2. Vireth #3
It would be nice to enjoy a meal—to enter a room—without attracting such disdain. The pain has dulled some with time, the splinters scabbed over. My lips twist in a sad frown with the realization that it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d worn the blue gown—though I like the gray one all the same.
I take a deliberate bite and chew slowly. The bread remains bread. The cheese remains cheese. I swallow and smile faintly into my cup of full-bodied, pleasingly tannic wine.
Technically, they’re not part of the Moontide retinue. Technically, they’re fair game.
It doesn’t take much from my little pool of power within to rot the food on their forks just as they clamp their vitriolic jaws around them.
When they spit and curse and retch, I turn my back to them to better hide my vicious glee.
I make good my escape before they can lob their accusations at me, though they will have little doubt who’s to blame.
It’s truly a pity that no one would dare make a scene at Sephy’s bloomday.
A ripple of movement near the doors draws the room’s attention away from me like a tide pulled by the moon.
Trumpets sound—brass, obnoxious, and blaring—and the Moontide delegation makes their entrance in a wash of deep blues and silvers, their cloaks embroidered with waves and scallop shells.
Lifting my nose a fraction, I scent them from here.
They smell of salt and clean wind and… money.
At their head walks a young prince with hair the color of wet sand and a smile polished bright as sea glass. He bows low to my parents, then turns and offers his hand to Sephia.
She steps forward and her radiance elicits a gasp of admiration from the court.
Gold beads and jeweled flowers glint in her green hair, and her rose velvet gown shimmers in the low honeyed light of the torches.
When the Moontide prince draws her into the dance, she doesn’t hesitate—there’s no trace of her earlier apprehension.
He bows low over her outstretched hand, and she sinks into a fluid curtsy as though her bones were made of water.
They dance beautifully, of course—moving as one in sweeping arcs about the hall. Sephia moves in a way that one cannot help but admire, the very air conspiring to flare her gown just so. Grace comes to her as easily as breath—as easily as my biting remarks come to me.
A dark, bitter, twisting thing bites into my chest—a sharp-edged pride, a lingering fear, and shamefully, envy, sour as vinegar.
The prince seems pleasant enough, though I’m more likely to think favorably on him after the insurance I gifted to Sephia.
I can sense the small mushrooms pulsing toxically from here, growing slowly in the box tucked away in her skirts. Mayhap she won’t even need them.
Finishing my plate and settling the gnawing in my stomach, I retreat to the wall, back pressed to cool stone.
From here, I watch the hall as one might watch a tide pool—curious, yet alert for sudden rogue waves that may sweep me off my feet.
Couples dressed in finery spin in endless patterns.
Laughter rises and falls, coming more easily as the wine and mead flow.
Servants scramble at the edges of the fray, anticipating every possible need.
My boredom grows legs and begins to pace.
Nibblebones senses my growing fatigue and yawns.
I weave fantasies of leaving this hellish assemblage, but catch Mother’s stern gaze as I quietly try to shuffle toward the back door.
Relenting, I give it another quarter hour out of politeness, obligation, and sisterly affection for Sephia.
Then another ten minutes out of haughty stubbornness, lest anyone believe their sneering drove me off.
But by the time Sephia is laughing at something the Moontide prince murmurs in her ear, I have reached my limit.
My feet ache from standing in these thin dancing slippers that have not once danced, and my low back yearns for the soft support of my bed.
I edge toward a side door half-hidden by a tapestry depicting Hollowmire in a more flattering century, filled with dragons and goddesses and humans, even. The air near it is cooler, redolent with the freezing rain and stone and blessed emptiness. Freedom.
I am one step from slipping through when suddenly, a hand clamps around mine.
Distantly, I acknowledge a foolish hope that someone is about to ask me to dance, but the hand is cold. Too cold to be the sweaty palm of some lackwit lord wanting to test his bravery in the face of the rot-tainted one.
I whirl, already snarling, and find myself face-to-face with Sephia’s bloomday fortune teller.
She isn’t at all what I expected—a stooped crone wheezing beneath layers of veils and mystery.
She looks scarcely older than Sephia, in fact.
Her face has sharp features and the golden eyes of a fox, and her dark hair braided with bits of carved bone, silver beads, and threadbare ribbon.
Her ears taper to delicate points like the rest of us.
