After
Night was a waterfall. To look up at the sky was to stand under the dark downpour, to feel the stars fall upon your hair.
He’d always felt this way. He belonged in the dark, he could feel it deep within him, the same way he could feel a person’s eyes on his back. Though the night made it all the more difficult for them to see.
Not for him.
The day had been long and grueling. His attention pulled in too many directions at once, too many eyes on every step he took. But the halls were empty this time of night. At last, he could breathe. At last, he could walk without feeling penned in. At last, he could just be…a normal person.
He knew what they thought of him. Saw the way their eyes were drawn to his hair. Heard the speculation and rumors dripping like drool from their lips. But he didn’t care about that.
He cared about the Witch.
She was here. In the castle.
He dashed down a set of stairs, taking them two at a time, as silent as an agile cat. It was risky, dangerous even. But he had to see her. He had to know. The answer he’d waited almost his entire life for was sitting in a cell just below his feet.
A face, hazy with the fog of uncertain memory, stuck to his mind. It was the small, rounded face of a child. A child with blue eyes and multicolored hair and skin awash with dozens of tiny dots.
It was an old memory, the kind that surfaced when he wasn’t expecting it. The kind of memory where he didn’t know what was fact and what was fiction.
She would know. She could tell him. The only other person who’d been there.
He paused at the bottom of the stairs. His fingers found their way to his hair, gently pulling on the strands. He turned his head to the mirror on the wall. He didn’t flinch at the reflection staring back.
His hair stood on end. A white cap like snow on a mountain peak. Beneath his stark, shocking hair, eyes as gray as storm clouds, complete with wisps of wind swirling around pitch-black pupils, watched him. Slowly, he straightened his fingers and brought his hand back down to his side.
The guards were easy to get around. He knew their patterns, the halls they didn’t cross this time of night. He continued down another flight of stairs. Then another. One last staircase brought him face-to-face with the guard outside the dungeon cells.
She didn’t know what to make of his presence. Her mouth fluttered open and shut like a moonlily waving at its namesake.
“I’m not here,” he whispered to the guard. “Understood?”
Her mouth snapped shut.
“Should someone ask if there were visitors, you tell them no one.” He smiled at her, the smile he used for all pleasant exchanges. “Tonight, I am no one.”
She nodded and stepped aside to let him through.
The dungeon was just as he remembered it. Cells on either side of a long hall, the end of which held a single step down and a final cell beyond, constantly brimming with seawater.
He couldn’t see the last cell from where he stood, but he could feel it. The anticipation made his hands shake.
He hoped it was her. He hoped she remembered him.
The cell was larger than he remembered. Wide enough to fit three people lying down in the ankle-deep water that sloshed about the stone floor.
She sat in that water, the shadows of it climbing the clothes on her back, creating patterns of wayward dark stains that clung to the outline of her spine.
Even with her back to him—the shape of her, the browns and blonds in the matted braid that hung from her head—it was enough for him to know he’d been right.
All these years and, at last, here she was.
He sighed, his shoulders relaxing, and leaned against the bars. A twinge of a smile tickled the corner of his lips.
“Hey there, Freckles.”
She turned and met his gaze. Her blue eyes, wide and full of mirth, were just as he remembered them. Mischief danced across her lips in a sly grin.
“Hello, Prince.”