7. Rosalina
Rosalina
Ilove traveling with the Prince of Thorns. He wraps me tight in his briars, my skin pressed to his, and for those brief moments when we’re whipped through the earth, it is as if we are one body.
Those are the only times he holds me.
Sometimes, he’ll touch me. We walk arm in arm to dinners. When others are around, he likes to graze his fingers over my shoulders or bring a lock of my hair to his nose to smell.
When we are alone, he looks at me as if he hates me. As if there’s a great tiger standing between us, and it’s all he can do to turn and run.
So I hold fast to those moments when we’re entangled, two hearts beating as one among the briars. Our own secret world.
We travel all over. Along the River Gami that runs all the way from the Briar through Summer. Up into the Ribs to speak with harpies. To troll camps deep in the north. To gargoyles that perch in the mountains of Spring. To bands of wild goblins in Autumn.
I learn things, and I write them in my book, over the pages of the high rulers of Autumn.
I don’t know why, but something compels me to pay attention.
That this is important, in the same way Heidi’s nickname for me is.
And it’s catching too. Most of the time, the Prince of Thorns calls me Princess.
But sometimes, every so often, he’ll call me Rosalina.
I write lots of useless things in my book, like how we’re gathering armies of rogue creatures from around the Vale to come to the Below. How it will take weeks for them to reach us. How many seem to hate Sira, but the Prince of Thorns is making them great promises for allegiance.
I write important things too. Like how he prefers the white sauce on his potatoes to the red sauce.
That he’s not very good at sleeping and often cries out in the night—but I’m not to go to his chambers when he does that, because he gets very angry.
And that sometimes when I say things that make him sad, like “I love you,” his eyes flash from green to purple, just for a second.
I don’t like to make him sad, but I do like when his eyes are purple like that.
When we’re home in Cryptgarden, I no longer dine alone or only with the Prince of Thorns.
Now, we eat at a huge obsidian stone table with Sira, his mother.
Often, two horned fae will join us, Faustrius and Aquila.
Faustrius has gigantic antlers like an elk, and though he’s very polite to me, I can’t help but feel a curdling rage in my belly every time he speaks.
Aquila doesn’t talk much. Heidi says, “One side of her face is pretty as a bloomie. The other looks like a rat snuck into the boiler.” I have to say, Heidi’s right.
Aquila still has her long, emerald-green hair on one half, clear skin and a full mouth.
But the other side is angry red scars and patchy hair. Someone really mean must have hurt her.
Sira doesn’t seem to like me much. She doesn’t talk a lot at dinners, but she watches her son. I don’t talk a lot either, so I watch her watch him. It’s like she’s observing a faucet dripping into a bucket one drop at a time. Drop drop drop. Just waiting for the whole thing to overflow.
I write about Sira in my book. Things about how she slips off by herself much of the time.
She rejects Faustrius’s requests for counsel.
When she’s lost in thought, her hand drifts to her shoulder and scratches idly at her back.
All ridiculous things to write in a book, but my mind feels itchy when I don’t.
The Prince of Thorns is too busy for me, so I still spend lots of hours with Heidi. Sometimes, we wander outside the Gem, all the way into the city of Cryptgarden.
Heidi talks to me about the bloomies she’s seen up on the surface, and I promise to bring her some when I next travel with the Prince of Thorns.
Though usually where we go, there are no flowers to be found.
I like listening to Heidi’s stories. When she tells me about her life in the Briar, her adventures with Bugu, or funny things she sees in the castle, it’s as if an empty well in my chest fills right up. I wish I could have more stories.
But no one else in Cryptgarden likes to talk to us. I wonder if they have empty wells too. A malaise hangs over the city in the way the light hangs: no one knows where it comes from or why it’s here, only that it drifts like a fog through the alleys and into our bones.
Maybe we’re all ghosts here.