Plague and war could not stop the Solstice Ball. Though ashheaps and unburied bodies cluttered the royal roads, cavalry rode from Fort Countenance to announce the festivities. A ball to celebrate the monarchy’s continued triumph. Every family that had sacrificed a son to the war cause was welcome to send a daughter to the ball. The Crown considered it recompense. Perhaps a daughter would find a husband among the wealthy princes and baronets there. Let the fair enjoy a night deliriously free from fear of infection. Let them breathe carefree.
Pharmokos recognized the rumble of the herald horsemen as they galloped past. He fidgeted with his mask—a dark apparatus shaped like a rabbit—to distract himself from the sound of steel that accompanied their royal message. Steel horse slippers crunched bone, the remains of insurgents and infected that lined the road. The Crown said in time it would sweep away the carnage, but for now it was a necessity. As much as the corpses limited local travel, the risk of catching the airborne virus slowed and deterred their enemies. The Crown hoped the people would understand. And the people did. The masks they wore would help them breathe, while the enemy would wither in the streets.
Pharmokos tried to imagine what his youngest sister used to look like. He was fairly sure Mary had decomposed by now. She was just meters away from the family doorstep, bones and sinew bedecked in a gown of shimmering pink tulle. She had never made it back from the last ball. Poor Mary. Behind his mask, Pharmokos sucked in a breath of fresh air.
“What are we going to do?” his mother wailed at supper. She slid a hand over the eyes of her mask and laughed defeatedly. “We’ve nothing to offer the Crown after all these years.”
“Mother.” Pharmokos’s eldest sister offered a tight smile towards the front of the table. “Please. It is about time that I go.”
“Gamoia,” their mother sighed, “we’ve discussed this. You’re married.”
“Widowed,” Gamoia corrected, her eyes shooting forward like arrows behind the slits of her owl mask. “And it would not have been Nicholas’s desire to die in vain on the battlefield. Before he left, he returned me to this household. I should go to honor his memory. It is only right. It is my right.”
“Gamoia.” Their mother’s tone rose like a kindling flame. “You have no youth to boast.”
“Mother, regardless of my age, I have assets, tools to seduce—”
“Gamoia. I would like a return on my investments. After all these years. Lucia. Helena. Mary.
“Mother, please—”
Their mother was up now. “Gamoia, they say you must offer up a daughter. You are no daughter to me.”
Gamoia sat back in her chair wordlessly.
Their mother did not ask if they were finished. She swiped their chipped yellow plates off the table and marched to the washbasin. Half of Gamoia’s food fell from its plate onto the floor. “Lucia. Helena. Mary,” she lamented. “You had your chance. As my eldest, my first, you watched your brothers make their beds and go off to war and never offered yourself then. You let the youngest, most innocent, of your sisters—your sisters!—learn what it means to be selfless so you could go off and seduce some farmboy without a talent besides a swift ability to be drafted—”
“He was kind. And he was honorable—” Gamoia’s voice shivered.
“And what? Your father didn’t have honor when they brought home a medal beside his death pension? Was Lucia some leech to you? Mary, a flea?” A wretched shriek escaped from the steel wool that their mother scraped across the dishes. “Suddenly, you speak of honor. I have always told you—as I have told all of my children—it is an honor to offer your body to this country. As a woman, especially, when we have had so little to give in this struggle. It is an honor to go the ball. And you have squandered the honor you had.”
In an attempt to broker peace, Pharmokos stepped in to help his mother with the dishes.
“And you.” The shadow of a cow turned on Pharmokos now, his mother lost behind a pair of bovine nostrils and tusks. “What have I kept you in the attic for? Coming out sick. You are healthy enough to stand, yet you cannot fight. You are healthy enough to eat from this table, yet you cannot march after your brothers. You are of age, yet you cannot go to the ball. What have I had you for?”
“I—” Pharmokos stammered.
“Oh, take him to the ball!” Gamoia spat. “He’s the best daughter you’ve ever had!”
