by Jessa Lucas
My head shook in warning against the compulsion. Don’t. Fucking. Touch it, Saylor.
I shut my eyes and tried to remember the texture against the pads of my fingertips, tried to remember the way a confident dance of fingers against trembling strings filled a place with music. I felt a beautiful lullaby expand against my heart as I imagined notes mingling with the splattering of the rain striking hard against Abduult’s grand walls.
“You were always so talented, Saylorabel. Go on, play.”
My eyes flashed open just as thunder struck high above. Chills careened across my skin. I stood suddenly, body rigid as my eyes searched the dark recesses of the seemingly endless chamber. I knew that voice. I knew the malice suppressed in that cool, composed tone.
I dragged my eyes across the hall slowly, my throat constricting as I noticed glints of light shifting across the stone floor. Something was moving at the far end of the hall. Something inside one of the mirrors.
The stifled gasp hung heavily in my lungs as I tried to remind myself to breathe. A swarm of fear was stirring in my body, stiffening every muscle and making the walls feel like they were pressing in on me.
“I am here, child. Come, look me in the eye.”
One step. Another. I wouldn’t be a coward. I wasn’t a coward.
You were courageous, he’d said.
Slowly, so slowly, I neared the shape of shade and crimson coming to meet me, eying the figure as she passed easily through the gilded frames of the mirrors. As the space between us diminished, the temperature plummeted as though an invisible frost were falling over the room.
“You found me at last,” she said, mouth stretched wide into a grin.
I came to a standstill before Valtronya, the shadow of cruelty barely masked by the veneer of her startling beauty.
The queen stood before me real as day, as though the mirror were merely a doorway into another chamber and she stood at the threshold. I glanced quickly over my shoulder to make sure she wasn’t a ghost only visible in reflection, but I felt no cool breath against my skin, no graze of her long fingers against my shoulder as she extended her hand in invitation.
“So you have awakened,” she said, the sound barely more than a hiss.
Valtronya looked the same as she had in Aiayla’s memory— a thin crown poised between the threads of her hair, her crimson lips thin as her piercing gaze flashed over me. A braid of silver snakes twisted around the pale column of her throat, their emerald eyes gleaming up at me in the blue light.
Strange magic. Dark magic.
I hugged my arms into myself, legs unsteady. “You miss me?” I dared quietly.
Valtronya’s lips curled up. “Spirited, aren’t you?”
The ominous roll of thunder meandered beyond the walls, and I took it as a sign of the universe’s agreement. “Let’s just say I don’t think I’m what you bargained for when you stuck me in a nightmare and bet on me never waking up,” I said. “Send the Grimms my thanks.”
I sounded braver than I felt, but I guess that’s how it usually is in moments of courage; we pretend before we believe.
“And what is it that you are now, Saylorabel? Powerless? Forgotten?”
As I took in her sharp elegance— the kind of elegance I’d glimpsed on myself in that shimmering reflection in the ballroom window— it was easy to see how this magnificence could strike both admiration and fear into the heart of a kingdom. My heart rapped loudly in warning against the confinement of my ribs, and I tried to calm my breathing as Valtronya’s eyes examined me with equal calculation.
“What is this?” I asked, suddenly suspicious. I wasn’t sure I could trust myself anymore to know the difference between illusion and reality.
“It is what you make of it, child. You are free to leave,” Valtronya lifted her hand lightly towards the door, “this chamber, leastwise.”
I planted my legs in a firm stance, forcing them still against the flurry of aftershocks her appearance incited in my body. “No. Not when I finally have you face to face.”
“Do you?” A manicured eyebrow inched higher on her forehead.
“Are you not real?”
“Are you?” she countered.
I felt my conviction waver, this question clattering through some profound vacuum made in me between truth and dream. “I don’t know,” I admitted.
“And does that make you afraid?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
Valtronya’s mouth twisted into a cruel line of satisfaction as those shrewd eyes slid up and down my body. “Closer still, Saylorabel. I want to see your face.”
