Snow by Tracy Lynn

am a duchess,” she said finally, thinking the older woman would approve. “One doesn’t treat a
duchess
that way.”
    “You
look
like a slattern!” The duchess slapped Jessica across the cheek. She said other things, too, but Jessica didn’t hear them. When she put her hand to her cheek, her fingertips came away with droplets of blood.
    “Behaving like a commoner—I have a hard time believing you are your father’s daughter. Maybe you aren’t,” the duchess said pensively. Then her eyes filled with rage. “Do you know what you did, behaving in front of Lord Belingham like that? Do you realize the
embarrassment
your father and I will have to suffer for it? And Count Donhall—it wouldn’t surprise me if his father never spoke to us again for what you did to him.”
    “I just wanted the puppy,” Jessica said softly, knowing full well she sounded like a five-year-old. But in the end, that was the heart of it, that was what had caused all of this.
    “Well, you certainly aren’t getting a puppy,” the duchess promised. “That, and your absence at this party except when I specifically ask for it, are just the beginning. You want to dress like a commoner?
Fine,
you can dress that way all the time, and do the job of one too. If you’re not going to be a duchess, you can at least be useful. And one more thing,” she added as she left, “if I so much as
imagine
you talk to any of the serving staff again, including Alan, I will have you beaten—the way I should have in the beginning.”
    And the duchess, if nothing else, was a woman of her word.

PART TWO
     
Snow
     

INTERLUDE: REFLECTIONS
     
    “Mirror, Mirror.
When people speak, whom do they say is the fairest in town?”
    Alan held the looking glass up, as always; the duchess stared and primped into it as always. Some things had changed since the first time, however.
    There was the smell, to start with. Burnt flesh cut with a clean, metallic scent like the smell before a thunderstorm. There were the cages of animals—all young, all babies—against the farthest wall of her hidden sanctuary. There was the basket with a bundle in it, a heavy burden that needed to be gone by midnight. There were the vials and pills—blue, blood red, and light purple—with medicines for the duchess’s increasingly frequent fits.
    And there was one more thing that changed.
    Alan ground his teeth and stammered, but the necklace bade him speak.
    “For all her rags and dirt, those who catch a look at her face, the one called Snow—they claim she is the most beautiful, fey thing Kenigh has ever seen.”
    The duchess’s eyes might have been hazel, but the look they gave Alan was the blackest he had ever seen.

Chapter Nine
TRANSFIGURATION
     
    1. Spring

    D
avey sat on the steps of the stable, waiting to run an errand for the coachman, when a figure dressed in old clothes struggled by, barely able to drag the bucket of slop she was burdened with, He leaped up, full of the newly discovered chivalry that often brought smiles and blushes, occasionally even kisses.
    “Here, let me help you with—” The pale girl turned her face to meet his.
    He stopped short, “Jess?”
    Deprived of sunlight, the starry freckles had faded from her face, and her copper-brown hair had grown in black. Her skin had whitened, becoming the pallor so many girls her age were trying to achieve by poisoning themselves with arsenic.
    “I don’t think you’re supposed to be talking to me, Davey,” Her voice was low, as if she wasn’t accustomed to talk, “I’m being punished. They might dismiss you or your parents,”
    “I heard things, but didn’t believe them—making you do all the chores, scrubbing, and cleaning, and locking you up? A
duchess?”
    She smiled wanly, remembering their lastargument,“I’m no duchess. Not anymore, at least,”
    “I didn’t even know it was you just now,” he went on, “You’re as white as a snowman. And taller than you were,”
    He shifted uncomfortably