Chapter Text
Celestial light dapples the jade walls of Heaven.
Beneath the wall, a crimson pearl flower blooms, nurtured in the fall of that radiant Light. Though as fragile as it is beautiful, it thrives, watered by the rain trickling down the surface of a divine stone, itself abandoned, that lovingly shelters that rare flower.
A story begins anew, in a new land, by new names, another cycle of love and of longing, of ink and of petals, of desires both sated and unfulfilled, and of tears repaid to the very last.
But it is not the same as before.
Beneath the wall, where shadow cools bare earth, unseen by celestial eyes, a single shoot wriggles from the bitter soil. A hardy weed, untouched by the light, unloved by the water, clinging stubbornly to life only by the force of its will.
Unseen by the deity of the stone, the weed looks to the bright flower in sadness, in envy, and in longing.
She, too, will soon be reborn in the garden of earthly splendours and earthly tragedy.
This tale is hers to tell.
She is a small thing. She is all knees and elbows and eyes. She was born not into silk and brocade and perfume, but into dust and flies and the stench of textile dyes and the darkness of the mines.
She had parents, once, poor miners, killed in an ill-fated rebellion, far away. She had an unbreakable sister, torn away from her and imprisoned where she cannot reach.
The girl might have been beautiful, under the auspices of another life. Poverty and struggle have, instead, made her as thin and wiry as a boy-child from the slums. Her skin is pale from her childhood in the underground, her long dark hair stained a blue river by the dyes of her adopted family’s work. Her dark-rimmed eyes stare, deep and haunting, from her small sharp face.
Since that first loss she has moved from place to place, in the shadows of the alleys, the sweaty crowd of the textiles districts, the noise and colour and smells of the markets. Too small and sharp and filthy for most to even notice as a girl, she has survived on stubborn will and the hunger of a sharp mind always eager to learn. She’s been a messenger running between miners, merchants, and their madams, a beggar, a pickpocket, a tinker, and brief apprentice to seamstress and toymaker, painter and apothecary, smith and firework maker…
The last was her finest hour. Her greatest, secret joy has been her skill with mixing the chemicals and powders, watching from afar as her master becomes renowned for the work she shall never be recognized for. But she cares little for the approval of others. When the colours she has painted with her careful mixtures and measures—in smoke, in flame, in light—reflect in her eyes and the sound pops and bursts in her ears, then, only then, does she truly smile.
They called her ‘Powder’ for that aptitude, for the stains of her concoctions on the pale of her skin, the blue tint in her hair. They called her ‘weed’ and ‘minnow’ and ‘monkey’ and ‘imp’ for her scrawny, agile, quick-eyed cleverness, her sharp tongue and penchant for mean-spirited pranks, and her talent for building and making and fixing things, for all things chemical made from plant, animal or mineral source, paints, dyes, inks, medicines, poisons…
But those are not the names that stay, not even her childhood name.
The happiest period of her young life ends with the fire that burns down the firework maker’s workshop. But it is only the culmination of her bad luck. She can never stay long in one place. Misfortune and ill-omen have followed her since the day of her birth, and find all those who come too close to her, eventually. She passes from one household to the next, to the next, always too slippery to suffer the worst punishments and cruelties of her masters, yet always bringing with her accident, heartbreak, and calamity…
Never her doing, but always her fault. No matter what name she is called, another name follows her, whispered behind her back, spat into her face, until it becomes the only name by which she recognizes her own reflection.
It will follow her all her life.
Jinx.
It is only by heaven’s twisting hand that she finds herself in a world unlike she has ever known.
To call it a ‘Garden’ is to call the sun a spark. It is built within the grounds of a great noble House in the Capital, a sprawling landscape of bright rivers and elegant canals, of sloping hills and soft whispering trees, of bridges arching beneath the splendour of blossoms of every kind in heaven and earth.
Though it is encased within the tall walls of the House’s grounds, to the poor girl, it is a celestial paradise that seems to go on forever.