I’m not sure why I obeyed. Perhaps it was the morbid curiosity. The rush of adrenaline. The opportunity it lent me to sock a bitch in the face. Being terrified was a backwards sort of high, a forcible way to find bravery. So I moved closer, clenching my fingers into fists and willing my hands not to shake under the pressure of that penetrating stare.
“So young,” she crooned. “Such a girlish naivety to your face. You look as impressionable as the day I sent you off on that ship.”
“And you,” I said carefully, “are as stunning as everyone told me, except you’ve got something right here...” I motioned to my lips, where the sneer was fixed on her face. “I won’t tell you to smile, though. That’s the most frustrating—”
The glass around Valtronya’s head began to splinter like a web, the fury building in the taut skin of her face as her jaw worked furiously. I took an involuntary step back, afraid she would burst through the mirrors in full splendor and might, leaving me with only fists and empty bravado to defend myself.
Okay. No snark, then.
“Why, Valtronya?” It felt weird, saying her name. Like she deserved to be called something both less and more at the same time. “Why do this? We were family. I mean—” I frowned, eyes searching hers for any ounce of humanity left in them. “Did you really hate me so much that you wanted me dead?”
“Hate?” Her pale, moonlight eyes glittered. “I was immeasurably intrigued by you, Saylorabel. It is a strange sort of fascination— a strange sort of lure you seem to possess.”
“So it’s just because of what I am.”
“Yes…” Valtronya began to pace in the mirrors, hands steepled, and I trailed her tentatively. “And no.”
Her lithe form fractured momentarily as she passed from the edge of one mirror through to the next, and I watched the lace trim of her black skirts drag along the reflection of the floor. I hated that I noticed the poise in her movement. That I admired it.
A sensation brushed over me, the reverent gaze of a child looking on as the object of her admiration strolls by. I froze as Valtronya continued her casual stride. I was sure that somewhere in the gaping blank space where my memories had evaporated there was a longing I’d always had for the natural regality of my step-mother. That once, in a time before sirenhood and murder plots, I’d been fond of her the way any child might be of a mother figure.
“What happened to you?” I asked, peering at her with the echo of that regard in my eyes.
A great ache in me pulsed with the need to know something I must’ve never understood about this woman. Now that she stood before me, I sensed that I’d been haunted by who she’d become far longer than I’d grappled who I was meant to be.
“Youth,” Valtronya sighed almost longingly. “I was weak in mine; I did not have the power I do now. It was always my intention to counsel you, Saylorabel. You were a pretty thing, and so very charming, even from that very first day I met you on the palace steps. Do you remember?”
I didn’t answer, trying to will the memory forward from the void. There was nothing there except pink eyelet curtains swaying in the memories of a faceless mother on Earth.
“I swore to myself that day,” she mused, “that I would warn you of all that was to come.”
“Warn me?”
“Beauty, Saylorabel, is a curse as much as it is a weapon. For those without cunning or power, beauty is a damning thing. It dra
ws predators, secures itself a price. It is the bargaining chip for those who wish to enslave. It is a bait for hungry men. And the brutality alone of men who take what they want—”
She stopped mid-sentence. The revelation in her words snagged in my throat. We were bonded in our shared suffering at the hands of barbaric men—
Except, of course, Valtronya had given me the nightmare that had the barbarians in it.
My brows knit together as I tried to understand the indifference of Valtronya’s tone, absent as it was of sensitivity to the very brutality she insinuated. I wondered if she held in her wounds the way I held in mine. I could see them there now— now that I knew to look. I noticed the slight curve in her shoulders where they caved in infinitesimally to protect her heart.
“I meant to counsel you to be careful,” Valtronya said quietly, “of your beauty, and of who you loved.”
“Love?” My throat shuddered with the word. With the curse it implied.
