3. Adelina
Adelina
The garden is the only place where the air ever feels like it belongs to me.
It is barely morning when I step outside, the sky above my private courtyard heavy with gray, the clouds so low they seem caught on the jagged roofline of the castle.
The cold finds me at once, slipping beneath the cloak Freya pressed into my hands before I left my room, but it’s a familiar cold.
Honest, in its own way. It doesn’t pretend to be gentle. It bites.
And after a night spent lying too still beneath warm blankets, measuring every breath against the ache beneath my skin, I almost welcome it.
Almost.
The first step drags pain across my back, deep and invisible, and it feels like the lashes are still there beneath the surface, waiting to reopen.
I pause with one hand on the carved stone archway, letting my breath settle before I move again.
The potion Freya gave me dulled the worst of it, but even her strongest herbs can only coax the magic’s echo away a little at a time.
I know better than to expect relief all at once.
Pain like this does not leave because I ask it to.
I lift my chin and cross into the garden anyway.
Frost and snow coat the stone path, delicate beneath my feet, and the ice orchids bow under the weight of the morning chill.
They are pale blooms, all silver and blue and faint lavender in the center, their petals translucent enough that the first hints of light gather inside them instead of merely resting on the surface.
No one else would have planted them here.
No one else would have bothered. They are too temperamental, even though they were bred from a tropical plant into something that could survive the bitter frost.
I lower myself carefully beside the nearest bed, swallowing when the motion pulls a burning line beneath my shoulder blades.
I stay like that, one knee tucked under me, one palm pressed to the frozen soil, breathing through the ache until it fades into something I can work around.
Then I reach for the small silver shears I left on the stone ledge yesterday and begin trimming the browned edges of the leaves.
The work steadies me. It always has.
There are no voices here, no measuring eyes, no brotherly smile sharpened into a blade.
The walls around my courtyard rise high enough to block most of the castle from view, leaving only the sky and the narrow towers beyond the far hedge.
It should feel like another cage, and perhaps it is, but it’s the only one I have been allowed to shape with my own hands.
My suite is large enough that visiting nobles might call it generous.
Rooms filled with polished wood, heavy rugs, tall windows, and shelves of books selected for me by tutors and advisors who decided long ago what a princess should be allowed to learn.
A music room, though I’m never asked to play for anyone.
A sitting room where no guest is received unless my brother or his wife sends them.
My brother calls it generosity and a privilege. I suppose it is easier for him to name it that way than to call it confinement. He always has pretty names for horrible things.
I clip another dead leaf and set it aside, mindful of the new growth beneath it.
My fingers are stiff from the cold, but the plants respond to me anyway, a faint hum of life brushing against my senses.
It is less a sound than a feeling under my skin, a slow pulse where the roots sleep beneath frozen earth.
Dravaryn magic is supposed to be strong, forceful, built from ice and stone and pressure.
My brother can split rock with a motion of his hand when he chooses.
I have watched northern guards summon shields of ice thick enough to stop a blade, watched soldiers carve training fields into frozen ground with nothing more than will and power.
My magic coaxes flowers open. It bends stems toward light.
It keeps delicate things alive where nothing delicate is meant to thrive.
Low-level, my tutors called it when I was young and still foolish enough to hope they were wrong.
Useful in domestic settings, one had added, as though that were meant to be comfort.
I learned to think of it the way they did, small and soft and harmless, a knack for keeping flowers from dying.
It was easier than asking why it sometimes felt like more.
The crown found a use for beauty before it found one for my power.
I press my fingers lightly to the soil around the roots of the largest orchid, letting my magic sink down, careful not to pull too much from myself when I’m already tired.
The dirt answers first, then the quieter green pulse beneath it.
I guide it, smoothing the brittle edges of the stem, urging warmth through places the frost has bitten too deeply.
One of the closed buds trembles, then eases open by a fraction, just enough that its petals loosen and the pale center glows faintly against the gray morning.
The crown prince arrives soon.
The thought slips in without permission, and my hand stills over the orchid.
I close my eyes, pressing my fingers more firmly into the soil as if I can bury the thought there and leave it beneath the frost. I am not meant to think of him as anything more than a guest. A diplomatic presence.
A man whose name I have studied because his kingdom matters, because Elyrion matters, because Zerath presses harder from the east and every court in the realm understands what expansion means even when they pretend not to fear it.
Prince Kaedryn of Elyrion.
I have read his lineage, his military history, the record of his position after his elder brother’s death. I know his parents’ names and that his kingdom prizes restraint and strategy over open displays of strength. I have learned and memorized everything I have been given.
And it still doesn’t feel like enough.
The rest is rumor, the kind that slips through servants who forget that silence carries, and I already know what the rumors say.
I turned them over in my head last night in the dark, when the pain prevented sleep.
A man like that shouldn’t frighten me more than the one who already holds my leash.
And still he does. The unease stays with me even as my hands keep working, shaking the snow from the leaves.
I will attend this meeting. I will lower my gaze when appropriate and raise it when commanded. I will answer questions with the precision Selvara requires, and I will not hesitate again. I will be composed enough that no one will ever guess I spent the night before counting lashes against my skin.
The thought makes my stomach tighten.
I set the shears down and cup the stem between my fingers, my magic answering faster this time, too eager, stirred by the panic I am trying to suppress. A faint shimmer of frost curls across my fingertips, thin as lace.
I go still.
Frost. I did not call frost. My magic is green and quiet, made for living things, not the cold that belongs to my brother and his guards.
I have felt this before, in flashes, when fear or anger slips past me faster than I can fold it away, something colder and larger stirring beneath the small, safe magic I know.
I tell myself it is only the morning chill catching the damp on my skin.
I almost believe it.
I breathe slowly and draw the power back into something gentler. The stem warms beneath my touch, the broken fibers knitting slowly, until the orchid straightens again, trembling but whole.
My heartbeat is still too quick when I pull my hand away.
I stare at the flower longer than I should.
Then I laugh, barely more than a breath, because if I can nearly destroy an orchid by thinking about a dinner, perhaps Selvara was right to question whether I am prepared.
The thought fades the moment it forms, leaving something sour behind.
No.
I know what happened yesterday. I have turned it over so many times. Selvara came to my chambers with kindness in her voice and a test hidden beneath it: where I would stand, who I would greet, when I would speak, how I would address a foreign prince. I answered all of it. Every question but one.
“If the crown prince addresses you directly, what will you say?”
There were too many right answers. For one heartbeat, I thought instead of replied. Selvara saw it. By evening, my brother had named it a risk.
I drag my fingers lightly over the orchid’s stem and force myself to release it.
The sky has begun to lighten. Pale gray washes over the courtyard, touching the stone and the high walls.
Inside, Freya is awake. Marra and Vera are preparing the dressing room.
The dress will be laid out, the jewels selected, the powders and oils arranged as if all of this is only another ceremonial appearance and not something I can feel moving toward me with every passing breath.
I should go inside.
Instead, I reach for my sketchbook from the bench tucked beneath the arch of climbing silvervine and sit carefully, because my back is still throbbing and I have already tested it more than I should.
The charcoal pencil is cold when I take it into my hand, but the weight of it is familiar.
I open to the page I left unfinished, my mother’s face waiting in soft lines and shadows.
The prince fades, and the pain becomes distant.
I work on the curve of her mouth, softening it where I made it too severe yesterday.
I was young when she died, young enough that memory has become more feeling than detail, but I keep returning to her face anyway, trying to hold the pieces before they vanish.
Her portraits hang in the old wing of the castle, but those are official images, crowned and jeweled and composed for eyes that never knew her.