She, the girl, Jinx, is now washed and perfumed, garbed in the robe of a maidservant of the great house in which she kneels, hair bound up in two braids wrapped into a simple headpiece that has more value than anything she has ever owned.
Seated before her, tea steaming in front of her, is a woman as resplendent as a goddess, and as formidable. She is dressed in purple, scarlet and gold. A diadem of a golden phoenix perches high upon her hair. She is Leblanc, a senior Lady of the household. As Jinx will soon learn, she is the one whose hand guides much that takes place within the walls of this floating garden of delight.
“Well, a half-starved bumpkin girl,” the great Lady muses of her malnourished guest, “I should have expected such. No matter! For this purpose, you shall serve excellently. This House is awash with great beauties; let us see what a piece of blue string may accomplish, where they cannot.”
Her eyes are not only haughty but shrewd, and when Jinx lifts her own eyes to her better in foolish affront at the insult, she is surprised to find in the Great Lady’s expression a look of amusement, even the tiniest flicker of compassion.
“There is your spark. Good,” says she, “Listen, carefully! You shall attend the young lady to whom you have been given in all matters, diligently, and befriend her as she wishes. Especially, you shall mind the company she keeps with the young lord. Well, can you speak?”
Jinx has held her tongue this long. She knows that here she knows nothing; here, she is nothing. It is a perverse impulse that takes her to speak as plainly as she does.
“Why’d you choose me? I’m only a Jinx.”
To her surprise, the great Lady does not scold or mock her.
She does laugh.
“Girl-child, it is because I learned of your reputation that I plucked you from the dirt!”
“Everyone says I’m cursed,” says Jinx. She cannot help herself. She cannot believe this great fortune would befall her, after all her life of suffering. It must be some terrible trick. “Why’d anyone want to bring a cursed girl into this pretty place?”
“Oh, yes. That is what I heard, myself. ‘There in the slums of the city is an orphan witch-girl, with hair stained blue. Her mind would baffle the cleverest scholars, but she’s cursed to bring bad luck to all around her.’ Isn’t that what they say?”
In answer, the great Lady rises, sweeping the fiery trail of her phoenix dress in her wake as she walks to where the humble girl kneels. She taps her nail to the underside of Jinx’s chin and raises her head, studying her features, her cheeks, her scars, and the scarcely-hidden defiance and pain in her eyes.
“There are no curses, girl. Those who bemoan misfortune are either blind to the consequences of their own deeds, blind to the machinations of others, or so arrogant as to think the whims of chance are the grudges of gods against their foolish persons. Hah! Fools create their own curses from fear and envy.”
Her blazing eyes are full of a cunning well beyond Jinx’s comprehension, but her sharp words cut away like fiery scissors at years of other words—cursed brat, witch-child, ill-omen–that hang upon the girl at her feet.
“A girl ‘cursed to bring down all who know her’ is either a schemer playing games to serve her own wickedness; or she is simply a girl too clever or too talented to be contained by fools. Which are you?”
Jinx stares without blinking at the woman.
“I’m me, nothin’ else,” she says, “Jinx stands for Jinx.”
She expects to be reprimanded, even punished, for she cannot give the answer the great Lady seeks.
Instead, she is met with a sly smile.
“If you are a schemer, or merely clever, I will find you out quickly. If you are something else, something more, then you will prove yourself useful. Very well.”
Leblanc turns away, musing on the view of bright blossoms through the window.
“I shall have a task for you, in its time. But first, you must meet your new mistress.”
She is a willow-branch draped in blue and pink silk; as melancholy and as beautiful as moonlight on fresh snow. Her moods change as swiftly as clouds crossing the sun, or fleeing it; her smile is every sunrise, her sadness a bittersweet rain.
Her name is Luxanna.
She is standing on a bridge in the gardens when Jinx is taken to meet her, reading a piece of poetry of her own composition, with her brows drawn together in fierce contemplation.
As the light falls upon her fair face, she lifts her hands into the petals falling, stirred from their branches at a passing breeze, and a look of such melancholy crosses her face that Jinx stops, frozen on the path.
The girl, her new mistress, looks up as she is called.