“I loved a man once,” she mused, “in the days when Dramon Dagma was but the footstool of our kingdom and justice was readily kept from those upon whom the gods mercilessly frowned. He was a politician well-versed in the Dark Creeds, I a beggar among many. He pulled me from the mud and made me fine, and together we envisioned a more balanced world. I learned quickly, that shade and shadow are swift instruments to secure power for those, like myself, whom circumstance mistreats. I was a natural.”
Valtronya fiddled idly with the snakes wound around her neck, almost as if she couldn’t breathe. “Darkness was easy, Saylorabel. It was, at first, but a means to an end. Though, my lover should not have been so eager to teach me his darkness; the first law of power is that one cannot keep anything while presuming to gain everything. Oh yes,” she said, eyes glinting. “I knew love, for I did not obey the first law. Youth— we are so foolish when we are young, are we not?”
It was overwhelming, my subconscious need to sit in her darkness as if it might explain or justify my own. Not a fraction of Valtronya’s movement escaped my notice as I let her carry on without interruption, drawn to her tale like a moth to the light.
“I do not pretend not to have suffered from my foolishness,” she said, a faint smile dimpling her face. “My half-sister’s looks were mild next to mine, but when she came of age... such thirsty powers. It was a rabid need inside her, to entice whoever her lust attached itself to. With a single look, she could break a man the way she watched countless break me, or she could consume him. She consumed mine.
“Darkness granted me this undeserved kindness, this freedom, and with it I clawed my way up to the top alone; I did not need him for our new world. I schemed, I sacrificed, I slaughtered. From the dust I rose, and through sheer willpower I became everything I had ever aspired to be. I ruled a kingdom with the most beloved ruler our world has known. I spited the gods and Fate, and all the powers which desired to smother my potential in the mire and despair of Dramon Dagma. And that is victory, sweet siren: to become all that you know is deep within you.
“And then you—” she spat. “My husband’s wretched daughter—” Valtronya tore her gaze away from me as though suddenly disgusted, and new cracks snaked along the surface of the glass. I took a step back at the violent rage I could now see simmering under her fierce beauty.
“That damning Fate,” Valtronya hissed, unaware of me now. “She smiled cruelly upon me that day, the day your song rang through the halls of the glass palace. Your every word, your every will, bending those around you. And just like every siren before you, in an instant you would have the world wrapped around your little finger.
“Perhaps if my sister had allowed her memory to diminish, had faded away into the sea like the rest of your kind, you could have escaped this destiny I have given you. Perhaps if she had left me to my throne, I might have forgiven your likeness to her. We could have been a family, Saylorabel— I your mother, you my daughter.”
A knot twisted in my stomach, a sick, nauseous emptiness burgeoning in me like a cancer. My heart thundered like the brawling sky outside, the torrential rain battering against the walls of Abduult like the regret I felt at all this regal, determined woman might’ve accomplished had she not fallen so far. As I watched her— the vexed angle of her brows, the cautious narrowing of her eyes, that haunting arch in her shoulders when she slid out of her regal posture— I wanted to hate Valtronya. But something in me understood her.
She inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly, fluttering her eyelids a few times. “Because of her, I knew better than to turn a blind eye to what you are. Your powers merely mask your nature, hide how utterly alone and soulless a wretch you are. The great irony is that you are the most cheated among creatures, for all you have ever done is whisper a word of deceit and had the world handed to you. You have no real achievement and therefore no true victory, and you will face this truth in the loveless gazes of those who are not swayed by your spell.”
Valtronya’s piercing gaze found me again and I felt my expression waver with self-doubt as she neared the front of the mirror and scraped talon-like nails across the surface that separated us. “How you admired me as a child,” she murmured.
Those things she’d said… they were everything I’d long believed about myself, and to hear them spoken so articulately, so accurately—
“Why are you telling me all of this?” I breathed.
