AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I know that.” I didn’t know that. “You didn’t answer my question.”
He shakes his head. “The other Seers didn’t tell me much. Have you dreamed anything else?”
A coldness has settled between us like a fog. I could warn Cyrus about the threats. The thorns.
The roses blooming from his blood-pricked skin.
His death, come summer’s end—or mine, in his place.
But my task for the king is complete, and I am no longer feeling generous.
“No,” I say, unblinking. “That’s it.”
I lay in my bed awake. I’ve kicked off my blankets; it’s too hot. Every new worry I have presses into my skull like a pin.
“It worked,” I say. “Cyrus believed me.”
The balcony doors are cracked open, but it’s a breezeless night. I wonder if any gods can hear me. Maybe they’re squabbling above.
One of them seems to want to help me. The rest wouldn’t mind me dead. I don’t know how to get a message to any of them.
“You spoke of betrayal in my future.” I trace the patterns in the embroidery of my sheets, half hoping for a real response, even a mocking laugh. Even if that means everythingthey said was true. I just want ananswer.“If betrayal is coming, I don’t want to wait around. Tell me what’s about to happen and I’ll listen to whatever you have to say.”
I shut my eyes, waiting for sleep.
The voice doesn’t answer.
But, at last, I dream:
Wet, musky fur. A tangle of leaves. Iron scents the air.
A hungry growl, and a voice, barely human: “Help—help.”
A monstrous creature rises from its crawl, spiral horns silver under moonlight. It is all wrong—man and beast and forest all at once.
It lumbers toward a lit window on a two-legged gait. Rose petals drift in its wake.
The Masked Menagerie finally arrives.
As the sun sets, carriages fill the grand plaza and revelers funnel through the palace gates. Before midnight, Cyrus will find his true love.
I think.
The rhyme plays through my head over the day. It must be a real prophecy, if that Fate told both me and another Seer, but the second line of it keeps drawing my attention:
Your father would not approve.
I let Cyrus believe that the girl I described and the one in the rhyme are the same person. But I know that his father set up the former, which means he’d approve of her; they couldn’t be the same girl.
Will there be another who catches Cyrus’s attention? Is there a double meaning that I’m not catching? I’m wary. Gods like toying with us.
And then there was that vision of—I don’t know what it was. Some beast in silhouette. I wish I’d seen more.
At half past seven, Eina, the royal twins’ former nurseand a persistent old stump of a woman, knocks at my tower. “You’re the last to get ready, come out now.”
“I’m not going to the ball,” I tell her through a crack in the door, but when I turn around, the three fairies in service of the palace have already found their way inside through an open window.
After a round of arguing, bargaining, and sneezing, Eina wrestles me in front of my mirror. She strips me to my chemise and snaps a clothespin on my nose to prevent me from inhaling fairy dust.
