My hands are shaking. Not the fine tremor of adrenaline. The deep bone rattle of something structural giving way.
“Stop.” I choke.
“Here.”
Pepper crying around a toilet. My toilet. In my apartment. She’s wearing my hoodie and her mascara is everywhere and she’s holding her phone like she’s waiting for me to call her back.
I never called her back.
“Don’t.”
“She just missed you.”
“Stop.”
“Forgive yourself.”
“I don’t know how to!” I scream at him, my heart fracturing open wide. I can’t breathe, I can’t think. I amundone.
“Forgive.”
“Why?” I choke.
“How can you become when you hold on to who you were?” He pauses before me. “You are loved. You are wanted. You are needed. Here, with us. Forgive the woman you were. She deserves that, don’t you think?” He’s holding my face and his eyes are swirling like galaxies.
“Why do I feel like I don’t deserve that?”
“Because you never learned otherwise.” He pauses. “A queen knows the importance of forgiving herself for her past. Otherwise how can she lead a court who relies on her forgiveness in them?”
I sob.
It isn’t pretty. It just is. Right now. It just is.
“I didn’t know.” I sit up, blinking through the pain. “I wanted so much more for myself. I deserved more. I was hurting. Because I felt so alone.”
“Fog.”
I scoff. “Fog.”
“You live in a fog where you couldn’t see the truth no matter how hard you tried.” He tilts his head. “My family drank from the Cauldron and forgot they were gods. You swallowed a life that wasn’t yours and forgot you were a queen. Same fog. Different cup.”
“Rude.”
He shrugs a shoulder.
“I can’t just—” I start and he waits. Patient as a god who’s been waiting for millennia. “You don’t just forgive twenty-eight years of?—”
“You do.” He says it simply. “Or you carry her forever. That woman on the bathroom floor. She comes with you into every room. Every bed. Every throne. Until you put her down.”
I look at the bathroom floor. At the woman I was. At the magic swirling around her that she couldn’t see.
“I do forgive myself.” The words crack coming out. But they come out true. And in Faerie, true is the only thing that sticks.
He smiles. “Well in that case you are going to need this.” His hands flick toward me and that magenta purple trial magic shoots out at me. Deep inside me, thorns grow.
I feel them pierce the skin at my temples, around my head. It burns, but becoming isn’t easy. It’s painful and the hardest thing that must be done.
“Fit for a Queen.” He nods, “You’re needed now.” And just like that a door appears beside him.