At that, their mother paused. It was an absurd idea. Yet, quietly, almost reverently, she wiped her hands across her apron and approached her youngest son. Where Pharmokos’s mask revealed the living, breathing thing underneath—just around the cheeks and ears—she sunk her nails down and pressed deep into the skin. She was careful not to pull the mask forward at all, lest she sever the bonds that were sewn into his face, the tendrils tubes that filtered out the plague and allowed him to breathe. Supposedly, the filtration also helped mask the incredible stench from the number of cadavers scattered across the kingdom. His was the first generation to have them grafted in at birth. Every child would wear a cute animal mask. The kind of mask would be chosen for them by the Crown. And the adults would get used to them too. A prosperous kingdom of wood and farmland creatures.
Pharmokos had been born sick. He had struggled to grow like the other boys his age and remained clinically thin. From childhood, he had been declared especially susceptible to the plague and had been locked up in the family attic, where the air was supposedly fresher and less contaminated. His primary education evolved from helping his mother around the house, cooking, cleaning, and sewing his dead sisters’ belongings into new garments for the remaining family. Of course, he had put together his letters, mostly from reading his brothers’ war diaries that were returned home wrapped in the country’s flag.
Despite his condition, his body clearly betrayed enough meat to support Gamoia’s ludicrous suggestion, based on the wonder with which their mother pulled her fingers away.
“What happened next?” Ecaf appeared behind Pharmokos in the boudoir mirror and gripped his shoulders. “I’m on the edge of my seat.”
Pharmokos tunneled down into a shrug. “You wouldn’t come so close if you knew.”
“Oh?” Ecaf dived forward so the tips of their masks nearly touched. A perfect replica of Pharmokos’s own rabbit mask leered back at him. “How’s this?”
“You’re in my personal bubble.”
“What happened?” Ecaf hissed. “What happened, what happened, what happened, what happened—”
“Okay, okay, I was just about to tell you!” Coyly, Pharmokos curved out of Ecaf’s touch. Even then, she lingered, her enthusiasm twirling around her like a sprite. “I guess it came out of me all at once. I knew I had only one chance the second Mother looked at me. So I ran outside as fast as I could. Mother and Gamoia were both screeching like foxes. I barely even heard them. I held my breath and ripped the pink dress right off Mary. ”
Ecaf crowed with laughter. “You didn’t!”
“I did.” Slowly, Pharmokos unfurled the layers of tulle he had stuffed into his knapsack. “You should have seen the look on their faces, the way Mother recoiled as I went to hug her knees. She made Gamoia scrub my skin red in the bath.”
“So you came to me!” Ecaf clapped her hands. “No runny nose or anything?”
Pharmokos shook his head.
“You know, I always had my hunch about you.” Ecaf hummed. “Did I ever tell you I think you’re immune?”
“No. What a ridiculous thought.”
“Well, you made it all the way here. You’re certainly not as diseased—or, well, impaired, is that what they say? Oh, you know what I mean. You’re not as ‘whatever’ they claim you to be.”
“It is refreshing to be outside the house for once.”
“I’m sure anything’s better than the asylum of an attic they keep you in most of the day. And in my bedroom no less! Should I be scared of what you’re going to do?”
Pharmokos coughed. “You know you act different than you do at my house.”
“Now you’re exaggerating.” Ecaf gave him a light slap. “What about all the times we played dress-up growing up? Didn’t I make a convincing mistress in Helena’s red overcoat?”
“That’s different. That’s make-believe. At dinner you were always—”
“Subdued?” Ecaf scoffed. “That’s the reality for the daughter of a former royal ambassador. Even among family friends we have a reputation to uphold.”
“Yes, but now we’re talking and it’s not make-believe and you feel so much more. You feel like how you are in your letters.”
“What?” Ecaf puffed up behind him. “You’re surprised it’s not a façade?”
“No, Ecaf,” Pharmokos said. “You know what I mean.”
While it was typically difficult to discern other people’s expressions behind their masks, Pharmokos found a unique advantage in reading one shaped so much like his own. Where the mask’s pupils dipped into pools of shadow, he pictured Ecaf’s eyes—normally alight, now like steady embers. Where the mask portrayed Ecaf with a perpetual grin, Pharmokos envisioned something more intimate than a smile, something hidden between the purse and press of her lips.
