“Mare, go to bed,” I say.
“But Rei–”
“Please, Mare. Just not right now, okay?” I ask, though it sounds more like begging.
He doesn’t respond. He looks at the ground and lets go of my hand, the motion less aggressive but just as cutting as the princess’s. He opens the door to the furthest room from the princess and slams the door shut.
“You want to talk to us.”
“Ineedto talk to you. I need to know why, to understand how you know about the stone and how you could have… how you could have…”
I’m rambling, my voice incoherent and wet despite holding back all my tears. Maybe I was this way all along. Since the princess ripped her hand away after making me promise not let go. Since Mare left. I don’t know when it started, but the tears have long been wanting to fall.
“I need to know why. Why do all of this?”
“Because it was the only way. Because we believed in our daughter, and, at that moment, we needed the rest of the world to believe in her too.”
It only takes a few more minutes, a few more stilted words, for an agreement to be made. Then, they leave me too.
I enterthe princess’s room in dead silence. I don’t expect her to be up. It’s been hours since she went inside, hours I spent crying in the dirt courtyard, choking on my own breath and pulling at my hair, after my conversation with Yanami’s grandparents. I was surviving the pain and fear of a heart attack, alone, with my head on my knees, sobbing their words out of my lungs.
Because we believed in our daughter.
I’ve never had someone believe in me like that, and now I never will. My mother is dead.
I rub my face again. It’s still dry. No more tears dare to fall.
To my surprise, the princess is sitting on a wooden bench placed beneath a window facing outside the property. She’s changed into some wool pants and a tank top. She wears a blanket half fallen off her left shoulder, revealing the thin strap of her top about to slip off. She stares out the window and doesn’t move an inch, even when she speaks.
“They still have some of my mother’s clothes if you want to change. They’re too big on me, but they might just about fit you.”
“Could you hear me this whole time?” I ask.
She doesn’t do anything to respond. She doesn’t even acknowledge me, save for a flicker of her eyes in my direction.
My stomach is in my throat. I was raw out there, and I cleaned myself up before stepping inside. I can’t have her knowwho the person I tried so hard to scrub from my face was. I can’t live with myself if she does.
Half her face is lit up by moonlight, and it gives nothing away. The half that’s in shadow, though, speaks something devastating.
“Kiss me,” she says, finally turning to face me.
“What?”
“I’m leaving tomorrow. You’ll do whatever it is you think, you swear, you need to do, and I’m gone. So you have to kiss me now. Before–”
I shut her up with my lips.
The kiss isn’t nice. It’s not even desperate. It’s a tool because I can’t stand to hear what else could come out of her mouth. The princess isn’t dumb, though. She turns away. Whether she’s mad or wants more is impossible to know now, but I still crave to be inside her head.
“Princess,” I whisper.
“Stop it. Everyone just needs to stop it. My mother is dead. I’m not the princess anymore. I am nothing to the empire.”
She’s wrong. She’s everything.
This time, when I kiss her, it’s an explosion rather than a restrained threat.
In seconds, I’m sitting on the bench and have her on my lap. My back is to the window, making it possible for the moonlight to continue to light up her face. I kiss the tip of her nose, the side of her cheek, her forehead, her neck. I kiss every inch that the moon dares to touch like the jealous lover I’ve found myself to be.
