Here's a mysterious summary
Hildegarde Sneal has lived at Penbrook House for as long as she can remember, together with her twin brother and a tangle of other children. The water runs cold, the beds are hard, and the matrons are harsh, but Hildegarde has always made the best of it. She knows it isn't a forever thing, that one day she'll leave to become a posie - a beloved companion to one of the masked, mysterious degas, the fae of high society.
Yet when the day comes, she isn't quite ready for it. Wrenched from her brother and ferried far into the north, she must find her place among the degas of the Virsk estate. The family is warm, their gifts are lavish, and the outings are exciting, but notes of doubt are everywhere. Why do the other posies speak so little? Why won't her brother respond to her letters? What secret sits in the tower upon the lake?
Biggest of all is the mystery of Daisy, the older girl who dines every evening with the Virsk family but is posie to none of them. As the reality around Hildegarde grows ever more fractured, and as countless secrets unfold, the two girls develop a bond that may save both of their souls.
And here's a summary that's full of spoilers
The degas are long-lived creatures capable of magic, deception, and powers beyond measure. What they are not capable of is feeling. The emotions they have are muted - they experience nothing with the vitality of human beings, whose passion and anger can level cities.
There is nothing the degas covet more than the ability to feel. The means by which they achieve it are delicate and precise. They need a human - a child, preferably; someone trusting. They need to care for them. They need to earn the child's devotion, their love - and then they must perform a ritual that entangles their souls together, so that everything the human feels becomes theirs.
Posies are humans who have been entangled with degas. They are blank, uninterested, and they feel nothing - everything they are is filtered through to their degas. It is this fate that Hildegarde is bound for, but she doesn't even know it.
The rest of my details about the story are quite vague. I know that Daisy is a posie, but to a half-dead, comatose degas that the Virsk family are straining to bring back to consciousness. I know that the plot is going to centre around Daisy and Hildegarde trying to escape the estate (in the hopes of finding Dante, Hildegarde's brother), which can only be done if they kill Daisy's degas, who she cannot stray far from. I know that things are not going to go smoothly.
But I am e x c i t e d to write.
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