“Bill,” Luce whispered.
But the gargoyle flew right in front of her face and shushed her with a finger to his fat stone lips. “Only crazies talk to their invisible gargoyles,” he hissed, “and crazies don’t get invited to many balls. Now, hush.”
“But what about—”
“Hush.”
What about going 3-D?
Luce took a deep breath. The last instruction he had given her was to take Lys by the hand.…
She strode over, crossing the dance floor and bypassing the servants with their trays of foie gras and Chambord. She nearly plowed right into the girl behind Lys, who was trying to cut ahead of Lys in line by pretending to whisper something to a friend.
“Excuse me,” Luce said to Lys, whose eyes widened and whose lips parted and let a tiny confused sound escape her mouth.
But Luce couldn’t wait for Lys to react. She reached down and grabbed her by the hand. It fit into her own like a puzzle piece. She squeezed.
Luce’s stomach dropped as if she’d gone down the first hill of a roller coaster. Her skin began to vibrate, and a drowsy, gently rocking sensation came over her. She felt her eyelids flutter, but some instinct told her to keep holding fast to Lys’s hand.
She blinked, and Lys blinked, and then they both blinked at the same time—and on the other side of the blink, Luce could see herself in Lys’s eyes … and then could see Lys from her own eyes … and then—
She could see no one in front of her at all.
“Oh!” she cried out, and her voice sounded just as it always had. She looked down at her hands, which looked just as they always had. She reached up and felt her face, her hair, her wig, all of which felt the same as they had before. But something … something had shifted.
She lifted the hem of her dress and peeked down at her shoes.
They were magenta. With diamond-shaped high heels, and tied at the ankle with an elegant silver bow.
What had she done?
Then she realized what Bill had meant by “going three-D.”
She had literally stepped into Lys’s body.
Luce glanced around her, terrified. To her horror, all the other girls in line were motionless. In fact, everyone Luce looked at was frozen stiff. It was if the entire party had been put on Pause.
“See?” Bill’s voice came hotly in her ear. “No words for this, right?”
“What’s happening, Bill?” Her voice was rising.
“Right now, not a whole lot. I had to put the brakes on the party, lest you freak out. Once we’re straight on the three-D business, I’ll start it back up again.”
“So … no one can see this right now?” Luce asked, waving her hand slowly in front of the face of the pretty brunette girl who’d been standing in front of Lys. The girl didn’t flinch. She didn’t blink. Her face was frozen in an unending openmouthed grin.
“Nope.” Bill demonstrated by wiggling his tongue near the ear of an older man, who stood frozen with an escargot poised between his fingers, inches from his mouth. “Not until I snap me fingers.”
Luce exhaled, once more strangely relieved at having Bill’s help. She needed a few minutes to get used to the idea that she was—was she really—
“I’m inside my past self,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Then where did I go? Where’s my body?”
“You’re in there somewhere.” He tapped at her collarbone. “You’ll pop out again when—Well, when the time is right. But for now, you’ve slipped entirely inside your past. Like a cute little turtle in a borrowed shell. Except it’s more than that. When you’re in Lys’s body, your very beings are entwined, so all sorts of good stuff comes with the package. Her memories, her passions, her manners—lucky for you. Of course, you also have to grapple with her shortcomings. This one, if I recall, puts her foot in her mouth with some regularity. So watch out.”
“Amazing,” Luce whispered. “So if I could just find Daniel, I’d be able to feel exactly what she feels toward him.”
“Sure, I guess, but you do realize that once I snap my fingers, Lys has obligations at this ball that don’t include Daniel. This isn’t really his scene, and by that I mean, no way the guards would let a poor stable boy in here.”
Luce didn’t care about any of that. Poor stable boy or not, she would find him. She couldn’t wait. Inside Lys’s body she could even hold him, maybe even kiss him. The anticipation of it was almost overwhelming.
“Hello?” Bill flicked a hard finger against her temple. “You ready yet? Get in there, see what you can see—then get out while the getting’s good, if you know what I mean.”
Luce nodded. She straightened Lys’s black gown and held her head a little higher. “Snap to it.”
“And … go.” Bill snapped his fingers.
For a split second, the party snagged like a scratched record. Then every midconversation syllable, every whiff of perfume being carried through the air, every drop of punch sliding down every bejeweled throat, every note of music from every player in the orchestra, picked up, smoothed out, and carried on as if nothing in the world had happened.
Only Luce had changed. Her mind became assaulted by a thousand words and images. A sprawling thatch-roofed country house in the foothills of the Alps. A chestnut-colored horse named Gauche. The smell of straw everywhere. A single long-stemmed white peony laid across her pillow. And Daniel. Daniel. Daniel. Coming back from the well with four heavy buckets of water balanced from a pole laid across his shoulders. Grooming Gauche first thing every morning so Lys could take him for a ride. When it came to small, lovely favors for Luce, there was nothing Daniel overlooked, even in the midst of all the labor he did for her father. His violet eyes finding her always. Daniel in her dreams, in her heart, in her arms. It was like the flashes of Luschka’s memories that had come to her in Moscow when she’d touched the church gate—but stronger, more overwhelming, intrinsically a part of her.
Daniel was here. In the stables or the servants’ quarters. He was here. And she would find him.
Something rustled near Luce’s neck. She jumped.
“Just me.” Bill flitted over the top of her capelet. “You’re doing great.”
The great golden doors at the head of the room were eased open by two footmen, who stood at attention on either side. The girls in line in front of Luce began to titter with excitement, and then a hush swept the room. Meanwhile, Luce was looking for the fastest way out of here and into Daniel’s arms.
“Focus, Luce,” Bill said, as if reading her mind. “You’re about to be called into duty.”
The strings of the orchestra began playing the baroque opening chords of the Ballet de Jeunesse, and the whole room shifted its attention. Luce followed everyone else’s gaze and gasped: She recognized the man who stood there in the doorway, gazing out at the party with a patch over one eye.
It was the Duc de Bourbon, the cousin of the king.
He was tall and skinny, as wilted as a bean plant in a drought. His ill-fitting blue velvet suit was ornamented with a mauve sash to match the mauve stockings on his twig-thin legs. His ostentatious powdered wig and his milky-white face were both exceptionally ugly.
She didn’t recognize the duke from some photograph in a history book. She knew far too much about him. She knew everything. Like how the royal ladies-in-waiting swapped bawdy jokes about the sad size of the duke’s scepter. About how he’d lost that eye (hunting accident, on a trip he’d joined to appease the king). And about how right now, the duke was going to send in the girls whom he’d preselected as suitable marriage material for the twelve-year-old king waiting inside.