“Yes,” Ecaf replied. “I do.” She bent down into a curtsy and left a kiss in the center of his palm.
Pharmokos curled his fingers into fists and kneaded the tulle in his lap. “I did what I could to it, but it was more far gone than I thought. I guess we all forgot how long six months can really be.”
Ecaf crossed her arms and poked at the fabric. “You did clean it, didn’t you?”
“I’m not an animal.”
“I’m just asking.”
“You can’t work with dirty material.”
“I know that. Probably better than you do.”
“It’s clean. I assure you.”
“Well then,” Ecaf drew out her words. “Can I see it?”
Expectantly, she pointed to the screen next to her wardrobe. Like everything else in her room, the piece was hand-crafted, made not to imitate but to decorate the chambers of a courtier in Fort Countenance. Flight from the castle had chipped away somewhat at the whiteness of the wood, the pinks and blues that frescoed across the front some generic pastoral scene. An aesthetic in disrepair, however, enchanted Pharmokos no less than the thing unblemished. Walking in Ecaf’s room was like walking in a dream.
After a bit of protest that the mannequin in the other corner of Ecaf’s room sat obtrusively naked, Ecaf managed to bully Pharmokos behind the screen. Secluded, Pharmokos felt his gut begin to turn. He debated darting back out and hiding under Ecaf’s bed. Blithely, the painted figures on the screen in front of him gamboled past, their genitals free in the wind and slapping against the tall grass. Pharmokos pulled at the same tan smock he had worn for the majority of his adolescence. He closed his eyes and counted to three. At the strike of one, he held his breath and slipped into the tulle.
Regret clouded his emergence. Ecaf jumped to comment.
“Don’t say anything. It’s hideous.”
“I haven’t said anything yet!”
“I can tell you’re about to.”
“You haven’t even seen yourself.”
“I don’t have to.”
“I can see what you were doing.”
“It’s abhorrent.”
“Pharmokos.”
“I’ve never worked on such a large scale piece before.”
“Pharmokos.”
“Perhaps this was too good to begin with—”
“Pharmokos!”
He froze as Ecaf dragged him to her by the tulle. Silently, she squared off his shoulders and lifted his chin so he was forced to look at himself in the mirror. Two rabbits in dresses stared back.
His alterations were not terrible. Ecaf praised him for the installation of off-the-shoulder sleeves, tracing and ogling at his collarbones for good measure. The dress had movement as well, although Ecaf remarked the length would have to be improved upon for a formal ball. But she understood the original fabric might have frayed or disintegrated during Mary’s decomposition. Her last set of suggestions Pharmokos had not even considered.
“Pink is not your color.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, don’t look like that. Not every color suits every one. For instance, I look terrible in black. With the mask, I look like a wraith.”
“So what color would be better?”
“You have a few options.” Ecaf drummed her fingers along her mask’s chin. “Do you prefer blue or white?”
“If I can’t have pink, white. Definitely.”
“White it is.”
“But how will you change it?”
“Practical magic.” Ecaf dashed into her en suite and dug around in the cabinet. Head still burrowed, she pulled out a translucent bottle marked with an insidious skull and crossbones. “Bleach.”
“How do you know white will really be best?”
Ecaf dropped the bottle of bleach on her vanity and dusted off her hands. In the mirror, she pointed to the two of them and then rapped on the side of Pharmokos’s mask.
“The color of onyx. White will do nicely for contrast.”
“I just hope I can keep it clean.”
“How are you getting to the castle again?”
“The carriage that the castle commissions for us. How else would I get there?”
“Oh, no.” Ecaf’s tone quickened with alarm. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no.”
“What? What is it?”
“You can’t do that. Certainly not.”
“Why not?” Pharmokos asked. “It seems pretty straightforward.”
Ecaf picked at her hands. “Pharmokos, I’m happy that you’re doing this. I really am. And I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”
“About what?”
“You’ve wanted to go outside your whole life. You deserve a night of bliss more than anything.” Ecaf inhaled sharply. “But you must be careful.”
“Now you’re the one being obtuse.”
