Chapter 4
103 YEARS AGO
ASCREAM CAME FROM the library. Amelia burst through the doors to find her stepmother, Lilith, standing on a table. Their eyes met, and Lilith pointed a trembling finger toward the bookshelves. Yellow scales covered a thick length, three lines of dark brown spots running down its body. A common garter snake, Amelia recognized, likely one that had wandered in from the greenhouse.
Amelia picked up the snake and cracked open a window, letting the animal slither outside. Meanwhile, Lilith’s legs continued trembling atop the table. Amelia reached a hand to help her down. In their grip, she felt warm skin, lean fingers, and a sweaty palm that, surprisingly, had calluses. Their proximity made her notice the freckles on Lilith’s sun-kissed cheeks, the birthmark on her chin, and the gleam in her wide brown eyes, one slightly smaller than the other whenever the woman winced or smiled.
Amelia became aware, then, how her presence had its own absence. She herself had no crooked features or unusual birthmarks. Her gift of beauty was a blank slate. She didn’t shine the way Lilith did.
“Thank goodness,” Lilith sighed with relief. “I was about to whack it with a book, but that would’ve been a waste of good literature.”
Amelia examined the array of tomes splayed over the table. Handmaids dusted each shelf to keep the books pristine, but she had never actually seen anyone read a single page. Even The Book of Samael, rumored to have been a journal left behind by the late king, was just for show, its contents completely illegible.
Lilith’s collection looked different. There were cracked spines, pages flipped open, scribbles of ink across dense notebooks. All bookmarked and carefully curated even amid chaos.
“What are you doing?” Amelia asked, following Lilith as the woman pushed a rolling ladder down the aisle. Books wrapped in leather and cloth spilled from floor-to-ceiling cherrywood shelves.
Lilith fiddled with her pearl necklace, her eyes scanning the room before they stopped to light up. her eyes lit up. She climbed the ladder, plucked a book from the top shelf, and tossed the tome to Amelia to catch. “I’m drafting a proposal to open Gyldan’s borders and establish resettlement programs. I figure the king will listen if I dress it up in more formal language. People in higher positions love to use lengthy words for such simple things, don’t they?”
Amelia pictured her godmothers’ disapproving faces. In council meetings with her father, they had stressed the importance of maintaining the kingdom’s borders and protecting Gyldan from invasion. It didn’t matter that their neighbors in Zilar were fleeing persecution. Foreigners brought diseases, stole jobs, and took resources away from natural-born citizens. When a nobleman was caught having an affair with a migrant woman from Zilar, Lilith was the babe who had been born from scandal. Amelia assumed Lilith would distance herself from her family’s reputation when she married the king. Instead, she was doing the opposite.
“Why should we welcome outsiders? Is it not better to take care of ourselves before risking our safety for strangers?” Amelia parroted her godmothers’ words, for this was the code that the faeries followed. If Gyldan had not offered them wealth and status, the Fae never would have mingled with human affairs at all. Sometimes she wondered how quickly they would disappear from the human eye if they no longer had such enticements.
Lilith pursed her lips, which were no longer painted dark like her portrait. She looked more vibrant than her own portrait now that her face was stripped to more natural colors. This, Amelia thought, was what the artist should have drawn.
“When I was a child, my mother told me about how Gyldan used to be nothing more than sand. Before it turned to gold, the land was a barren desert that stretched for miles. I liked that idea: that something can be made from nothing.”
Lilith’s heels clacked against the patterned wood as she slid down the ladder. The momentum made her rush to Amelia with such smooth speed, it was almost as if she was floating.
“I think people can do the same,” Lilith said, “and we start with each other.”
Up close, Amelia could see how the dark hues of her eyes flickered under the sunlight like wine. She was not pretty in the delicate way in which the godmothers had blessed Amelia to be. Yet there was something radiant about her: the strength in her jaw, the sharp point of her nose.
Perhaps this was supposed to be what beauty looked like, Amelia thought. To care so deeply about something, it brought life in you.
? ? ?
SUNFLOWERS BLOOMED WHEN summer arrived. Amelia kept a fistful of seeds in her pocket. She liked to pluck them from the greenhouse and replant the flowers in glass jars around the library. When sunlight hit the windows and spilled through the jars, the flowers turned their heads and looked up at the sky, following the sun like admiring children.
Amelia mimicked their behavior when it came to Lilith as well. They spent slow afternoons in the library, occupying the space as if it were their private oasis. She learned phrases in different languages from beautiful countries that were torn apart by war. She listened to stories about Lilith’s mother fleeing to Gyldan through secret tunnels and working in brothels to survive. Every time, she stared at Lilith, watching the pages of books flutter between her slender fingers, the furrow in her brow, her soft pursed lips.
One day, Lilith didn’t visit the library until late evening.
Amelia had curled into an armchair and fallen asleep waiting for her. She dreamed of a cottage house, clean sheets drying in the breeze, a garden of sunflowers that germinated in late spring. The cottage was made of misshapen stone. Forest animals visited the porch for warm tea and nonsensical conversations. It was a silly dream, quick to dissolve as she awoke to Lilith shaking her shoulder.
In the candlelight, shadows appeared beneath Lilith’s puffy eyes, as if she had been crying. “I didn’t think you’d still be here,” she whispered.