When Jinx is introduced by the less-inauspicious name of ‘Powder’, Luxanna turns that gaze on her, and Jinx is blessed with her smile for the first time.
“What beautiful hair,” she says, as no one has ever said to Jinx, “Welcome to the Prospect Garden. I wish that you and I shall be the closest of friends…so please call me Lux.”
Jinx is as slight and as small as she. But Lux has the fragile grace of a songbird where Jinx has the twitchy agility of a monkey. To pass near Lux is to breathe the perfume of rare blossoms drifting on the breeze. The baths Jinx has been given and the clean maidservants’ clothes she now wears cannot hide the chemical stains on Jinx’s small fingers, nor the scars, nor wash away the scent of gunpowder and dye from her skin.
Lux is everything that Jinx is not, and can never be. She should envy and despise her from the crown of her head to her smallest toe…
Yet one look is all it takes. One meeting of their eyes, and she knows. No one she will ever know will ever see Jinx, and be seen by her, like this.
“I wish so too,” The blue-haired girl swallows. “Lux.”
“Fold the other way, Powder, have you not been taught so?” Lux scolds her softly, but always with a faint smile, “Gosh, I shall have to fold these myself! Here, let me help.”
“My lady, it is my duty to—”
“Oh, foolish! Have they told you to speak like that to me? Cut that out!”
Lux’s brows meet in a stormy frown, but just as Jinx begins to cringe from being struck—for how many times have past masters and mistresses done so?—Lux is laughing.
“Your face! Come on, Powder, I can tell you are just acting like you think a servant should. If we’re going to brush each other’s hair and play games to pass our time, and sleep in the same bed, I want to at least hear you speak with your own voice.”
Jinx stares at her, and the courtly manners she has so recently been taught slip away like a poorly worn disguise.
“Well, how d’you want me to talk to you then, Lady Precious?” she snorts, “If I toldya foldin’ your robe like that’ll sure show off the collar all pretty upon a shelf, but it’ll wear a crease into the weave over time, wouldya believe a pathetic gutter rat like me?”
Lux’s lavender eyes become wide as the heavens; crossly, she stands in a swish of silk.
“How dare you,” she says.
“You asked for my voice,” says Jinx, “I was raised in a textiles district. I know that fabric. Over time, creasing it against the weave, that’ll wear away at the thread!”
“No, idiot!” Lux scolds her, “How dare you speak so cruelly of yourself? Every other girl I’ve known has simply folded my robes in the pretty way without question. How dare you call someone clever and honest enough to correct me ‘pathetic’?”
Jinx’s words slip away. How can she respond to such a thing, from that face?
“Come!” says Lux, gathering up the garment in question, “Show me how to fold this.”
“Show you?”
Lux’s smile is brilliance. “I want to learn from you.”
“Why?” says Jinx, “You’re a great fancy Lady and I’m—I am—”
She trailed off as Lux’s smile fell away; sunlight vanishing behind a cloud.
“A clever girl,” says Lux, “Who has learned so much in her short life. I’m an outsider here, too. I was sent here after the passing of my lady mother to stay in this household, where my only relatives remain. My maternal grandmother is the matriarch of this clan and highest lady of this House…but to most here, I'm only an orphan foundling, a burden they must smile and bear for her sake.”
Lux’s eyes shine as she looks out the window of her chambers and into the gardens.
“I have lived all my life walking paths decided for me. I have only seen the streets of the city over the manor walls and the countryside from the windows of a palanquin. I know nothing of your world.”
Jinx, on uncertain, creeping steps, takes her place by Lux’s side. She does not look at the gardens, but at her lady’s face.
“And I know nothing of yours.”
“I think that your mind and mine have plenty of space to learn,” Lux’s smile dawns again. “So, let us be each other’s teacher, my dear Powder.”
“Jinx,” says the poor girl, “If I’m supposed to call you Lux, when we’re alone…please call me Jinx.”
The beautiful Lady’s eyes are bright with surprise. She searches Jinx’s features, for some sign that the girl is playing some trick, giving herself such a cursed name.
