Prince Arthur and Prince Wilhelm wasted no time in making their way to Windenburg Castle, their hearts heavy with anger and disappointment. As they confronted King Wilhelm, Arthur's rage erupted, unleashing a torrent of curses and accusations upon his brother. The weight of betrayal and confusion fueled his words, leaving no room for restraint. "How could you do this to our family? What kind of king are you?" he bellowed, his voice reverberating through the chamber.
The confrontation took an unexpected turn as even King Wilhelm's own son, fueled by years of neglect and a sense of abandonment, joined in the scathing criticism. The resentment that had been simmering within the young prince found an outlet, accusing his father not only of being a terrible king but also of embracing a heretical faith, tainting the kingdom with false religious beliefs. Shocked and appalled, King Wilhelm recoiled from the harsh words of his son, the sting of disappointment cutting deep into his soul.
The king, struggling to process the accusations and the weight of his own shortcomings, rose abruptly from his desk, dismissing both Arthur and his son from his presence. Alone in his office, the weight of his decisions and the consequences of his actions settled upon his shoulders. Doubt seeped into his thoughts, questioning the righteousness of his choices, particularly regarding the relinquishment of Willowshire.
As King Wilhelm sat in solitude, turmoil consumed his mind. Regret gnawed at his conscience, questioning whether he had made the right decisions for his family and kingdom. The words of his son echoed within his thoughts, fueling a sense of self-doubt and deepening his sorrow. The path he had chosen seemed clouded, overshadowed by the pain and divisions that had emerged within his own bloodline.
In the midst of his solitude, King Wilhelm grappled with the burden of his failures as a father and a ruler. The anguish of losing the trust and respect of his own son weighed heavily upon his heart. Uncertain and deeply troubled, he searched for solace and wisdom, hoping to find a way to mend the shattered bonds and navigate the tumultuous path ahead.
In the wake of Wilhelm's decision to sign over Willowshire to Bagley, a sense of betrayal and anger consumed Prince Arthur and his nephew, Prince Wilhelm. The news came to them abruptly, with guards arriving at Willowshire Castle in the early hours of the morning, bearing the harsh reality of their eviction. The senior knight from Bagley's army, devoid of empathy or remorse, demanded their immediate departure, leaving behind their ancestral home and all their possessions.
Prince Arthur, seething with rage, could hardly believe that his own brother, Wilhelm, had made such a monumental decision without informing them. The suddenness of it all struck him deeply, adding a layer of hurt to the already bitter taste of losing their family's cherished heritage. The weight of their family name, tarnished by this act of dispossession, pierced Arthur's heart, and he vowed to never forgive his brother for this betrayal.
As the prince and his nephew were forced to leave Willowshire behind, their minds filled with memories of happier times spent within its walls. The loss of their ancestral home served as a constant reminder of Wilhelm's actions, etching a deep divide within their family. The bond that once held them together now strained, with Arthur harboring resentment and a deep sense of disappointment toward his own flesh and blood.
Prince Arthur knew that this mark on their family name would be a lasting stain, a testament to the shattered trust and the price paid for political expediency. The pain and anger burned within him, fueling his determination to carve out a new path for himself and his nephew, one that would bring honor and redemption to their family name, even in the face of adversity.
Within the solemn walls of a council chamber at Windenburg Castle, King Wilhelm and King Thomas finally came face to face. In this crucial meeting, King Thomas presented his proposal to King Wilhelm, the terms of which held both promise and sacrifice. Thomas offered Wilhelm the opportunity to retain his title as King of Windenburg, but at a cost. To solidify their alliance and ensure their combined strength, Wilhelm would have to relinquish the dutchy of Willowshire, surrendering it to the Kingdom of Bagley.
In a strategic move to sway Wilhelm's decision, Thomas emphasized the potential benefits of their alliance. He pledged his unwavering support in future battles, envisioning a formidable force that, when united, could be virtually unstoppable. Such an alliance, Thomas argued, would provide both kingdoms with newfound strength and opportunities for prosperity.
AN: Hi guys! So, this is an original piece by yours truly. If you guys could read it and give feedback, I would be immensely appreciative. Let me know what you liked, what you didn't like, what confused you...I really need to know if this is worth continuing or not. Thank you so much!
I hide myself within my flower,
That wearing on your breast,
You, unsuspecting, wear me too—
And angels know the rest.
I hide myself within my flower,
That, fading from your vase,
You, unsuspecting, feel for me
Almost a loneliness.
~Emily Dickinson
I haven’t spoken a word in three years.
My vocal cords died the day I saw ice in my father’s eyes and a blade in his hand.
My voice has been asleep since I saw my mother’s head topple from her neck and roll across the blood-spattered flagstones.
I am not mute, though many think me so. Communication is so much more than the spoken word. Communication is simply more difficult without it.
My words…
There are so many of them, and I tried so hard, at first, to stifle them. To swallow them and digest them. To absorb them into my skin and pretend they never existed. But I found, in that first month of darkness, that they were only satisfied with one escape: I let them bleed from my fingertips, my blood turning black against the thick, pulpy parchment of my heart. They swirl on their own to form letters and drawings and scribbles and numbers.
My words are my pain.
My words are my joy.
My words are my tears.
My words are my laughter.
My words are my voice.
Why couldn’t they end my father’s tyranny?
Why am I heard when my words cause destruction, and why am I ignored when my words can bring justice?
December 5, 1859
Today I became a waterfall.
Today I found my cliff.
Today the churning and the moaning of the water morphed into pained screaming and roaring as my terror shoved me off the ledge.
Today I fell.
Tomorrow, I will lie broken on the rocks.
Tomorrow, I will be alive, but I will wish I was dead.
Tomorrow, my blood will bake in the glaring sun and it will tell the travelers that waterfalls are dangerous. But they are survivable.
I wish they weren’t.
I wish. I wish. I wish.
“Your father wishes to see you in his study, Miss Emmeline.”
Every girl in the room turns, their wooden desk chairs creaking with their movements, to stare at me, thirty-eight eyes blinking blankly, nineteen pairs of lips pressing together in thin, disapproving lines. These girls are under the delusional impression that they know exactly who I am, that they know how I came to be here, that they know all of my darkest secrets and all of my dreams and all of my nightmares. They think of me as ‘that girl who lost her mother and went a little bit mad in the aftermath.’ They think I lost the ability to speak. They think me dumb as a mule, despite the fact that I excel in all my subjects. But they don’t know me. All they know is the painstakingly designed mask I hide behind. None of these girls know my heart or my mind or my soul.
Not the way he did.
I close my eyes for a moment, trying to suffocate the sharp pain that lances through my chest at the thought of him, and I rise out of my seat, gathering my books and things off my desk and into my arms. I keep my head down and my eyes trained on my feet—the feet I cannot see. I know they’re there, under all those skirts and petticoats and stockings and boots. I pretend I can see them and I watch them as they pull the rest of me forward, clacking impatiently against the scuffed wooden floors, almost as if they had minds of their own, coaxing me to the front of the room and out the open door.
They do not hear Madame’s sharp reprimand. They do not care if my spine is straight or if my head is up or if my shoulders are back. They focus on moving, on dragging the rest of me, skirts and corset and all, behind them.
I emerge from a cloud of chalk dust and ink stains and paper cuts, leaving the French classroom behind, and entering the cool hallway that leads directly from the front of the Academy to my father’s office.
I really don’t want to face my father once more. I don’t want to see the false warmth in his eyes. I don’t want to see the apologetic downturn of his lips. I don’t want to hear him apologize for taking my mother’s life, don’t want to hear him explain and rationalize, don’t want him to ask me to speak, because I won’t, not for him, not for anybody; don’t want him to ask me to stop ‘terrorizing the school.’ I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to see him.
I take a moment to run my hand along the soft, worn wallpaper my great grandmother so lovingly pasted to the wall when she and my great grandfather built the Academy oh so many decades ago. It’s velvety and crimson. A bit like a rose.
A bit like blood.
I jerk my hand back as blood runs in rivers through my mind, nearly blinding me.
“Miss Avery?”
The blood dissipates and I startle, jumping back from the wall and locking gazes with Miss Jacqueline, my father’s personal assistant.
She smiles kindly and extends her hand to me. I think she tries to be motherly. I think she tries to be a mother to us all, but that’s simply not possible. It isn’t realistic. No one has twenty children, and if they do, their children certainly can’t be comprised entirely of girls.
Also, the aforementioned woman may want to invest in a calendar, so she may keep track of her cycles.
