A gift, mother had called that girl. A testament to your father's victory.
She could not have been more than a year younger than Ishtar herself, and yet, behind those bars, Ulster's princess looked to be nothing more than a broken girl meant for death.
Of all the gifts that father had brought them, this one seemed to make mother the happiest. She was a trophy, a thing to admire. There was never a truer smile on mother's face than when watching her suffer.
And then one day she was gone. It was as though she had never been at all, for her place on mother's shelf was filled once more and so there was no reason to speak of that worthless girl anymore.
She looks different now, away from the shadows of that cell. Her face is flushed with life, eyes hot with a life they had not known all those years ago. Ishtar's skin prickles with the way they burn into her. This anger is more than deserved, and so her heart can only ache with its acceptance.
"You are alive," there is a relief in the way she breathes the words, one she can only imagine goes unreciprocated. "I had always hoped..." To see you survive, to tell you that I am sorry, to have become your friend. Ishtar swallows. "It is good to see you well."
She had always hated Friege's heir. She hated the hair color like silvery moonlight she shared with the rest of her wretched family, so out of place in the halls of Ulster's castle. She hated the way she walked around like it was her home, flanked by her parents, as if it weren't Miranda's home they were living in and as if they hadn't executed her parents. She hated that one by one, all of Ulster's people were replaced, until Count Conomor was the only one of her family's knights that visited her.
She resented that whole hateful family.
Most of all, she hated the way Friege's heir would visit her only to disappear again for weeks. Their interactions were never comfortable, not the way they had been when Prince Leif and Princess Nanna had stayed in her home, but some days they were the closest approximation to normal she had.
It would have been better had she been completely forgotten, save for the servants bringing her meals. It would have been easier to accept that way.
It had taken weeks after being sent to Melfiye to accept that she had been abandoned again. There would be no one coming to rescue her. If she rotted away in that monastery, who would even know?
Miranda had been thirteen years old when she was sent away from her only home, Ishtar scarcely a year older. They stand before each other now, newly young adults (no, still children, just adults in the eyes of society). There is no longer a distance between them as hostage and captor.
It's good to see you well.
Miranda really hates her.
"I am alive, of course!" No thanks to you. "What, were you hoping I'd die once your family sent me away?
Say that you did, so I can continue to hate you.