But there are none, and Lux’s heart changes again.
“Have you ever written poetry, dear Jinx?”
Jinx, hesitant, shakes her head, and Lux frowns.
“Can you read and write at all?”
“Some,” Jinx admits, self-conscious.
“Who taught you? Your family?”
“No. They couldn’t. They were poor. And they’re all dead now. Even my sister probably is.”
“Oh,” says Lux, very softly.
“But my masters…I’ve lived in different places. Before I came here. One house had a lot of little ones. They called in scholars to tutor ’em.”
A small smile comes to her features.
“I hid in the rafters. I watched and listened.”
Lux’s mouth opens in surprise; “And did you have paper, brushes, and ink…?”
“Bark. And charcoal. And my memory.”
Lux’s silence hangs over them for a long moment; Jinx thinks, as she always does, that Lux’s anger is about to fall on her.
So many people in her life have been angry with her.
“Like a clever little monkey, hiding in the high branches,” Lux murmurs, “How wonderful you are, dear Jinx. I have never met anyone like you at all.”
She snatches up a box of writing implements, beautiful polished wood inlaid with gold and silver.
“Well! You shall have no need of bark and charcoal here. For our lessons—here!”
It passes into Jinx’s scuffed, scarred hands, the most precious thing they have ever held.
She stares at it in wonder. But it isn’t the marvel in her hands that makes her heart beat faster, or her skin grow warm as it never has before.
It is the brush of Lux’s fingertips, soft and cool as finest silk, over Jinx’s fingers. An accidental touch, as she draws her hands back from the box, into her gown’s billowing sleeves.
It can only be Jinx’s imagination, the faint flush upon the beautiful Lady’s white cheeks.
“Let us begin.”
She will become accustomed to that touch, Lux’s slender fingers on her own, shaping her grip upon the calligrapher’s brush, gently guiding her strokes…
She will become familiar with the glance of Lux’s sharp eyes from beneath their long lashes as she glances up from perusing Jinx’s progress.
She will become intimate with the bright, floral scents of her, sweeter than the garden, when she is assigned to keep her Mistress company through the cold nights of winter, talking long into the night at her side, lying in her Mistress’s bed to provide warmth and conversation and to guard her troubled sleep…
Jinx does not yet understand the flutter of her own heart, or the warmth it leaves behind.
One day, she will.
She’s settled into her new life awkwardly, but with a fierce determination not to fail. She is a wildcat in their midst, prone to fierce flashes of temper and sudden, impulsive whims and the tendency to disappear, exploring every corner of the mansion with the boldness of a burglar and the scurrying skill of a little blue mouse; and her rough upbringing means she lacks much of the skill and training suited to a noble Lady’s maids…
…but her unusual life outside the manor has left her with talents no one else possesses. No one has her knowledge of paints and dyes, nor fabrics, nor herbs and powders, medicines and chemicals; she can build anything and fix anything she’s asked, she paints scenes of grotesque, childish, but compelling phantasmagoria nobody else understands and crafts ugly, whimsical, delightful toys that astound her peers. For all her failures of temperament and personality, she’s very far from anything that can be called lazy. She can be unfailingly relied upon to use her skills when asked; she is thirsty to be useful, and here, for the first time, she’s found a place where her eccentricities are a thrill and delight to the bored maidens in their delicate lives more often than they are a nuisance or source of fear and scorn.
This place…it is like nowhere she’s ever been. She can almost believe she is safe here.
“The young lord has grown up surrounded by women,” says Lady Leblanc, seated upon her cushions, in another of her private confidences with Jinx. “Though clever of mind and beautiful of body, he is uninterested in the politics of the court and the study of the great scholars which his station commands of him.”
Jinx does not understand these meetings.
Though she has never lived more comfortably, and the servant girls she is surrounded by have welcomed her like a little sister, or perhaps like a stray kitten brought in from the rain, she is always aware that she is the newcomer, the one with the most to prove…
Yet Lady Leblanc summons her, and speaks to her just like this. As candidly as if they were friends, or, at least, as if Jinx were some troublesome niece of whom she was fond, and not the lowliest of servants.