Having that many children can’t possibly be healthy.
I skirt around Miss Jacqueline’s hand and continue down the hallway, my eyes back on the floor. I don’t want to look at the wallpaper. There may as well be blood covering the walls, running down like a waterfall, parting like a river around the candles flickering in their brass sconces, and if it splashes onto my skirts…
Blood doesn’t come out of cloth. I know. I tried to scrub my mother’s blood off the hem of one of my favorite dresses once, but the dress was ruined. I couldn’t wear it anymore, but I didn’t want to throw it away, so I asked my father to bury my mother’s body with my ruined dress. He actually said yes. That must have been one of the only times in my life he’s done what I’ve asked him to. I haven’t asked anything of him since then.
Blood. It doesn’t come out. It doesn’t come out of cloth.
It stains everything. It stains your skin, and your clothes, and it stains your veins and your heart.
Blood stains everything.
Blood.
Suddenly, I want nothing more than to get out of this hallway.
I swallow hard and practically sprint into my father’s office, where the walls are not painted in blood. Instead, they are painted with the ocean. They are a deep, gray-blue and they are stormy and they are dangerous, but they are clean.
My father looks up from his oaken desk, his severe face softening slightly when he sees me. He drops his quill into its placeholder and nods to Jacqueline, who sweeps elegantly out of the room and shuts the door.
“If you would leave us, Charlene, I would be very grateful.”
Charlene. The one woman left on this earth that I will show any emotion for. The only woman left who tears down my walls and examines my soul.
I glare at her with all the fire I hold in my heart. I am not the entire reason my real mother is dead and gone. She is an enormous part of it. Charlene is. She came straight from France and leapt straight between my father’s sheets, and she drove a stake straight into my parents’ marriage.
She turns her fawning blue eyes—the ones that match the color of her silk dress perfectly-- onto my father and bats her wicked eyelashes as she rises from the chaise upon which she was seated, tucking her embroidery under her arm. “Of course, my dear,” she says, her voice poisoned honey. “If I may, however, suggest sending dear Emmeline away this time?” Her lips are smug and sure, if a bit too pale still. “It is my firm belief that all this sea air is wearing on her. Perhaps Inopa will build her strength?”
She doesn’t look sick. Why doesn’t she look sicker?
My father shakes his head. “I’m not sending my daughter to the mines, Charlene,” he says firmly. “I don’t care what she’s done to you. She’s still my daughter…and my only heir.”
The daggers I glare elongate into swords, but Charlene is out of the room before I can pierce her skin.
“Emmeline.”
I point my swords at him.
He sighs and folds his hands on his desk, leaning forward. “Please sit, daughter.”
Where? The leather chaise? He can’t possibly expect me to sit within five feet of where that woman was sitting only moments earlier.
He looks at me expectantly, his peppery gray eyes hiding behind thin, wire spectacles and beneath furry black eyebrows.
I remain standing.
He shakes his head again in apparent exasperation and leans back in his leather chair. He looks imperious. I think that may have been his goal—to intimidate any of his young ladies that misbehave. To intimidate anyone, really, from the delivery boy to the rich, hulking fathers of the ladies who attend his school—the highly, royally esteemed Willowshire Academy.
“Your loathing for Charlene is understandable, Emmeline. But you are a lady now, a lady of incredibly high class, I might add, and I’m afraid I cannot tolerate your treatment of neither her, nor myself.”
Yes, well. You murdered my mother. You’ve been a man for quite some time now, a man of incredibly high class, I might add, and I’m afraid I cannot tolerate your treatment of either her, or myself.
He pulls his spectacles off his nose and folds them delicately, placing them on his desk. “Honestly, Emmeline. Arsenic in her tea? Arsenic is a poison. Do you not understand just how dangerous that is? There is a reason I do not tolerate any of my students ingesting it to make their skin paler.”
Ah, yes. Last week, I snuck some of Jacqueline’s ‘cosmetic’ arsenic into Charlene’s tea. Just enough to make her sick. She was in bed for nearly four days, and everything she ate or drank came right back up.
Of course I know it’s a poison. I wouldn’t have put it in her drink otherwise.
And…if she happened to die…I don’t think I’d feel very guilty about it.
“Are you listening to me?”
My attention snaps back to my father, and I nod.
He sighs tiredly and rubs his temples. “You must correct this behavior, Emmeline, for your own good. You attend the best school in the entire country. You have been given everything in the world that you could ever possibly want. Nearly every girl in the country would kill to be in your shoes, and yet you take it all for granted.”
He looks up at me, his expression grave. He must have been a very handsome man, once. Tales fly through Elsus about him—about how handsome he was, about how beautiful my mother was. A match made in heaven, they used to say. Nothing could break them apart.
Nothing, of course, except Charlene.
And me.
“I cannot have you pulling pranks—petty or dangerous—on Charlene or myself, or anyone in this building when the delegate arrives next week, do you understand? He is here as a representative from Arana and he has an incredibly important announcement to make. I want his stay to pass with as few complications as possible, and I will not have your ‘revenge,’ as you so see it, be one of them. He will return to Arana, and more importantly to the Ivory Castle, and he will make his report to the King and Queen. The King and Queen will relate their report to the rest of the country, and it is the rest of the country that sends their daughters here to be educated and taught the ways of high society.”
He leans forward and I see a flash of the fire in his eyes that I saw on the day of my mother’s death. I step back reflexively, my heart fluttering and pounding against my ribcage, trying desperately to escape, to take off and fly away—away from this beaten body and this tired mind.
“The future of the Academy rests on your decision, Emmeline. Will you choose to ruin your peers’ chances at a happy, fulfilling future? Or will you stand up straight and behave like the grown woman you are?”
The fire in his eyes grows to an inferno and it’s enveloping me and it’s choking the oxygen from this room. I can’t breathe. My father’s desk becomes my mother’s funeral pyre, and I see her draped in my blood-spattered execution dress, burning, the flames licking at eyes that were never respectfully closed. I watch with growing terror as her skin melts and her bones turn to ashes.
There is iron binding my chest and my lungs have died. The ash has settled in my airways and the oxygen is being choked from my body and…
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
The smoke from the fire that lights my mother’s body slowly encroaches on my vision until I can’t see. All I know is darkness. I cannot breathe. I cannot see. I cannot hear.
I cannot breathe.
I cannot breathe.
I cannot…I can’t…
December 8, 1859
I have silenced myself. I have drawn the curtains around my vocal cords and I have locked up my thoughts in my mind. Father keeps storming into my room and yelling and screaming and raging at me.
It’s my fault.
It’s my fault.
It’s my fault my mother’s dead.
It’s my fault he had to kill her.
I forced his hand.
If I hadn’t been so stupid. If I hadn’t stuck my nose in his business.
It’s my fault.
My words catapulted me into a world I do not recognize. They have launched me into a life I never wanted.
So I will remain silent. I will let the trees give themselves to me so I may give my words to them. I will use their skin and I will use my ink and I will carve letters and numbers and patterns to form words and paragraphs. I will take the pure, white feather of a dove and I will use it to write letters of terror and blood. My screams will rip across a page. My tears will become black. My thoughts and my desires, my dreams and my nightmares, my fears, my joys, my pain, will bleed through my fingertips and stain a book.
Books can’t hurt you if you don’t open them.
The only person my words can hurt is me.
Chapter One
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
The Hollow Men, Stanza IV
T. S. Eliot
December 12, 1859
I am alone.
I am so, dreadfully, awfully, irreparably alone.
Is this what the sun feels like, so far removed from its radiant brethren?
“I often find it difficult to believe that she was truly raised here in Willowshire.”
“How so?”
“She seems to have lost all sense of propriety.”
“She’s a mute. Of course she’s lost all sense of propriety. Her brain doesn’t function properly—at least, that’s what Miss Charlene tells the delivery boy every morning when he asks to see Emmeline.”
If I stare hard enough at this book, the words start to float off the page and sink like feathers to the pale pink carpets below. How curious…
I blink quickly. There are words on the carpet. They look like pink rose petals.
I look up, searching eagerly for the source of the words, hoping beyond hope to see them floating off the pages of another girl’s book and turning into flower petals, and notice the intricately carved oak tables placed against the walls at intervals throughout the room, upon which vases are placed. In each vase is a bouquet of pink roses.
Ah. So they aren’t words. They are rose petals.
I sigh in disappointment and look back at my book.
