WARNING: The excerpt below contains spoilers for Heiress to a Court of Nothing
“Kneel.”
I would be so easy to kill.
Nearly half a century old—delicate, despicable, vulnerable, weaponless—Queen of a court of emptiness, I am a weakling, a nothing.
Fragile.
My face has been hollowed out by the years like a skeletal landscape, my cobweb-white hair floating out in fine, translucent wisps.
But our cur of a king has stripped me of escape like a man tearing off an offensive glove.
The assassin kneeling behind me now, though, could end me before my king would know. My vanity mirror reflects the killer’s cloaked form, his face partly illuminated under his hood: his lips as fat as toads, his nose just short of bulbous, his eyes as flat as water.
Not the most attractive assassin I’ve hired over the years, but he could still strangle me with sweet and callous atrocity.
Yes. Do it. Provocation romps along the rim of my smile. End me.
Triumph so beautifully chokes me, for his potent fury feuds with the restraint in his leather-gloved hands—so close!—until the daunted rat drops his gaze to my monarch’s crest on the hand mirror among the combs of my vanity, and—
All of his barbed wishes rot behind his sneer. A hiss slithers between his teeth. “Whose life today, Queen?”
Coward! Consigning me to another day in this never-ending scream. These endless shrieks.
Unless… I could request a different target tonight.
Him. My hated jailor-king.
But requesting his death would only prove a profligate squandering of gold, because not even an assassin can kill the unkillable, and that royal swine is unkillable.
For now.
I shove my part in that aside. “Her.”
The mercenary angles his head, loosing a lethal curiosity. “I’ve heard that none return alive. That she’s—”
“—as mortal as you and I,” I cut him off, toying with a ruby-red ribbon on my vanity as candle-glow gilds my bony knuckles. “And her protector has been banished, meaning she must draw her own blade now to defend herself. You will have an easier job than your predecessors.”
“But the court wizard and the healer remain by her side.”
“I weary,” I clip out, “of your cravenness.”
He stills, the fiery blaze in his eyes scarcely banked, and then he rises as smoothly as blood. “Consider it done, my queen.”
He genuflects and strides fluidly from my bedchamber, his dark cloak unfurling around his boots like dead skin. At the door, he stoops to retrieve the dagger and two swords deposited earlier at my threshold, then he recedes like an unimportant fact.
I stand from my vanity and begin to swish after him to shut the door.
“Oh, you naughty, naughty queen.”
I halt, rooted in place, the hair on the nape of my neck prickling.
The familiar whisper insinuates itself far too close to my ear: “Dispatching another wicked soul after your goodling child.”
I swivel. “Villain!” My lips peel back from my teeth. “Intruder, show yourself!” Helplessly, my glare stabs every corner, every movement, but only shades and shadows congregate around my etched wardrobes, around the brass mountings on the stone wall, and amid the silken ripples of my canopied bed. “I tire of these unwelcome visits.”
His goad laughs on the air. “But no one else visits you.”
“Oh, how I weep.”
He swishes close again, a shift of air, but before my strike uncoils, he shifts away. “Don’t you know, my queen, that this assassin will die trying to kill her just like all the others?”
I whirl again, my dressing gown tangling in my pathetically stick-like legs. “Do you have something to do with that, snake?”
“Would you bargain for my morals if I did?”
I curl my lip. “Do you have morals?”
His snicker takes a jaunty skip through the air, behind me now. “Did you like losing yours?”
Again, I spin. “Do you enjoy these games?”
“Do you want a game, my queen? Let’s play chase! How flattered I would be if you misspent all your gold, or better yet, spent yourself, hunting me through our crooked lanes.”
“That is a sad ambition.”
“But I would make a delicious prisoner. The most delicious you’ve never had. Lavish me with your pursuit.” His unseen fingertip emblazons its touch upon my lips.
My clawed fingers snatch at empty space. They close on my own flesh, my nails nearly gouging my palm.
His voice retreats toward my open window. “If only I let myself be caught, you would be my favorite captor.”
A rush of air hurls apart my gauzy draperies, baring my bedchamber—and me—to the frosty, starlit air. The crescent moon pales my hair to milky-white threads.
The phantom’s laughter vanishes into the firmament, after which a single opalescent feather drifts to the stone sill, iridescently gorgeous in the moonbeams. Like a vestige snipped off an unwary bird.
