A trial of power.
Again the dark brushed against her leg, and Demelza was struck once more by the suspicion that what she had first thought was infinite was in fact an individual. It felt soft. Cold. Like placing one’s hand on the fur of a cat that had found its way to the kitchen hearth after running in the snow. To destroy it felt unfathomably cruel. But then what was she meant to do?
Power, thought Demelza…but whose?As the word slid back and forth in her thoughts, Demelza glimpsed the flaw in her logic. Not once had the queen said the word “overpower.” Violence was presumed, but in truth the most powerful forces in the world were ones not of destruction… but creation.
When Demelza beheld the dark again, she understood not only what it was, but what the trial truly demanded. The surrounding dark was vast because it did not know how else to be. It wanted to be something. Anything.
Demelza breathed deep and gathered up her past selves. She remembered sitting before her mother’s mirror, fashioning swan wings out of scraps of poetry pages, wondering if it would be enough to transform her. She saw herself poring over magical translations in Prava’s library, determined toprove herself a vital scholar since she was a failed veritas swan. All this time, she imagined she had no power, but in this she was wrong. To sing and summon truth was not a power, but a mere instrument. True power lay in perception. In belief. And Demelza believed she could be anything.
“I see you,” she said to the dark.
It rippled around her, tensing.
“I see you as the night sky, I see you as the shadow of dead branches upon the snow. I see you as the gleam in a horse’s eye and the sweet terror beneath a child’s bed,” said Demelza. “I name you for all that you are… and all that you could be.”
As she spoke, she felt the darkness flex around her. Demelza could see no changes, and yet the space felt different. She was no longer suspended in a void. The roiling dark had begun to pull back and over itself; its hold on Demelza’s senses no longer felt like an attack but an anchor… as though the dark wanted to be separate from her but was too frightened to let go entirely.
“I see you as the shadow cast by doubts, but also the sweet shade in which dreams ripen,” said Demelza. “I see you as the lake beneath a moonless night.”
No one would ever call Demelza’s singing beautiful, but when she spoke there was a fervent sheen to her voice that leapt over the senses to speak straight to one’s soul. Demelza could not see the assembled audience, but she knew they were there. She could not imagine what the audience thought of her in that moment—and, in truth, they could not have been further from her thoughts—but she would havebeen delighted to learn that in this second she was flying through their imaginations. No longer was she the girl who was unexpected. She was becoming the woman who was unimaginable.
Bit by bit, the dark whittled itself down and down, pulling back so that Demelza could finally behold it in her line of sight. It was the shadow of a slender elm, the gloss of lake water, the lightless corner of a cellar and the fearful dark radiance in a wolf’s gaze. Demelza kept speaking and the dark kept transforming.
“You are the center of a flower and the prophetic scatter of leaves left behind in a cup of tea—”
The more she spoke, the more Demelza became aware of shapes—people—all around her, but she gave them none of her attention. She was making herself a promise as much as she was proclaiming to the darkness, and she would not share this power. Now the dark was a great flower, each petal the size of her head. Now it was a steaming teacup three times her height.
“You are a jewel in a precious necklace,” said Demelza.
The dark shivered. Droplets of midnight arrayed themselves into a garland the length of a horse. What she had mistaken for darkness was longing, raw and boundless; a longing untamed and unshaped; a longing Demelza recognized as her own as she spoke the final words of transformation.
“You… you are treasured.”
The necklace shattered. Fractals of night sky glimmered. When they moved once more through the air it was with allthe natural grace of breathing. And perhaps that’s what it was. The dark exhaling all that it was, inhaling all that it could be.
Demelza felt something solid hit her palms. She was oblivious to the creamy marble floor beneath her and the audience of aristocrats, royals and hundreds of the Isle’s denizens filling the seats of the amphitheater. She did not notice the way the oaks and birches of Rathe Castle peered anxiously over the stage. For a moment she did not even remember that this was a trial and that she was a contestant. In her palm rested a glittering jewel that looked like a thousand molten midnights—a threshold of one day to the next made dazzling, for it was alight with hope and aglow with dreams.
