25. Adelina
Adelina
Departure day arrives slowly.
I lie on my side because my back will not tolerate anything else, my breath shallow, my hands curled beneath my chin as pain moves through me in patient waves.
There are no marks for anyone to see, but the skin across my back feels split open, each line of magic burning beneath flesh that remains smooth enough to satisfy my brother’s vanity.
The potion Selvara forced between my lips has long since worn off, but the punishment has not. It lingers deep, pulsing whenever I shift, I breathe too fully, or my shoulders draw up against the memory of wings pinned and helpless.
I can’t call them. Yet another part of me that has failed.
They let me lie on the floor for hours last night before a healer was sent, but even then, I was only healed enough to function and survive. The cuts and bruises on my face were healed completely. Everything else was barely touched.
The first bell rings somewhere in the castle.
Departure day.
The words should mean something. Relief, perhaps. Fear. Grief. All of them wait somewhere beyond the pain, but my body has no room to carry them properly. It can only carry the next breath. The next movement. The next command.
I sit up slowly. The world tilts at once, and I grip the edge of the mattress until the chamber steadies.
My nightgown pulls across my back, soft fabric turning cruel with the smallest drag against my skin.
A sound catches in my throat, but I swallow.
No one comes. No one is allowed to come, and even if they did come, the faces I would look for are gone.
Freya is gone.
Marra and Vera have not returned.
None of my former guards stand outside my doors.
None of the maids who once moved through my chamber with downcast eyes and careful hands have come to help me dress or braid my hair or pretend not to notice when I cannot lift my arms without trembling.
Selvara sent two of her own women last night, strangers with pale hands and expressionless faces, and they had touched me like a task.
This morning, I’m alone.
I stand with one hand on the bedpost and wait for the worst of the pain to pass.
It doesn’t pass, not fully, but it settles into something familiar enough to endure.
The gown set out for travel lies over the chair near the hearth, dark blue wool with silver embroidery at the cuffs and collar, warmer and plainer than last night’s ceremonial gown.
Beside it are fresh stockings, boots, gloves, and a cloak lined in fur.
Everything chosen for the journey. Everything appropriate for a princess leaving her brother’s kingdom as the legally betrothed bride of the southern crown prince.
Legally betrothed.
Yesterday, before witnesses, I stood beside Prince Kaedryn and placed my hand in salt water with his.
I repeated the words I was supposed to repeat.
I let him kiss the back of my hand while my body burned beneath silk and cosmetics.
I sat through the final dinner in my brother’s hall and answered questions when spoken to.
I took bites of food I could not taste and sips of wine I did not want.
I lied when he asked if I was hurt. I said good night when Selvara guided me away.
And all the while, Kaedryn watched me.
He told me I would not be harmed, then handed me back to the people who brutally abused me.
He looked unsettled last night, yes. Suspicious, perhaps even concerned.
But concern did not stop the whip or the beating.
Suspicion did not stop Selvara’s women from dressing me over pain I could not name.
His promises fell apart the moment they had to stand against ceremony.
Now he will take me south.
Four days by road and wing-carriage routes through the pass, then into Elyrion’s green mountains and temperate coast. Four days to the kingdom I have studied in books, the kingdom that values control deeper than strength, the kingdom ruled by a family that needed my bloodline enough to accept my brother’s bargain.
Four days to my new home.
The thought is so vast and hollow that I nearly sink back onto the bed. Instead, I reach for the travel gown.
Dressing takes too long. I have to stop twice, once with the gown halfway over my shoulders and once when the row of front buttons blurs because my fingers shake too hard to manage them.
I breathe through my nose, slow and silent, until the room comes back into focus.
My hair is worse. I can’t lift my arms properly, so I braid it over one shoulder in an uneven plait that would make Selvara click her tongue if she saw it.
Then I tuck it beneath the hooded cloak waiting on the chair and let the loose silver strands remain where they fall.
No one is coming to make me perfect. There are no tonics or drugs to make sure I can hide the pain. It doesn’t matter today.
