She always turned out to have excellent reasons for her bizarre, complicated, wheels-within-wheels plans. Although she’d never bother to tell you what they were. Or shield you from the consequences of carrying those plans out. Jonquil had beendismembered and beheaded while fighting a grootslang in the Summerlands. She’s fine now. Except for the scars. And the nightmares.
“You are thinking,” my stepmother said, “of King Estienne. He is king no longer. He has died after a lingering illness. His son, Gervase, sent word to ask for your hand.”
That did not make me feel any better about the situation. If anything, it troubled me more. I knew something of Estienne from my occasional lessons in statecraft. Tailliz was one of a dozen or so small kingdoms on the shores of the western sea, and its aging king had been a peaceful and conservative monarch, although one of no particular note. His son was scarcely more than a name to me, a footnote on a list my tutors had made me memorize in case I ever had cause to travel west.
Which now, I supposed, I did.
She rose from the obsidian throne and walked toward an oval mirror that hung from a nearby pillar. When she tapped the glass, her reflection was replaced by a forest scene. Dense trees and underbrush and, in the far distance, a castle on an island in the sea. Tailliz?
Now that she was no longer sitting, it was permitted for me to stand as well, much to the gratitude of my throbbing knees. As a princess, I had been given years of training in grace and deportment, so I was able to lurch to my feet with only a tiny bit of a stagger.
“Why is this happening so rapidly?” I asked. “Is he that desperate for an heir? Does he know I barely count as a princess?” I wasn’t even in line for the throne; that was reserved for the queen’s blood relatives. Calla sometimes grumbled that this was unfair to me, but I had a hard time believing it would ever matter. I expected that my stepmother would still be ruling Skalla hundreds of years after I had perished of old age.
I thought I remembered Gervase had been a younger son at the time of his birth. Some of his siblings must have died. Thatdidn’t seem like a promising portent. What had they died of? Could I be heading into danger of some kind?
My stepmother’s eyes remained fixed on the scene in the mirror. “It is possible he is unaware of your parentage. He did not ask for you by name.”
“How charming. What did he request, then? Any spare girls you might happen to have lying around?”
“He specified his bride should be of age and as of yet unmarried.”
“What luck,” I spat, “that I qualify.”
“Yes.” Her reply contained no acknowledgment of my sarcasm. She did not turn from her contemplation of the forest in the glass. Her features might as well have been carved out of the same raw mountain rock as the palace. She seemed as ageless and eternal as the columns supporting the ceiling, and her expression was just as impenetrable.
He must have dispatched a messenger immediately after his coronation if I was hearing about his proposal before I’d even known Tailliz had changed rulers. I hadn’t been out on the tooth quest for more than a few weeks. What was the cause of all this speed and urgency? It was odd that my stepmother had accepted so quickly. Had the messenger already been sent back with her agreement?
And without mine. My assent had been neither asked for nor required.
Since I was the queen’s stepdaughter, my fate was shaped by the obligations of politics and the caprices of sorcery, not by lesser concerns like my own preferences. I’d always assumed my marriage wouldn’t be of my own choosing. I’d hoped, though, that I would at least have some say in the matter.
My sister Jonquil was married to a fairy princess from the Summerlands. It was a political arrangement, accompanied by a trade agreement reducing the tariffs on honey, blood, and hen’s teeth and containing a codicil that stopped the theft of babiesand their replacement by changelings, an issue that had brought Skalla and the Summerlands to the brink of war. But Jonquil and Gnoflwhogir had had a chance to meet, and fight a grootslang together, and save each other’s lives before the treaty was finalized.
Calla’s fate sounded worse on the surface; when she turned eighteen the year before, the queen had offered her hand to all comers in a contest, as if she were a prize cow. But for all practical purposes, she’d made a love match. Technically, Liam had won the competition by crossing the world and sailing the seas and bringing back a golden feather from the undying firebird. Everyone knew, though, that Calla had liked him better than any of the others and had blatantly cheated to help him out. The queen pretended not to notice. Calla is the baby of the family and can get away with things that would see me clapped into the tower again in an instant.
My fate, it appeared, was to be shipped off to some complete stranger, with no opportunity to make my own choice. As usual, I was about to be stuck with the worst of three bad deals.
I had my suspicions as to why things tended to turn out that way. And just where I stood in my stepmother’s regard. I was an afterthought. I always had been. At best, a disappointment. At worst, an irrelevancy.
The middle child. The only one with no blood relationship to the queen; when she took my father as her consort, the daughter from his previous marriage came along as part of the bargain. I was the least magical of her three children. Not so enchanted, or enchanting, as Calla, so beloved by nature’s creatures that mice do her sewing and raccoons wash her dishes. Not so powerful in spell craft as Jonquil, who turned herself into a lake once when she was courting Gnoflwhogir. A whole lake. With ducks. Where did the ducks come from, I ask you?
When I tried to turn into a lake, I only managed to transform myself into a puddle. That was after hours of effort thatleft my ears ringing. It goes without saying I failed to produce any waterfowl. And I doubted anything would ever strengthen my power—not the Golden Key, or True Love’s First Kiss, or a hair plucked from a devil’s tail. A sow’s ear will not become a silk purse no matter how much effort goes into the sewing. My greatest achievement as a sorceress thus far was making my hair grow, which, as you might imagine, has limited utility. But I was burdened with a stepmother who routinely performed six impossible acts before breakfast and had little patience for those who couldn’t. In the face of that unattainable standard, I’d only ever had two options: Try to live up to it, and fail. Or try to rebel against it, and fail even harder.
My stepmother moved away from the mirror and reached over to cup my chin with her fingers, turning my head until her storm-cloud-dark eyes met mine.
It took every ounce of my self-control not to flinch. I’m not sure what shocked me more—her touching me or her meeting my gaze. She didn’t generally do either. She seldom looked at people. She looked around them, above them, and very often through them, her attention fixed on matters far beyond their petty understanding.
If there was a time, during my childhood, when I’d longed for her to hug me, that feeling had withered away years before. Now I mostly hoped she would leave me alone. Possibly after first telling me I was as capable and worthy as my sisters. And as long as I was imagining the preposterous, maybe then she’d grant me three wishes and a magic porridge pot.
“Melilot,” she said. “I would like you to trust me.”
I was unable to stifle a short nervous laugh.
Five heartbeats passed before she released my chin. Her eyes slid away from mine, which honestly came as a relief.
Was she serious?
I couldn’t afford to trust her. Not when Jonquil still had scars circling her neck and joints, ragged marks that never faded. Notwith my stepmother’s history of poisoning, of trickery, of dark and dangerous magic.
