Lilith tugged Amelia’s arm, urging her to stop. It was too late. Since Amelia’s curse at birth, her fate kept being sealed, over and over again. She stared at her father and silently pleaded with him to give in. He ran a hand down his black hair, stopping where the streaks of gray began.
“It’s not that simple. There needs to be consequences.”
“Please,” she begged. She wanted to argue that Lilith was good for their kingdom. That no matter how many princes she met, it was Lilith who she thought was brave, and strong, and smart. But according to her father, trust had been broken, and she knew such pleas would fall on deaf ears.
She knew, too, there was another thing the king cared about.
“I want Lilith to stay, because she’s the only mother I’ve ever had.”
The lie tasted foul on her tongue, but she needed her father to believe it. If Lilith could stay, Amelia was willing to pretend that the only reason she wanted the woman beside her was due to familial attachment. There would be no other explanation, no deeperfeelings she could have explored. Nothing that was complicated or wrong.
She would bury the truth, so that it would never see the light of day.
King Victor’s crinkled eyes turned sympathetic. A long sigh hissed through his gritted teeth. After a tense silence, he turned to Lilith. His hand raised like a threat before she could speak.
“You are lucky my daughter cares for you. But mark my words: If you deceive me again, there will be a steeper price to pay.”
Lilith squeezed Amelia’s hand, a silent thank-you. Amelia could hardly feel it. Her whole body had turned numb. The candles surrounding them burned too hot. Her mind lifted away from the wax and drifted to the edge of the room. Beyond the windows, the night was pitch-black. She thought of sunflowers perched on sills, the way they stretched toward the sun, as if aspiring to become stars themselves.
But there was no future where things could be different. Darkness always came, and the sunflowers would never become what they dreamed of being. Her feet stayed rooted to the ground. If she tipped any farther, she would sink below the earth.
CHAPTER 5
“SHE’S TRAPPED BELOW the earth,” Elly often insisted, her ear pressed to the ground. As a toddler, her tiny fingers would claw garden soil, dirt caked beneath her nails, all in search of a girl who the world was uncertain ever truly existed.
Corin said that even if the fairy tales were true, sleeping comfortably in a big castle was no nightmare for a princess. Still, Elly insisted the castle remained underground. On the eve of the princess’s eighteenth birthday, the queen brought foreigners into the kingdom to assassinate her husband and stepdaughter. The invaders murdered the king while the princess escaped into the forest, only to cross paths with the demon who had cursed her as a baby. The demon tricked the princess into pricking her finger on a spindle and doomed her to eternal slumber. Among the roaring flames of their battle, the prince killed the demon and saved the princess. He brought her back to their castle, only to find it was too late. Even with true love’s kiss, she remained asleep forever.
Despite being the successor to the throne, grief blinded the prince from accepting his duties. He buried himself with the princess and their castle, so that even when rivaling kingdoms toredown Gyldan’s borders and erupted into war, they would never be seen again.
A hundred years later, Corin would disappear with them.
She woke with a scream clawing at her throat, as if she’d emerged from a nightmare. But she hardly remembered her dreams, and soon enough she forgot what she’d seen.
Sharp rocks stabbed her spine like tiny knives as she lay flat on the ground. Dust particles stung the back of her eyelids, as if ants had crawled through the slits and were now nibbling the skin underneath. Her eyes were so dry they burned, like she had been crying. Yet all she remembered was the darkness taking her when she fell.
Yes, that was it. She had fallen. Slipped over debris and slid farther underground. Her head had slammed against a rock, rendering her unconscious for what must have been hours.
Corin rolled over to her side, but the movement shot flashes of pain down her back. Her neck and shoulders had been locked in the same position for too long. A gagging noise burbled from her parched throat. She hunched over, trying to vomit the invisible sand that piled in her mouth, but there was nothing to heave from a hollow stomach.
There was nothing left inside of her. She was empty.
And she was going to die.
Corin had imagined herself dying before, pictured hundreds of gruesome deaths in her mind, but nothing like this. Stranded after wandering endless miles, buried beneath stagnant air and soil, it seemed so uneventful.
Harlow’s laughter echoed through the tunnels. “No, compared to your eighteen years living in Gyldan, it’s too gentle a way to die.”
Corin groaned. Even in near death, she couldn’t escape Harlow’sghost. She supposed Harlow would have loved the irony. By the time their commune busied themselves making posters and protest materials, Corin had distanced herself from the artisans out of self-preservation, complaining to Elly that these efforts only made them look like criminals putting themselves in harm’s way. They had wanted to send a message to the army, but there was no point risking their lives for a war that would never end.
Now here she was, dying like the rest of them.
Darkness engulfed Corin in the tunnels. Her coiled body shivered in the cold as she waited for death to wrap her in its box and tuck her away. Surrounded by dust and debris, she would become part of the ground, a skeleton whose bones didn’t deserve to be unearthed.
The last words she’d hear from Elly would be a simple truth.
I hate you.
For a moment, there was nothing. Then a new thought emerged from her drowsy haze, like a dim light peeking through the dark clouds of near-death. Her hand roamed over her chest, fingers twitching for the ghost of an object. After her palm came up empty, her fingers jammed into the soiled pockets of her trousers and sifted through dirt.