“I heard Miss Jacqueline tell Headmaster Avery that she fainted last week because her corset was too tight, but we all know that simply isn’t true.”
A nose scrunches up.
“Then why did she faint?”
Eyes narrow to slits.
“She was having those delusions again, you ninny.”
“How do you know?”
A voice lowers to a whisper. Lips touch to an ear.
I don’t have to lean in to hear what the girls say to each other. They’re quite loud, as I think may be their purpose.
They think me incapable of full comprehension.
They think wrong.
“I was passing by the study when she passed out. I heard Headmaster Avery telling Nurse Elizabeth that before she passed out, she began breathing quite quickly. Her eyes were very wide and he said she was staring at his desk like there was a dead animal upon it. Her skin turned gray and then her eyes rolled up in the back of her head and she simply crumpled to the ground.”
There are far too many roses in this room. They are on the tables, they are falling to the carpet.
They’re even stuck on the walls. The walls of this parlor have been painted with roses.
“How dreadful! Poor Headmaster Avery, having to claim such a dysfunctional girl as his only heir.”
Yes, I muse silently, sticking my fingers in my ears, trying to block out their voices. Poor Headmaster Avery.
They try very hard, every day, to hurt me. Perhaps they would succeed, if I weren’t so focused on isolating myself from them. They wield the wrong words, the wrong ideas. They think I’m broken on the inside. They think my mind has shattered and I’ve regressed to childhood once more. My mind isn’t broken. My mind is simply beaten. It’s a little scratched up, but it in no way compares to my heart.
My heart is broken.
And they do not possess the weapons to destroy it further. They don’t know the true reasons for my distress, for my silence. They know what they’ve heard.
They think they know.
Once, when I was a little girl, perhaps eight years old, I suggested renaming the study period of the day ‘Gossip Hour.’ My mother laughed and my father frowned.
Between the times of three in the afternoon and five in the evening, each of the twenty girls is to report to the upper Parlor, on the second floor of the Academy, dressed in a tea gown and armed with a book or an assignment, and is to spend the entire period of time engrossed in ‘something constructive,’ as my father says.
As one might assume, no one does much studying during this period. We are under no supervision, and we are all sitting in rather close proximity. All anyone does is gossip.
Hence, ‘Gossip Hour.’
I find the gossip entertaining only because I think it funny that every Sunday, they swear to the Priest that they are growing in God’s grace, and that they are following in His footsteps, and then as soon as they set foot on the cobblestone streets outside of the church, they are back to gossiping and cursing.
It amuses me immensely.
They think their idle gossip hurts me. They think I cry at night in my room because of what they say about me during Gossip Hour. On the contrary, their gossip makes me laugh.
I inspect the navy velvet bow at the bottom of the neckline of my tea gown, trailing my gaze along the seam that attaches the velvet to the frilly lace underneath. My book—Jane Eyre—lies open on my lap, a pretty picture against the backdrop of my blue and green checkered skirts. I imagine all the cruel words in the world sinking into the cotton folds of my dress, drowning in fabric and checkers and thread.
Someone taps my shoulder and I gasp, nearly falling out of my chair. I look up, and I find that every girl in the room is, once again, staring at me. Some look smug. Some look like they wish to laugh at me. Some look worried. Some look annoyed.
None of them look disinterested in what is about to happen, whatever it may be.
The girl who began the earlier conversation—the one who passed by my father’s study when I lost consciousness—gazes at me evenly, her expression wry.
Her name is Victoria, and her father is very proud that she and the Queen of England share a name. She is the epitome of what my father wishes to see in all his young students: Her auburn hair is pinned back, not a strand out of place, the pearly pins shining in the sunlight. Her skin is pale and creamy—not a single freckle or blemish, as if it’s never seen the sun. Her waist is tiny and her navy blue dress accentuates her frame perfectly. Her green eyes are large and innocent, framed by long, black lashes and deep auburn brows. She speaks quietly and intelligently, and she is courteous and submissive to all gentlemen she meets.
She always sits so the sunlight from the enormous bay windows of the parlor illuminates her figure. Victoria always looks like she’s on fire.
She very much reminds me of a lioness: Beautiful and graceful, but cruel.
Her lips move and I hear her voice float through my ears, but I cannot make out what she says. She sounds as if she is underwater, and for a moment, I think I’ve lost the ability to hear. Perhaps I’ve gone deaf. It would be awfully convenient—the perfect excuse to never speak again. I can’t possibly be expected to respond if I don’t know what I’m supposed to respond to in the first place….
Alas, no.
I realize, somewhat belatedly, that my fingers are still in my ears. I lower them slowly.
“There,” Victoria says airily. “Now, if the delegate happens upon this room, he shall see twenty ladies, instead of the nineteen ladies and one asylum girl with hands growing out of her ears he would have seen moments ago.”
Is she referring to herself as the asylum patient? She shouldn’t have such low self-esteem. It isn’t healthy.
“What are we going to do if the delegate decides to speak to her?” Linette—the girl to whom Victoria was speaking earlier—asks, chewing on her full bottom lip.
She, too, is very pretty. In fact, being pretty may be a pre-requisite to attending this school. Linette is very delicate, like a fairy. Her mother is from France, but her father is from Wales. Her hair is black as a raven, and she has big, luminescent, pale brown eyes. She is very thin, and she is very pale, but her face looks almost wild. She often looks as if she is preparing to leap from her seat and run outside and dance in the rain with her hair flying all around her.
Sometimes I watch her in class, and I imagine her tearing apart her dresses until she wears only her chemise, pulling all the pins and braids out of her hair, slipping out of her stockings and shoes, and running free with the deer in the forest.
She would make an ideal wood nymph.
I nearly smile at the thought.
“He won’t,” Victoria says confidently, silencing the worried murmur that has spread through the room. She picks her embroidery back up off her lap and turns her eyes toward it, pulling the thread and the needle in and out and in and out and in and out and—
“And if he does,” she continues, pulling my attention away from her hands, “We simply tell him that she isn’t feeling well, and that Doctor James has instructed her to remain silent, as her throat is red and raw.” She looks up at us all, steel in her eyes. “Is that understood?”
Every girl in the room, with the exception of me, nods, and by some silent agreement, they all return to their quiet gossiping without even a glance at me.
I settle myself back in my chair, trying to sink into the rough, beige cushions like a pesky little insect. No one would bother me if I were a bug, and if I were found out, I could simply run away.
I let my eyes close.
I wish I could be a bug.
I wish I could be a cockroach. People could step and step and step on me, but they couldn’t crush me. The strongest man in the world could stomp on me as hard as he wanted, and I would survive. I wouldn’t have a mother I loved, a mother who died because I told her something I shouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have a father who drank fire that made him lose his mind and try to murder half his household.
He wouldn’t have befriended me. He wouldn’t have defended me. He wouldn’t have betrayed me by forming a relationship with my mother.
Didn’t he know? Didn’t he know he could have had that relationship with me?
If I were a cockroach, I wouldn’t have betrayed him.
If I were a cockroach, he wouldn’t be dead.
If I were a cockroach…a lot of people would still be alive.
December 13, 1859
Apparently, killing my mother wasn’t enough.
Why?
He used to love me.
He really did.
Today is a Black Day.
I awoke this morning from a nightmare, and I stood in the early morning sunlight on my balcony, wrapped in a knit shawl, shivering in my thin nightgown. I wanted the sun to melt the fear away, but it didn’t. The fear and the pain burrowed deeper in my bones, and I’m positive that if it is to ever come out, it will have to be cut out with a knife.
I fear physical pain. I often get the urge, on Black Days, to take a knife and try to cut the pain out. I think, sometimes, that if I could force my mind to focus on the physical pain, its attention would be drawn from the emotional pain.
Whenever I pick up the knife, my hands start shaking and my heart climbs into my throat, and I can’t do it. I fear physical pain.
I also fear knives.
Instead of harming myself, which is something I find myself wanting all too often, I unsheathe my quill pen and I slice it across my paper. My blood runs in ink, and swirls form letters, and I hardly know what I write until I’m finished, and I re-read my work. The words just…come out. I don’t know where they come from. I don’t know how they organize themselves, but somehow they do, and somehow they find themselves on my paper.
Black Days are my darkest days. They are the days when I can hardly get out of bed because the pain lingers too long. They are the days when I shed all my clothes until I stand in my chemise, and I let my hair down. The days when I wrap myself up in a blanket and station myself at my little ivory table by the fireplace, and I open my journal and I write.
I write.
And I write.
