Amelia broke down crying, wiping the drip from her eyes and nose with her sleeves. Silver clouds cloaked the weak sunshine as cold air bit her wet cheeks. Her father bent down on one knee and brushed a thumb over her tears. In her blurry vision, she saw the gray hairs that stemmed from his temple.
“It’s all right.” His jaw was clenched. “Let’s go home.”
• • •
“IT WAS HER first time, Your Highness. Regardless, you know she loves animals far too much to harm another living being. That’s what makes her so sweet.”
Amelia overheard her godmothers talking in the dining room after dinner. She peered from the doorway, where a long oak table stretched from one end of the hall to the other. King Victor stabbed a fork into a piece of venison. The meat had been roasted, a pink hue on the inside exposed between each slice.
“She cannot fend for herself,” he muttered.
Dahlia, who had been speaking, shifted her chair legs across the tile floor.
“Perhaps she does not have to. We can still return to our original plan of disguising her until she’s safe from Malicine.”
“That’s not the issue.”
“Then what is it?”
A long silence pulsed between them. Candlelight made the blood around the king’s plate gleam a sickly shade of red. His eyes took in the wine swirling inside his goblet, retrieving a distant memory from its murky waters.
“When my first wife was with child, we didn’t think the baby would survive. Then Amelia came out, kicking and screaming. I was too amazed to even be disappointed that she wasn’t a boy. The way she emerged into the world so defiantly, I thought she would grow up to be a fierce woman. Spunky and loudmouthed, just like her mother.”
There was fondness in his voice, tinged with a foretelling of defeat. King Victor drank from his cup, his throat bobbing up and down until he eventually set the empty goblet on the table. He leaned forward and pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut.
“But she couldn’t have turned out more different from what I imagined. She talks to animals and inanimate objects as if they are her friends. She stares at the sky longer than she can look into another human’s eyes. She’s there, but she’s never present.”
He pushed the chalice farther away from him. Drunk eyes roamed across the wolfskin blanket that lay scattered in front of the fireplace. Preserved skulls and animals sat on the mantel. The room had been decorated with relics from Victor’s younger days, a time when he was a hunter, before he became king.
Amelia had heard stories about his own father taking him to the woods, shooting the creatures that inhabited the wild, and coming home to make fresh stew. He had shared his childhood tales with pride, his chest puffed, his face flushed with glory. This was what it was like to be a man, and wasn’t that what made a person stronger than all?
“I’m not afraid of my daughter dying,” he said. “I’m afraid of her growing up to be a coward.”
Murmurs shifted among the godmothers, but their responses faded in Amelia’s ears. Her feet slowly backed away from the doorbefore sprinting down the hall. She reached her room and dove into bed, burying her face in pillows and hiding from the rest of the world.
That night, she understood the cruel irony of her birth. When Amelia was a baby, her godmothers had blessed her with three gifts: beauty, song, and true love’s kiss. Beauty proved itself whenever men ogled her pearl face, golden hair, and long lashes. Song revealed itself as handmaids fawned over her voice echoing down the corridors, sweet and light as a hummingbird’s. True love’s kiss promised itself to be the cure to her curse, the answer for whenever she needed a reason to wake up and keep living.
She was born a beautiful girl with a beautiful life.
They told her she could become anything.
And so, she became nothing.
CHAPTER 7
LIGHT SWALLOWED CORIN, scattering pieces of her into fragments as fine as windblown sand. Stars exploded around her ears. Their debris peppered her skin and sank beneath to set her veins on fire. Rays broke through every particle in her body as she punctured through an ocean of bright blue.
Water filled her lungs before they turned to air. Bubbles burst from her feet and then transformed into clouds. Her limbs flailed forward, her body hurdling between ice crystals in the atmosphere. Wind whistled through her hair and whipped her face as she descended through an endless sky. A white flash ripped into her bones before she came together again, the tiny particles of her conscience clustering together to form a body landing softly in snow.
The wind slowed to a stop.
Then the world waited in silence for her.
She opened her eyes to a hole filled with light in the sky, its rims swirling in a thin coat of red. Blood slipped from the fringes and scattered into pieces. One fell in her palm like a snowflake, drying like a scab, before it dissolved. The hole closed above her, as if it had never existed at all, and the sky returned to normal as a portrait ofpure white with saw-toothed trees. One branch bent beneath her weight, its wooden arms cradling her in a blanket of soft snow as if she were a newborn.
Across from her, between another tree’s limbs, someone was watching.
The stranger was different in an otherworldly way. Pearls glistened across her cheeks like teardrops and embedded her porcelain skin, dappling around her chin and forehead. Snowdrop flowers intertwined her silver hair, spilling over a pale lace dress with nightingale embroidery and beaded feathers. Her eyes looked like sea glass, narrowed and glaring, as if Corin were an intruder that she would kill with her bow.
