“No, no, you misunderstand me,” said Arris. “We’re spending the eveningasstags.”
Demelza blinked at him.
“Yvlle thought it would be entertaining if we tried to find another herd of bucks and then I’d fight them in a manly display of… manliness. But don’t worry, I’ll only be a stag for a few hours, and during that time I’m really only hopingto enjoy one’s heightened senses. Did you know that a stag’s sense of smell is about a thousand times more refined than ours? Imagine what I could forage—”
At that moment, Demelza had kissed him. Partly to cease his chattering. And partly because he was making her smile too much and her lips would soon be frozen in a grin if he kept talking.
Demelza thought of that kiss as she sat at the edge of her bed, twisting the ends of her hair. How long can love last without true choice? Without trust?
Demelza had always wanted freedom, and in a way she had it. Arris had given her the winged necklace out of love. Demelza had no wish to be free of Arris, but even if she did, she would stay, for she would die without him. Love made for a beautiful prison, but what would happen to them over time? Demelza thought of her own parents. Araminta and Prava loved one another, but it was a love steeped in its own poison. A love that kept looking over its own shoulder, always circling, never settled. Araminta once told her to be wary of passion, for passion that never cooled was like making a home in a burning house.
Demelza was still lost in these thoughts as her mother and sisters arrived. All morning, Demelza remained in her private wing of Rathe Castle. Every time she looked out the window, she was reminded of the future that waited for her. Though the ceremony was not to begin until late in the afternoon, the roads to Rathe Castle were already choked with carriages drawn by pure white horses and featheredwyverns, bejeweled crocodiles and huge, tawny cats with curling horns.
The fox-faced attendant knocked and opened her door. “Your Highness—”
“I am not royalty,” said Demelza. “Not yet.”
“Very well,” said the attendant. “I am to let you know that your mother and sisters have arrived.”
“Thank you,” said Demelza, but she made no move to get out of bed.
For a week she had been counting down the moments until she would see her mother and sisters, and now she could not bear to lay eyes on them. When she was little, Prava told her and her sisters that a group of swans was called a lamentation. He had delighted in the word.
“Look at my little lamentation,” he said, ruffling their heads. “My little ruin makers, my little emperor slayers! What better word suits my girls, for all who know you shall weep!”
Demelza had always found it a sad thought and a sadder fate. But when her feathers never manifested, at least she could take refuge in the fact that being someone else’s tragedy would never be her destiny. How wrong she was.
Demelza took a deep breath. The moment she stepped outside her room, she would be bombarded. There was Edmea’s final fitting and then cosmetic routine. Her sisters would wish to catch up. Her mother would want to examine her new home. Where was Arris? If he was here, perhaps her heart would race faster for an altogether happier reason. But he was probably still a stag somewhere… or elsesleeping off the dregs of a silly night with his sister before the festivities truly began.
The attendant cleared his throat. “Before you meet with them, your father wishes for a private audience.”
Demelza looked up. “What? When?”
“Now… if it is agreeable to you.”
It was. More than agreeable, actually. Demelza wished to sag against her father the way she had done as a child. She wanted him to fold up the vastness of the world so that it might fit in her palm. She imagined herself six years old and sitting on his knee, fighting for space with Corisande and Dulcinea or spitting out Eulalia’s feathers when her wings smacked Demelza across the face. In the evenings, they had always loved crowding into Prava’s study, where he would bring out the floating globe of the world. One by one, he would show them the terrains of strange countries. Warm Zazoa and the icy Yüttland Mountains. The freezing Ocean of Tresses and the eerie, green deserts of Miraze. He would show them the vast Isle of Malys surrounded by the Famishing. One by one, he would press his finger to these lands and they would light up and turn dark upon the globe’s surface.
Yours, yours, yours, he would say.
And then the globe would shrink to a marble, a mere plaything for Demelza and her sisters. The world no longer felt like a trinket; if anything, Demelza felt as though she were a toy within it. Perhaps her father would make her see differently.
“I will see him,” she said.
The attendant nodded. “He will appear shortly.”
Moments later, the wall beside her vanity began to glow. The outline of the bricks took on a silver gleam. The air thrummed with magic as the bricks shivered apart. Bits of dust and mortar fell to the floor as a window appeared upon the once blank wall. The window was shaped like a large oval, with gilding around its border as if it initially dreamt of being an ornate mirror before it had changed its mind at the last minute.
Though there appeared to be no pane of glass, there was an uncanny iridescence to the air that suggested the boundary was not to be crossed. It had not been there the last time she had spoken to her parents and Demelza wondered if Queen Yzara and King Eustis had insisted upon certain conditions before Prava could see her. At first, nothing appeared on the other side of the window but a swirl of smoke… and then slowly, shapes coalesced. Her father’s study, with its teetering piles of cobwebbed books. An astrolabe on a bone table. And then, finally, Prava, who sat in his favorite armchair.
“Oh, my Demelza,” he said, sniffing. He withdrew a handkerchief from his sleeve and blew his nose loudly. Even though he could not be a wedding guest, he had still dressed for the occasion. His hair, a duller version of her own, was combed back. He wore a worn-looking suit, with buttons shaped like teeth fastened down the front. Demelza looked a bit closer. Never mind, those were actual teeth.
“Hello, Father,” she said.
She had not forgiven him for asking to carve out her heart, but he was her father and she loved him and affection crept into her voice whether she wanted it to or not.
“I can’t believe you are to be married and I am not permitted to be there!” he fumed. “Who’s to walk you down the aisle? Because if it’s Eustis, that starry-eyed sack of flour, I shall burn down this Isle—”
“Mother is walking me,” said Demelza.
