A ten-year-old of skinny limbs, dark-chocolate eyes, and a wildness that tends to give her tall, ebony-haired nurse headaches sits at a vanity, grumbling about her mass of curly deep-brown hair and why can't we just straighten it, Rhiannon? The nurse just keeps brushing, and eventually pins the front bits back, out of the girl's face, before helping her into a dress. In a small act of rebellion, both nurse and girl conveniently forget makeup. And then she is ready for the day- lessons with her tutor, Mr. Ashwen, meals with her parents and her five older siblings, and more lessons, this time with the much-hated etiquette teacher, Mrs. Vega. And then an hour of free time. She will visit the stables, where a beautiful black colt has just been born, and she will name him Starlight.
We meet her again. She's thirteen now, and those skinny limbs have grown quite a bit, especially her legs, because she spends every spare second riding out on the pastures by the stables. She cannot ride the little black colt yet, but she is training him, under the watchful eye of the stablemaster. She can ride sidesaddle and astride, but she prefers the latter unless she absolutely has to. She still hates her hair, but now it's mostly because it gets in the way. Rhiannon is unendingly patient when she comes back from riding and it's a tangled mess, simply grabbing a hairbrush, smiling out a There you are, Pretty Girl, and working the brush through the curls until they aren't completely knotted up anymore.
She is sixteen, tall and full of righteous spunk. Starlight is officially her mount, and she still spends every spare second at the stables, mastering bareback riding. She complains now when Rhiannon, whose black hair has become streaked with silver, calls her Pretty Girl, but both of them know that she secretly doesn't mind. She smiles and laughs when she's supposed to. She attends parties and events with just enough grace to fade straight into the background. It's easy when you have five older siblings, and one of them is going to be king someday. She savors every moment of freedom she can get, because as a young princess of Anerah it is her duty and basically her only usefulness to be married off to seal an alliance.
And she sometimes wonders if she'll ever do anything worth mentioning a hundred years from now, a thousand. Will people remember Ailsa Danton? If they do, what will they say was her defining moment? She's imagined it, over and over, but at sixteen she would have never thought it was the time more than a decade previously that she was afforded the privilege that almost no one in the kingdom had; the one thing that being a princess, even a completely irrelevant one, got her. She had been taught something powerful enough to topple kingdoms and raise them up again, to move people, to change hearts and open doors, to shake the foundations of society, of the world.
Those poor fools had taught Ailsa Danton how to read.
YOU ARE READING
Eleven Books
FantasyPrincess Ailsa Danton, youngest non-heir of Anerah, knows that she is not destined for greatness. But when she is recruited by a group of rebels bent on restoring her kingdom's culture and honor, she forced to reconsider her own role in the history...