Then it dissipates, dispensed into lustrous silver motes, which the envious night whisks away.
Who is he?
A mage who can cloak himself from human sight, that is clear, but the First Demesne is not a city of enchanters like the Seventh; only two known ones reside here, and both have lived here in the castle for years; neither can be this mad visitor.
Then who?
Moreover, why single out me to skewer with his trite and uninspiring prods? Other women in their unlocked chambers would part their mouths and spread their legs for his foul, invisible tongue. They would unbind their corsets in fulsome unrestraint for the thrill of this unseen lover. Welcoming, receptive, inviting.
Yet he plagues me, an antagonistic queen crafted of gaunt corners. My soul is nothing but a gallery with a thousand hanging carvings of cynicism—and one hanging body of a dream.
He cannot seem to keep himself away. I’ve even woken a few times in the night to the dying susurration of the curtains on a little sigh that was not mine, as if he’d come to visit, found me asleep, and vaulted off my sill again, rousing me only with his departure back out of existence.
Enough. Dwelling on nobodies does not befit a queen.
Bestirring myself, I march to my bedchamber door, still ajar from the departing assassin. I touch my fingertips to shut it and—
—blink, instead, at the most powerful man in the known world, standing outside my bedchamber.
My heart clenches.
He clasps his lace-cuffed wrists behind his waist, the lace unfolding in an elegant fall across his sturdy fingers. Brass buttons wink in a line up his high collar. His mauve coat, glittery and veined with green and gold, flares out below his hips. Coal-dark breeches end below his knees, where white hose encase his muscular calves. On his black high-heels, silver buckles engraved with his crest vie for attention.
A man crowned with extravagant power but otherwise featureless. Behind his ears, mud-brown hair curls with indolent gloss and silvery gray, and beneath those perfected curls, his low-lidded eyes study me. His scrutiny, deceptively mild behind his trimmed beard, gropes out every detail of my sour mood, like fingers probing an empty vessel for edible remnants.
An awful taste puckers my mouth. “Husband.”
He inclines his head down the corridor, in the direction the assassin retreated. “Another?”
“Will you stop him?”
“Have I ever stopped them?”
“A monarch can change his mind whenever he wishes.”
“Can I?” He slides his attention down my body, the piqued gleam in his eyes the only aspect about him not bland. “Is this not exhausting?”
Existing with you?I think. Or existing at all?
I shrug. “Everything is exhausting now.”
“Is it? Then perhaps we should liven things up.” He sidles near, his manner moderate as always, but nothing at all lazy lurks behind those flat eyes. “Kneel.”
My spine snaps tighter than a cord. A hiss escapes between my teeth.
A hard smile shapes his lips. “No taste for that?”
For obeisance—to him? My grimace grits out, coiled and hideous.
Another step as hard as his smile brings him closer. “I wonder,” he murmurs, “what would… urge you to kneel.” His fingers gently cup my wrist, and I tamp down a sordid response.
I refuse to kneel to anything, not to fear, not to fate—and definitely not to him.
In truth, though, no matter how I refuse, no woman chained to such power can stray far. At a tug on her chain, she must bow like a supplicant before the power on the throne; she must spread herself submissively on her marriage bed, as I had all the years he required it.
And if my king chose to use force now, no one in the seven cities would stop him. If he chose to chain me to my bed instead of simply chaining me to life, no one would stop him.
Even if I fled, were I so imprudent, none of the Seven Demesnes would harbor me, not when he rules the other cities through his six brother kings. I would be draggled back through mud and muck, an errant weed, his errant queen, whom he would plant back in the center of his poison garden.
Another step toward me, though, brings him up short. His brows shooting together, he glances down.
He unsheathes a tiny dagger from his coat pocket.
I weasel free of his one-handed grip and swish back, proffering him a mirthless smile. “Is your own spell biting you, my magnate?” My mouth gnashes into a grin. “Is it not letting you bring your piddly blade into my room?”
He looks up. The knife clatters to the stone corridor.
He sweeps into my room, weaponless and wordless.
I startle backward like a skittish rabbit and maneuver out of his grasp. “Tell me why,” I spit out. “Why did you have your wizard cast this spell today to block all weaponry from being brought into my chamber?”
He catches my wrist and reels me in, sliding his palms up my upper arms. “Why?”
