The Black Swan Read Online Free

calendula and chamomile. Fragrances spicy and sweet filled the air as flowers opened their petals to the sun. Phlox and meadowsweet nodded as she passed, gentian and lupine lifted heads as proud as Odette’s to greet her. In many ways, she hated to sleep the day away, and sometimes would scant herself on sleep in order to drink in the sun and morning air.
    Not this morning, though. She was in no mood to enjoy the birdsong or the riot of flowers, and besides, the spell she had worked so hard to master had worn her out. She stifled a yawn with one hand as she slowly mounted the stairs, and the thought of her soft bed in her darkened room had more appeal than the azure sky and emerald lawn.
    Magical work never seems to tire Father, she thought resentfully. Why does it always exhaust me?
    The door opened as she approached. Von Rothbart was certainly asleep at this point, for if he had not been, there would not have been a single one of the invisible servants free to open the door for her.
    She passed through the portal, and it closed behind her. The two torches in the Great Hall had already been extinguished, and the golden morning light poured through the clerestory windows high in the walls, shining on the strange creatures frozen in the weave of the tapestries, glinting from dim jewels, as dust motes danced in the slanting beams. In the shadows below, Odile made her way to her bedroom, where thinner beams of light played and flirted through cracks in her shutters, and a gentle breeze sighed through the same cracks and brought a hint of the garden into her chamber.
    Invisible hands helped her shed the gossamer folds of her midnight-silk gown; more helpers brought her a wispy sleeping shift the color and texture of dawn clouds. It slipped over her head, and she tugged it into place, while the servants tidied everything up. The bed covers turned back beneath the ministering of another of the Silent Ones, and Odile needed no further invitation than that. She climbed into bed, and the bed curtains slid shut around her, cutting off the playful sunbeams and leaving her in lavender-scented darkness as profound as the night.
    Now, at last, she could lose herself in sleep, and perhaps in her dreams her father would be pleased with her.

CHAPTER TWO
    W ITHIN the cedar-paneled robing room, a hand ful of women hovered over their ruler, speaking in carefully modulated voices. The queen hated what she called “cackle and gab,” and this soothing murmur was more like the hum of contented bees. Seated at her dressing table, cosmetics spread before her in a palette of open jars, Queen Clothilde frowned at her mirror: The traitorous object revealed far too many wrinkles around her eyes, and too many silver hairs among the blonde. I must try the saffron rinse after all, I suppose, ruinously expensive as it is—or bring back the fashion for henins and wimples to hide hair altogether.
    â€œThe gold-spangled headdress and the red-gold coronet,” she ordered, in a voice scarcely louder than that of her women, and the ladies hurried to fetch the precious objects from the wardrobe. With the spangles to distract the eye, and the reflections from the ruddy gold adding bold color, her silvering hair would be less obvious. There was nothing to be done about the wrinkles, except to paint her face carefully with egg white and alum to tighten her skin and try not to smile or frown once it dried.
    She attended to her face herself, and did not allow her ladies-in-waiting back inside her chamber to dress her hair until after she had done all that art and artifice could contrive to erase what time had done to her. Alum and egg white at the eyes and mouth to shrink the skin tight, powder to cover the shine. . . . She dipped tiny brushes in the pots on her table; rose quartz held the carmine for the lips and cheek to counterfeit the blush of youth, malachite the kohl and mica to add depth and sparkle for the eyes, all imported at unthinkable