And I write, until my eyes are drooping with exhaustion, until my hand is shaking with pain and weariness, until my body is aching and my bones are screaming.
I do not eat.
I do not dress.
I do not attend class.
I simply write, until all the pain seeps out of my pores and evaporates into my room.
Today is a Black Day.
February 14, 1862
Today is hard.
Today is cold and unforgiving, and just
as the sun cannot melt the ice and the snow outside the Academy, it cannot melt away the fear and the pain I feel in my heart and my bones and in my skin and in my mind and the fear and the pain are everywhere today.
He plagued my dreams last night. At first, they were so lovely…so full of sunlight, of laughter. And I spoke. I told him all of my thoughts and everything I want to say.
The desire to speak is so overwhelming, sometimes, that I think I cannot bear it. Sometimes, I think I may burst and rivers of words will sprout from my lips outside of my control.
So I speak in my dreams, where no one but the apparitions in my mind can hear me. Last night, the apparition was him.
“Emmeline,” he said, pulling small strands of grass up with his fingernails. “Emmeline, you must stop this. You only hurt yourself.”
“I hurt my father,” I told him. “I hurt him, too. I must…”
His eyes turned to me and they are the color of a riverbank in springtime—green and fresh, with a little bit of brown mud mixed in. His lips drew downward, worried, his brow furrowed. “I think you hurt yourself more than you hurt your father.”
I bit my lip, looking away from him, not wanting to piece his words together. He’s usually right, and I usually hate that fact.
He hooked his fingers under my chin and pulled my gaze to match his. “Emmy,” he said, his voice firm. “Use your words. Show the world how you can bend them to your will, how they become your weapons.”
“If I do,” I protested, my voice climbing higher in pitch, “then I lose the only weapon I have over my father. You know that. If I speak, then all power I hold over him evaporates. All power I hold over Victoria, and over Linette, and over Louise, and over Henrietta and all those girls is gone.”
He smiled slightly. “I would not be so sure,” he said. “I think if you spoke even one word, everyone would be rather shocked.”
“Maybe,” I muttered, turning away from him. “The shock would disappear in a matter of hours. They’d simply return to treating me the way they did before.”
“Emmeline,” he said sternly. “Please. Speak again. For me. For your mother. You hurt us and you hurt our memories by silencing yourself.”
My vision watered, and the green grass upon which we sat began to turn to shards of glass. “I can’t risk hurting anyone again. I can’t risk it. I can’t risk it…”
That was when the scene morphed to a nightmare. I began to speak again, but my words fell flat and hit the grass. My words grew to spikes of glass and he opened his mouth to cry out in alarm, but no sound came out. Blood did. Blood poured from his lips and down his chin and his eyes rolled back in his head. He fell back and I screamed as the glass shards pushed past his curly brown hair and pierced his scalp.
I sobbed and I sobbed and I sobbed.
Do you know what he told me before I awoke?
I held him in my arms, trying desperately to ignore the spikes of pain shooting through my body as he lay dying, and his lips moved. I leaned down to hear his words….
“I never knew it was possible to die twice…and all on account of your words. They’re so sharp, Emmy…So sharp.”
I’m sorry, Eli.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry, Elijah.
Forgive me.
A knock at my door draws my reluctant attention away from my journal. I set my quill down very carefully, watching the door, listening.
I don’t want to answer the door. Answering the door requires standing up and walking, and I’m not sure my legs are steady enough for the journey.
The knocking continues, persistent, annoying.
I sigh. I gather my dressing robe around my chemise and push myself out of my navy, velvet cushioned chair, and I pad across the polished wood floors, barefoot, to my door. I pull a small key from my pocket and unlock the door, pulling it open.
Jacqueline stands before me, her blond hair twisted up in the French style, adorned in a pale yellow gown. She looks worried, her brows drawn together, her arms tightly wrapped around a large pile of documents. Her usual, charming smile seems forced. “I am so sorry, Miss Emmeline, if you were expecting to be alone today.”
I was.
She shifts the pile of documents in her arms, rifling through them with quick fingers. She pulls a few out and hands them to me. “The delegate and his assistant are arriving today from the Ivory Castle, and your father has requested your presence when they come.” She smiles. “Well, he’s requested the presence of every girl in the Academy, but he told me to make sure that you attended, dressed and presentable.”
I frown. Today is not a good day for the delegate to arrive. I stay in my room on Black Days, not because I can’t face the day, but because it’s much more likely that I’ll ‘have an episode,’ as my father says.
When I passed out last week…when I saw my mother’s body burning and I saw the blood…that happens all too often. Doctor James tells me that my brain tricks me, that I see things that aren’t really there, and that those delusions send my body into a state of panic. I don’t faint because of the ‘delusions.’ I faint because I begin to hyperventilate.
This is so much more likely to happen on Black Days.
Doesn’t my father see?
I can’t faint in front of the delegate. If I faint, so many more questions will arise. Am I being fed enough? Have I done anything for cosmetic purposes that could damage my health? Is my father treating me well?
Or, more importantly, is he treating the other girls well?
I bite my lip and try to hand the documents back to Jacqueline, but she doesn’t take them. She looks at me sympathetically, her warm brown eyes sad.
“I’m sorry, Emmeline,” she says softly. She leans forward and kisses me on the forehead, pretending not to notice when I hiss and jerk away. “Your father is well aware that today might be one of your bad ones. However, he has been instructed to have all his ladies standing on the drive when the delegate arrives, and he has all the confidence that you shall be able to pull through.”
She reaches out and cups a soft, pale hand over my cheek. “I’ll be by your side the entire day, Emmeline, I promise.”
I fan at my face, and she understands immediately, as she always does. As she always will.
She smiles softly. “If you faint, I’ll tell the delegate it was my fault. I’ll tell him I accidentally laced your corset too tight this morning, and because Doctor James told you to rest your voice, you were unable to tell me you couldn’t breathe.”
I look away, clutching the papers tightly in my hand.
“All right?”
I nod.
Jacqueline shifts the papers in her arms again, moving closer to me. She pulls the documents out of my hands and holds them up to the light. They are drawings. Drawings of girls wearing different dresses. Swatches of cloth are pinned to each document, and directions for wearing each dress are scrawled at the bottom of each page.
“You have all of these different dresses to choose from for the day. They are all in your wardrobe, and if you need help lacing up, I’m sure Charlotte would be thrilled to help you. She will be outside of your door in five minutes—no earlier, and no later.” She smiles and kisses my cheek again. I don’t hiss this time, but I can’t keep myself from flinching. “You will be fine, Emmeline. I know you will.”
How can she possibly know that?
She can’t.
No one can.
She doesn’t live inside my head. She isn’t trapped inside my mind, protecting herself against my nightmares and my delusions and my memories. She doesn’t see the blood. She doesn’t see the fire and she doesn’t hear the screaming.
I hear the screaming….
I hear it so much.
The screams plague me at night, when I try to sleep. They are so loud, and they are so disruptive, and they are so chilling. Sometimes, when they’ve been racketing against my brain for hours, for days, for weeks, I bury my face in my pillows, crush them against my ears, and I cry. I sob until I forget the screams. They go away when I forget them. I can finally pull my head out of my pillow and collapse from exhaustion.
I’m so tired.
I’m so tired, and I can’t do this. Not today. My father must understand…He must understand why I cannot face my classmates, why I cannot face him, why I cannot face the delegate. Not today.
I look up, determined to shove the documents back into Jacqueline’s hands, or else leave them to be trampled on the floor, but she has disappeared. The long dormitory hallway is empty, and the sound of girls’ excited voices drift lazily to my ears.
Of course. There are other girls that live in this place. It isn’t just me.
“Emmeline…”
I startle and whirl around, my heart pounding in my chest. A girl, smaller and thinner than me, with honey blond hair and grey eyes, stands before me, her face full of concern.
I think her name is Demetria.
“Aren’t you cold?” she asks.
I blink and glance down at my body. I’m still wearing my chemise and my dressing gown. I look at Demetria, who’s wrapped in a crisp, blue silk. Her ears and her neck drip pearls, and her coiffed hair boasts a blue silk ribbon.
I suddenly feel very naked.
I shake my head slowly. I may feel naked, but I do not feel cold. I only feel the cold when I am afraid. When I am haunted. When the cold seeps from my mind and into my body.
I haven’t felt physically cold in three years.
Demetria’s already soft features soften even further, and she moves past me to open my door.
I didn’t know it had shut.