“How should I say it? You know there will be many girls there,” Ecaf prompted.
“Yes, of course. All eligible families will bring one girl. That’s practically everyone in the kingdom.”
“But not all of them will make it,” Ecaf continued.
“Yes, because of the plague and the war. I know that.”
“Yes,” Ecaf said slowly. “Because of the plague.”
“Fort Countenance assured us that the path the carriage takes takes the necessary precautions into account.”
“Mary didn’t take the carriage back, did she?”
“The castle told us she left the party early. Something disagreed with her, so she walked back on foot.”
“That’s a long journey.”
“She was hoping to find some inn or stable along the way. You remember Mary. She would never be the one to inconvenience royalty.”
“I do. I do remember Mary.”
“I’ll be careful, Ecaf. I promise.”
“Pharmokos,” Ecaf said, “You do know the point of this ball is that the young girls from the outer villages meet someone, don’t you?”
“There’s a possibility, but the main one is that we just symbolically receive the bounty that our brothers couldn’t.”
“Right,” Ecaf agreed. “But you could meet someone.”
“Yes.”
“And that someone could be the prince.”
“It could.”
“Pharmokos,” Ecaf sighed. “I want you to have fun, but I also want you to come home. Safe. Does that make sense?”
“Ecaf, does this have something to do with your family’s disagreement with the Crown?”
Ecaf stepped away from the mirror. “Pharmokos, the settlement isn’t the only reason I don’t have to nor do I wish to attend the ball.”
“Missing a night of glamour is unlike you.”
“Listen, Pharmokos,” Ecaf said, “if I make this dress for you, I am begging you to do this for me in return.”
“Begging is really unlike you.”
“Listen!” Ecaf’s voice rose. “If you won’t do it for me, do it to keep your dress clean. There is a tunnel that the castle dug under this house, right when my family decided it was going to split from the court. That’s how we moved all our belongings out here. In the beginning, my mother was still acting as a partial liaison as well, so she used the tunnel to traverse between home and the castle without impediment. There should be a cart down there still. The night that you go to the ball, the night that I’ll have your dress finished, I want you to use that tunnel to get there and back .”
“Won’t the castle wonder why I haven’t used their carriage?”
“No.” Pharmokos detected a bit of contempt in her words. “If anything, they’ll think you’re shrewd.”
“It seems like a hassle just to keep my dress clean,” Pharmokos lamented.
“Pharkomos, please.”
“I’m only teasing. I’ll do it.”
“Good.” Ecaf murmured and clasped her hands to her heart. “And don’t talk to the prince.”
“Why? Will you be jealous?”
Again, Ecaf approached and lay her head down on his shoulder. “I may be a little green.”
“Well then, I won’t.”
Ecaf pouted. “Why was that easier than getting you to take the tunnel?”
Pharmokos shrugged.
“I’m glad I got to meet you in person. At least once.”
Pharmokos tsked. “I’m sure we’ll meet many more times than this.”
“Promise?” Ecaf held out a pinky.
Pharmokos reached out a hand and took hold of it firmly. He held it for a long time. “Ecaf?”
“Hm?”
He was looking at himself in the mirror. He doted over the places Ecaf had pinned in his waist, and he imagined petticoats adding volume and fluff to his sagging skirt. “Would you still like me so much if I looked like this all the time?”
“What kind of a question is that?” Ecaf laughed. She rocked their hands together back and forth once before letting go. “I liked you before I even knew what you looked like. When you sent your first letter to welcome us to the neighborhood. And when I saw you—” She aligned the edges of their masks in the mirror. “How surprised I was that we shared the same face!”
They sat in silence for a moment. Then, Ecaf said, “Who else would there be?”
_______
The dress kept catching on the cart. And the cart hardly carried to begin with. Every few minutes, the metal can would slow to a halt, and Pharmokos would have to step out onto the track to get the lever working again. The whole mechanism was in desperate need of oil. Wet rust seeped into the tail of Pharmoko’s dress. Half an hour in, with no end in sight, Pharmokos thought about turning back.
