Mortal Fantasy

✴｜chapter twenty-nine

The utter blackness of the room causes me to stumble where I make it through the door. A single pinprick of moonlight pierces the heavy draperies that must be covering the window; I hear the soft click of the door coming closed as the maids leave the room, their shadows retreating along the floor. When I look up, I can make out the figure of the queen in a cathedra at the far end of the room, her eyes glittering almost iridescently in the darkness.

"I thought you might prefer that we talk elsewhere," she says. "Certainly this is not something to speak of in front of a lowly pair of guards, as it were."

In face of the Queen of Atellyn there is nothing to prefer or not prefer, but I incline my head in an attempt to appear obedient. "Thank you... Your Majesty."

"Hm." Her close-lipped smile is eerily apparent through the darkness, almost unnaturally so. "Don't you want to know why I brought you here?"

Out of habit I cast a backward glance at the door, through which the corridor outside branches off toward the library. The suite is almost obscure, easily missable in the broad, opulent palace halls—it must be a spare room allocated for use by the queen, whatever purposes that may warrant. My silence in face of her question had prompted Queen Auven to take me here, and it would be foolish to let on that I am in fact terrified of being trapped in any closed space with her. Perhaps that was her intent all along—to get me alone, wrangle the truth from my throat, snap my anima as if it were nothing but a piece of thread. Standing in this narrow room, ensconced in shadow, I can feel the beginning of a fearful tremor, starting up at the base of my spine and rising with a perverse chill. "Why you brought me here... to this chamber?"

A hand crosses her mouth, perhaps to mask her mirth. "Your provinciality is rather amusing, Ithena." When she lowers her fingers from her lips, I glimpse an almost manic smile through the darkness. "To the palace. Don't you want to know why I even cared to send you a letter in the first place?"

The breath constricts in my throat. The queen sent that letter? I try and fail to conceive an appropriate response. "I... what?"

"Oh dear," the queen says, her brow furrowing as if my ignorance disturbs her. "You really don't know, do you?" Her lips curl to reveal an impossibly bright smile. "Well of course, no one must have told you. I take a rather special interest in you, Ithena. Your bloodline is quite... unique. You could say that I handpicked you for my prince."

Stephen's words from my first night at the palace echo through my head: This is simply another one of her games. For all I know, all of this could be an elaborate ploy, a mere foolery to toy with me. But the Palanquin never warns of their arrival; what other explanation could there be as to the letter I received three days prior to my taking?

"And it was so difficult to get my hands on you, for so long," Queen Auven sighs, tapping her fingers against the arm of the cathedra. "Your mother did an almost irritably good job of hiding you from me. But at last, you're here. Which is why I won't punish you for this little transgression of yours tonight."

My mother? The blood pounds in my head. Of their own volition, memories of her force their way into my conscience, her soft straight figure and gentle hands. Everything I thought I knew about her seems to be muddled—did she truly abandon me, or was she trying to protect me? But protect me from what? The queen?

"Speaking of which," the queen says, standing to grip the curtains by the window. "You must be getting lonely, simply standing there. Come along, show yourself."

For a moment I think the queen is referring to me—until she yanks open the draperies, sending a flood of moonlight through the room and illuminating a small figure standing by the corner next to the meager bed. I glimpse her face and I am immediately rooted to the ground, by shock or fear I cannot tell. She has dipped into a curtsy, her head angled toward the queen, and it is then that I realize her face has changed.