“Come,” she says. “Let’s get you dressed. We can’t have you standing outside in your underwear, now can we?”
December 15, 1859
I’m sorry…
I seem to be thinking that so much. I just tell everyone ‘sorry’ over and over again in my head without actually saying the words out loud. I feel that if I did say the words aloud, I would only generate more contempt among those who are demanding my apologies.
But I am sorry to you, trees. I promised my honesty. I promised I’d tell you everything. I can’t…Right now, if I tell you what happened ten days ago…If I tell you what prompted those words…Writing it all down in ink would make it real. I’d be forced to acknowledge that such a thing actually happened and to acknowledge such a thing as that…
I should take my own life. I should…but, I don’t want to. I can’t. The thought of ceasing to exist holds allure and terror all at the same time. I don’t want to stop existing.
I don’t really want to exist, either.
I cried today. Crying is a funny thing. We get sad or frustrated or angry or stressed and our eyes leak and our shoulders shake and our noses run and it’s hard to breathe. When I cry, my mind is always at war with itself. I want everyone to leave me alone. I don’t want to be heard. I don’t want people to know I’m crying, because even though I think that crying is a perfectly acceptable release of emotion, many people think that it’s a sign of weakness. Something to be ridiculed. Something to be made fun of.
But…at the same time…I want someone to hear me. I want someone to slip into my room and sneak their arms around me when I’m not looking. I want to cry into their shoulder and I want them to tell me everything’s going to be okay, even if it isn’t. Even if okay is the farthest thing from what I am. I still want to be told everything’s going to be all right.
So I just cry into my pillow. I cry as loud as I can and I let the cotton and silk muffle my sobs. That way, only someone who cares, only someone who’s listening, will hear my tears. Only someone who’s paying attention will hear how my mind tears the oxygen from my lungs.
Two hours ago, I appeared to have all the beauty of a waif.
Now, I feel like a belle from the American South. My father traveled to America once, and he came back with an entire trunkful of new dresses for me, in the fashion of the Southern Belles. I wore those dresses more than I ever wore anything in my entire life.
They are rags now, packed back in their trunk, collecting dust in the Academy’s 5th floor—the Attic.
Demetria curled my hair and pinned it to my head with pins adorned with tiny pink rose buds, so my hair appears to grow a garden.
My mother once told me that if I wanted to impress a gentleman, I must wear pink, because my hair is black and my eyes are brown.
Or rather, ‘amber,’ as Elijah told me once.
I finger the lace draped over the pale pink bodice, inspecting the pattern of roses at the bottom of my dress. Unbearably tight bodice, unbearably large, sweeping skirt.
The fashion of what many have come to call The Victorian Era—all on account of the widowed queen of England.
“My goodness, Emmeline,” Demetria says, inspecting me with a small smile. “You are so beautiful. Why must you hide your beauty behind your hair and your dark dresses?”
I pretend to be very interested in a fictional piece of lint on my shoulder.
“You look just like her, you know.”
I glance at Demetria sharply.
She smiles. “You do. Your hair is your father’s, but your face is all hers.”
I force a small smile, and I pretend to be happy, but the shards of my heart are cracking in two. I’d nearly forgotten my mother’s face, and I was thankful. Now…now I shall not be able to look in a mirror without being reminded of my mother.
Demetria holds her hand out and I take it. “Come,” she says, pulling me out of my room. “Let us go meet this royal delegate.”
December 21, 1859
I’ll tell you tomorrow.
I promise.
I promise I’ll tell you everything tomorrow.
Chapter Two
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body…
~Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
Richard Wilbur
We are twenty shades of a rainbow.
We are twenty porcelain dolls, dressed and dusted, eagerly awaiting a potential mother, eagerly awaiting a little girl’s careful embrace.
We are twenty pairs of blue lips.
We are forty shaking hands, two hundred fingers red with cold.
We are cloaks and fur and cloudy breath.
The air is crisp and sharp, slicing through my skin and whipping my hair and my skirts around me as I stand tall, shivering in the icy winter sun, awaiting the arrival of the delegate.
My father stands to my right. I forget all too often, exactly how tall he is. He must be over six feet. I always see him hulking behind his enormous, heavy desk, and though it sits on a raised platform, it still diminishes his stature. He’s dressed in pitch black, his neatly combed, graying hair nearly completely covered by a tall hat that I suspect has been dusted off very recently.
He looks down at me—me, at least seven inches shorter than he—and smiles softly.
I jerk my eyes back onto the Academy’s drive.
“Are you feeling well, Emmeline?”
To my left stand nineteen colorfully dressed girls, each with their parasols resting gently against their shoulders, their silky gloves protecting their hands.
I blink.
I am the only one without a parasol…or gloves….
I shift with the uncomfortable realization, the gravel of the drive crunching under my boots. I must look ridiculous to the outside observer. No parasol or gloves to protect my skin, to keep it pale.
I sigh and rub my hands together, moving them behind me and clasping them together. I cannot hide my lack of a parasol, but I can hide my lack of gloves.
My father nudges my arm with his elbow. I turn to him.
“Here,” he says, holding out a pair of silk gloves and a small, white parasol. “They are Charlene’s, but I asked her to let you borrow them until you are able to retrieve your own.”
There is no circumstance in this world in which I would willingly touch or use anything that belongs to Charlene. I would honestly rather die. I keep my hands clasped together and turn back toward the drive, focusing intently on the way the road curves up in a semicircle toward the Academy.
My father sighs and turns to hand the gloves and parasol back to Charlene, who sounds all too happy to have them back. “She wouldn’t take them.”
“Of course she wouldn’t,” Charlene replies, slipping her gloves over her hands. “She’s much too proud. She would not accept help from me if her life depended on it.”
It is difficult to believe that Charlene and I would ever agree on anything…
But there it is.
The willow trees that line the drive weep in the wind, their thin branches bent and burdened. The sun is bright.
It is so far away from us. It must take so much concentration to melt all of this snow, all of this ice. No wonder it takes him months and months to do it. Winter blows in with a rage, destructive, caring not if he kills everything in his path. But spring. Spring and the Sun must work so hard, must work together. The work to melt Winter’s destruction must be so painstaking, and they must be so careful, so as not to hurt the newborn flowers, and the healing trees.
How exhausting their work must be.
“There they are!”
Whispers and giggles tear through our small party of girls. My father, Charlene, and Jacqueline all shift their weight, no doubt feeling the same anticipation as we, but too well-mannered and ‘grown up’ to show it.
I remain absolutely still.
The distant sound of horse hooves against snow and gravel fight through the spiky air and reach my ears. I squint my eyes, trying to make out the small traveling party. Four horses in front, their riders dressed in the black uniforms of the army, two carriages, one large and ornate, and one small and boxy, and six more horses in the back, their riders dressed alike.
The horses are blinded by little leather straps on their harnesses and do not see us, but the girls of the Academy certainly see them.
“Oh, would you look at the darling things?”
“They must be awfully cold.”
“How far away is Arana?”
“They must have ridden hundreds and hundreds of miles to arrive here.”
“I wonder what the message is.”
“Never mind the horses, and never mind the message! I dearly hope the soldiers are as handsome as they appear from far away.”
“Girls,” my father admonishes. His voice is quiet, but commanding, and every single girl hears him. I do not know how. Perhaps his voice is cutting. Perhaps it is different, a distinguishable bass rumbling through so many altos and sopranos. The girls silence themselves and stand as tall as the soldiers atop their horses.
“When the delegate arrives,” my father continues, “You will line up behind Emmeline, who will line up behind Miss Jacqueline. I will introduce first myself. Next, I shall introduce Miss Charlene. I will then introduce Miss Jacqueline. Finally, I will introduce each of you in succession. When I say your name, you are to curtsy, give your hand to the delegate and to his assistant, and then you will line back up as you are now. Am I understood?”
A chorus of ‘Yes, Sirs’ and the delegate’s carriage is rolls to a stop in front of us, the horses snorting in the chilly air, stamping their hooves against the ground.
A soldier slides off his horse and walks with painfully precise steps to the ornate carriage, moving in such a way that one might think his actions were rehearsed.
Perhaps they were.
I bite my lip as he wraps a gloved hand around the handle of the carriage door and pulls it open, immediately saluting.
Of course they were rehearsed. He is a soldier. Nearly everything he does is rehearsed.
