In the Eye of the King's Needle

Chapter One

When I wake, the first thing I remember is the taste of pine and the way the needles pressed lines against my cheek. For a moment, in the dark, I think I am dreaming. I think that I am still lying there in an evergreen grove. My lungs bellowing in the resin-soaked air through my nose. Face pressed so hard my lips part. Looking across the jutting, angular ocean of piled green. By the dream's telling, I chose to be there.

My mind clears, and I am somewhere else. 

***

My mother let me weed her garden when her knees ached too badly to crouch. She'd sit in the wooden chair on the front porch. The one with the boards sagging in the middle of the seat. Her glass of blackberry gin sweated on the table at her side, and she frowned over my work, face brown and starting to weather. 

I didn't know much about her, then, but I still thought she was something realer than real. She had presence in a manner that set her apart from the rest of the town. I could never quite put my finger on it when I was a child, kneeling in the soil beneath her detailed guidance. I wondered how no one else mentioned it. Why people didn't gravitate toward her, heads turning when she walked by the way her flowers followed the sun.

 While the pine-laced wind blew in from the forest on the north edge of our property, she told me stories of all the gods and kingdoms and heroes she could remember. The transparent remains at the Crystal Ruin, Archaeus who slew a roving clan of mad fae, Tephus who rules the forests, and on. 

But my favorite was about the King of the Needle, the man named for his castle's capability of existing in a single point of his choosing. I tried to visualize what that could possibly mean. How could an entire castle be as thin as needle and still fit dozens of courtiers, thousands of servants, horses, dungeons, monsters, and more rooms than my mother could fit into a single story? It was an impossible thing, and it fascinated me. 

Then I grew older and I turned away from the king to direct my fascination toward its prince. A dark-haired youth with a barbed tongue and eyes that glinted like knives. He stole from the courtiers and trashed the palace with schemes and wild parties, and he seemed like the wilderness itself. He could go wherever he wanted. He could be cruel when he wanted. He didn't have to forgive those who had wronged him. Wrathful and feral and free. 

"Will you remember this?" my mother asked when she finished her tale and the last of the blackberry gin. "Will you remember?" She demanded my agreement with a firmness that puzzled me. It was those moments when I felt her weight on the world, bending it until we slipped toward her for just one second. 

Did she not thrum like a beacon for everyone else? She was a signal tugging at the edges of my mind long before I met her. In fact, it's what led me there. I'd been wandering alone for so many years, angling vaguely toward something that felt like light. I thought I'd been mad, heading towards something that was so exactly what I needed that it couldn't be real. 

Then she was there. A woman with the face of a dying god. The woman who would become my mother, she took me in, and suddenly I had a destiny. 

"When, mama?" I asked her. 

She gave me a small, tight smile, that left her dark eyes unlit, but not without a certain protective warmth. "It'll come," she said. "You'll know the sound."

She wouldn't tell me more.

***

The floor is golden tilework, without a single pine needle or even the hint of anything organic at all. If I smelled anything at all, it was just the last lingering trace caught in the fibers of my woolen tunic. People spoke in low voices somewhere above me, but I couldn't make out the words. My senses were leaden and cottony. My tongue felt huge and dry in my mouth, like an old sock. 

I shifted, infinitesimally, and my head rang. Screwing my eyes shut, I waited for it to stop, and took inventory of my body in the meantime. My right ankle throbbed with a dull agony now that I was paying attention to it, but I couldn't draw up the memory of injuring it. Bruised and scraped, but nothing too serious. The heaviness in my limbs coupled with my clearly jostled head is more pressing. Combined, I don't think I could fight if I had to. 

Fight, I thought, then winced at the rising ache in my head. No, I couldn't fight. I'd already fought, already tried that, and I had lost. 

Leather boots came into my blurry field of vision, and someone gripped me by the hair to raise my face to the crowd I could only vaguely make out. I peered up at him through the corner of my eye. 

Ah, now I remember. He was there in the glade. A flurry of movement. Hands and knees and crushing arms. His silvery eyes bright in the gloom. There was a fire in him that day, a wild anger in his features. Now he is cold and empty, like the shell of a person or a corpse. He didn't look at me. His eyes remained firmly unfocused on the middle distance where stood the crowd. 

The crowd. God, the crowd. I still can't see past my headache. They're a mess of brightly smeared colors and glinting jewelry that stings me like pinpricks. With dye like that they have to be nobles. That doesn't tell me much, but it tells me nothing good. Not enough to know exactly where I am yet, or who has me. Or for what reason. 

One figure detaches itself from the mass and came forward. 

"Where did you find this one?" he says, with a sneer I can't see but can clearly hear. 

A buzzing starts in my ears. 

"The king won't want to bother with this one, but he might want to bother with you."

No one else seems to hear it when I squint around at them. It's growing and strange, almost more feeling than sound. 

"But with a display like that, maybe an audience with the king was what you were after." His voice takes on a dangerous edge. 

My blood has started to--to vibrate in my veins. I can't get a clear look at the man speaking. My head, pounding. The one holding me is near enough for me to read the tension around his mouth. I try to grasp at the meaning of that detail, but it's slipping away from me. 

Who is the man there? That dark form? He... That's it. The ringing crescendos, and I feel myself like I'm falling backwards. 

The sound of destiny isn't a sound at all.