Fae, then. Obviously young enough that her gift still owns her, rather than the other way around.
That, I suppose, is something we might have in common.
“Lady Vireth—I must speak with you. It’s rather urgent, and…”
Her onyx pupils dilate with fear and something ominous and knowing slithers through me. My pulse flutters like a moth stuck to spider silk, because I’m certain a fortune teller with urgency on her mind is about to deliver an ill omen just for me.
Before I can offer a wary assent or aristocratic dressing-down for grabbing me without permission, her eyes roll back, showing only white.
She screams, guttural and shrill at the same time. The sound tears through the music, through laughter and clinking cups, through the marrow of my bones. The hall freezes.
“Blight Mother,” she shrieks, fingers digging into my skin hard enough to bruise. “Rot-Born Queen!”
The silence that seizes the crowd has all the air of a teapot ready to whistle. From the back of the hall, a goblet clatters to the floor, clanging sharply against the stone. Still, no one moves.
Her grip tightens as though I mean to pull away—and I should—but I find myself rooted to this spot, staring into her milk-pool eyes.
The next time she speaks, her voice isn’t the lilting tenor of a young woman—it’s older, weathered with age and deep as the sea, as if something vast and ancient is leaning close to whisper through her mouth.
“From the rot of mercy comes the mother of endings,” she intones. “Crowned in hunger. Swollen with what the world casts away.”
Every eye in this accursed room has found us, leveling me with censure far beyond an unflattering gown or spoiled apple.
The heat of embarrassment wars with the chill of dread, making my skin a clammy too-tight binding upon my flesh.
If it wouldn’t make my spectacle worse, I would tear this suffocating wyrm silk from my body and run outside to breathe in the cool night air.
Her head jerks sharply to the side, spine bowing as though an unseen hand has pressed between her shoulders.
“The green will fail her first,” she gasps. “Then stone. Then bone. What is buried will answer her call, and what yet lives will beg to follow.”
A sob wrenches out of her, but the words keep coming. I have the faintest desire to press my hand over her lips and keep her world-shattering words stuck behind her teeth.
“By heart of stone, she may be undone. A curse unraveled, another begun.”
Her fingers slip in mine, clammy with cold and slick with sweat.
“She will love the world,” the voice whispers, suddenly soft, almost tender. Her sightless white eyes find mine, full of terror and sadness. “And in loving it, she will unmake it.”
The girl shudders violently, breath hitching. “The ancient ones call her forth from slumber,” she croaks, “the Blight Mother awakens. She heralds the end.”
The silence in the hall is absolute. Even the guttering candles seem to hold their breath.
My heart is scrambling to claw its way out of my ribcage. My mouth is dry. My hand aches where she grips it, and beneath the fear—oh, beneath it, something terrible stirs, curious and pleased and horrified all at once.
I swallow. In this frozen moment of silence, one thousand thoughts crash through my mind like waves preceding a storm at sea.
As if people needed another reason to hate me—to fear me.
First, I am merely disturbing, bothersome, and now I am to bring about the end of the world?
I can almost hear the hisses, the whispers, the shrieks, and the jeers.
I will be lucky if I can ever set foot at court again—not that that would truly be a loss to me.
But her words are like bands of iron shackling me to my isolation—a lone woman with strange magic, chained to a prophecy I know I shall never be free of.
I huff out a breath that’s half laugh, half sob.
“Well,” I say, my voice scarcely more than a hoarse whisper, “shit.”
The fortune teller collapses forward. I catch her automatically, because of course I do, and the hall erupts into bedlam around us—shouting, scrambling guards, my mother’s sharp voice cutting through the din.
Nibblebones bares her tiny teeth and hisses at those who press in too close to me, half-terrified, half-enraged.
At the edge of the room, I hear Etia telling anyone who will listen that she just knew there was something to these ill omens.
Her eyes cut to me across the room and gods, it hurts to see her flinch from my gaze—the way her body already recoils from me even separated by a room full of sweaty bodies and chaos.
Through my gathering panic, a singular frustration rises to the surface. Gods, I longed for a different life, for a change, but this isn’t quite what I had in mind.
I stare down at the unconscious girl in my arms, my pulse roaring in my ears, and think dimly that I really, truly should have snuck out when I had the chance.