“Yes.” I claw my fingers but dare not strike—although I tremble to—oh, how I tremble. I suck in a breath and inhale the buttery scent of the remnants of whatever rich fare he fed upon earlier. And his presence, his power fills my vision. It glints in the golden crown upon his head, in the threads of his attire, in the rings on his forceful hands.
Pinning me in place with his formidable grip, he brings his mouth right to my ear. His beard brushes across my neck. “My queen is… unprotected—unarmed. A small spell for your life,” he scrapes out, “is a small price to pay.”
To keep alive a barren woman you never bed? I want to smack the words into his face, but pride pins them back down with sharp needles. “Undo it.”
“No.”
His offhand refusal makes me grit my teeth. My life is a toy in his hands, one he is not yet done playing with, yet he never plays with me at all. Estranged. In other beds. Playing his games of ‘fetch my cock’ with other women while I am nothing but an old bitch lamed at his heels, still on his leash. My life an afterthought to his reign.
Why does he deny me an escape from this life? A knife, a sword. Or if only his wizard’s spell allowed me to step off a windowsill. For me, there is an invisible barrier, although any other raggedy beast can leap out as it wills, while I can scrabble no farther than a rat with its tail clamped in a cat’s jaws.
Or if the wizard’s spell permitted me to shatter my mirror, I would take up the most promising shard. I would impale my life. My king wouldn’t notice; he wouldn’t care. So—
“Why?” I grate out.
“Why?” He slides his mouth across my hair—a mockery of affection!—down, down across my chin, until his lips hover just over my throat. There, he laughs, low and crafty, digging a reaction I don’t want all through me. “I’ll leave you to wonder that, my queen.”
With that, he’s gone.
*
Bracingly, I lean out the window into the swirling night, into the battering wind that blasts past.
At least the spell permits me to experience these elements buffeting my skin, even if it chains my feet inside this unwanted life.
I revel in the force that lashes my cheeks and whips at the sash around my waist, even as I want to grab the wind’s shriek and make it hurl me toward the earth. I need to escape. To wrench free.
Below me, under the windy sky, the First Demesne stretches out like a sculpture of a city, a nocturnal artistry of chimneys and cupolas and labyrinthine lanes. Cozy and shielded by stone walls, all daubed in ashen monochrome.
But overhead, unshielded pennants flap violently on the castle’s moon-blanched towers. As powerless as my hair in the wind’s assault, those banners snap like cracked bones, while the stars above them leak like puncture wounds in the sky.
I imagine a goddess wielding the moon like a sickle blade and perforating that firmament uncountable times in order to cut out those stars. Stab, jab, gouge. Bleed it all.
Disheveled by lunacy and buttressed by animosity, I emulate that warrior goddess’s fury in the battlefield of my own mind, felling unfavorable thoughts like enemy warriors.
I am so sick of it all. I did everything right, all that they bade, and what have I to show? No sons; no lover; no true husband; just scorn. I am trampled, spurned, unloved, used up. Sealed up with sorrow.
Highest queen, wed to the highest ruler of the known world. A joke! Here in my empty room, my empty bed, my empty life taxes my every breath. My soul lies inanimate on a slab of stone, my heart as hollow as a carved epitaph.
At forty-six years, I drag my grief through eternal and lackluster hours, and here in my failed life, all the wanderings on the bleak and barren moor of my despondency lead me back to the only happiness in my life.
Before this marriage.
Before this prison.
Potential had glistened beneath my skin. Underneath my feigned and shrieking hilarity, I’d torridly hungered for more than the vicious nothings that danced with me beneath the teardrop chandeliers. I wanted to be more than a breeding ground, more than just a body some nobleman would bloat with babes—with his miniature likenesses, mere vacant puppets to jabber around me.
In that place of gilded mirrors, gilded smiles, and gilded lies, I’d spun hauntingly in a meaningless merry-go-round of velvet-swathed nobles. In truth, though, I was a changeling child. The same skull and bones shifted beneath my skin, yet my soul craved differently.
And after my awful father, that contumacious brick, betrothed me to an unhinged nobleman in the Second Demesne, a known murderer, I knew that, before the year was out, I would be boxed up into death.
Who would grieve my loss?