Ecaf swore the journey would take no more than an hour, but she could very easily have lied. That is, if she had even traveled the road herself. Certainly she had not done it as encumbered as Pharmokos was. Thirty minutes of consecutive lever pumping caused the diamonds around his throat to dangle like an anchor around his neck. His earrings threatened to tear off his lobes. Fresh blisters seared their brand into his heels. No gratitude for the generosity of Ecaf’s bequests lightened the load.
The moment that Pharkomos glimpsed a light ahead, he nearly laughed himself into hysterics. Like a dandelion head, he leapt forth from the cart, lush white feathers cascading down after him. He bounded over to the source of light, a large peephole dug into the side of the tunnel, and peered out.
Based on the landscape, Pharmokos realized he had made a loop around several of the kingdom’s outer villages. He was staring out from the very edge of the forest, where the woods opened up onto a large plain covered with bodies. The warfront. Pharmokos inched closer. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted it. The very edge of a bit of cobblestone, what Pharmokos had been told distinguished each and every one of Fort Countenance’s defensive battlements. This must have been the first line, the outermost parapets that protected the castle. He was close, then. Before Pharmokos pulled away, a bit of rustling near the forest caught his attention.
First, there was the sound of feasting. A guttural, indulgent smack. Then, ripping, swallowing, slurping, messy and ravenous. One sniff. And then another. As if on command, Pharmokos breathed in too. Through the scent of worms and petrichor, a perfidious odor shot into his nostrils. Rotting bodies. Instantly, Pharmokos relaxed. For a second, he thought he was at home, and the smell came from Mary outside their front door or some other partial carcass in the streets. Yet, Pharmokos paused. Never before had the smell been so strong, and something about it made him roll his tongue behind his mask. The air that carried it felt heavier, more metallic. Fresher.
A figure twisted into view. The shape was vaguely humanoid, but it was hunched over, absorbed with whatever it had discovered on the ground. Grumbling, Pharmokos pressed his mask as tight as possible against his face, as if he could grant himself greater vantage through the eye holes. He sorted through bush and shadow and could just make out the familiar sheen and shape of a pair of golden centipedes that flanked the figure’s silhouette. Military epaulettes. Then, the figure turned, and Pharmokos could clearly discern in its one hand a cracked mask—the wires that normally fused the apparatus with the skin probing outward like sentient tentacles—and in the other hand, the ragdoll remains of a young girl dressed for a ball. Where her face should have been, there was a skin-faced candle dripping vermilion wax.
Pharmokos raced from the scene as fast as his mind could propel him. He choked down vomit, sweat, and tears and ran. Only when the clack of tile under his feet replaced the give of dirt did he recalibrate his senses.
The room was sparsely furnished, aside from a bedframe and a dresser that faced it from the opposite wall. Pharmokos blundered forward, fishing for a way out. He grabbed hold of a doorknob and, emerging from relative darkness, was abruptly struck by a concentrated prism of light, light that reflected off the floor, the hallways, the mirrors, and crystal chandeliers. Pharmokos nearly collapsed from the impact. Vertiginous, he swore and raked towards the wall for a crutch.
“Ecaf?”
Pharmokos froze.
“Ecaf, is that really you?”
A young man about Pharmokos’s age approached from behind him, manifesting in his line of sight crowned with a halo of light. Pharmokos blinked. His skin was like water, smooth, glassy. Bare. It moved with every microexpression, bending and folding at every word, every thought. His eyes were like triremes, dark brown masts and a hundred black oars. And his mouth. His mouth spread wide, revealing a million porcelain pincers. He stretched and stretched them in Pharmokos’s direction, gasping and panting and smiling and smiling.
“Um—I’m—”
“It’s been years.” The man sounded like he was about to weep.
“No—I’m—I’m just a friend. But I know Ecaf,” Pharmokos sputtered through his shock.
“Oh? But you have the same mask.”
“Yes.”
“It must be Providence.” The man’s features hardened with intensity. “What’s your name, then?”
“Um,” Pharmokos said, “it’s Fanny. Short for Francesca.”
“Francesca.” The man bowed. “A courtly name.”
“Ha, yes.”
“Prince Eton, at your service.”
