Chapter One Kit #2
My mother’s look could pierce armor. “Catharine, I couldn’t help but notice last night that your sleeve had a tear at the shoulder. I’ve had the gown laid out in your room, and I expect you to mend it before you come downstairs.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” Catharine curtsies again, glances at me, and steps toward the hall. My mother barely moves out of the way, so Catharine has to twist to get past.
Once Catharine is gone, Mother turns her full attention to me.
Her gaze softens, though her blue eyes still simmer with frustration.
My mother is a beauty—skin like moonlight and hair like a raven’s feathers.
Unfortunately, I took after my father—prone to freckle under the dimmest sunlight, with hair somewhere between brown and blonde, and eyes a murky hazel.
I’m never entirely sure if my mother pities me for this, or if she blames me.
Her eyebrows lower. “Why are you dressed like that?”
“I couldn’t decide what to wear,” I lie. “I asked Catharine to help me pick an outfit. I just pulled this on so I could cross the hall without being in my robe, since we have guests.”
“It would be worse if they saw you like this,” my mother scolds.
Worse to see me in humble clothes—the sort I might have worn any time before her marriage—than undressed? I close my mouth over the question. Perhaps I’m not one to judge, considering I watched Prince Idris when I ought to have blushed and shielded my eyes.
Mother strides to my wardrobe. She emerges with one of my better white morning gowns, with full sleeves in the latest fashion, and adds an emerald sash.
“This,” she commands. “Even if you are not introduced until the ball, it doesn’t hurt to look your best in case they catch a glimpse of you.”
I begin to disrobe without answering. As Mother lifts my simple gown off me, she tuts and continues talking almost to herself.
“I do wish you would see the tailors when Catharine does. You don’t have enough gowns to suit your status as a princess of Aberloche.”
I don’t answer. We both know that my stepfather, King Byrne, has a habit of sending me on errands whenever it would give Catharine an opportunity for more: more attention, more to spend, more to impress.
The sash is from Catharine, in fact—she has taken to asking for clothing specifically to find it “not to her taste” and gift it to me.
“It’s just as well the princes stay only a week,” Mother goes on, looking back at my wardrobe. “You don’t have enough to be presented much longer than that.”
Mother steps nearer to ease the new dress over my head, and I remember the before times—when we lived in my father’s house, and he was returning from some court case or another, and we helped each other dress in our finest. The way Mother used to let me braid her hair, even though it would fall out by the time he walked through the door.
Not that he minded. His smile was always wide, and when he embraced me, I felt nothing but joy.
“I wish you would do your best with the princes,” Mother says as she ties the back of my dress. “This is not an opportunity for Catharine only.”
“I don’t know that anyone will notice me,” I reply honestly.
Mother’s tone becomes sharp. “There are two princes. Why shouldn’t one of them favor you?”
“Why should they?” I ask.
My right pointer finger aches, and I massage the swollen joint. I think of the twisted hands of old women, the creak and click of my bones even on a good day. I think of the way even footsteps in the hallway can make me freeze with fear. Who would want that for a bride?
Mother moves in front of me and cups my hands with surprising gentleness, as if I were a frail bird. My throat tightens unexpectedly.
Almost to herself, she whispers, “I must get you free of this.”
My voice comes too sudden, too alarmed. “Free of what?”
She does not answer immediately, her lips compressed in consideration. At last, she says, “The women of our family carry a curse, of sorts.” She closes my hand between her two perfect ones. “When we are hurt, we become ill.”
My heart slows. She does not ask if I have been hurt. I do not say.
I wonder how long she has known. How she discovered it. Whether I revealed it in my fear, or whether King Byrne’s gloating gave it away. Why she hasn’t done anything about it.
But then, what can anyone do against a king?
But I do not ask. She does not say.
“My mother suffered as you do.”
I glance up. I knew my father’s mother: She taught me to gather from the fields and tend fevers and tap away my fears. But I never met my mother’s mother, never heard a single story about her.
“Well, not exactly,” Mother amends. “But her sister was endlessly cruel—tormenting her with impossible tasks, keeping food and drink from her when she could not finish them. Beating her, even. And your grandmother became ill with a wasting sickness.”
A tremble runs through me. Am I wasting? Are my hands the first signs?
“Later in her life, after everyone considered her a spinster, my mother escaped through her marriage,” Mother says softly.
“She escaped and had me, and for a time she seemed stronger. But the wasting returned, and even with all the food and water and love Father could give her, she became no more than skin stretched over bone.”
I swallow on a dry throat. I had not considered that the pain in my hands, the weakness in my fingers, might be the first sign of something permanent. Something worse.
“She thirsted. Always. No matter how much she drank.” My mother’s voice grows pained. “Eventually, she did not rise from her bed. Never did again.” Her grip on me tightens, and her tone grows stony. “It was her sister’s doing. Though years had passed, her sister’s cruelty killed her.”
I had not thought that my pain might never end, that it would only grow worse until it claimed me. Tears prick my eyes, but I wrap my heart in numbness before they fall.
I don’t know, I tell myself firmly. I don’t know if that will be my fate.
“Her sister should have been the one to bear it,” my mother whispers.
In her eyes is the anger I saw when she opened the door, when she saw me kneeling before the fireplace while Catharine sat comfortable in my chair.
“Catharine has never harmed me,” I interject, pushing away my distress. “She would never.”
“But you reap pain.” Mother’s voice hardens. “She reaps fortune.”
I jerk my hands away. “This isn’t her fault.”
I do not say whose fault it is. My mother does not ask.
“All I want is for you to be safe.” Her lips tremble. “If you can get out sooner than my mother, you might not share the same fate.”
My heart tears, fear on one side and a stinging love on the other.
I want to curl into my mother’s arms, shrink to the size of a child and curl myself onto her lap.
I want her to stroke my hair and run her fingertips down my back, to murmur comfort until all of this fades to a dream.
I wonder what she would do if I asked for comfort—I wonder if she would welcome or chide me.
I hope she would cover me, protect me, keep me.
But if I fold now, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to stand again.
There is a blackness in me that needs to be carved by freezing winds, that needs to lean into the gale of sunrise, the way the prince did this morning. And maybe if it cut sharp enough, deep enough, all this terror would drain out.
My thoughts have tangled, and I cast wildly for a way to pull myself back into this room, this moment. My fingers find my collarbone, and I tap a few times.
“I have thought of an idea,” my mother whispers. “But the hedgewitch wasn’t powerful enough.”
Hedgewitch? I think she must mean the strange woman at the edge of the next village who soothes children’s colds with herbs and claims to read a woman’s fertility in bone dice. If my practical mother has gone so far as seeking aid from a folk healer, she must truly be desperate.
“Well, if we are reaching for magic, maybe I will marry one of the princes,” I say in a fragile, jovial tone. “Get out the way my grandmother did, and sooner.”
I mean it as a joke, but Mother steps close and presses a firm kiss on my forehead.
“Yes,” she says. “I will see you married and cared for. I swear it.”
There is a vow in her voice—a fervent promise that considers no cost too great.
But somehow it only makes my fear grow.