Chapter 13 To Anchoring
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TO ANCHORING
Ihad a new routine.
It was crafted by my own yearning to preserve what remained of my sanity.
Each night after the guard departed, I would recite them—the names of those who had mattered, who still mattered, whose existence tethered me to a world beyond these walls.
Not many names. I had never been one to collect friends like jewels, displaying them for others’ admiration.
But the few I cherished, I would not surrender to obscurity.
It began as it always did, with a deep breath that filled my lungs with the damp, musty air of my prison.
Then I began to whisper, my voice barely disturbing the silence, “Lysa... Isolde... Darius...” The names emerged like prayers, each syllable carefully formed, as if speaking them properly might somehow preserve the people they belonged to, might keep them—us—safe.
“Lysa,” I whispered again, letting her image form behind my closed eyelids.
My youngest half-sister, almost four years old, with our father’s golden curls and her mother’s delicate features.
The way she would tug at my skirts when she wanted attention, how she insisted I tell her the same stories over and over.
Tales of brave princesses who rescued themselves from towers and dragons.
Was it her birthday today? I hoped she was still alive to celebrate. Oh, how she loved her cake.
I rose unsteadily to my feet, ignoring the protest of muscles grown stiff from inactivity and the renewed throbbing in my lacerated soles. Movement was essential. I knew this, although I had never been in such a small space for this long.
Three steps forward, pivot, three steps back. A pitiful circuit.
“Isolde.” My friend, my confidante. Isolde with her quiet competence and knowing eyes, who I had resented at first, another pair of eyes watching me on my father’s behalf. Yet over the years, something genuine had grown between us, a trust built on shared secrets and unspoken understandings.
I remembered the precise shade of her ash-blonde hair, the way she would arrange it in simple styles that nonetheless adhered perfectly to court fashion.
The slight quirk of her left eyebrow when she found something amusing but decorum prevented her laughter.
The gentle pressure of her hand on my arm, a silent communication that spoke volumes in a world where every word might be a weapon.
Names were anchors. They held meaning and memory, kept the past from slipping away entirely.
I had been Mireille of Vareth, bastard daughter of a king, sister to a true princess, friend to one woman who saw beyond my title to the person beneath.
These connections defined me as surely as the blood that ran in my veins.
Five steps forward, pivot, five steps back. My bare feet made little sound against the stone. I’d become a ghost in my own life, insubstantial, haunting the margins of a story written by others.
“Isolde,” I whispered a final time, then hesitated before the next name formed.
“Darius.”
His name felt different on my tongue—not cherished like Lysa’s, not comforting like Isolde’s.
It tasted of regret and fleeting pleasure, of midnight encounters in forgotten corridors and the peculiar loneliness that follows physical intimacy without emotional connection. But his was still one I had to say.
Captain of the Royal Guard, with his copper hair and hazel eyes that seemed to hold laughter even in serious moments.
Darius had been a diversion, a way to feel something other than the constant, dull ache of being unwanted.
His hands had been gentle, his words sweet.
I had never loved him, as he’d begged of me.
I did not think I could feel the emotion for a man.
I wondered if he had survived the slaughter.
Wondered if he had fought bravely or surrendered quickly when defending the Queen and Cordelia.
Selfishly, I wondered if, in his final moments, assuming they had come, he had thought of me at all.
It shouldn’t have mattered. It didn’t matter.
Yet the thought of his laughter silenced forever left an unexpected hollowness in my chest.
“Darius,” I repeated, acknowledging what he had been to me without romanticizing it. A warm body in cold nights. A temporary salve for a wound that went bone-deep. Nothing more.
Seven steps forward, pivot, seven steps back. I tried to summon other names, courtiers, tutors, servants whose faces I had seen daily for years, but they slipped away like fish in murky water, just beyond my grasp.
This frightened me more than I cared to admit. Five days in isolation, and already my mind was betraying me, letting go of what should have been firmly fixed in memory.
At least, I had told myself it had only been five days. But the darkness held no calendar. The meals came, but sometimes I couldn’t remember if I’d eaten or only dreamed of eating.
“I am Mireille,” I said aloud, my voice stronger now, rebelling against the silence. “Daughter of King Aeldrin of Vareth and...” I faltered, my mother’s name a mystery I had never solved.
No matter. Anyone who knew her was now gone. Her existence would fade with me.
My pacing grew more frantic, as though physical movement could prevent the slow erosion of self.
My head throbbed with each step, the injury a constant reminder of how quickly power could shift, how easily one could become a prisoner.
The cuts on my feet had reopened, leaving faint, bloody prints on the stone.