Nobody. An insignificant nothing, I was young and uncanny, more stork than girl—as my mother doted on noting. Gangly, gawky, squawky, irascible, I teemed with a mouthful of caustic and contumelious calumnies.
And yet.
What young girl would not want something to treasure before the end?
Touching treasure, though, only reminds you later how poor you really are.
*
I shouldn’t think of it, but my mind is jagged, ragged, and cruel, cruel beneath these aloof and unfriendly stars.
The carnival—it had dazzled.
Strings of hanging lamps pouring out light like molten gold. Ribbons and shawls spiraling from every direction. Secrets peeping around every corner.
A wind had whisked promise across my lips like enchantment.
And like an extension of that enchantment, I discovered a boy beneath one of the rides…
In a tiny room, on time-eroded planks, he had knelt—scarcely older than I, with silvery hair, silvery eyes, his feet bare, his clothes rags—and he was cranking a cylinder to keep the ride’s gears spinning.
While looking upon him, I fell into a little bit of agony, a little bit of wish, and as the wind brushed sand across my toes in my slippers, the boy glanced up.
I swore my breath stopped.
But my life?
That was where my life began.
(They said he’d come from the dark sea, emerging from the frothing tide, and wandered, red-lipped and salted from the ocean, into the lantern-lit carnival.)
—Why am I cruel, reliving this? Jagged, ragged—
Those evenings—those nights—that followed, I ran away from my life and stole into his.
I craved what I hadn’t been given, what I wasn’t permitted, but a door had opened into stupidity, and I hurtled through it.
The carnival had scintillated around me. Spontaneous games, unconstrained music, uninhibited hilarity, ruddy-cheeked merriment, all flavored with the sweetest confections: candied ginger, spun sugar, liquor comfits, even spicy, cinnamon fire wine that seared down the throat like icy fire.
And the boy. After I’d stomached all the jackdaws of the court, people who ripped joy from my days like throats torn from animals, the carnival boy’s smile offered a living haven.
His soul brushed stirringly up against mine, tranquil, lulling, hushed. As palpable as the very heartbeat in my chest.
(They said that he was born mute; he never spoke. But he moved around me like a gentle breeze. He spoke in mouthed words and the tenderest of gestures… of touches.)
With his world to take refuge in, I weathered all the tempests at the castle—the tensions. The masks. The egregious schemes. The two-faced shams. The censorious eyes.
And the heir—Declan Feylinn, the magnate’s eldest son, heir to the throne—who seemed to be watching me at teatime, at the balls…
Why watch me? I’d thought. Because I’m happy? Because I do not copy the other puppets of derision and do not pull amorphous deformities out of my twisted mouth like sick things from my rotten core? Does he dislike that one of his courtlings secretly sings in her heart?
I ignored it as days unspooled into months, as joy loomed up in me so large that I couldn’t find a pocket to put it in. Everything in those days with the carnival boy erupted into vivid life: every scent, sight, sound more than ever before—the bursting sweetness of a strawberry, the tangy tartness of crumbly cheese, the crumble of honey cakes from our fingertips.
And the boy.
The intensity in his eyes as he looked at me divined the intense beat of my heart—and drove me to intense heights of yearning… too intense. It was too much for my affection-starved soul to bear.
However, we could not be—ever. Courtly girl and carnival boy. Too many steps of strata between us.
But then, on a near-soundless night, in that night-hushed belfry, when I could hear the beating of my own heart, the boy knelt upon my flowing gown…
It pooled around us like a foamy sea…
And he reverently traced a confession of love like a script across my eyelids, my cheek, my lips. His hand entangled in my hair, and he touched our mouths across the impassible divide between us.
Why do I think of this? Why am I cruel?
Because I deserve it.
No matter how many interludes of bliss I seized, my engagement to the murderous Vile seized me harder still; still clamped around my throat. I would still be wed and slain in another demesne unless I found a way out of the marital dovecote that blocked me in.
I began to suffocate inside that engagement, inside the cast-iron mold of the court, and I could not breathe, especially when dancing with the heir.
He constantly searched my face, trying to peer behind my mask.
What did he want?
By then I knew that he, too, had tangled his heart in a poorer place, for I’d encountered him at the carnival with a poorer girl—although he could do as he wished, could take any lover he liked, for he was the highest boy in the land!
I was a nothing, a nobody—I could never.
And yet, in a way, the heir and I became slight friends in that fraught time.
