The old Queen—Seraphina—had a vulture. A big, ugly, dark thing whose body was once white, now turned rust-brown by sand and dried-up blood, a bird whose patchwork-colored eyes were always too unsettling to be looked at directly. Once upon a time, when I was a real princess, I went to go visit her. I felt old, somehow; I remember being surprised by that, how young she was when I met her. Like my little sisters. I saw the vulture, perched on the back of her throne, and my blood ran freezing cold when she looked at me and opened her mouth and let out a truly mortal kind of laugh. I had heard that it was a demon. But I didn’t believe it until I heard that laugh—until I looked up and saw the rows of teeth in her beak, concentric, crowding against one another like a shark’s.
Looking down at the pile of bones, picked to pearl-shiny cleanness, I think of that vulture, and I wonder—with a sense of dread so overwhelming it makes my heart literally ache—if my dreams are really prophecies.
The door opens.
Fear shoots through me. It lances in a straight electric line all the way from my head down to my chest: it strikes from the inside out, forks through me in a web like lightning. Suddenly I am frigid and panicked and nearly shaking, and when I whip around to look at him it is with the frenzied immediacy of a prey animal backed into a corner.
I am sure I look wild. I am sure I look like what the rumors say about me—that I dye my hair with goat’s blood; that my mother built me wrong and now my heart has fallen apart; that I’m not stable enough to be head of house. That I’m not even stable enough to live in the house, anymore, and I should be sent out to live my days in some facility on the coast where the ocean air will cure me. (Sometimes I think that wouldn’t be so bad. I imagine a little room with the windows open, with the smell of salt ingrained in the stone walls. I imagine that Ruth will come to visit me; maybe she is even my doctor, who comes in and crushes up my herbs each morning. Sometimes I imagine that things will be okay. But that’s a pipe dream.)
I recognize the boy in the door.
Despite myself, I blink in surprise. I don’t think I’ve ever recognized the people in my dreams; besides my siblings, or the barely-knit-together bones of my parents. And I don’t even know how I recognize him, exactly. I can’t recall his name—I look at him and my mind goes dark and blank, like the place where I should know him is suddenly a black hole, a vacuum I can’t draw any knowledge out of.
I look at him and I know I should know him; but I don’t, and I’m scared.
He’s taller than I am. And rangier, like he’s gotten used to not knowing where his next meal will come from. His coat is a dark, rich brown all over, smooth and even as the door that swings open behind him, and the eyes that stare out at me are dark brown too, ringed like oak and just as old.
I wonder: am I supposed to love him?
Lady Miriam, he says, but I am too startled to answer. Instead I stare back at him, my eyes so wide they feel wind-battered and cold, my body leaning slightly away from him of its own accord. I am thinking of a response; I am trying to But then he says—gross. He giggles.
Indignance flares up in my chest, burns in my face. I feel like myself again.
“Well,” I counter sharply, “that’s quite rude. Isn’t this my dream, anyway?” My mouth turns down completely, aggressively.
I won't admit I’m glad I’m not in here alone.
