Page 5

So I do. Immediately, stars smear my vision, the strength in my knees waning. Long moments pass as I gather my will. When the fog finally clears, I force my spine straight.

He steps before me then, assessing. I’ve gained some weight, a little muscle, but it isn’t enough.

“Dance,” he orders.

He wants to see my progress. He is tired of asking Brigitte.

I blink at him. “Without music?”

“Yes.”

Even if I wanted to, the last of my strength has dissolved. “I . . . can’t.”

He steps forward, pushes my chin up with his chalice. “You will if I say you will.”

His request isn’t made by a king; it’s a command from a puppeteer.

I still have five weeks. I shouldn’t have to perform yet. Brigitte opens her mouth, but he whips up a hand in warning. She purses her lips at him before giving me a pitying glance.

My fingernails drive into the flesh of my palms. This man holds my life in his hands, but rage courses through me.

He put me in that cell in the first place.

And after two years of aching loneliness and pain, he drags me back out, expecting me to recover on his timeline.

Hatred seeps through me, hot as lava. “Your Majesty,” I say before I can think better of it.

“I merely wish the time you promised me, so that I might prepare a performance befitting your honorable crown.”

He catches the insult buried in the flattery. I tell him now, with my gaze, that I haven’t forgotten. He knows I am innocent.

He says nothing, just watches me, silent for one breath, then two. He has never needed hands to touch me; his eyes prod my flesh as if it were clay. But then I realize the risk I’ve taken in angering him and curse myself inwardly. Foolish.

But when he doesn’t chastise me or revoke our deal, I know for sure: whatever his plans, he must truly need me, and only me.

He must not trust anyone else—perhaps because I’m the only dancer he has bound through unseen chains, tethered to him by desperation.

Was that the reason he threw me in prison to begin with?

Or is it something more?

“Your Majesty,” Brigitte says, attempting to smooth the tension, “she will be ready by the time we leave.”

“Yes, she will be,” he responds. “She will prove to me just how thankful she is for a second chance.” He leans in, his wine-soaked breath clogging my ears.

“Oh, yes, Vasalie,” he whispers. “I see your little test. That streak of defiance never ceased to amuse me before, but know this: You are only here if you are valuable to me. A broken toy has no worth.”

Broken toy.

No worth.

His words are blows, harsher than the guard’s assaults. They burrow into my mind, sowing doubt and fear. I can’t escape them, or the truth behind them: He broke me, and I am too fragmented to piece myself together again.

The certainty of it follows me, mocks me, as the days slip by.

Brigitte tends to me each day, pushing me through therapy, meals, treatments, practices. I retreat into the crevices of my mind. I float through the motions, drift through the hours.

At night, I leave the window open to the stars—to the rain, even—if only to remind me where I am, and where I am not.

Even so, my sleep is fitful, nightmare-ridden, full of festering darkness, biting manacles.

Shrieks and screams that echo throughout my dreams, so like the terrors that haunted my mind in that cell.

I wake only to feel like I’m sleepwalking through the next day.

It is a brittle, absent existence.

“Vasalie,” Brigitte scolds, tugging my arm from the window one morning.

She’s found me here more than once, in a trance, staring at the snow-crowned mountains in the distance.

It’s a reminder of the place I once called home—a place far away, separated by miles of sea.

A place where the mountains are wholly covered in ice, so bright during winter you have to squint to see them. The place I ran from.

I wish I could run from here.

“You should be preparing,” Brigitte says, scooting me toward the door. Normally, I’d have been in my training room hours ago. “You’re to dance for King Illian tomorrow.”

That’s all I’ve done lately: train, practice, stretch, train. My muscles remember every dance I choreographed, every step I learned, but my body doesn’t always obey. Even as I build my strength, the breadth of my movements . . .

My progress is not nearly enough.

Worse, my anxiety stacks into a fortress I can’t navigate.

I push myself and fail. I mourn what I lost. And when that timid thing inside me breaks—the last traces of determination and pride I desperately cling to—I crumble.

I lie on the floor, heart rabbiting, lungs struggling for breath, needles of pain grating my skin like the jagged teeth of prison rats. A broken toy has no worth.

I have nothing to show but how destroyed I am.

It reopens even more wounds from a time before Illian.

You’ll never be more than a man’s plaything.

My father’s voice is so clear, I almost wonder if he’s near.

My father, who’d made a deal, who’d seen me as a token to trade with.

Who offered me as a match for a man Emilia despised.

It hadn’t mattered that I was thirteen, that I hadn’t even begun to bleed.

How could you deign to believe you’d be anything more?

Plaything.

Broken toy.

“We both know it’s a useless cause,” I spit, wrenching my arm from Brigitte’s grip. “Look at me.” She can see it as plainly as I can. We both know I can’t perform the way I need to. Not for King Illian, and certainly not for the elite environs of the Crowns’ Gathering.

