In malicious courts, soft-hearted girls end up with poisoned hearts.
She walks with a scream in her soul and a smile on her face, her dreams rotting in her pocket like undrunk nectar.
If young noblewoman Trista ever revealed her wish for a meaningful life, one profound and free, the lords and ladies of her gilded court would crush her beneath their slippered toes.
But when her father arranges a foul betrothal for her in another city, she craves at least one taste of freedom before she is boxed up into nothingness.
For one night, she escapes to the honeyed radiance of the carnival, where she sneaks behind one of the rides and finds…
An open door.
In a small room, on time-eroded planks, kneels a boy scarcely older than she, and as the wind brushes sand across her slippers, the boy glances up.
Unlike anyone she’s ever known, he is beautiful and mute, and he speaks only with his heart.
With him, she seizes secret joys.
But her spiteful father would rather snap her neck than set her free.
*
In a viperous court, can a single sweet bird fly her cage?
Especially with the cryptic heir to the kingdom always one step behind her, inscrutable with his own unspoken intent.
The beginning is below! Or if you want to grabby now, it’s on Amazon and other retailers.
Before her wickedness, there were dreams. Dreams inked in a journal now forsaken on the floorboards under an evil queen’s bed.
The dust of decades has fuzzed its leather, motes pluming from its creases, and across its pages, between loops of aged ink and blotches of tears, winds the tale of a once-nobody.
Eat Your Curdled Dreams…
I walk with a scream in my soul and a smile on my face, masking myself behind a repertoire of flatteries and lies. My dreams rot in my pockets like undrunk nectar while everywhere I turn glitters with madness and gold, a meaningless merry-go-round of velvet-clad fops, in sickening revolutions between madness and gold.
Dance and glut! they cry, as gilded mirrors reflect gilded smiles that tongue gilded lies.
I am not entirely part of that shallow madness.
Not yet.
I hunger torridly for a different sort of existence, one profound and free, while the vicious nothings that dance with me beneath teardrop chandeliers chase superficial obsession.
The same skulls and bones may shift beneath our skin, but if my soul craves differently—what then? The sounds of frivolity haunt my sleepless nights with vacant melodies, for no heart sings in this music. This place.
My mother hunts my days like a hawk, picking my bony hours clean of anything that could potentially be mine and mine alone. She loves nothing more than to rend the flesh from my dreams; already, she has pared them down to tendon and bone, and tonight, she swept grandly into my bedchamber like an incurable disease. Silken robes swaddled her supple limbs, but their pastel hue couldn’t disguise her flinty eyes. She alighted on my bed like a hawk by a dove.
I didn’t bother fleeing—to what end? She controls my life. I only straggled up, mussed and morose in my nightmare-drenched gown.
She pronounced without preamble: “Your father has arranged a marriage for you.”
Dully, I listened as she relayed my imminent engagement to a vile, unsightly man, a man thrice my age and distantly related to the magnate of the Second Demesne.
I will be ousted from everything I know, dispatched to a demesne where I’ve never been, to belong to a man I will never want.
And naturally she trilled at my deadened reaction, savoring my misery in her lofty, lifeless way. “Why frown, my babe? No one better would have you. More stork than girl. Gangly, gawky, squawky, irascible. You are an uncanny creature. Thin as bird legs; taller than most men. And your eyes! So weirdly dark. Skin pallid as a lizard’s belly. And this.” She flicked her fingernails over my almost-white hair, her lips pursed. “Looks more like spider web than hair.”
I mashed down any retort, because every word I spoke became a weapon that she wielded better.
At last, she departed, but her words punctured my mind like needles sewing my burial shroud shut. Marriage had manacled her, and she will ensure that it chokes me, too.
Both of us were born into our ancestors’ cradle, squeezed into unsuited shoes, made to bow behind our veils of courtesy, and cultivated into unctuous obeisance. Now we parade through our days in wrathful and powerless pageantry.
But I am like a changeling child; I am gone fetid with hope.
Slumped in my plush bed, heartsick and bloated with the day’s cruelties, I envision my fate spanning the decades ahead. Relegated to a minor nobleman’s wife in a distant demesne, I will be a woman of gimlet eyes and vinegar-sour lips; addled creature sharp of tooth and dark of eye, my rancor fusing with my sinew and bone.
Puckered up like a mouth as dark as blood.
Eat your curdled dreams, Dear Trista.
And when my skin sags, ancient, upon my bones, and my life has withered behind me, the masked charade I wear will have saturated me marrow and heart and soul.
I will be as stiff-spirited as my mother, and as iron-dead.
Can I ever escape?
My fate is closing around me like a circle of foes.
Available on Amazon and other retailers.
The old cover for anyone curious!
