3. Adelina #2
I want the woman who brushed snowflakes from my hair and told me they looked like stars. I ache for the voice I almost remember and warmth of her hold that has faded over the decades.
The orchid beneath her portrait takes shape slowly, petal by petal.
This is the only way I can keep her.
?
By the time Freya finds me, the morning has fully arrived, though the sun itself remains hidden behind cloud.
“There you are,” she says, and the relief in her voice makes guilt press gently at my ribs.
I look up from the sketchbook, keeping my movement slow. “I didn’t go far.”
Freya stands beneath the archway with a shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders, her silver-streaked hair braided over one side. Her eyes move over me in the same way they have since I was a child, searching for what I will not say. There is none of Selvara’s cold measuring in it.
“No,” she says softly. “But you’ve been out long enough.”
“I needed air.”
“I know.” She makes her way to me and lowers herself beside me, not touching my back, not yet. “How bad is it?”
I close the sketchbook before the answer can show too clearly on my face. “Manageable.”
“That means worse than you’ll admit.”
“It means manageable.”
Her mouth tightens, but she lets it pass because there is no time to argue and we both know it. She looks down at my drawing, and her eyes briefly tear.
“It looks just like her. You have a gift.”
The words are quiet, but there is something fierce beneath them, something she would never allow anyone else to hear.
I look back at her, and for a second I’m not a princess sitting in a frozen courtyard waiting to be dressed for a prince.
I’m a child again, clutching her sleeve after nightmares, believing her hands could fix anything because they were the only hands that ever tried after my parents died.
Freya reaches for my sketchbook and tucks it beneath her arm. “Come inside, little love. We need time to prepare.”
The nickname almost hurts more than my back.
Warmth gathers around me as soon as we cross the threshold inside, the air scented faintly with lavender smoke and the sharper oils Freya uses when she wants to calm me without making it obvious.
Marra and Vera are waiting in the dressing room, both of them turning when we enter.
Marra, younger and round-faced, drops into a curtsy too quickly.
Vera is older, composed in the way servants become when they have survived long enough in royal households, but even she looks strained around the mouth.
That is when I see the dress.
Everything in me stills.
It hangs from the carved wardrobe frame like something meant for a statue in a temple, not for me.
The fabric is a pale, luminous silver, so fine it seems to hold the light rather than reflect it, with threads of ice-blue embroidery climbing from the hem in patterns of frost, thorn, and open-winged birds.
Tiny stones are sewn through the bodice, just enough that every movement will catch the light.
The sleeves are long and close-fitting, sheer along the forearms but opaque across the shoulders, and the back rises high, closing in a smooth line all the way to the nape.
From behind, I will be covered completely.
It is the front that is meant to be seen.
The neckline plunges lower than anything I’ve ever worn, a deliberate line that bares my throat and the soft skin below it, and the silk is cut close enough to leave little about my shape to the imagination.
My back tightens in remembered pain, and it takes me a moment to understand what I am looking at. They have hidden it. Every mark, every silver line, sealed away beneath fabric. What they have left bare is everything else.
“It is what the queen commanded,” Freya says before I can ask. Her expression stays composed, but the truth is in her hands. She keeps them folded at her waist, one thumb pressed hard into the other, a small habit she has never fully broken.
She is nervous.
A cold feeling moves beneath my ribs. “Why would the queen want me dressed like this?”
“She wants you to look the part she has chosen for you tonight.”
Marra looks down. Vera busies herself with a tray of pins that does not need arranging.
The room seems warmer than before, too warm all at once, the air thick with perfume and smoke and all the things meant to make a woman pleasing before she is allowed to be seen. I stare at the dress until the embroidery blurs slightly.
I force my fingers to unclench. “Will it show?” I ask.
Freya’s face softens in a way that makes my throat burn. She knows what I mean.
“Not the marks,” she says. “The back was cut high on purpose, closed all the way up. Nothing of them will show.”
“That doesn’t comfort me.”
“It was not meant to.” Then, softer, “I will use more balm before we dress you. The fabric will sit against the worst of it, and I don’t want it to chafe.”
I nod because I don’t trust my voice.
They undress me carefully, leaving me in a thin underlayer. Freya warms the balm between her hands before touching me, and even then I can’t stop the tremor that moves through my shoulders when her fingers pass near the worst of it.
“Breathe,” she murmurs.
The balm sinks in slowly, cooling at first, then warm, dulling the raw edge beneath my skin. By the time she steps away, I can stand straighter without feeling as though my back might split open under an injury no one else can see.