“It’s all right. Understandable mistake, given that I haven’t seen daylight in weeks and my body has no idea what time it is.”
The queen’s exhale is pleasant enough. I suppose she wants something.
In my experience, the queen wanting something rarely ends well for others.
“Well, perhaps you’d enjoy stretching your legs. Taking a stroll about the castle.” She offers her arm, like we’re forever friends about to skip through a field of dandelions.
“Thank you, but I have my balance back. Venom’s finally worked its way out of my system,” I say through my teeth.
The queen’s smile is tight-lipped. “Then you won’t mind climbing a few sets of stairs.”
She gestures for me to follow, and I do, figuring if she were going to kill me, she could easily do it here. It is her dungeon, after all.
The stairs are cold underneath my bare feet.
She doesn’t offer me shoes.
We climb four sets of staircases and traipse down seven winding corridors before we come to a stop before a set of ornate wooden doors.
They’re carved to look like the night sky and painted to imitate the colors of the aurora.
There’s nothing quite like the real thing, but this artist’s rendition still steals my breath away.
I approach the door, placing my palm along the smooth divots in the wood.
The wood seems to hum back.
There are no door handles, and when I push, the wood simply resists.
“The doors do not open to simply anyone,” says the queen, her whisper the clanging of wind chimes set to a minor key.
“So, is that what you wanted to show me? Your fancy doors? Is this some way to remind me that if I misbehave, you can lock me up where no one else can get to me?”
The queen levels an assessing stare at me. Then, “No, but there are often several lessons to be gleaned from the same tale.”
“Ah.” I step away from the doors and gesture her toward them.
When she lifts the slender line of her forearm and pushes her palm against the wood, the doors seem to groan. Like the sound a person might make as their masseuse works on a rather persistent knot.
I don’t attempt to cloak my shudder.
The door creaks open and reveals a room speckled with scattered moonlight that makes its way through a stained glass window to our right.
The colorful bits of moonlight dance across the wide open floor, and I realize this was once a ballroom, though I can’t imagine the Queen of Mystral hosting any such thing.
Frivolity and joy don’t seem like things she places much stock in.
Indeed, though the ballroom is beautiful, with marble columns ribbing the walls that are also speckled in a host of colors, there is a solemnity that creeps into the air. Stifles the beauty.
Probably because directly across the room lies a corpse.
The body is lain out across an emerald dais, the type of monument I suppose might have once displayed the Crown Jewels back when parties were once held in this room.
Except now instead of sparkling jewels, it is a sparkling girl.
Blue and pink specks freckle her ivory cheeks, litter her golden hair, laid out behind her head and spread across the dais. Her hair is too long to be contained by her resting place, though, and it falls off the edge in cascading waves.
The girl looks to be in her early twenties. She’s dressed in a shimmering satin gown, and though I first think it’s the chartreuse of the night sky during the aurora, when I venture a step closer, I wonder if it was all just a trick of the light, because now the dress is as pink as soft rose petals.
The queen follows silently behind me as I approach the girl, the only sounds in the room our careful footsteps against the pristine, gleaming floors.
We walk as though trying not to wake her, and I can’t find a reason for the urge.
Not when the girl is so clearly dead.
But then, as I approach the dais, I realize that is not altogether true. Because the girl’s pale cheeks are not pallid as one might expect from a corpse, but flushed with life. And if I peer closely enough…
The girl’s hands are interlocked over her bosom, but her chest is moving in and out, ever so subtly.
“Who is she?” I find myself asking, though it’s not a question. Not really. Not when I already know the answer.
Not when, while her coloring is unfamiliar, the slight curve of her nose and the cut of her cheekbones are not.
Maybe that’s why the question comes out more akin to an accusation.
Maybe that’s why the queen doesn’t deign to answer it. Instead, she says, “They are both special in their distinct ways. I didn’t recognize it in her when we first met. In fact, I found her vapid. I’m learning that there are those who choose to display such temperament on the outside as a means to mask their value.”
“You mean lest someone treat them like a bauble to be stolen and profited from?” I ask, venom leaking off my tongue.