“You asked if I hated you, Saylorabel.” Valtronya’s eyes wandered as if they’d forgotten her words held audience, finally settling back on me in consideration. “Hate? No. In the end, hate is far too strong a word for what I feel for you,” she said, the superficial smile re-emerging as she hooked her gaze into mine. “When the thought of you dares enter my mind at all, I pity you. I suppose this small honesty is the least I owe a daughter of mine, if she is to die.”
Chapter 19
A Stolen Legacy
Chills ruptured along my skin, something feral awakening inside me as I stood my ground, letting Valtronya’s words— loveless, soulless, pitied— crawl over me. How many days had these words held imaginary power over me? How many days had I allowed soundless lies to preach to my heart, as though the claims of my worst fears rendered my identity?
I heard the deception and knew it was what had stoked the furnace that’d reforged me. I felt certain that, even had our fates not been irrevocably bound by a curse, each of my men would’ve had a tear to spare for my life, if only for the girl I’d once been. But as I withered under Valtronya’s smile, this knowledge succumbed to the amnesia of my heart. Too vivid were my memories of Earth. In that mockery of a life, she was right: there really hadn’t been anyone left to love me.
This ravishing woman standing in the place of my reflection was the one responsible for warping my whole life. She was the reality by which all my other realities became false; she was the liar who’d destroyed and remade me for her own ends.
She was the face I needed to fear when I went to sleep at night. When I closed my eyes, it was her eyes I should fear and her ghost I should worry of waking to.
And yet it was a confusing madness to a weary heart, to know a thing but not believe it. To stare a liar in the face and try to manifest the claims to speak over the lies from of a place of truth.
What was my truth?
As my eyes passed over Valtronya’s pristine smile and self-assured stance, the reverence of that child nudged its way back into my mind. For a cursory moment, all that this queen might’ve been if not for her deviated dreams flickered before me.
A new confidence sparked in me as I stood a little taller. “You became queen, Valtronya,” I said. “Justice for yourself and everyone like you, hope for your people… those were honorable things to fight for. You could’ve brought balance to the kingdom” —I hesitated— “our kingdom, like you always wanted.”
“Bitterness is a sweet poison, Saylorabel. Curious that you have not yet learned this. You can know a darkness inside yourself, and still draw indulgently from its well.”
&nb
sp; As I held the arctic gaze of those eyes, what I really wanted to tell Valtronya was I see you. I see you.
I didn’t know why.
The cool of those frothy blue eyes made me think of something lost in me, a lake, a trembling water, a depth that petrified me. But as the proud queen clutched airily at her garments, I realized that she was invisible to herself and no kind word, no encouragement, could speak her out of the abyss she’d lost herself in. It woke a new devastation in me, this brilliant but broken woman declaring her depravity as the highest of her achievements.
“Beautiful and powerful as you are,” I said, vibrance coming to my voice, “nothing in you understands life. You will die, Valtronya, fighting a battle with yourself that you’ll never win.”
“You still believe this is about beauty, Saylorabel?” She loosened a mirthless laugh. “My beauty was of no advantage until I fashioned it into one. Until I gave it power. My beauty, like you, has only ever been my pawn.”
Ündane célé-van ashriv-ar, ni nominmar elemtani.
The hairs on my whole body spiked with maddening passion. Not the savage vengeance of a siren, no… this was the justice of something far older, far bolder contouring a soul within me that I recognized in the shadow of sea and twilight...
“Pawn?” I asked. I neared Valtronya, my eyes seizing hers. “All your potential hinges on your destruction of me. Your perception of me. You’ve fixed your victory on me. I know I’m no pawn, Valtronya, because you are nothing without me. And I am everything without you.”
The wintry air of the reflected world washed over me as I pressed my hand against the glass with fervency. “But I’ll be one. I’ll be your pawn if you let them go. Free my watchmen and give them safe passage in the world outside, and I’ll suffer whatever creative torture, whatever endless nightmare you and the Grimms want to dream up for me.”