by Carrie Ryan
Auda came running into the hall, demanding to know what was going on, and a woman in a plain blue dress detached herself from the entourage of attendants to speak to Auda in low, intense tones.
Essylt came down the stairs. She was drawn to the silent girl in the corner, who looked up at that moment and saw her. A shiver ran down Essylt’s spine: quicksilver, insistent. Go to her.
As Essylt approached, the girl unwound the veils from her face to reveal brown skin, full lips, and dark eyes: a beauty unlike that of any Anvarran woman. This girl took a step away from her corner and extended her hands, palms up, toward Essylt. In the center of her palms a design was painted: swirls and loops that connected to form a pattern that was like a flower, but no flower that Essylt knew. Instinctively, Essylt reached out and covered the girl’s hands with her own, paler ones, and when their skin touched, a tremor went through Essylt’s body. For the first time, she became wholly aware of the way her fingers and toes were connected to the pulsing of her heart, to the breath that fluttered from her lungs to her lips, to the heat that spread over her cheeks.
Behind her, Auda said in a strained tone of voice, “Your Highness, this is the Princess Sadiya of Nawharla’al.” There was another round of feverish whispers between Auda and Sadiya’s chief attendant, who spoke Anvarran with an accent that Auda had never heard before and thus found difficult to understand.
“Sa-dee-ah?” Essylt said uncertainly.
“Sah-dee-ya,” the girl corrected, and her name sounded like music on her lips.
Sadiya’s chief attendant said something to her in Nawharla’ali, and Essylt heard her own name amidst the stream of foreign words. “Ess-elt,” Sadiya said tentatively, her gaze never leaving Essylt’s.
Essylt’s heartbeat quickened, and she realized that Sadiya had wrapped her fingers around her own, and it was as if a faint dusting of magic had settled over them, fixing them in place so that they might look at one another for just a bit longer.
It was Auda who broke the spell. “Your Highness,” she said, “Princess Sadiya will be staying here in the West Tower until your father returns in ten days. Then they will be married. The princess will be your new stepmother.”
“My new stepmother?” Essylt said, and saw Sadiya’s attendant whisper something urgently in her ear.
Sadiya pulled her hands away. She knew that her attendants were shocked by how Essylt had touched her and how she had accepted it. The proper greeting would have been for Essylt to hover her hands over Sadiya’s and then to incline her head ever so delicately, but of course Essylt did not know Nawharla’ali customs. Her mistake could be excused, but what had caused Sadiya to hold Essylt’s hands, as if she were a lover rather than a stranger who would someday become her stepdaughter? Sadiya’s face flamed as she realized what a scene she was making.
Essylt did not understand how she had erred, but she saw that Sadiya was uncomfortable, and she regretted it, for already she wanted to ensure that Sadiya was happy. “Welcome,” she said, but then her mouth went dry. She could think of nothing more to say except You are so beautiful, but even Essylt, unpracticed in courtly manners, sensed that others would find that odd, so she bit her lip and remained silent.
But that was enough, and Sadiya smiled, and her face was so exquisitely shining that Essylt was certain that another sun had burned into being right there in the entry hall to the West Tower.
From that moment on, Essylt and Sadiya were inseparable. Essylt taught Sadiya the words for the flowers and plants that grew in the West Tower’s garden, and Sadiya taught Essylt the Nawharla’ali equivalents. Their progress was remarkably fast, for they spent every waking minute together, exclaiming over the sounds of words and the way sentences formed when they spoke them to each other. Essylt learned that Nawharla’al was a kingdom of many islands, and each island was named after a different tropical flower, and each flower was worn by the prince of that island on state occasions. Sadiya learned that summer was short and hot in Anvarra, and she had arrived at its beginning, when the days are long and lush and sometimes so humid that sitting in the shade brought sweat to the skin. Essylt learned that the women of Nawharla’al wore long, loose skirts dyed in shades to match their islands’ flowers, and they preferred to leave their arms bare, binding only their breasts in scarves that matched their skirts. Sadiya learned that the women of Anvarra wore layers of undergarments beneath heavy skirts and bodices that gripped their torsos with whalebone, and she wrinkled her nose at these gowns and said, “I will not wear those,” and Essylt laughed at the expression on Sadiya’s face.