An ancient looking man with trembling hands and a sagging neck steps shakily out of the carriage. He’s wrapped heavily in dark furs, a hat upon his nearly bald head. Another soldier slides off his horse and rushes to help the man, but the man refuses. He holds up a hand, unable to steady it, and shakes his wizened head. The soldier steps back and mirrors the other soldier’s salute. The old man lifts a pair of spectacles hanging around his neck on a thin cord, and perches them on his nose, blinking at all of us curiously.
Another man—a boy, really—jumps out of the carriage, much more spry and energetic than the man before him. His hair is straight and brown, if a bit windswept, and he is dressed in a simple suit, a dark cloak draped around his broad shoulders. He straightens up after hitting the ground and looks at all of us with large, light blue eyes. He smiles and bows slightly, sending the girls beside me tittering.
These girls act as if they are the most elite, mature women on the earth.
All one must do to dissolve them into giggling five year old schoolgirls is place a bit of testosterone in their midst.
“Welcome, Lord Hugo, to Willowshire Aca—“
A whistle, a squish, a thud, and a grunt cut my father off.
One of the girls screams.
A soldier shouts.
I turn slowly, as if stuck in a large pot of warm honey, my heart stabbing at the inside of my chest.
There, on the ground, is one of the soldiers from the back of the traveling party, his face pale, his eyes wide, his mouth frozen in surprise, an arrow sticking out of his back. I can see the blood spreading across his black cloak, wet and splotchy.
Chaos erupts.
The girls are screaming. A few are crying. One is heaving over a pile of vomit on the ground, which makes me wonder just how long I was staring at the dead soldier. Sometimes I vanish inside my head for a few seconds, and I emerge to find that hours have passed.
It’s like waking from a dream.
Slowly, the water is clearing and I’m drifting to the surface, still frozen to the ground, still shocked…and then I’m rocketed skyward and suddenly I’m slammed back into my right mind. Traumatic events—battle scenes—only happen slowly for a short amount of time. At least, in my experience. After that short amount of time, however, everything is speeding, galloping around with the speed of a horse.
More soldiers are falling to the ground and my father is trying his best to herd the girls into the Academy. The soldiers are forming a barrier around the delegate, but paying no heed to their injured comrades writhing on the ground, moaning with pain.
Soldiers are human, too.
Without much thought, I pick up my skirts and run to my father. He lifts his arms, to command the girls’ attention, I think, and I see exactly what I’m looking for—a knife handle, protruding from the pocket of his trousers. I yank the knife out of his pocket and turn and run, ignoring his shouts of warning and anger.
“Emmeline!” he yells. “Emmeline, come back here! You cannot defend yourself.”
I reach the carriage, panting heavily, my corset constricting my lungs. I bend down and gather my hem in my arms, lifting the material so I can see it clearly. I hold the knife in between my teeth and hold up one end of the silk of my gown. I take the knife and slice into my dress, creating a large tear at my hem. I drop the knife to the ground, not caring that it’s my father’s, not caring what happens to it, and I begin to tear at the material of my hem, creating long strips of silk.
Silk is by no means the most absorbent of cloths.
But it is what I have, and it is what I will make do with.
I kneel down by the nearest fallen soldier, who has an arrow sticking out of his right hip. His face is ashen and covered with dirt, and he is shivering, no doubt from the freezing winter air. I give him my best look of sympathy.
What I must do will not be pleasant.
I press the palm of my hand to his mouth, praying to God that he does not scream. I cannot see who our attackers are, but I can hear them. I can hear their shouts and I can hear the screams of the soldiers from the traveling party, and I can hear the arrows of the attackers finding their marks.
I do not want them to hear us.
I ignore the man’s wide eyes, try to fight his struggling. He is too cold and too weak to truly fight me, but his attempts weigh on my chest. I wrap my free hand around the arrow protruding from his side and yank, pressing harder on his mouth as he screams in pain. I toss the arrow to the side and pull my hand from his mouth, pulling a strip of silk from my shoulder. I begin to wrap it as tightly around the soldier’s side as I possibly can, to staunch the blood, and I tie it off.
He’s gasping on the ground, writhing in pain, his eyes squeezed shut. I have to help him off the ground. He must make it inside the walls of the Academy, to Doctor James, or he might not live to see another day. With a grimace, I stand and grab one of his hands with both of mine and pull as hard as I can. I only succeed in dragging him across the ground, which makes him yell louder.
I can’t let him die.
I can’t let him die.
I can’t try to save him, only for him to die anyway.
I cannot have more innocent blood on my crimson hands.
The images of my mother’s body and the fire are winning in my mind. They are pushing past the walls I threw up hastily, so I could save some of these soldiers’ lives, and they are beginning to flash before my eyes.
The soldier’s body bursts into flames and I drop his hand with a loud gasp, jerking away from him as the flames lick up his clothes. I can’t get enough oxygen into my lungs and the fire is everywhere now. Night is creeping into my eyes and suddenly I know what is happening.
I squeeze my eyes shut and clench my fists tightly.
I cannot faint.
I cannot lose consciousness.
I will not faint.
“What on earth are you doing, girl?”
I open my eyes. The boy from the carriage is standing in front of me, a sword in one hand, an arrow in the other. His eyebrows are raised and his lips are pressed together in obvious disapproval.
I bend down and grab both of the man’s hands, pulling as hard as I can, and once again only succeeding in dragging him across the ground. He yells in pain, swearing like a sailor, and I drop his hands to the ground, my spine rigid. I look around in panic, searching for the attackers, hoping desperately that one of them didn’t think this soldier’s scream different from the rest…
And I find myself suddenly airborne.
I scream and begin to writhe, desperate to escape my assailant’s arms, desperate to flee. I reach for one of my strips of silk—something, anything I can use as a weapon—but my shoulder is empty. The silk strips must have fallen off my shoulder when I was picked up.
The arms around me grip tighter, despite my struggling, and I slowly become aware of the words my attacker is speaking.
“Please,” he says. “Please, be quiet! I am trying to get you inside the Academy, where you’ll be safe.”
It’s the boy.
I let myself go limp in his arms and he grunts, but his grip loosens. Without warning, I jerk to the side, rolling out of his arms and toppling onto the ground. He shouts and falls backward, his arms flapping in the air for balance—an action I may have found comical under other circumstances. I heave myself to my feet.
An arrow thuds into the ground next to me and I yelp, jumping back.
From here, I can see our attackers.
There are perhaps twelve of them. They all ride black horses. They all appear to be archers. They are cloaked in black, and though many have their hoods up, three do not. Their heads are wrapped in what look to be white bandages, with slits cut in the material for eyes and for the nostrils. There is no slit for the mouth. Where the mouth would be cut, there is a large, red ‘x’ drawn on the material.
They are shooting with deadly accuracy.
One by one, the remaining soldiers are dropping to the ground with cries of pain and screams of surprise, and the snow is turning red.
I glance back at the boy, who is just getting to his feet. I gather my skirts, and I run again, toward the fallen soldiers, desperate to save those who may still be alive. I still have a bodice and I still have lace, and I still have miles and miles of petticoats and slips beneath my gown. If I have to, I will strip naked. If my clothes can save lives…
I hear a loud whinny and I jerk to a stop. I look up, locking eyes with one of the attackers, my veins freezing to ice.
He pulls his horse up in front of me and reaches behind him for an arrow. I cannot see his eyes. All I see is blackness. Two black holes. An expressionless mask.
I’m finally going to die, I think miserably.
I feel the fear of pain and the fear of death race prickle my skin.
I don’t want to die.
The rider pulls the string of the bow with the arrow, aiming…
I shut my eyes…
And my face kisses the gravel of the drive.
I gasp and roll onto my back, just in time to see the boy from the carriage standing over me. The rider lets the arrow fly straight at the boy’s heart, but the boy moves so that the arrow embeds itself in his arm. He lets out a low growl of pain and flips his sword in his hand. He spins lightly on his feet and his blade flashes in the sun. The horse neighs loudly and rears up on its hind legs. When its hooves touch the ground, it crumples, throwing the rider off in one swift motion.
The rider picks himself up off the ground and makes a motion in the air with his hand. A loud, high pitched whistle pierces the air, and very suddenly, many more whistles, all at different pitches, each pitch stacked on top of the previous one, join the first whistle. I roll onto my stomach and bury my face in the gravel, clamping my hands over my ears.
When I lift my head again, the riders are gone.
“You are an incredibly stupid girl.”
I roll over onto my back and look up at the boy, who is examining the arrow he pulled from his arm with a grimace. I scramble to my feet, dusting the gravel off the back of my dress. I’m wet and I’m frozen. My skin is scraped up from being shoved to the ground. My hair has half fallen out. My dress is torn to shreds.
