived. I flicked it open, finding paragraphs dedicated to customs that were second nature to me yet so alien to those around the room. I closed it, knowing that as a child, I had studied books at my previous school that mirrored these in every way, except that they were about humanity. Looking up, the prince caught my eye, a grin on his lips as his eyes darted down to the book and back up. He thought it amusing. I thought it a tragedy.