The days they spent together seemed to stretch out luxuriously in the peaceful isolation of the West Tower, but as the fortnight drew to a close, neither girl could avoid the increasing sensation of impending doom, for soon Sadiya would marry Essylt’s father. The night before the wedding, they walked the garden together in silence, as if not speaking would stave off the future. When they parted to sleep in their separate chambers, Essylt held her hands out, palms upward, in the way Sadiya had upon her arrival. Sadiya was surprised, but she hovered her hands over Essylt’s unmarked ones, a bittersweet sadness sweeping through her.
Then, as if she were a knight in a storybook, Essylt raised Sadiya’s hands to her mouth and kissed the knuckles, her lips brushing soft and quick over Sadiya’s skin. A flush spread across Sadiya’s face, and she saw an answering emotion in Essylt’s green eyes.
“Sleep well,” Essylt whispered, and she wished she could sleep beside Sadiya and guard her against any nightmares that might slip into her mind that night.
“A blessing upon you,” Sadiya said in Nawharla’ali, and then backed away before the tears could slip from her eyes. Essylt watched her go, her scarves fluttering in the dim evening light.
The wedding was held in the castle’s Great Hall, which was hung with golden ropes in honor of the God of Matrimony and wreaths of snowbell flowers for the Goddess of Fertility. The morning before the ceremony, which was to take place at noon, Sadiya’s attendants bathed and scented and dressed her in the Nawharla’ali bridal finery they had brought with them. They wrapped her body in fine white linen, and then draped her with scarves the color of the sea in every shade from deepest blue to azure and aquamarine. They hung jewels from her ears and twisted them around her bare arms and throat, and when she stepped into the sunlight she glittered with reflected light. Her lustrous black hair was brushed out and woven with the little white flowers plucked from the gardens around the West Tower, and though they were not the tropical blossoms of Nawharla’al, they served well enough. Essylt especially liked to see the flowers she loved in Sadiya’s hair.
Auda had taken care while dressing Essylt that morning, as well, though Essylt’s gown was much plainer so that she would not outshine the bride—and so that she would draw no man’s eye. Essylt did not like the way the tight stays cut off her breath; she found the layers of skirts confining; and she thought the dove gray of the gown itself was ugly in comparison to the brilliant colors of Sadiya’s clothes. But the thing she hated most was the gray linen veil she was forced to wear, obscuring her hair and face and swathing the whole world in dimness. As they left the West Tower, Essylt followed in Sadiya’s perfumed wake with Auda’s guiding hand on her arm. She felt suffocated and suppressed, each layer of clothing like a hand over her mouth.
In every Anvarran wedding ceremony, a series of customs is dutifully followed in order to ensure that the union is a fertile one. As with every naming ceremony, a prophecy is given, and to be chosen to deliver the prophecy at a royal wedding is a high honor. Haidis, the hapless soothsayer who had presided over Essylt’s naming ceremony, was present at King Radek’s marriage to Princess Sadiya of Nawharla’al, but Haidis had not been chosen to officiate. He came as a guest of his mentor Gerlach, who was prepared to deliver a prophetic benediction on the king’s marriage to the exotic foreign princess if he had to lie to do it.
The wedding prophecy, however, would not take place until after the init
ial prayers to the God of Matrimony and Goddess of Fertility, led by a high-ranking priest, who intoned the traditional phrases in a voice devoid of emotion. Sadiya was expected to kneel on a cushion at the feet of King Radek during the prayers, and though she did as requested, she refused to lower her gaze, for she did not believe in these gods. To her right, seated in the first row of ornate wooden benches, she could just make out the corner of Essylt’s veil, shroudlike in comparison to the bright colors worn by Sadiya and her attendants.
Essylt did not need to bow her head, for no one could tell if she participated in the prayers at all. Instead, she clenched her hands into fists and hid them beneath the voluminous folds of her hot, scratchy gown. A deep ache began to spread in her, from belly to chest to throat, until she felt as if she might choke from it. She heard the priest ending his series of prayers, and she knew that after this would come the ceremony itself, when Sadiya’s hands would be bound with golden rope to the King’s left wrist, and from that moment on, Sadiya would be her stepmother.