And I must tear it more.
I bend down and tear another strip of silk off my dress, moving to the boy’s side.
“I’m quite all right, I promise,” he says. “Nothing immensely important was hit.”
I shake my head and pull his arm up, wrapping the strip of cloth tightly around his arm and tying it off.
“What is your name, girl?” he asks, gingerly placing his arm back at his side. He uses his uninjured hand to slide the arrow into his belt.
I ignore him and tear another strip of my dress, moving away to another soldier, who seems to have lost consciousness. His face is pale and I might think him dead, if not for the shallow rise and fall of his chest. I kneel beside him and use the hole in the material of his trousers to tear the rest of his pants leg off. He must have pulled the arrow out himself. There is a gaping hole in his thigh, angry and red and screaming. I bite down on my tongue, forcing back the images of blood and sword wounds the man’s injury brings to my mind. I wrap the strip of my dress around his leg.
He may lose his leg, but at least he’ll live.
All I care about is whether or not these soldiers live. I do not care if they never walk again. I do not care if they never speak again. All I care about is if they continue to breathe, if they continue to function in some way, shape, or form.
It’s more than I was able to do for my mother and Elijah.
Within the hour, I’ve bandaged seven men, thirteen wounds, and I’ve torn apart my entire skirt and every bit of lace attached to my gown. My hair is a mess of dark knots near the small of my back, every single pin having fallen out somewhere along the way. I’m covered in gravel and my skin is smeared with dirt.
And I’m wet.
The snow clings to my dress and my skin and it melts in the sun and I’m wet.
I finish the last soldier’s bandages and stand up, dusting my hands off on my petticoat.
“Are you a mute?” a voice asks.
I startle and whirl. The boy has been following me and watching me this entire time.
He walks over to the carriages and kicks at the remnants of one of the wheels.
“They smashed the thing to splinters,” he says. I can hear the restraint in his voice. He’s trying to swallow his anger. I know that sound, because I know how it feels in your throat…when you try to shove the lump of emotion back down into your stomach. “Every single wheel,” he continues, “is smashed. Our horses have fled. And all for what? They didn’t steal anything. They didn’t kill Hugo, and they didn’t kill me.”
He pulls the door of the plain, boxy carriage open and yanks a trunk out from the inside, swearing under his breath as he forgets the injury in his arm. I tear a strip of cotton from the bottom of my petticoat and rush to him, pulling his arm up and wrapping the cotton around it. The blood from his injury went through the first bandage when he used it.
How ignorant can one be?
The boy sighs and leans forward to pull another trunk out, while I continue to wrap his arm up. “I don’t believe I’ve properly introduced myself,” he says. “My name is Isaac. Isaac Johnson. I accompany the Lord Hugo on all of his endeavors as delegate of the King.”
I nod and dip into a small curtsy.
Isaac laughs, his blue eyes lighting up as he does so. “I don’t suppose you feel inclined to tell me your name?”
I hold up a finger and turn my back to him. I reach into the front of my dress and pull a small, polished wooden stick—I never know when I might need to write, and I never know on what I might need to write—from the inside of my corset. I turn back to Isaac and bend down, writing my name in the gravel of the drive.
Emmeline Avery.
I stand back up, watching Isaac read my name, clutching the stick in my hand.
“Emmeline,” he says softly. He peers back at me. “And Avery…as in the daughter of the Headmaster of this Academy?”
I smile and nod.
He holds his hand out and I place mine inside of it. He brings my hand to his lips and smiles at me. “I am honored to meet you, Miss Emmeline.”
I nod again.
I am surprised he hasn’t heard of my…condition. Or, if he has, he hasn’t brought it up. Nearly everyone in Willowshire, and nearly everyone in Arana, has heard about how the Headmaster of Willowshire Academy beheaded his own wife, how he also tortured his daughter’s closest friend to his death, and how his daughter lost her mind in the midst of it all.
It’s a wonder that families still send their daughters to school here.
I suppose it’s because most of the country has sided with my father. They think he was right to do what he did.
But they don’t know the whole story.
I’m the only one still alive who knows the whole story.
Charlene doesn’t know the whole story.
My father doesn’t even know the whole story.
“I want every available staff member and soldier out there looking for my daughter!”
I’m pulled from my thoughts by the sound of my father’s voice, angry and loud. Isaac and I both turn in the direction of the Academy, where my father, Charlene, a soldier, and Jacqueline stand in the doorway, arguing. Charlene’s face is the picture of boredom. My father’s eyes are wide and his face is turning red. The soldier’s face is a mask of stone and Jacqueline is pale and tight-lipped.
I glance at Isaac, whose eyes are wide. I pick up my skirts—well, what’s left of them—and I run to the Academy.
“My daughter is a thousand times more important than any soldier on the face of this earth. I will not have her missing because you can’t—“
Jacqueline sees me first. Her eyes widen and she gasps. She covers her mouth with her hands and walks toward me, taking me in with her eyes.
I must look horrendous.
“Emmeline!” she breathes. “What on earth—“
Before she can finish, my father’s covered the distance between us and has wrapped his arms around me more tightly than I ever thought possible. For a moment, I panic, and I struggle. Is he trying to choke me? Is he going to kill me and call it an accident? He was so overcome with relief that he forgot himself and held me too hard?
His grip isn’t tight enough for that.
Despite my struggling, he’s managing to hold onto me, and I think his body might be shaking. I stop struggling, but I stay stiff. My breathing is coming more quickly.
Don’t panic.
Don’t panic.
“My god,” my father says, pulling away from me and holding me by my shoulders. His eyes inspect me, hunting for injuries, wide with shock at the state of my dress.
Hi guys! For those of you who care about my personal project (the novel I'm writing, called Willowshire) I have an excerpt here. I'm testing out a couple relationships in this excerpt, and also pacing and description. PLEASE, read and give feedback! You can give me feedback in my inbox, or simply reblog, add tags, captions, whatever. I'll read them all. The more people review this and give CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM the better. Even 'Wow, I really like it, but I think this could have been done better' will help!
His mother’s eyes, though colored green, were like chips of ice nestled in a beautiful bird’s nest—a nasty surprise for the poor, unassuming blue jay that fluttered in to rest in warmth and comfort. Her mouth, though beautiful, was set into a hard, firm line, and her chin was lifted regally. She was every inch a queen, but she didn’t have a single drop of the blood of a mother—not as Daemon thought she ought to. She was not warm or comforting. She’d never held him tightly to her chest and rocked him to sleep in the hours after the moon had been swallowed by the horizon and before the sun awoke to illuminate the sky. She’d never woken him up by sitting on the edge of his bed and pushing his hair back from his forehead, stroking his cheek with her thumb as she gave his sleepy little eyes time to adjust to the light of a new day. She’d never shown him any affection, and he resented her for it.
Her gaze was trained on him now, cold and unforgiving—unforgiving for defending a girl who had the insolence to stand up for her people, to stand tall and firm in the face of death and punishment. “Why are you defending this girl, Prince Daemon?”
Prince Daemon. Always Prince Daemon. Never just Daemon. Never ‘my son.’ He glanced at Emmeline, whose eyes were trained on the polished floor in front of her, as if the veins of silver running in streaks through the marble fascinated her. Her hands were folded in front of her, and he realized why her stance struck a nerve of his:
This wasn’t the Emmeline he knew. Where was the Emmeline who had marched alone into a rebel camp with nothing but a small knife she didn’t even know how to use and demanded to speak with their leader? Where was the Emmeline who’d sat up in her sickbed and desperately told him that she was in love with him, and that she couldn’t lie to him anymore because he meant so much to her, and she felt horrible for keeping secrets from him? Where was the Emmeline who’d fallen out of a tree and knocked him to the ground, and then, instead of apologizing like any good, submissive young lady who was the student of a finishing school would, reprimanded him for staring up her skirts?
“I am defending her because she did nothing wrong, my queen.” The words were poison on his tongue. Emmeline did not need his defense, and her silence tore at the back of his mind.
His mother’s gaze did not waver. “She snuck out of the Ivory Castle, stole a horse, and rode to a rebel encampment, demanding that they enlist her immediately, and now she won’t speak a word when we ask her about the location of this encampment. We’ve given her a chance to redeem herself, young prince, and she has not taken it.”
