Chapter 1
In the ninety-seventh year of summer, Naia met her prince.
She felt her destiny arriving from the moment she awakened, when she cracked an eyelid to find her mother leaning over her in the darkness. Outside, the birds cooed sleepily in the trees, but something was decidedly different. Her parents never woke her before dawn.
“It’s Trading Day,” her mother murmured, squeezing Naia’s hand. “I’ve been saving and saving, and this year, I might actually have enough. But your father’s still away hunting, so we’ll have to go into the village ourselves.”
Naia sat up, struggling to make sense of that. Into the village. The village?
“You’re...taking me with you?” she whispered.
A beat of silence passed. Just one. “Yes,” her mother said. “If you’d like.”
The gray haze of sleep evaporated, giving way to a rush of possibility. “Of course,” Naia said. “Of course I want to go.”
Not once, in all her twenty years, had Naia visited the village.
But the village meant people, and people meant princes, like in the old copy of Granger’s Fairytales she pored over by the fire each night.
Naia had reread those pages so many times the ink had seeped into her bones.
In the stories, princes always showed up in circumstances like these—when the lonely stepdaughter charted a new path to the well, or the exiled princess sang a different song from her tower window.
Or the girl who’d never left her hillside visited the village for the first time.
Naia slid from bed, hope burning inside her like an ember. The village. Because where else would my prince await?
She braided her long, dark hair in the darkness, then pulled on her best dress. Outside, the sky blushed pewter while she and her mother hitched the mule to the cart. Naia climbed into the back as her mother took the reins.
They set off, Naia clutching the cart’s sides. As the miles passed, day broke. Sunlight spilled over flower-strewn hillsides, promising a day as sticky and bright as the thousand that had come before and the thousand that would follow.
Naia tried not to blink. Lush fields rolled past, dotted with fleecy white sheep, and everywhere she looked, tree branches curved earthward, weighted by apples as red and dazzling as overgrown rubies.
She drank it all in, her heart climbing higher with every turn of the wheels.
What a perfect day to meet her prince. And what would he be like?
Handsome, probably. Brave, too. But most importantly, he’d soothe this empty ache inside her, the jagged crack that widened each time she played both sets of pieces on the chessboard, or wandered alone in the green-bright woods, conversing with someone whose answers she had to imagine.
When the cart neared town, Naia’s mother held out a dark shawl. “Here, my love.”
Naia frowned. Already, heat prickled in her hair and dampened the nape of her neck. She had no desire to make it worse. “What’s that for?”
“To cover your face.”
“My face? Why?”
Her mother’s fingers clenched around the fabric. “So you can keep your butterflies a secret.”
Naia faltered. “My butterflies? But you told me they were beautiful.”
“They are,” her mother said, something fragile in her voice. “The most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. But the villagers...they might not see it that way.”
Naia hesitated. Her parents had always treated her butterflies as special, and she’d never given much thought to what others would think. She’d never needed to. No one else had ever seen them. “Why do you say that?”
Her mother swallowed. “Because. The people in this village care far too much about things that don’t matter. And hardly at all about things that do.”
“Oh.” Naia wondered what that meant, exactly.
But her mother didn’t take back the shawl, so eventually, Naia took it. She draped the fabric around her head, covering one half of her face, then knotted the corners beneath her chin.