And then—
I tried to fly my tyrannical cage.
Mindless metaphorical poultry!
Creatures with clipped wings can never fly.
Look at that pathetic mess! My past self, winded and fractured and cracked, crumpled in a daze of wrecked wits and things (like hopes) smashed where the world can never see. Dragged down—lightless, flightless, beset with adversity from every corner.
Battered, buffeted, I was a dragonfly against a tempest. The boy and I still struggled to fight our way out, but I was merely a paltry, panicked, vehement beating of wings, shredded by a demon-like wind.
The day inexorably approached when I would be carted off to my murderous betrothed.
And, at last, like a bird hurtled from the sky, folded in half by heartbreak, my wings tangled in the miry earth, I finally begged Declan Feylinn—the heir newly made king, now highest power in the land, the only one who could extend his royal hand to lift me from my father’s plan—him, I begged: “Save me.”
And Declan Feylinn said: “Marry me.”
Feathers Floating…
Married.
*
Kneeling amid flowers and smiles…
*
I’d had no choice.
*
Rose petals raining down on my upturned face…
*
Marrying our king was the only thing I could’ve done to escape being murdered in a stranger’s garden.
*
Feathers floating around me from tamed doves swooping overhead…
*
My awful father would never be able to touch me after this.
*
The cloyingly sweet taste of ceremonial wine in my mouth, trickling down my throat…
*
Declan Feylinn had smiled at my ‘yes’ in his flat, unrevealing way, and only his eyes had flickered with a strange sort of life as he’d taken my hand and touched it to his lips. “You and I then, for life.”
Only after I’d agreed had I pressed my kissed hand to my cheek, unaccountably flustered, and wondered: What have I actually done?
I’d agreed to marry our king.
*
In front of the altar, in front of witnesses, Declan kissed me with a shocking bout of passion…
And I, fraud, was rendered inert beneath his ardent show.
*
Perhaps, in my hollow soul, I knew that as I wed, heartache was spreading its wings in the belfry, that my beloved carnival boy was standing where my gown had once frothed around our hopeful, hopeless kisses.
That he was stepping off…
The end.
Our Cruel and Hungry Court
In the days that followed my marriage, I could barely endure the sickening surfeit of popinjays and pageantry that paraded around me. I despised this place—how they watched me—constant, always, ever judging. Their black-rimmed eyes—their poppy-red mouths flapping behind beringed hands, whispering—what? Surely ‘What a wreck she is!’ (I was.)
I overate on icky sweets.
I guzzled liquor as if it were poison.
I drank until everything around me ran together like blotched ink into smears of smiles and sneers on faces, mouths pouring out falsehoods, eyes blurred with malice—
Yet, still, I reveled at their revelries and debauched at their debaucheries—with Declan, king, husband, because he bade me to.
When he urged me, I danced—with him—and some days—on bad days—he brandished a goblet of wine in one hand and sloshed it, slipshod, offhand, as we danced, and occasionally he tipped it to my lips while mouthing, More.
I obeyed.
More.
I glutted.
More.
Meat and cream and wine.
I kissed my king, and the liquor abetted my smile.
It seemed like every time he looked at me, he took me. Morning, night, in the middle of the day. How many times he dragged me into a salon, his lips urgent, his hands deft—bunching up my gown, crumpling the embroidery cloths that he lay me upon, pinning my softly harnessed breaths beneath his.
He would rouse me from ominous dreams at night and stimulate my whimpers with his royal will.
If I shut off my mind and heart, I could cry out in the powerful, irrefutable pleasure of our coupling (if I ignored my soul and tore off my mourning for the carnival boy’s lost life, and my own lost dreams).
I had to submit. My emotions did not matter as long as I bore the next seven rulers, the septuplets born every generation to firstborn son of the Feylinn line.
After all, the Absent God prophesies in the Book of Promises that our entire world is doomed if a time comes when the septuplets are not born.
Thirty years I’ve had, though, and they have not been born of my womb.
*
I am a barren queen, proven by a series of stillborn years—
No.
One child clawed out of me alive during all those devastated years of ruinous labor.
My daughter. Worthless thing. Cursed urchin! Her existence knifes me again and again with the truth: I failed to bear the septuplets.
I am the blight of the kingdom.
The bane of our world.
I want her gone.
Unfortunately, my daughter has not proven easily slain.
