Day 7: Future
@7kpp
It took years.
Seven cold, bitter, stolen years she would bear the scars of forever. She was not enough. She would never be enough. Turning, turning, turning, round and round she went, until that one morning when the melody stopped, her crystal music box shattered into pieces.
She never spoke of what it took. Never spoke of that final drop, that final act of violence. Perhaps the memory itself became distorted: a vile, acrid thing to be replayed, time and again, in nightmares she could not remember upon awakening.
The maids whispered. Of a shrill, piercing scream; an animal in pain. Of the blood they washed off her linens, that morning, and the few mornings that followed. Of how, for a while, the king seemed much more at ease, his manner relaxed, yet all the more unnerving for how unusual this was. Of how the queen stared past everyone and everything with vacant eyes, eyes filled with nothing but despair so perfect it could have been mistaken for indifference.
Odile, queen of Revaire, retired early, and sent her maids away. Alone, she sat for hours upon her bed. Dry-eyed and silent, she stared, transxifed, upon the small blade in her lap - a letter opener as sharp as a sword.
As the dawn broke, it’s light gray and uncertain, she closed her hand upon the hilt, and hurled the knife accross the room.
‘No.’
She would not die, neither by her own hand, nor by his.
*
Constance was wrong. Not in the way she questioned duty - only in the way she chose to act upon that realization. A letter was not enough. Not at first.
The king thought the running of the royal household an inconsequential matter, best left in the hands of his wife, that meek, foolish creature who could not possibly manage anything of greater importance. In the sphere that was her due, Odile was free.
There were many desperate men and women, more in Revaire, perhaps, than anywhere else. Sickness. Poverty. Unfulfilled ambitions. A bitter, all-consuming need for vengeance. All useful motives.
The castle became filled with servants who owed the queen a new chance at life. Before long, she realized that her plans might succeed, that an accident would not be questioned: a jousting lance that would not shatter on impact, a horse driven into a frenzy. Then, she remembered. Not everything. Enough.
Odile, queen of Revaire, thought a quick death too great a mercy.
*
In the autumn months, the young king came down with a wasting sickness. The queen loved him well, and despaired of his misfortune. Unafraid and ever vigilant, she remained ever at his bed, sparing no effort to find the cure. She has been seen confering with medics from all the lands, from tattooed healer-men of Skalt to the renowned doctors of Jiyel, all in vain. Cordelia, first of her name, queen of Wellin, became an unexpected companion and a steadfast ally, visiting often to console Odile in her despair.
At the dawn of the first spring day, bells all accross Revaire rang out in a mournful melody, and the heralds cried: “The king is dead! Long live the queen!”
Jarrod’s funeral was a splendid affair. Too splendid, perhaps, to be seemly in a land as ravaged by poverty and hunger as his reign has left Revaire. There were some who cried out against the injustice that was monarchy, some who tried to stop the red procession as it moved through the capital.
She bid her informants to learn their names. Those, too, the heralds would cry soon enough, the owner of each name bound and gagged before the executioner’s block.
Odile, queen of Revaire, knew better than to forgive.