There is one thing left that no one set out for me.
Once the healer had gone and I had been left healed just enough to lift my own arms, I slid my mother’s necklace beneath the pillow, close to where I slept. It was the only thing in this castle that still felt like mine.
Now I reach under and close my hand around it. Silver and moonstone, cool against my palm. It catches the gray light and holds it, the way it always has, a pale gleam that is almost blue, almost silver, never quite either.
Freya pressed it into my hands the night I ran. My mother wore it before me. I do not fully understand why it matters as much as it does, only that it does, and I will not let them have it.
I fasten it beneath my collar, where the chain lies hidden against my skin and the stone rests below the neckline of the travel gown. They can search my trunks. They can search the satchel. This, they will not find.
When I finish, I kneel beside the low chest at the foot of my bed.
The large trunks have already been filled by other hands, packed with gowns, jewels, shoes, diplomatic gifts, and everything my brother wants the southern court to believe I am.
This chest is older and smaller, something easily overlooked because it isn’t as fine as the others.
My sketchbook is first. The leather cover is worn soft from years of handling, the edges smudged with charcoal and crushed pigment.
Inside are flowers, windows, faces drawn from memory, Freya’s hands while she mended a sleeve, the shape of my garden under frost, the curve of my mother’s mouth as best as I could remember it.
Pages no one commissioned. No portraits meant to flatter. Nothing useful to a crown.
I wrap it in cloth and place it at the bottom of my satchel.
Next is the book of fairy tales my mother gave me for my seventh birthday.
The cover is faded green and the gold title nearly rubbed away.
There is still a pressed ice orchid between the first pages, brittle and pale, from the morning she sat beside me in the garden and read the story of the princess who turned into starlight rather than marry a cruel king.
I had loved that story. I thought it meant brave girls could become free if they wanted it badly enough.
I know better now.
Still, I place the book beside the sketchbook.
A small linen pouch comes next, filled with seeds from my garden. Ice orchids. Moonvine. Silverleaf moss. I don’t know if any of them will grow in Elyrion or if the castle there will give me a patch of earth, or if my new husband will decide a garden is another indulgence I have not earned.
But seeds are stubborn things. Freya said that once. A seed looks dead until the day it decides not to be.
The pouch goes into the satchel.
The stuffed unicorn is difficult. I find it wrapped in one of Freya’s old handkerchiefs, tucked beneath the false bottom of the chest. Its once-white body has gone cream with age, one ear slightly crooked, its silver horn dulled by years of small fingers and secret comfort.
My father brought it from Maralis when I was a baby, or so Freya told me.
A toy for a princess not yet old enough to know unicorns were more myth than mount, more omen than pet.
I press it to my chest before I can stop myself.
The smell is faint now, wool and cedar and time, but for a moment I’m small again, held in a lap I can’t fully remember, surrounded by voices that loved me before love became something I had to earn by being quiet.
My throat closes. I almost cry then.
I miss my parents with a grief made worse by how little of them I own. A portrait. A fairy tale. A handful of memories so worn around the edges I’m not sure what is real and what I have drawn over too many times. I miss feeling loved without performing. I miss being touched without flinching.
I miss Freya so sharply it’s difficult to breathe, because Freya knew how to hold grief without making it smaller.
Freya would have scolded me for packing too much and then slipped three more things into the bag herself.
Freya would have kissed my hand and told me to go in peace, even when peace was impossible.
I’m not even sure she is alive.
I move before the thought destroys me.
The unicorn goes into the satchel. Then the portrait, small enough to fit between the pages of my book, painted on thin ivory-backed parchment and framed in worn silver.
My mother sits in a chair near the garden windows, my father standing behind her with one hand resting on her shoulder.
They look younger than I remember them. My mother’s pale hair falls loose over one shoulder.
My father’s eyes are stern, but not cold.
There is a softness in the way his hand rests against my mother’s shoulder, and a quiet joy in the way she leans toward him.
I touch the edge of the frame. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.
For failing and becoming something they would not recognize.