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I pressed my fingers against my swollen abdomen, feeling new life kick beneath my palm. I placed my hand over his so he could feel it too.
“What if she’s a monster?” I asked. “A mutid?”
“It doesn’t matter what she is. She’ll be beautiful, like her mother,” Damien said, his eyes soft, lifting my chin. “You make the world warm and kind. These past few days have been the happiest of my life.”
Then he kissed me, and pulled me closer to him. But something was off. He felt different, and smelled funny. I looked up at him through my eyelashes, and tensed as the color of his eyes shifted from blue to green.
I struggled to push him away, but he caught my wrists.
“Don’t struggle,” he said. “It’ll all be over soon.”
Then he kissed me again, but his face was old and rough. The face of his father. The king kissed me, then bit my lip hard enough to draw blood. I slapped him, reaching for his throat. I sucked in a breath as he stabbed me, and the dagger pierced my abdomen.
This time I felt the pain. It felt like I was cut in half. Like I nearly had been by Damien’s sword, in the mountains above Skormhead. Somehow I’d survived that. I could survive this too. I bit his hand until it bled. He tried to cover my mouth as I screamed. I kicked at his legs until he lost his grip, and stumbled to my knees, my vision blurring.
When I looked up again, the cozy room was gone. I was back in the meadow outside of Algrave, and there was snow on the ground. I had one hand placed protectively across my stomach, gripped with a sudden, irrational terror that I’d lost something important, but found only the deep knife wound staining the snow red beneath me.
The king was dressed in splendor. A white suit, golden crown, and a long dark beard. His sword, the one he’d lost, was longer and heavier than I remembered, hanging from his belt. The one I used to kill him. The one he’d stabbed through me. Is that how it happened? Is this what he looked like? My memories seemed to slip away, growing fuzzy and distant.
It was so cold I was shivering, but this couldn’t be real. I glared at the bloody dagger in the king’s fist, and the bright red stain on his lips. Then I spotted the teeth marks I’d left on the side of his hand, and the crimson stains that splattered across his palm and fingers, like the marks I’d worn since birth.
“I killed you,” I said. He smirked, still clutching the ornate dagger, as it dripped blood into the snow. He licked its edge with his tongue, cleaning the sharp edge. Tasting me.
“You freed me,” he responded. The voice was low and rough, not quite as I remembered it. I realized my palms were empty, and held them up to study them, as if unsure they were my own. Didn’t I have a sword? I squeezed my hands into fists experimentally, but felt nothing but cool air and icy snowflakes that stung my skin.
“How do you know about this place?” I asked, looking around us. A small mound towards the center was all that was left of the mutid deer with three eye sockets. I could barely make out the skull and bones poking out from under the thin layer of snow. The prize that had started all of this. A deadly game, without rules, that somehow I was still playing, as if I’d never left the meadow at all.
“You know it, so I know it,” the king shrugged. “This place, it’s important to you.” He raised a hand and I felt him slithering into my brain, looting through my history.
“Why do you think he brought you out here?” he asked. “Your father, that is. Have you ever thought about it?”
A memory formed, vague and irresolute, just a blur sitting in the treeline nearby. A young girl and her father. He looked so tragic, his face sadder than I’d ever seen it. Broken. His eyes were wet with tears. I asked him what was wrong but he brushed his eyes and told me to pack up, because we were going home.
“Why did a girl from the compounds need to learn how to hunt, to fight?” the king prompted, with a knowing look. “He was teaching you to survive, because he was going to force you to leave.”
“That’s not true,” I gritted my teeth, feeling fury flood through me. “He loved me.”
“You still believe that? After all you’ve learned? He took you in, but then had kids of his own. You were dead weight; even dangerous to his real family. In his last year, each time he took you to hunt, he considered leaving you behind. But he never had the strength, so he took the coward’s way out. I think you’ve always known.”
My mind raced through every memory I’d had with my father. I always thought he’d been preparing me, knowing if he was gone, someone would have to look out for his family. But there was something in his voice, in his expression. I hadn’t understood it at the time.
I growled, charging at the king with my bare hands, sprinting across the meadow. He tossed his dagger but I swatted it aside. He unsheathed his sword and took a swipe at me, but I twisted over the lashing blade, reaching for his head. I wrenched his shiny crown down around his neck and twisted it sharply, sawing through the flesh beneath his jawbone.
He exploded into dark butterflies that swarmed my eyes and nose. Forcing their way past my lips and down my throat until I was suffocating. Digging into my skin, a kaleidoscope of blinding colors. Something rippled in the fabric of the space behind it. I pushed through and the world blurred.
I was spinning in a hall of mirrors, seeing the king again and again in every direction, grabbing Damien by the neck. Stabbing through his heart. Killing him in a thousand ways, each more brutal than the last. I could smell the blood and hear the agony in his voice.
“Stop it!” I screamed, covering my ears with my hands.
He grabbed my wrists, binding me in place. His fingernail was long and red. That one incongruous detail was the first link. I seized it and ripped it out. The king snarled in pain, but it was too late, the illusion was fracturing. The floors, the mirrored walls, then the panes of glass seemed to bend and crack around me. King Richard’s face shattered and slid off, revealing dark eyes and red lips.
I clutched my chest, taking a deep breath when I realized I could breathe again. We were in a ballroom with long curtains near open windows. The guests danced or chatted silently around us, without faces. I heard the hum of the glowing chandeliers and light piano music in the background; the floral fragrance of the flower displays on the tables. I was dancing with a tall woman.I knew this memory.
“It’s you,” I said, pushing through the compulsion. She lifted a hand towards me, as the pieces of the king’s face tried to rearrange themselves, but this time I fought back, flinging every broken shard to the floor like a shower of sparks. She stumbled backward several steps.
I barely recognized Damien’s mother, Mrs. Hartmann, apart from old photographs. She looked so different from the rotten lump, the caged beast she’d been when we found her. Nigel had let her feed.
“You’re so strong,” I said.