Evidence of my existence that would be washed away when I turned to dust, my suffering as impermanent as everything else.
Memories flickered like candle flames in wind, threatening to extinguish completely.
The sound of my father’s voice—had it been deep or merely cold?
The color of the dress I’d worn to my betrothal meeting with Valen—black for mourning, but what had the fabric felt like against my skin?
The main course served at my wedding feast—had I even taken a bite, or had the anticipation of our consummation robbed me of appetite?
“Remember,” I commanded myself, voice cracking. “Remember everything.”
But memory is selective, preserving what serves its purpose and discarding the rest. Already, the edges of my past were growing indistinct, details blurring into generalities.
Only moments of intense emotion remained in sharp focus…
The expression on Darius’s face when I told him I would not stay in the castle keep.
Isolde’s look of determination as she raced towards the stables with Lysa in her arms. Lysa’s tears as our pinkies wrapped together in a promise I was sure I wouldn’t be able to keep.
“Lysa,” I began again, returning to the beginning of my list. But something caught in my mind.
A detail about her that I couldn’t quite grasp.
What was the name of that wooden doll she always carried?
The one with the chipped paint and missing arm that she refused to have replaced?
I stopped pacing, my breath catching in my throat.
I couldn’t remember.
That small failure sent a spike of panic through me. What else was I forgetting? How much of myself had already been worn away by this place, by isolation and grief?
“Her doll was called Sir Whiskers,” I said aloud, the name suddenly surfacing from the depths of my memory. “Because it had painted whiskers like a cat, though it was meant to be a knight.” Relief washed over me, disproportionate to this small triumph.
I resumed my pacing with renewed determination, my bare feet slapping against the stone floor. The sound echoed in the small space, a percussion to accompany my whispered recitations.
“Isolde collected pressed flowers,” I continued.
“She kept them between the pages of poetry books. She said it was to remember that beauty endures, even when cut off from its source.” I hadn’t thought about that in years, but now the image was vivid—Isolde’s slender fingers carefully arranging a violet between the pages of a leather-bound volume.
“Darius had a habit of touching the scar on his temple when he was thinking deeply.” I demonstrated the gesture unconsciously, my fingers brushing against my own temple.
“He got it defending a merchant from bandits on the northern road.” The memory of him telling me the story was clear.
We had been standing on one of the castle’s lesser-used balconies, the evening air cool against our skin, his voice low so as not to carry to unwanted ears.
With each added detail, I felt myself growing more solid, less like a ghost and more like the woman I had been before.
This was why I performed this ritual each day, not just to remember the names, but to hold onto the specific, unique details that made each person real.
To preserve the world that Valen thought he had destroyed.
My legs trembled with exhaustion, finally rebelling against the continuous movement.
I staggered, caught myself against the wall, and slowly sank back to the floor.
My breath came in shallow gasps, my heart hammering as though I’d run for miles instead of pacing the confines of a cell that suddenly seemed even smaller than before.
“Lysa,” I began again, determined to maintain the ritual despite my physical weariness. “Isolde. Darius.” The names emerged as barely audible exhales, each one carrying the gravity of what I feared to lose.
I pressed my palms against my closed eyes, seeing patterns of light spark against the darkness—false constellations, a universe contained within my skull. Was this how madness began? With the slow dissolution of memory, the blurring of boundaries between what was and what might have been?
No. I would not allow it. Not while Lysa might still be in danger. Not while Valen’s plans remained unclear. Not while some small part of me still burned with the desire to reclaim what had been taken.
I opened my eyes to the darkness of my cell, no less absolute than when I’d closed them.
But something had shifted within me—a subtle realignment, like a broken bone setting itself.
I was more than these names I recited. More than daughter, sister, friend, lover.
More than prisoner. I was the sum of choices made and unmade, of potential unrealized but not extinguished.
“I am Mireille,” I whispered once more, and this time the name resonated with something deeper than memory. It was identity distilled to its essence, a truth that existed independent of circumstance or station. Even if all else was stripped away, this core remained, obstinate and immutable.
I would not let us fade. I would hold our names close, repeat them until they were inscribed not just in memory but in the very marrow of my bones. This, at least, was within my power.
In the darkness of my cell, with nothing but the distant drip of water and the sound of my own breathing for company, I continued my vigil against forgetting. The names became a chant, a prayer, a defiance.
Lysa. Isolde. Darius.
Again and again and again, until the words lost individual meaning and became pure sound, a barrier against the void that threatened to consume me.
Until exhaustion finally claimed me, and I drifted into uneasy sleep with their names still on my lips, anchoring me to a world I feared I might never see again.