In the following days after the Baron's funeral Lucy was hardly given a reprieve; surrounded by various friends of her grandmother's and her own, they each offered empty words of sympathy, cooing about how she was a 'poor little thing'.
It nearly drove her mad.
I didn't know him, she wished to tell them, He was a stranger to me and nothing more. And yet the identity placed upon him as her suitor gave the death a further air of tragedy and most certainly made for an excellent scandal that one might talk over during tea time.
Lucy only wished they would wait till she was not present before they spoke of it.
"It must be so tragic," her friend Agnes said to her one afternoon over a cup of coffee, perhaps three days after the funeral as they all sat within her garden for their usual meeting. "Now you've become the only one of us who doesn't have any prospects of a suitor."
She was rather smug when she said this, and so Lucy never once felt any semblance of guilt when she secretly pried open her purse-- left unattended on the ground under the table-- and plucked a few coins from it.
It wasn't as though she needed it, not more than when she had been a small child prowling the streets, yet there was something about a small act of theft every now and again that brought her a bit of room to breath. To live.
It was a small taste of rebellion for her; the thrill of doing something she knew she ought not to, the danger involved if she were caught, her life and reputation hanging in the balance.
What was more, it gave her a distraction from the Baron's passing-- a brief moment in which she did not have to recall watching him as he had fallen down the ravine, turning what had meant to be a romantic walk into a tragedy.
She did not have to think of the moment in which she had hesitated, meaning to reach out and grab hold of him before he had plummeted, her split second of indecisiveness seeming to her the true cause of his death.
To be sure, she hadn't pushed him. Hadn't guided his path towards the fall. Yet when he had needed her to save his life she had not acted quickly enough, and in the end... She felt partially to blame.
No one else had been present, thus none other might know her secret other than her own consciousness and the guilt inflicted upon it. Thus, she merely wallowed in such secrecy, the days passing her by in agony that made her stomach roil in a near constant state of anxiousness.
Yet the anxiousness was something she felt she hid as well as her addiction to stealing valuable items, and none of her companions appeared to notice. Indeed, no one gave her a second glance as she eyed now the purse of her friend Evelyn whilst the girls chatted about some meaningless drabble or another, feeling the worry lift for but a moment as she focused. Yet just as she slowly and purposefully reached for it a single word caught her ear.
Carnival.
Immediately she halted, her curiosity winning over her every other thought, her breath held as the conversation turned towards the mysterious tents she had seen oh so long ago, the Baron forgotten entirely. For though the carnival was a well known aspect of folklore within the town of Hawthorn Vale, Lucy's grandmother had forbidden her learning anything about it. And in turn she had only garnered whispered rumors when others mentioned it and one can learn quite a thing or two when one eavesdrops.
She knew then, that the carnival came only once a year when it was said that the veil between worlds thinned. It was lead in full by a mysterious carnival master who's face most could never recall-- though many said he was beautiful in a manner that was almost other-worldly. Indeed, the entire carnival itself was something that many said seemed like something from another world entirely... Though it was from here that accounts of what happened beyond those silver gates were conflicting.
Some said they had seen the ghosts of loved ones, others that they had witnessed great and powerful magic, others whispered of monsters. Yet above all not one tale of those that had seen the carnival in full had the same story to tell, and now as she listened to her friends speak of it, she found that it gave her the same sense of awe. An awe that chased away her miserable demeanor for a little while.
Thus, she dared not interrupt with any questions of her own, but rather listened for any scrap of information-- falsehood or otherwise-- that would tell her about what she had seen years ago.
"I went only once," Agnes said, her lips pulled into a perpetually smug grin that Lucy loathed. "My father warned me against it-- said it was full of ghosts and the like-- but I had a glorious time nonetheless."
"Well, was it full of ghosts then?" Lucy asked, unable to help herself with an inquiry.
At this, Agnes seemed to pause and all the other girls leaned in with curiosity, the quiet howl of the autumn wind in the gardens around them filling the silence.
Yet finally the girl spoke, her tone far more uncertain than it had been before. "You know I... I don't quite recall. You're a far different person when you go through those gates than when you come out of them. The carnival changes you and, when it's through with you and you walk beyond those gates, you can't quite recall what was true and what wasn't."
It was an unsatisfactory answer, yet Lucy did not ask anything further and the conversation turned once more to something else. Something she could not be bothered with.
Yet the idea of the carnival did not leave her, even as the day faded away into the early evening and the girls departed the words of Agnes seemed branded into Lucy's memory; and for the rest of the evening she would think of little else.
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YOU ARE READING
The Mortal And The Wicked-- ONC 2023
FantasyONC 2023 Shortlister His features had haunted her for years; a boy with silver eyes peering out from beneath a mask of bone. His body cloaked in darkness, a wicked grin upon his lips that spoke of treachery-- a smile that had broken countless hearts...