Had Lilith wanted time alone in the library? Strands of dark hair drifted loosely from her knotted locks. Amelia wanted to brush them away from her face. “Are you all right?”
Lilith’s gaze was distant, too complicated to discern. A moment of deliberation passed, as if she were evaluating her words carefully.
“Amelia,” she said, “do you think I am capable of deception?”
Amelia stared at her, trying to make sense of the puzzle in Lilith’s expression. She could not fit the pieces together. She decided it didn’t matter. “Of course not.”
Then the doors flew open, and she soon realized that whatever she believed didn’t matter either. Heavy feet stomped across the room, and candlelight flickered with seething rage under a new presence. Lilith turned around in time for King Victor to strike his palm across her face. Her hip knocked against one of the tables, its legs scraping the floor with an ugly sound that made Amelia wince.
“How long were you going to keep this a secret?” He pronounced each word with a hardened voice and a spray of spittle.
Lilith placed a hand on her bruised cheek. Her jaw was clenched, and in the crevices between her fingers, Amelia spotted tears. “I’ve told you before,” Lilith said. “This time, I didn’t want to make you angry again.”
“And did you think the midwife would hide this from me as well?”
As they argued, the candlelight grew too bright in Amelia’s vision. Wooden shelves stretched and blurred in every corner. She tried to tune out her father’s voice, but it was too loud, as if he could shake the books with volume alone.
“The godmothers were right. You are nothing more than a grifter vying for the crown.”
“That’s not true,” Lilith protested. “I want to build Gyldan together. You know that.”
“Your barren womb will help me build nothing.”
Lilith drew back, as if his words struck harder than his hand.
“Don’t look so surprised,” he said. “Your father was my closest friend. I gave him a favor by marrying you so that you wouldn’t be left in disgrace after he died. I at least expected your fertility to be as rampant as your whore mother.”
Pieces of their conversation scraped Amelia’s ears as she put together the ugly truth. Lilith was never supposed to be her stepmother, nor a proper queen for Gyldan. Lilith must have known this too, as shame warmed her cheeks. The woman bundled the fabric of her dress tight in her fists, knuckles white.
Victor’s shadow grew taller under the candle flames. “I can tolerate your overzealous ideas, but I will not accept you lying to me. For your deception, you will be exiled from Gyldan by dawn.”
The threat knocked the weight out of Amelia’s body. Fear charged her forward, the bright reality of Lilith snuffed out like a flame. “No!”
She jumped between them and splayed her arms wide, standing like a shield. Despite her shouts, her voice still trembled, hardly a buffer against the looming figure of her father.
“Please, Father. There must be another way.”
Victor’s blue eyes crinkled as they settled upon her. The expression only deepened the wrinkles on his face, the sagging skin that betrayed the time he fought so hard against. His beard had stubbornly grown back, yet gray hairs spread across his chin, and he could no longer hide them.
“The prosperity of Gyldan rests on its ruler having our blood. If they do not have it, the kingdom will be doomed.”
Amelia swallowed hard. She thought about the gold that shimmered in their veins, how she had to strain under the light just to see faint traces of it. Their family’s lineage was too fragile. Her father was growing older, his coughs sounding sicker. He was running out of time.
Then again, so was she.
“I will marry a prince,” Amelia declared. “Before I turn eighteen, I will find someone to rule after you. He will be brave and strong and smart. I will give him a child, so that the next heir will have our blood.”
She steadied her breathing, counting the short future ahead of her. Her mind suppressed the image of a swollen belly, an entire life bursting inside her while she was robbed of her own.
“I will do all of this, but only if Lilith remains queen.”
Lilith tugged Amelia’s arm, urging her to stop. It was too late. Since Amelia’s curse at birth, her fate kept being sealed, over and over again. She stared at her father and silently pleaded with him to give in. He ran a hand down his black hair, stopping where the streaks of gray began.
“It’s not that simple. There needs to be consequences.”
“Please,” she begged. She wanted to argue that Lilith was good for their kingdom. That no matter how many princes she met, it was Lilith who she thought was brave, and strong, and smart. But according to her father, trust had been broken, and she knew such pleas would fall on deaf ears.
She knew, too, there was another thing the king cared about.
“I want Lilith to stay, because she’s the only mother I’ve ever had.”
The lie tasted foul on her tongue, but she needed her father to believe it. If Lilith could stay, Amelia was willing to pretend that the only reason she wanted the woman beside her was due to familial attachment. There would be no other explanation, no deeper feelings she could have explored. Nothing that was complicated or wrong.
She would bury the truth, so that it would never see the light of day.
King Victor’s crinkled eyes turned sympathetic. A long sigh hissed through his gritted teeth. After a tense silence, he turned to Lilith. His hand raised like a threat before she could speak.
“You are lucky my daughter cares for you. But mark my words: If you deceive me again, there will be a steeper price to pay.”
Lilith squeezed Amelia’s hand, a silent thank-you. Amelia could hardly feel it. Her whole body had turned numb. The candles surrounding them burned too hot. Her mind lifted away from the wax and drifted to the edge of the room. Beyond the windows, the night was pitch-black. She thought of sunflowers perched on sills, the way they stretched toward the sun, as if aspiring to become stars themselves.
But there was no future where things could be different. Darkness always came, and the sunflowers would never become what they dreamed of being. Her feet stayed rooted to the ground. If she tipped any farther, she would sink below the earth.