“Oh!” Pharmokos shuddered into a curtsy. “Your Highness.”
“Oh, please, no need for all the theatrics. Are you here for the ball?”
“Yes, Your Highness. I’m afraid I got lost on the way to the—privy.”
“It’s a big fortress, I understand. Shall I escort you?”
The prince held out his arm. Pharmokos curtsied once more and noted not to tell Ecaf about any of this.
He led her into the main ballroom. From the top of the staircase, Pharmokos observed a curious mixture of people with masks and people without, like the prince. The difference was hardly clear, although Pharmokos noticed many of the people without masks were men, who must have been nobles, based on the sashes that clashed against their golden epaulettes.
“Drink?” The prince offered her a chalice.
“Oh, thank you,” Pharmokos handled the thing carefully. “Is there no food?”
“Sorry?”
Imitating Ecaf, Pharmokos puffed up. “Will there be further refreshments? I—I apologize. It’s just been a very long journey.”
“Why, of course, you must be starving!” the prince marveled. “As am I. Don’t worry. We don’t mean to mindlessly eat up your time.”
Pharmokos nodded.
“You have a very beautiful mask, you know.”
“Um, thank you. I’ve had it since I was born.”
“How fitting. Shall we?”
There was never a good moment to flee from the prince. He stuck to Pharmokos all night like a virus. He asked Pharmokos all kinds of questions, where he was from, how many siblings he had, how many were left. Quickly, they traversed the basic conversation of acquaintance to explore more peculiar questions such as Pharmokos’s experience with the plague, his understanding of the war, and, most extensively, the intricacies of his diet. About the more frivolous details, Pharmokos was happy to lie. He was a twin. Fraternal, of course. He had no other siblings. Ecaf and he grew up together. He loved the outdoors, but he understood the danger. His mother loved him very much and had helped him plant a garden. He ate well.
On topics that must have required a formal education, Pharmokos displayed his ignorance.
“So how do your masks work?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Pharmokos said. “We were told the plague was airborne, so they help us to filter air. It definitely dulls the smell.”
“Well, it certainly is airborne,” the prince mused.
“I notice you don’t wear one.”
“None of us do. The court, I mean.”
“Is that safe, Your Highness?”
“It’s something relatively novel, but we’ve developed our methods over the years,” the prince said. “We mostly stay inside these days.”
“I see. Did you go out much when you were little?”
“As little as possible. Even when we wore masks.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Did what hurt?”
“To take off the mask.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, because they’re sewn into your face.”
“Yours is sewn into your face?” Preemptively, the prince reached forward to touch Pharmokos’s mask. Pharmokos held his breath.
“Yours isn’t?” Pharmokos whispered. “Wasn’t?”
“Of course not! Why would it be?”
“So we could live, I suppose. Grow up healthy.”
The prince traced his fingers downward, just hovering over the skin of Pharmokos’s chin.
“I see,” the prince murmured. “Do you know much else about the plague?”
“I’m afraid not, Your Highness.”
“I do.” He plunged his fingers further, playfully pulling at the mask’s connective tissue. “What’s so insidious about it is that it’s invisible. You can’t tell who has it. That’s why we have troubles with the bodies, you see. But it also doesn’t kill you right away. It doesn’t dull your faculties. What makes the plague so treacherous is the way it sustains itself.”
“How does it do that?” Pharmokos let out a thin gasp.
“How do you think, Francesca? Like any other living thing. Food.”
Pharmokos’s eyes widened.
“You must know food is a scarce resource. And as always, it’s better fresh.”
The pain was unbearable. Before anything else, Pharmokos felt a cool breeze, and then on the floor was his mask, splattered with a mask of its own, the outline of cheek, chin, and forehead. Pharmokos’s eyes seared with sweat. The light blasted him blind, and he fell after his rabbit counterpart, screaming and howling. Down came the prince, dipping into his ocular sockets, pulling at the white ball of meat until it was unleashed from its wire spring. He sucked it dry. Out of one eye, Pharmokos flailed for something to save him, to defend himself. The image of Ecaf lay cracked next to him.
The prince dug in.