Freedom slips from my fingers like wax melting beneath a candle’s flame.

But Brigitte grabs me roughly by the shoulders, shaking them as if to startle me from a nightmare.

“You listen to me,” she says, eyes so sharp I feel as if I’m being held at the tip of a blade.

“I have a daughter your age. A scrawny thing like you. Life got the best of her, too. Her bastard of a father set fire to our house with us in it. He left us to burn. We escaped, Vasalie, with nothing but our lives. Our home, our land—it was all gone.” She slides back her sleeves, revealing white ripples of scar tissue banding her arms. “Marian, my daughter, got the worst of it. Her whole body.”

I stare at her, words caught in my throat like stones.

“She loved cooking,” Brigitte continues.

“Loved it so much it’s all she could think about.

Even after that—after being burned—she did not fear the fire.

But no bakery would hire her. No one would even look into her eyes.

I didn’t earn much, but I took two jobs, then three, and with every quatra left over after our rent, I bought Marian a stove.

Spices, ingredients, anything I could get my hands on, though it wasn’t much.

In our tiny corner of a kitchen, she baked.

And baked. She had no training except what I could give her.

But she had talent, brains, and swiftly discovered a method to refine millen into flour, and a fine one at that. Finer than any you have ever seen.”

Impressive, I can admit. Millen grows plentifully in Miridran, but its tough stalk had once made it all but unusable.

“But when she went to the market to sell her samples and goods,” Brigitte continued, “no one bought them. They avoided her, looked the other way. But still she went each day, determined.

“Then one day, a man from East Miridran sampled her scones. He liked them so much that he purchased her entire basket, then came back the next day after sharing it with his convoy, asking her what she used. When she told him about millen, he made her an offer. Turns out he was King Anton’s closest friend, and now she works for a king.

Not even King Illian can convince her to return, much less devise her process, and now he must settle for purchasing millen flour from the east in heftily priced trades.

And my daughter? She lives in a palace. I’d be with her now if it weren’t for .

. .” She trails off, shaking her head. A pained breath leaves her lips. “She triumphed. That’s what matters.”

I don’t know what to say, so I stare at her, my thumbs curling into my palms. It’s quite the tale, but I still feel so numb.

“Your story is not a kind one,” Brigitte says, kneading my hands softly between her own.

“But though you’ve suffered your own fire, child, you won’t always smell of smoke.

And yes, it may have burned you,” she tells me, and I lift my gaze.

“But scars are powerful things, because they show your resilience. So rise from your ashes, my dear. Do not crumble alongside them.”

With that, she leaves. But her words . . . They wash over me again and again until I fall to my knees and sink my head into my hands.

I thought I had made it. That I had escaped the horrors of my past. My father, his abuse.

The man he planned to sell me to under the guise of marriage.

I had escaped, because Emilia bought me that chance, and then I came here.

Danced until my feet bled. I earned my place—and my peace.

My hardships should have been over. Years of striving, almost starving, and I’d made it. I was King Illian’s chosen.

Until everything was ripped away like a thatched roof in a heavy wind.

I think of Brigitte, of Marian. I’d give anything to have a mother.

Or even a sister. Emilia, even if we weren’t related, was the closest I had.

Another hole opens within me, widening, fraying.

I see Emilia’s face again, and like a blow to my barely beating heart, I remember the pitch of her laughter, how it sounded like a song.

The way I’d find her twirling in a pool of sunlight at the earliest hint of dawn.

Emilia had performed at the Gathering one year. It was the reason I had wanted to see it one day, if only to feel close to her once more. See what she told me so much about—the wonders of the palace, the splendor of such an event.

I tug the glove from where I’d hidden it under my mattress and graze it along my lips. “I failed you,” I breathe. “I failed you so badly.” But I know what she’d say. Survive. It’s all she asked of me before I left. Survive and be free, my darling girl.

But the cost was losing you.

I press the glove against my eyes until it’s soaked with my tears. My heart throbs painfully in my chest. Long minutes pass until the tears run dry, until the scent of cinnamon rises from the tray Brigitte left behind. A small scone like the one she described is nestled next to my cup of tea.

I take it, lift it to my lips, and pause.

Sugar. Flour. Cinnamon. This pastry, pressed and kneaded with an elaborate flourish, is made from simple components, and only when it is baked together does it form the scone in my hand.

I pull it apart with my fingers. It breaks easily, flaking onto the tray like ash.

It must be made from millen flour, Marian’s creation. Light as air, thin as mist.

Rise from your ashes, my dear. Don’t crumble alongside them.

An idea crafts itself in my head, small at first, but it grows like dough baked with yeast until it forms into something larger—

I pick myself up and race from the room.