She laughed, and something in the sound, in the expression on her face so astonished Leander that he gasped, and then laughed with her, unknowing.

"Helena," he whispered in delight and trepidation. He touched her hand. "Helena!"

Shortly after that, perhaps because of that brief indiscretion of Leander's hand on hers, their chaperones announced that it was time for the girls to leave. As they waited at the gates, Helena saw a scrap of white caught in the tortured crook of a metal scroll, faintly luminous in the dusk. She reached out, so casually that the gesture went unnoticed,  and pulled it loose, held it in her curled hand as if it was a living butterfly.

In her room, she opened her hand and held the rose petal to her face. It was white as bone, as alabaster, as leprosy; it was whiter than that, it was as white as the light that had glared on the executioner's sword and cut his sweet throat before the steel ever touched it. It felt like skin and like velvet fur, and the flesh of it glimmered slightly so that Helena felt that she wasn't seeing it properly, as if the petal, though its shape stood out clear, was slightly obscured by its own beauty. She shut her eyes and drew the rose petal across her cheek, her lips, her throat. She held it against each eye. Then she put it on her tongue and she thought of his cheek smudged with blood when the headsman held his head up to show the crowd; she thought of his rose flesh eaten up by the fire, blistered, splitting, blackened like meat, and the horror of it, the sheer ugliness of it filled her with pleasure. What a glorious injustice. She could taste that golden aura on the rose petal. She swallowed it.

Because he wanted to. She laughed again.

*

At table with her father, as she promenaded with her chaperones, stood in airy galleries and paid decorous, diffident attention as Leander and others courted her, she appeared unchanged. But Helena was all the while aware of a slow transformation taking place, invisible and wonderful. Within her was a mausoleum, and within that the rose petal: all that was left of Theron's body. Or, she began to think, what he had been all along. It was difficult for her to distinguish between the roses, now creeping out of Alsacz Square, and him. He had been an abstract expression of them, and they, she felt, were a symbol for something else: what Theron had meant when he'd said, "Because I wanted to."

She thought of how fondly her father loved her, how dear she was to her friends, how she caught such grave, tender looks on Leander's face. With the sweetness of the knowledge of their love was also the realization of how she might betray them, in ways small and grand, and how keen and sumptuous their pain would be. She watched the king, bent with the years Theron had stolen when he promised to find  the young queen, whom he had hidden by sorcery, and wondered if he had been the most pleasant to betray. Or was it the young queen, who had once named Theron her favorite? Or her stepson, the prince, who had also been his intimate?

It was not that it wouldn't grieve Helena to wound them, but that grief would be an ornament, a jewel of such beauty and price that it would bring her only joy. And that would be only the very least of her transgressions and the slightest part of her glory. She had learned  how a message might be passed to the king's enemies and what intelligence they still lacked. She had planned how Leander might be made to carry these secrets, unknown to him, and be exposed. She had also, through other sources, gained access to the vicious spells Theron had used. There was one, perfect and absolute, that made her lips prickle to read softly to herself, as if she was being kissed with great urgency and secrecy. Theron hadn't used this one, or else no one would be left in the city to find it, but he had, she thought, begun it: his crimes, his death. It needed only a few things to complete it: gold given as a gift, a dead man's hair.

It wanted only the moment.

That came when Leander formally petitioned her father to allow Helena to marry him. It was an offer that the entire court had anticipated for several weeks, and which her father, although he told her at breakfast that morning that he would miss her dreadfully, was delighted to accept. The three of them sat in the parlor and the men arranged the dates when they would meet with their lawyers. Leander gave her a gold bracelet, a lock of his hair bound with a ribbon, and a swan carved in white jade. She held the swan in her lap. When Leander said goodbye, her father allowed him one kiss, pressed chastely to her forehead. She stood, the swan still in her hands, Leander's hands as gentle as birds on her shoulders. His lips were warm, and as he drew back he looked down at her with an expression that was grave and tender. He loved her, Helena had no doubt of that, and he had confessed to her that this sincerity of love had caught him by surprise: he was young and invulnerable and affected the attitudes and fashions of the court. He had expected a dutiful marriage, but not to be brought low by a loving one, or to find the surrender so sweet. He left the frivolity and games of a courtier's bachelorhood for the richer, deeper things she had revealed to him. The tenderness that Helena felt for his love, a thing as pretty and guileless as the jade swan, was the bait and compliment for a red-gold longing to ruin him. She leaned up and kissed his throat, where the light had struck Theron's, felt his pulse and his beautiful, forfeit life against her mouth.

She contrived to follow him out the door, and asked him to deliver a note to a certain shop. He kissed the note, his death sentence, and put it in his pocket.

*

Her father took the news very hard. Leander's trial was brief; the king could not face another lengthy scandal and there was no room for leniency or defense. He had delivered information to rebels, passed communications between them, disclosed state secrets. This had led directly to an attack on the ministerial courts and the death of several cabinet ministers and very nearly the king. Helena and her father were the subject of much sympathy, and Leander's betrayal of his fianceé was held as the meanest of his crimes. Helena, although she didn't contradict her father's wishes, would have liked to see Leander's trial. Did he guess that it was her? He must have. Had he tried to blame her? Did he think he was protecting her? She would see him die, at least. She had insisted; did she not have a duty to support the king, did she not still owe Leander?

They raised the scaffold outside the city for this execution. Helena and her father were given a place in the royal box, and the queen's own ladies-in-waiting stood ready to catch her if she fainted when her lover was beheaded. They were already making plans to find her a new suitor. The queen kissed her forehead, where Leander had, and told her to be brave. Rose petals blew against the railing and stuck on the banners.

Leander looked very frail and defeated in his black suit when they led him up the scaffold. He looked up for a moment and caught Helena's eye, and it was plain in his bewildered, terrified expression: he knew. The rich, delicious cruelty of it made her catch her breath, shaped a pleasure more exquisite than anything she had thought possible. Her body, felt so intensely for a moment, seemed to grow translucent, imprecise, until she was nothing but soul and sensation. Was this what Theron had felt? Within her, in that mausoleum, something stirred: a white rose opening in unrelieved darkness, or a hand as white as a rose pressed to a door that would never open.

The ladies-in-waiting, mistaking her response, took her arms and tried to draw her away, but Helena would not leave now. Leander knelt, miserably but with some solemn dignity, and the headsman raised his sword, and it flashed in the light, and it cut through his throat where she had kissed him.

When the executioner held Leander's head up, Helena folded her hands around the talismans she had prepared, white rose petals, a lock of a dead man's hair, a gift of gold, and made the passes that would complete the glorious, terrible spell Theron had prepared.