Essylt watched through her veil as the priest picked up the rope and approached Sadiya, still chanting the blessings for matrimony. The rope dangled over Sadiya’s head like a snake uncoiling to strike. The ache that gripped Essylt hardened. A desperate anger galvanized her. She lurched to her feet and felt Auda’s hand reaching for hers, but she shook it away. She ripped off her veil and cried, “No! Please, no. Sadiya, you must not marry him.”
Essylt lunged for the rope and tore it out of the priest’s hands, throwing it behind him onto the stone floor.
Sadiya stood, astonished and terrified and hopeful.
At first everyone in the Great Hall was simply too startled to move, for none could remember a time when a royal wedding had been disrupted in such a manner. In that moment of stunned immobility, Essylt took Sadiya’s hands in hers and pulled her away from the king. Sadiya said to her in Nawharla’ali, “You are mad, my love,” and Essylt responded in the same tongue, “I am mad with love.”
Haidis had watched in shock from his seat as Essylt leapt to her feet, jerking away the marriage rope. As she clutched the hands of the foreign bride, Haidis realized that the prophecy he had delivered on Essylt’s naming day was coming to pass. He stood up—he was the first among the audience to do so—and said under his breath, “The princess shall grow into a young woman strong and pure, but when she finds her one true love—”
Gerlach’s hand gripped his arm. “Do not speak any more!” he hissed, and Haidis’s mouth shut tight in fear as the Great Hall exploded into shouts.
King Radek’s thick, strong hand clamped down on his bride’s shoulder, and as Sadiya winced in pain, he dragged her from his daughter. “What perversity have you wrought on my bride?” he demanded of Essylt, who tried to reach for Sadiya again but was wrenched back by the hands of the king’s soldiers, who had leapt forward at his command. “What damnation are you bringing upon my kingdom? You have been cursed since you killed your own mother, and it was only my mercy that kept you alive.” The king would not take his hands off Sadiya, whom he held near him like a plaything. He growled to his soldiers, “Take Essylt away to the farthest reaches of the darkest forests of the north, and abandon her to the wolves. She is no longer my daughter. May she die alone.”
Essylt heard the words as if from a distance, for all she could focus on was the look of terror on Sadiya’s face. As the soldiers dragged Essylt from the Great Hall, she tried to struggle but her skirts were too heavy and her bodice too tight, and then someone struck her across the face. Pain burst in her cheek and nose. She screamed and lunged away from the soldiers, but they grabbed her and hit her again and again. The last thing she saw before she fainted from the pain was the glimmer of blue in the jewels around Sadiya’s neck, liquid as the faraway sea.
Essylt awoke in a cage on a moving wagon. She winced as the wagon jolted over a bump and caused her hip to bang against the wooden floor. Outside the bars she saw green fields rolling past beneath a clear late afternoon sky.
She was outside the castle.
This fact alone overwhelmed her. She had never been outside the castle, and her heart began to race as she sat up, hands gripping the bars. She drank in the unfamiliar landscape: stone walls rising and falling over the fields; solitary trees standing watch in the distance; an occasional farmhouse or barn, with horses grazing nearby. It was almost dark before she realized that a man was riding behind the cage, watching her.
A soldier.
She shrank away from the bars, and everything that had happened rushed back to her: Sadiya and her father’s wedding, the marriage rope hanging like a noose above Sadiya’s head, her father’s words. May she die alone.
As the sun set she wondered whether it was still the day of the wedding. Was this the wedding night? Her stomach twisted. When she had first begun her monthly bleeding, Auda had told her what it meant, and Essylt knew very well what her father desired from his wives: sons. There was a chance that her father had not gone through with the wedding, but the way he had treated Sadiya made Essylt doubt that he would give her up. No, he would take Sadiya as his bride regardless of how perverse he thought his daughter was.
Essylt wanted to throw up, but she hadn’t eaten all day, and she could only cough up bile, bitter and acidic.