“Instead!” Leblanc declares with a great sigh, “He plays frivolously with the ladies of the household and indulges himself solely in the amusements of poetry and philosophy and the trinkets of far-off lands. Often he escapes his duties to some mischievous adventure, and although he is guileless and his worst vices only the whimsy of a listless child, he is the heir of the line, so the fortunes of the household do rest upon his head. If he ever truly succumbs to wickedness or self-destruction…”
The great Lady smiles coldly.
“This house thrives or crumbles as one. The highest here might have farthest to fall, dear Jinx, but the lowest would be crushed beneath them. Remember that.”
Jinx meets him, soon. The young lord.
She had imagined him quite differently; a rakish dilettante, full of charming words and barely-disguised hunger, or a cold, haughty master of the house, expressing his dominance as he pleased. She has witnessed both amongst the places she has lived, closer than she cared to, and only by her gutter rat cunning and her native talent at remaining unobtrusive and unappealing to the lusts of men, has she avoided their attentions…
She could always deflect, disguise, disgust, disappear, where the other poor girls and women around her couldn’t. But she never could spare or save any of them. Not in any place she ever was. All she could do was hide in her shadows and watch, and listen, until she forced herself not to, anymore.
Jinx doesn’t trust men. And she does not trust this one.
But he is ‘different’.
Ezreal is the prettiest boy she has ever seen. His glossy dark hair is long and carefree; bound up on his head and pinned with a distinctive red ornament; at his throat, a piece of precious jade that, she learns by gossip, was said to have been found in his mouth when he was born, like a gift from the divine. His robe of red and white cuts close to his slim figure; his eyes are bright as gold, quick and inquisitive or faraway and dreaming with equal ease, and his eager smile is curious and excited by everything, but most of all by anything new.
He strolls among the women of the Garden with a playful ease and friendly, familiar words for every girl he meets; he knows them all by name.
Jinx is quick to see the truth of Lady Leblanc’s words; the young man doesn’t act like a rich man at a brothel or a king with his courtesans. He bounces around like a bored child, joking with the girls, reading poetry, exciting them with stupid stories, even trying on their makeup! They humor him, not with the forced coquettishness Jinx has seen so many times in women carving smiles on sweet faces for the sake of survival. No, none of them, even the lowliest servant girl, seems averse to a roll of the eyes, a swat of a fan, or a good natured riposte of words, a familiarity, a safety, flowing both ways.
To Jinx’s bafflement, they treat this handsome, witty, charming young lordling like a mixture of an affectionate sibling and a shared, mildly troublesome pet.
It’s almost as if he is one of them. ‘Raised among women’, indeed.
“Ah!” he says when he sees her, “You’re Lux’s new friend! They said you had hair as blue as a river of cobalt, and so I was disappointed I hadn’t seen you yet. But here you are now! And it’s true!”
His bow to her is courteous, if a bit theatrical.
“I’m Ezreal!”
“They call me Powder,” she replies, “I’m happy to serve.”
“How polite,” says he, with his bright laughing voice, and his warm inquisitive eyes searching hers, “Well, don’t worry if you don’t stay that way. Being around our Frowning Princess for long will ruin anyone’s good manners.”
“Hah!” Jinx slides her narrow eyes to him. “Is that so?”
“What a slanderous accusation,” says Lux herself, sweeping up behind them on footsteps so dainty and quiet that neither Jinx nor Ezreal heard her, “As the House cannot afford to have its future master proved a liar, I shall have to fulfil it.”
“As long as I don’t lose my head for it, My Lady Luxanna,” Jinx says to her with a hint of acid on her tongue, and Ezreal looks at her in surprise.
“My dear Powder, I will protect that precious head of yours to my last breath,” Lux smiles and touches her arm, with those bright eyes Jinx cannot tear hers away from burning into hers, “After all, it must be kept safe to think its clever thoughts, and to keep my pillow warm on cold nights before I sleep, mustn’t it?”
