But now my limbs ache—down to the very bones—and I know it will not be long before the aching fades to numbness fades to the shadow of death.
I don’t think I’d mind so much if I didn’t have to imagine Father’s face—sunken with grief—when they tell him what became of me. If I couldn’t hear Mama and Zora’s screams, reaching out to me from the future, stretching themselves across time to reach my frozen ears.
When even my knees can no longer support my weight, I make sure to fall backward. At least then I’ll die with the sun on my face. Indeed, as my heart drags itself upward to knock against my chest for what must be one of the last times, the sun brushes my forehead with its rays, and I decide to forgive it for not saving me.
Then I succumb to the darkness and feel nothing for a long while.
Someone is murmuring above me, stroking my forehead with their long fingers and whispering frantic words of comfort in my ear. Those same fingers run themselves through my soaked hair, and through the fog in my mind I hear someone mention a fever.
“Mama?” The word forms on my lips without effort, though I’m sure if I tried I couldn’t speak anything else.
There’s a staccato sob in response to that one word, Mama. “I’m here, baby,” she says, but she doesn’t sound like Mama. Mama’s voice is like the thrumming of a kettle above a smoldering fire, and this voice is like the howl of the winter wind through the mountain passes.
“I’m here, baby. Mama’s here, Farin.”
I don’t know who Farin is, but I am not him and the female speaking to me is not Mama, but she sounds so worried over me, I don’t have the heart to tell her.
When I wake the second time, I don’t allow my eyes to open.
It’s the same female voice that wakes me. Her tone is sharp and demanding, and there’s a male’s voice too.
Gunter.
At least I’m not alone with her.
I know where I am now, but I’d rather not.
So I keep my eyes sealed shut and focus on the crackling of brush in the fireplace. I focus on the warmth radiating in the cozy room that breathes life into my aching limbs. I focus on the warm quilts that fasten me to the bed.
And I pretend that I’m home. That my father is stoking the fire and that mother quilted my bedsheets herself and that it’s Zora’s voice whining and demanding in my ear.
I forget to keep my breathing shallow with sleep, though, and I’m only Fates-blessed with a few fleeting moments before the queen realizes I’m awake.
“Farin? Oh, Farin.”
The name makes the muscles in my shoulders tense, but it’s nothing like how they react when the queen rushes to my side and runs her fingers through my hair, wiping the sweat from my forehead with her palm.
When she buries her head into my chest and presses her ear against my ribcage, as if to feel the steady thrum of my heartbeat, I squeeze my eyes shut to hold back the tears.
My chest starts to heave in short bursts, and though I can feel it rising and falling, it’s as if the air does me no good. As if my body has lost the ability to use it. Something howls, and it takes me a moment to realize it’s me gasping for air.
“Farin? Farin,” the queen says, and as soon as she removes her head from my chest, some of the air slips through to my lungs.
But there’s no time to be relieved because now she’s clutching my face, forcing my eyelids open with her cold, spindly fingers, and I feel as though my ribs might crack.
I’ve never really understood the urge to lash out, not like Zora does, as if the spirit of the wind overtakes her body and she has no say in the matter.
But when the queen pries my eyes open and forces me to look into her cold, dead gaze, I lash.
The queen isn’t ready for it when I claw at her face, digging my fingernails into any bit of flesh I can get my hands on. I barely miss her right eye, and she screams, a horrified, childlike sound that I wouldn’t have expected from her.
“That’s not my name!” I cry, and I find the words are fueled by rage, and rage takes a whole lot of breath, and my body is cooperating again, feeding me with the surrounding air, and when I get a taste of it, I’m not eager to stop lest I suffocate again. “My name is Nox and you will never be my mother and I will never be him!”
The queen jerks away from me, shock and hurt petrified into her whitewashed features.
I find I like the look of it—the queen in pain.
There are three dark lines streaked across her face. They’re already starting to knit back together, so I make sure to memorize them. To etch them into my memory, never to forget it was me who drew the queen’s blood.
“Restrain him,” the queen tells Gunter, her voice utterly devoid of the agony that lingers in her pale eyes, in the way her slender shoulders droop. “The child is clearly still feverish. We wouldn’t want him to harm himself while he remains in this state.”
Gunter does as he’s told, his hands gentle, but the leather restraints he wraps around my arms aren’t necessary, because I’ve managed to hurt the queen, and that’s all I needed to calm me.
I spend the next few days in and out of consciousness. I think Gunter might have added fortuinata leaves to the concoction he gives me to assuage my fever. I try to make myself remember to ask him about it every time I wake, but each time, the thought flees me.
One day, Gunter is called away, and I’m left with a guard to watch over me instead of a physician.
I suppose this either means the queen is confident in my recovery, or she wouldn’t mind if I convulsed and there was no one here to rescue me.
After I clawed her face, I figure the latter is likely.
Gunter is still gone, and his absence gnaws a hole in my stomach—which is empty already because everything the servants bring me in stone bowls keeps coming back up, much to my guard’s chagrin.
I’m contemplating how long I can go without keeping down food, when the creaking door gets my attention.
Relief sags at my shoulders at first, because I think it’s Gunter, finally returned, but it’s not Gunter at all.
It’s the queen, looking regal as always with her shimmering silver dress and her hair pulled tight against her skull.