The dark had not just been tamed, but transformed… by her. The floor trembled and Demelza startled. She turned, convinced that the trial had not yet ended and now some manner of beast was charging at her… but there was nothing there. What she had mistaken for tremors was, in fact, resounding applause.
“Extraordinary!” called someone in the audience.
“A marvel—”
Demelza blinked. Where her senses had felt distant and disembodied, now they rushed back to her in startling clarity. The audience was full of strangers, but Demelza felt as though she somehow knew them. An armored woman with familiar wide brown eyes and golden hair stared at Demelza, a half-smile playing on her lips as she rested her hand on the arm of a burly, dark-haired man with roughlyhewn features and gentle blue eyes. Lady Azeria. Ursula’s mother. And that must be Lord Oberon, her father. An elegantly dressed man with rose-pink hair looked at Demelza as if she were something he had found on the bottom of his shoe. A pair of Aatosian women, both dressed in white furs despite the warm weather, sat with their hands clasped and whispered back and forth. Not far from them was a woman who looked like the spitting image of Cordelia, only her skin was pond green. She was not smiling. A stunningly handsome young man caught Demelza’s attention, for he was grinning at her as if she had told him wonderful news. But a moment later, he rearranged his face into an expression of sorrow as Zoraya flung herself into his arms.
“Oh, Niko!” she wept loudly. The handsome young man stroked Zoraya’s hair as her shoulders shook with grief. “She has stolen the love of my life from me!”
In the front row alongside Zoraya sat the other contestants. Except for Zoraya, the others were all staring at Demelza. Ursula and Talvi smiled and clapped. Edmea looked stunned… but proud. Cordelia’s face appeared as if it had been carved from stone.
All these things Demelza noticed, but they did not stick to her. She felt adrift, convinced that all this was occurring in some dream space, until a figure far from the crowd seized her attention. Arris. He appeared to be leaning against a slender elm, one hand in his pocket, the other turning something over and over in his palm. His brown hair was tousled from sleeplessness. Atop his rumpled charcoal tunic and trousers, he wore a cloak of sheared shadow, the endsdissipating into the air. No one was looking at him. Demelza suspected that no one even knew where he was. Arris was invisible to the entire crowd, but not to her. And though all eyes were on Demelza, hers beheld only one person.
The chaos of it all—the applause, the shouting, the spotlight—lasted no longer than a minute. But when Demelza saw Arris, the seconds expanded. Arris had the look of a man who had been told a great secret. His gaze was inscrutable in its intensity. Was he happy? Was she? She almost wanted him to look disappointed. Then she could disavow all her efforts as merely a way to satisfy her pride. She could laugh all of this off and say it meant nothing. But Arris continued to stare, and not for the first time Demelza wondered if the prince possessed some truth power of his own, for no matter how she tried to school her expression or affect indifference, looking at him dragged out every little scrap of her private hopes. She suspected he could see all of it on her face in this very moment. Was there a name for the hope of bringing light to a room simply by entering it? Or the hope of resting within the circle of another’s arms and never once doubting the certainty of tomorrow? Or simply the hope that wondering about the life unlived would not become a ghost that haunted one’s footsteps but a dream that set a new pace for living?
Demelza felt a tug at her elbow and looked down to see the fox-faced attendant directing her to an exit. The other contestants were already gone.
“Come along, come along, my dear! If you stand here any longer, then they’ll try to talk to you, and the keyto royalty is inaccessibility!” said the fox-faced attendant. “The others are already hastening to get ready! Straight to the ball, as they say! Well, actually, I have no idea who says that, but we must be off!”
Demelza followed after the attendant. By now the audience had risen to their feet. Their applause was so deafening, she could hardly hear herself think anymore. As she walked off the stage, she glanced once more to the place where Arris had been standing.