The soldier behind the cage rode closer and banged his sword on the bars. “Don’t choke to death, Princess, we’ve a long way to go yet.”
The journey to the wild forests of the north took a week. There were two soldiers: one who drove the wagon, and one who rode behind. They gave her a bowl of water every night that she had to lap up like a dog, and once or twice the driver slipped her a piece of dried beef out of pity, but she was given no other food. Neither of the soldiers ever let her out, so Essylt was forced to relieve herself in one corner, humiliated by the stench that began to rise from her body.
She watched the countryside when she was awake, but as the days passed and she grew weaker, she slid into a half-sleeping doze in which she saw Sadiya’s face hovering over her, radiant and beautiful. She clung to those visions as tightly as she could, the memory of the last words that Sadiya had said echoing in her mind: You are mad, my love. Mad, my love. Mad.
Finally, they reached the pine-forested border of Anvarra. The driver drew the wagon to a halt in a small clearing in the woods and climbed down from his seat. The soldier riding behind dismounted, pulling a black iron key from the chain attached to his swordbelt. Inside the cage, Essylt sat stiffly with her arms around her knees, her bright green eyes wide in her pale face. The soldier unlocked the cage door, which groaned open on its hinges.
“Welcome to your new home,” he said, and laughed. “Time to get out.”
Essylt didn’t move until the soldier reached inside and clamped one hand on her ankle. Frightened, she kicked him in the face. He cursed as blood spurted from his nose, then grabbed both of her ankles, his nails digging into her skin, and dragged her out until she landed with a bruising thump on the ground.
“Never seen a man except your father, eh?” he said, and the tone in his voice made her skin crawl. He began to unbuckle his belt.
Essylt tried to scramble away, but she only banged into the wagon wheel behind her.
“There’s a reason you turned out wrong,” the soldier was saying, a horrible grin on his face. “You need to learn what’s right—”
“Shut up,” said the driver. He smashed a wooden staff into the side of the soldier’s head, knocking him to ground, unconscious. The driver shook his head and looked down at the princess. He had a sister her age, and he would never forgive himself if he let the soldier have his way with her. Even if she was perverse. He jerked his head toward the woods. “You’d better run for it, Princess. You’re on your own now.”
Essylt didn’t hesitate. She jumped up, her legs tingling as she stood for the first time in seven days, and she fled.
She ran over unbroken forest ground, her thin-soled court shoes doing little to cushion her feet f
rom fallen twigs and upturned stones. She ran as the daylight faded and turned the forest into a land of murky shadows, and she slowed down only enough to prevent herself from tripping on the uneven ground. She found a riverbed where the trees parted to reveal a sliver of black night sky strewn with stars, and she knelt down and drank the water from her cupped and dirty hands, and then she kept going.
At some point she removed her whalebone corset so that she could breathe more freely. She stripped off her encumbering underskirts and wrapped her torn shoes in the cloth to cushion her feet. When she was too tired to walk any farther, she made a nest for herself in a bed of fallen pine needles and slept with her head resting on her arms. When she awoke, she continued. She saw no one.
She was hungry, but she did not know what she could eat in the forest, and her book learning had taught her to be wary of unfamiliar plants. A few times she thought she glimpsed the shadowy movement of wolves nearby, and she prayed to the God of Safe Passage to watch over her. She did not know where she was going, but she knew she had a destination. With every step she took, even though her body felt weaker and weaker, she was more and more certain that she had something to live for. Sadiya. Sadiya. Someday, she vowed, she would go back for her. She would return to Anvarra City and save her, and King Radek would pay for what he had done.
One morning, after Essylt had walked in a stubborn, starving daze for hours through the dark night, she stumbled through the last of the pine trees into a clearing where she saw a little cottage built of logs. Smoke curled out of the chimney, and the windows were hung with cheerful plaid curtains. She dragged herself the last few steps into the clearing before she collapsed, her body giving up at last.
The cottage belonged to a retired knight named Bowen, who lived there with his wife, Nell. It was Nell who discovered Essylt later that morning, lying in a crumpled heap at the edge of their garden, and it was Bowen who lifted the princess in his burly arms and carried her inside, laying her down on their bed.
