69. Cassiel #2
Not quite like my mother used to, but very prettily.
I look good with braids. She said I looked beautiful, and she can’t lie, so it must be true.
I asked her if she ever braided my father’s hair, but she said he never wore it long.
She doesn’t like to talk about him much, but today I asked her if he loved my mother.
She said yes, but her voice was sad. Is love a sad thing?
I’m not sure I’ve felt enough of it to know.
My mother loved me. I remember that much.
Her love was warm. I wish mine wasn’t. I burned the thing I loved most in the world.
Why would I want to love anything again?
And yet I do, I do. I want to love and be loved. Maybe no one likes me here because they know what I can do. No one could love an inferno.
Tears trail down my cheeks. I want to reach into the past and scoop up this girl and hold her in my arms.
I do, Wren. I do, I do.
I would scream it into the void, but my throat is too closed to speak.
I keep reading. I have no idea how old Wren is now, because she rarely notes the date.
She talks of lessons, of the birth of a new child in the forest, how he doesn’t fear her like the others do.
She speaks of her frustration at not being as good as the others.
She can’t do anything right, no matter how hard she tries.
She is determined to be good at something.
When she is fourteen, she is sent to the house of a mortal man suspected of trafficking fey.
It turns out that Wren is very good at killing people.
I took a life today. He definitely deserved it.
I snuck into his room and slit his throat.
I thought it would be like killing a deer.
I’ve killed enough of those, though I’ve never taken pleasure in it.
I expected to like this more. A deer is an innocent, after all.
But watching the light drain out of human eyes is different.
It took him longer than I thought to die. He was scared, he was in pain.
He probably deserved pain too, but I did not like being the harbinger of it.
My grandmother praised me when I returned. So did most of the elders. That part, I liked. Is that what I need to do to gain their approval?
Because if so, I will learn not to dislike it. I’ll be the best little murderer there ever was.
I close the diary for a moment and lean back against the bed, hating that she was only ever made to feel good at doing something like this—hating the act, loving the praise.
It is so different from how I was raised.
As a prince, there were so many expectations, and yes, sometimes it seemed too much, too hard.
Never once was I ever made to feel unlovable because I couldn’t meet certain goals. Never once did my mother’s praise feel like something I would have to kill for. Never once did I ever truly feel like a failure.
But it’s the prevailing theme of Wren’s childhood. Always a failure, never enough.
Until she learns to be a weapon.
The entries are longer now, but the pages are running out. I am losing her words, losing pieces of her. It is like she is crumbling in front of me, all over again.
You’ll get to keep these words, I remind myself. You’ll only read them once, but they will stay with you.
But I don’t want her words. I want her, living and laughing and breathing beside me. I want the impossible, not this paper imitation.
But paper is all I have, and I will grasp at it.
I had my first kiss today. It was with Arvar during a revel. We danced away from the others, and I kissed him under the boughs of the tree. It felt nice enough. Nothing like what the bards sing about. I wonder if I will ever experience a sensation like that?
I brush tears from my cheeks.
You will, Wren, you will.
I wish I could tell her how loved she will be. I wish I could tell her she will experience everything she desires, that bards will sing her story and poets will weep. I want to tell her all her dreams will come true, that she won’t have to fight for love, but be wrapped inside it.
You’ll have your happy ending, Wren.
Only, of course, she doesn’t.
And neither do I.
I read through the rest of the entries, little stories of her kills, her triumphs, her failures. Stories of her dalliances—sometimes with far too much information—and stories that make me weep again in frustration.
Every time I turn the page, I worry it will be the last one, that her words will finally run out. There isn’t much space left, and I can’t find another diary. Besides, from one entry, I grasp that she has already turned nineteen.
It will all be over soon.
And it is.
I reach the final entry.
The elders have decided on my next mission: I’m to enter into the service of the second son, Prince Cassiel.
This must be important, but no one will tell me what I’m going there to do.
I suspect it’s to discover information and then kill him, or maybe someone else.
It’s the eldest son, Prince Evander, who has more of a reputation for fighting the fey, and the Queen is ruthless.
But it’s Prince Cassiel I’ve been sent to guard.
I know surprisingly little about him. He’s nineteen, like me, the middle child of Queen Alessandra. He is described as handsome. He almost always accompanies his brother on hunts and excursions, but I’ve heard no stories of his prowess on the battlefield. Neither have I heard him described as weak.
He was blinded a few months ago, which can’t have been easy for him. He’s not been seen outside the palace since. I don’t even know what happened, and no one will tell me. Stars, how I hate not knowing things. I feel like I’m the blind one.
Maybe I’ll be lucky and he’ll be awful and my grandmother will quickly order me to dispatch him, but I’m worried he won’t be. I’ve never had to kill someone I’ve gotten to know before.
What happens if he’s nice?
Grandmother seemed to sense my reluctance. She told me after dinner last night to remember what they’re like, that his kind are murderers, that his father killed mine.
She forgets that I’m a murderer, too. She made sure of that.
I want to please her, but I don’t like the way I have to do it, and I don’t want to have to kill someone who’s done me no wrong. He didn’t kill my father.
I almost killed his. Some nights, I wish I had. I wish I’d done it so that he didn’t have to suffer.
Perhaps I’m not a good murderer after all.
I wipe my eyes on my sleeve. It’s the last thing she ever wrote, but it’s the words she didn’t say that slide against my soul, pressing into my chest, making it difficult to breathe.
Wren never, ever wanted to be a weapon, and she wasn’t, in the end.
She brought people back to life. She was an instrument of peace.
But beneath that, she just wanted to find her place in the world, and be loved in spite of who she was or what she’d done.
And she is.