My king’s lover, on the other hand…
*
When my king abandoned my bed for hers, I thought: unfair.
His first love yet lived, and he abandoned his duty to sire the septuplets with me to be with her.
Unfair.
But I had married a king; I had access to his gold.
I poured his gold into the purses of brutes, and those brutes took her life, took her from him.
Unfair?
Do I care?
The decay of years, perhaps, has made me unbenevolent.
*
Did my king return to me after losing her?
No.
That squirming larva takes lover after lover even though they are useless, for if I don’t bear the rulers as his wedded queen, no one will. The Book of Promises clearly states that the babes must be conceived within our marriage bed. No mistress can bear them.
Which means I must birth them so long as I breathe.
And Declan—despicable worm—is ensuring that I continue to breathe.
*
What is left to me?
On lonely nights, when slumber calls—a siren song that even queens must obey—she lures me onto steep rocks where nightmares break, and I break with dreams.
Of him. The carnival boy.
In those dreams, I kneel before him, a young girl again, and I plead, “Help me. Save me. Not Declan, but you. You.”
What can he do? He looks upon my despair, but he is only a phantom formed of regret, his real body decayed in a place I’ll never know. (The priest will never tell.)
Now, every day of my forty-sixth year, I wake from dreams like a deadened thing and trudge through vacant hours, dragging along hopes long waned to nothing—hope for the septuplets…
But bearing the septuplets would require my king’s return, and I do not even want him after all his infidelities.
Maybe, though, in this empty life, this empty bed, even an empty man would be preferable to nothing at all.
Yet not even this empty man returns.
*
From the most magnificent castle in the known world, I gaze out upon a pox of stars. The sky suppurates its diluted oozings of light upon me, and I wish I could swallow them like pallid dribbles of poison.
I sing lullabies to my bloodied hands, but they will not sleep, they will not sleep, and I cannot weep—but through the open window, the rain smatters my cheeks, the sky itself weeping for my deed.
Eighty dead.
I poured poison into their bodies so that they would turn on me—bruise me, punish me—kill me. Slay this atrophied heart.
“Kill me!” I’d as good as screamed it at them. My arms spread, my face acrid.
They might have, those ragged ones on the periphery…
But Declan—I imagine his whisper against my throat: ‘A small cage is a small price to pay for my queen.’
He will not let me escape; he forced me to live even after I ordered the murder of so many, and now…
How long can this iron mask of nothingness smother the ravings of my mad soul? How long before the stewing madness broiling in my core spews vomitously out the eyeholes of my mask?
Stroke the iron curve of my spine! I would scream. Its spikes will disfigure your courage.
I am a creature sharp of tooth and dark of eye. Odium fused with sinew and bone.
This is what happens to things that are soft. The boy made me soft, and that made me easier to stab—to pin down.
Do I regret it? How I was with him?
My war-torn, lovelorn soul relives a single moment: that night in the carnival when the boy cupped me in his lap on the carousel, my pliable body, his barely-there exhalation on my hair, his bird-soft fingertips feathering across my waist, his silence like an incandescence in my soul, illuminating my way…
The higher the joy, the more shattering its fall.
What use lies in this rumination?
I strain to unpeel myself from this deluge of grief, but today, thirty years ago, I met him.
The only happiness in my life.
Nothing ever made me happy again, and the thought of succoring more endless days, months, years while trapped in this fleshly vessel, closed up in this echoing castle—in this life, this conscience—abandoned by the very king who locked me here…
Like a butterfly shut up in a jar by a neglectful child, I beat my wings in a last bid for freedom—to end all I’ve done.
It is airless here, and I cannot breathe.
I cannot weep.
I cannot bear it.
I cannot stand it.
I cannot stay here anymore.
*
I throw acidic sneers at every servant I encounter in the halls—sneers that scream: Don’t come near me! Never near me.
And they don’t; they cower. But cowards tell tales, and someone might misplace a word in my magnate’s ear and tell him that I’m running.
And so I hurry—I sprint. No one stops me, which terrifies me.
Faster.
In the courtyard, rain spits from the turbulent sky, where lightning incises the clouds with brash and violent fingers.
I dash beneath the mounted torches, race over the glistening and golden-lit flagstones, and I ignore my gown as raindrops and puddles drench the silk until it clings to my calves.