Jinx’s heart is sparrow-quick. No matter how many nights she spends, as the other maids do in their turn, keeping the lady’s company as she sleeps, she cannot explain to herself why the feeling won’t leave her.
She cannot speak at all.
Then Lux turns those eyes on Ezreal, who’s grinning at her like a fool, and her pretty brows crease in a scowl.
“Did you forget to bring your study materials, again?”
“No, I have them right here,” he protests.
“Those are books of poetry, Ezreal.”
“They are works of classical literature!”
“They are books of erotic poetry, Ezreal,” Lux sniffs, “Really, in my presence? For shame. Read those in your room, and you’d better be reading them alone.”
“Rare editions! From centuries ago!” He scoffs. “There’s a great deal of merit in the philosophy presented in the Tale of the Peony Curtains…”
“Hardly material that is going to be on the Ministry Exams.”
Jinx hides her smirk behind her Lady’s back. Oh, if only they knew what Jinx had seen with her own eyes, through the cracks in the doors or from in the rafters or behind the curtains during her time as the favoured urchin and market-runner for Madam Babette of the House of Scarlet Curtains and her girls.
Perhaps she could put the great poets to shame describing what she’s witnessed, if she only knew the words…
“Th-that may be true,” Ezreal whines, “But I don’t care about the rotten exams. What beauty is there in being another dull face in a row at the ministry? Is not life in every falling petal, in the trickle of the stream beneath the bridge, and the call of the magpie, the thrush and the koel?”
“Grandmother will scold you until you weep for her forgiveness, you great waffling idiot,” Lux sighs, “And you had best not let Janna see you reading such things, either! Let alone your father! But very well. All this talk of exams is exhausting me. Come, come, let’s sit by the weeping willows and read some poetry…”
She snatches away his satchel of books, with a sharp raise of her brows, and winks back over her shoulder at Jinx.
“My poetry.”
“Sorry to steal her, Powder,” Ezreal sighs, and flashes her a wink, “I’ll see you around, I’m certain! Let’s talk soon!”
And then he and Lux are gone.
“My lady, how may I best help to protect the young lord from himself?”
She is learning their manners of speech, though it hangs rough upon her sharp gutter tongue. She dares only speak freely around Lux, and a scarce few of the other girls in the Garden—those most like herself.
And, she cannot help herself, also around Ezreal.
“Ah,” Leblanc says with a sly laugh, “So you have met him, then!”
Leblanc’s next words twist her heart. She does not yet know why.
“Of all the women in this House, it is your Lady Luxanna he is closest to,” the Lady regards the fan with which she lazily stirs the air at her cheek, “Their bond is a rare one, and grows stronger each day. One need only look at them together to see two halves of the same mind…even the same soul!”
The great Lady cannot know what eats at Jinx’s heart. This feeling, as if she had just swallowed poison. She cannot let this feeling show upon her face.
“Everyone here sees what is happening between them, even if neither of them yet does.”
She couldn’t put a name to those feelings if she tried.
“Yet, for several reasons, she may be an unwise match…”
Jinx sees it, the next time she sees them together.
They are on the bridge; one of many, but this one is special to Lux. She spends a great deal of time there, lost in her many mysterious bouts of melancholy, especially in the season when the white peach blossoms are falling from the tree above the bridge…
Ezreal is listening, rapt, his hand upon his cheek, as Lux sings softly, reciting one of her original pieces. Lux’s voice is soft and thready but full of passionate emotion, her words alive with rich poetry, subtle nuances of feeling like the changing colors of the seasons.
Jinx, her commoner’s rudimentary understanding of the courtly tongues clashing with her gutter rat’s intimate understanding of pain, of loss, feels each word burrow into her heart.
It is a song that could move the heavens to weep.
When it is done, Ezreal meets her eyes.
Lux’s eyes are shining with unshed tears. But her smile, like her song, is just for him.
That night, as Jinx lies at her side, watching over her sleeping face like a small blue cat guarding her mistress, she hears it for the first time.
The thin wheeze under Lux’s sleeping breath.