“She didn’t take it,” Daemon said slowly, “because she cannot remember the encampment’s location. She stumbled on the encampment by accident—it’s true, yes, she was hoping to find a camp—but the one she found, she found quite arbitrarily. She would not be able to remember how she got there.”
Daemon’s father stood from his throne and stepped forward, his expression harder, even, than his wife’s. “And the return journey?”
“She was unconscious for half of it,” Daemon said quickly. “She did not awake until we were well hidden in an old Nomad cave two days later.”
“Why can you not remember the location, Prince Daemon?” The queen also stood up, but she stood a couple of feet behind her husband, her hands crossed in front of her in much the same way as Emmeline’s.
Emmeline finally looked up and glanced at Daemon, her blue eyes wide. Daemon was silent.
“It seems to me,” his father said, descending the steps of the dais, his cloak sliding down behind him. “That you are defending more than this girl. Did something happen while you were a…visitor…to this rebel camp?”
Daemon shook his head. “No, Father. I rode in, I paid the ransom for Emmeline, and I escaped with her unconscious on the back of my horse.”
“But surely you had to know the location of the camp in order to retrieve her.”
Daemon stared straight ahead at the cold stone walls of the throne room. “I knew nothing but the direction in which she had ridden. I tracked her the rest of the way there, and I tracked my way back.”
“Your Highness,” Emmeline spoke. “With all due respect, though I cannot remember the exact location of the encampment, and neither, I think, can the Prince, I do know that it lies west of here, and that it is close to a fortnight’s journey.”
The King gave her a hard look. “I don’t recall permitting you to speak, girl.”
Emmeline was silent at that, but she lifted her chin and her eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. It was this small act of defiance that nearly made Daemon breathe a loud sigh of relief. Rebellious, stubborn Emmeline was still there. The thought gave him courage. After all, it was infinitely easier to fight a battle if one had a partner. Daemon, without even glancing at Emmeline, stepped between her and his father. “You asked her to speak earlier when you asked her the location of the encampment. She simply answered a bit later than expected. She did, however, speak with permission.”
Daemon’s father laughed slightly. “So she did.” He stepped the side so he could see Emmeline. “Are you sure it is in the west, girl?”
Emmeline’s gaze shifted from the back wall to the King. “With all due respect, Your Majesty, as the Ivory Castle sits in view of the eastern sea, the only direction in which for me to go was west, so, yes, I am sure.”
The king nodded curtly. “Thank you for your cooperation.” He looked toward the back of the room and held a hand up, “Guards, lead her down to the prisons. She will be kept there until further notice.”
Emmeline was stoic as the guards tied her hands behind her back with stout rope, her gaze never shifting from the stone wall above the queen’s crown and in between the long, crimson tapestries.
Daemon, however, was rather upset. He took a step toward his father, gesturing to Emmeline behind him. “She did what you asked! Why are you treating her like a criminal?”
The king turned on the steps, which he’d been ascending on his way back to his throne and his wife. He regarded his son with a cool stare. “She is a criminal. Therefore, she shall be treated like one.”
Daemon glanced behind him at Emmeline, whose gaze had moved from the wall to him, her blue eyes slightly wider than they’d been before. He looked back at his father, trying to calm himself, trying to remember what Chris had told him about speaking to their parents, about trying to win arguments. Be calm, Daemon. Don’t do anything rash. Nothing impulsive. You know how Mother and Father despise disorder, how they loathe people controlled by their emotions.
“She was driven by grief,” Daemon said, his voice wavering ever so slightly at the end of his sentence. “She did something impulsive, yes, but not necessarily wrong.”
The queen let out a harsh, barking laugh. “Enlisting in a rebel army? That is not wrong? That is not traitorous? Do explain, Daemon.”
Daemon looked at his mother. “When I arrived at the encampment, I asked where she was. I fully expected her to be serving them—to be one of them. A traitor. Punishable by death. I was prepared to tell her so myself. They told me, however, that she was in a tent, tied to a pole upholding the center of the canvas and gagged, because they were going to hold her for ransom. She hadn’t tried to join them at all. She’d tried to negotiate for peace…on her own.”
“Then she assumed a position that was not hers to take,” the king said dismissively. “She took the duties of her king upon herself, which is also treason, also punishable by death. I am being merciful in not executing her. She will still be in the prisons, because she will still be punished for her crimes, though not as severely as she might have been.”
The guards began tugging Emmeline away as Daemon watched helplessly, void of any power to intervene. The king seemed to sense his son’s distress.
“Do not concern yourself over her, Daemon. She is nothing to you.”
Daemon bit his lip, closing his eyes and willing his father to stop, but he didn’t.
“She’s a pretty little thing, yes, but there are thousands of other girls like her. Girls who will do what they are told, like they are expected. Girls who will submit to the wishes of their betters, who recognize that they were created to serve men. Miss Avery does not understand that. She will learn her place soon enough, and when she is…properly trained…perhaps she will be deemed appropriate for your service.”
Daemon’s eyes flew open. Emmeline and the guards weren’t yet halfway across the throne room, and at his silence, she turned briefly to look at him.
She was terrified. He could see it in her slate blue eyes, those eyes the color of a cloudy sky on the eve of night, and he could see it in the way her bottom lip trembled ever so slightly. Another person would be unable to read this fear, but Daemon—Daemon knew Emmeline, and she knew him.
Fury massed inside Daemon’s chest, knotting his stomach tightly, and he could almost see a swirling vortex or anger and rage consuming the inside of his body. His feet seemed to move of their own volition, carrying him slowly, then briskly, then very quickly, until he was running across the throne room to Emmeline. Time seemed to freeze, and he barely registered the opening and closing of a door before he’d reached Emmeline.
Without stopping, without warning, without hesitation or (), he closed the gap between them. The guards stepped back in surprise (and fear of what he might do to them if they didn’t), and Daemon heard a little gasp from the corner of the room before the sound of his blood rushing in his ears drowned out all other noise. Daemon took Emmeline’s face in his hands and pulled her roughly against him. She gasped in surprise at the sudden motion, stumbling, because her hands were tied behind her back and she could not use them to balance herself. Before anybody in the room could overcome their shock enough to object or cry out, Daemon bent down and kissed Emmeline with every ounce of anger he had in his body, his lips pressed hard against hers, asking and wanting. Emmeline stiffened in surprise, her back bent slightly from his weight and force, her eyes wide open. Daemon moved his hands down from her cheeks and he wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly against him.
Emmeline’s eyes fluttered closed and she relaxed into his arms, allowing Daemon to kiss her, and allowing herself to—finally—kiss him back. After what seemed only a moment, Daemon pulled back, touching his forehead to Emmeline’s. She looked up at him with wide eyes and he laughed breathlessly. “I’m sorry it took me so long to answer,” he whispered.
She smiled, her eyes alight. “It’s all right. I heard you in the cave.”
Daemon made a noise of surprise. “You did?”
Emmeline’s smile turned into a smirk.
“Daemon Arthfael Jonathon Kensington!” The king tore across the throne room toward his son, his face reddening with anger.
Daemon straightened up and turned away from Emmeline, his head held high, his heart pounding against his ribs. He felt like he could fly. “Yes, Father?”
There was a loud, resounding crack as the back of the king’s hand connected with his son’s cheek, followed by several loud gasps, and one very loud hiccup. Daemon only grinned. “I’m not going to apologize, Father. Not to you. Not to Mother. Not to Chris. Not to Emmeline. I’m not apologizing to anyone, because I’ve wanted to do that for a very long time.”
The king raised his eyebrows. “Oh? If not to me, your king, your father, then perhaps you will apologize to your fiancée?”
Daemon followed his father’s extended arm and pointed finger to the corner of the room, where Demetria stood by the door, her face painted with pain and betrayal, streaked with tears. She’d been the one who gasped right before he’d kissed Emmeline. She’d been the one who’d hiccupped. Daemon felt his heart sink.
Behind him, Emmeline gasped. “Oh no,” she breathed, her voice laced with horror. “Oh no, Demetria…” She tried to go to her friend, but Demetria gave another hiccup and shook her head, her lips pressed together, and she pushed open the heavy wooden door and fled into the hallway.
Daemon swallowed. He’d completely forgotten about Demetria.
*giggles* I just wrote this and I'm real proud of it.
"Emmeline took a shuddering breath and leaned in on an impulse—an instinct so primal, so carnal, she could feel the warmth of it growing in her chest, spreading like a hot cup of tea on a crisp, cold day, pushing against her bones and urging her closer, closer, closer, until she felt the warm skin of his lips brush softly against her own."