At the portcullis, the guards rear back, their feathered helms bobbling, chainmail jangling.
My glare goes sweltering and foul. Despite the guards’ obvious glances at the castle, they do not impede their queen; apparently Declan has not gone so far as to curb my physical roving.
I dart past. In the squalid city beyond, the raindrops spatter my face, and the ice-tinged wind shrieks like a fishwife shearing her fingernails across my skin.
Cut me, I urge it. Hew down my anguish. But she can’t; no one can.
On either side, buildings lean in like bullying vagabonds, thrusting their distended brick bellies out onto the street. Their fractured windows reflect my crooked crown, my tilted smile—a smile I’ve bitten down to a bloody hue.
In the timeless night, I reach a gate. A thing constructed of monstrous iron, it consists of locks and spikes and guards that prowl apace.
In the darkness where I dwell, my breath forms wraiths that the wind brutally steals from between my teeth.
“My queen!” Some insignificant personage goes prostrate at my feet.
I scorn his stuttering bow and demand entry.
He lurches to obey.
I stride through the gate, onto the grass beyond that squelches underfoot and muddies my hem.
No one follows me as I enter the span of the city scrapheap, that bleak expanse which stretches out before me, abandoned by all.
Here lie the unloved things, the things dismissed to rot. Wigs with white tresses that sprawl out like albino snakes. Pillows riddled with teeming larvae. Splintered buckets, splintered barrels, overturned troughs. Dolls with faces caved in, unsalvageable and cracked, their porcelain mouths now sunken into morbid grins.
Beneath my slipper, a tarnished silver music box with unscrewed hinges sinks into the sludge, its corner bluntly jabbing my toe. A doll’s fractured porcelain arm entreats rescue from a strangling weed.
All around me: the washed-up flotsam and jetsam of a sea of un-cherished things.
The carnival never returned here because Declan decreed this ground the dump-heap of the city.
A blessing? A curse?
Perhaps here, in this very spot, the boy and I shared our aspiring dreams…
If I close my eyes, I can still see our nook beneath the ride… the candle I’d brought, my cloak spread out upon the planks, he and I existing in that isolated nimbus of light with only the autumn air sweeping in with its crusty leaves.
I can hear my voice reading stories, gabbing, raised in song—all my songs silenced now, in Declan’s and my world, our cruel and hungry court, for no songbird sings among raptors; it must become a raptor itself or have its throat gored.
Despair replaced my joy so long ago it walks in my heart like a changeling ghoul.
But not even despair can keep walking here, and so I pick it up in my arms and rock it to sleep. Humming softly, discordantly, I navigate the stench and debris.
The hem of my gown drags behind me, hampered in the wind, heavy on the earth…
My soul sags, too, small and downtrodden, sodden as a drowned kitten. Broken. Vacant. Why, I wonder, is emptiness so burdened? So cumbrous? How can something hollow belabor my steps?
What irony is it that love is a full-fleshed fruit, and loneliness a shriveled, juiceless husk, yet loneliness poses a far weightier burden than love?
Or is it guilt that anchors me at the bottom of this unbreathable sea?
I halt, for there, lying in the grass, winks a cracked window.
I lean down, and nothing hinders me.
A loophole in the spell?
I sweep up a large glass shard and prick its cold edge to my flesh, and press.
The sharpness of it bursts my wrist open on a small release of blood—a hot, tiny trickle that tickles down my skin.
Nothing is stopping me here.
Suddenly, wildly, I grow aware of my pulse, my life, its vehement throb.
That pulse beats like unseen fists pounding the underside of my skin. Too violently caged.
I am almost free.
In the jagged glass, my reflection mirrors my ghastly challenge to finish it: end this skeletal face framed by wispy hair, with its too-dark eyes beneath a too-onerous crown.
A deeper, downward slice splits my skin further open on a hotter trickle of blood.
I stifle a wince, but pain cannot stop me now. As dark liquid leaks lustrously from my slit vein, triumph blooms.
Finally.
I prepare to slash to the bone, but something moves inside the glass that indents my flesh. An image takes form inside the shard: the inner wall of a stone fortress, and in front of that wall, the face of a monster, like a sharper, gray-fleshed human, only more finely honed.
His charcoal-hued lips part on the points of rending teeth, and he greets me: “Human queen.”
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Sonya Lano 