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SELINA
When you live in the opulent palace of Kyrene, it’s easy to forget what the real world out there looks like. In the palace, surrounded by my extended family of princes and princesses, dressed in bejeweled gowns and slippers embroidered with gems, having servants attend to my every need, I forget that most of the people in the world live hand to mouth.
Reality hits me right in the face as I hurry through the streets of the town, a hood pulled low over my face, the stench of sewage and trash mingling with that of unwashed bodies and animal manure. I’ve exchanged my silken slippers for leather bottines and my satin gowns for a woolen travel dress and cloak, and I still feel exposed to the wary glances of the passersby and the cold.
I never realized how warm the palace is kept for our comfort, so that we can stroll around its long corridors and lounge in the parlors dressed in fine fabrics that do little to protect us from the elements.
It’s what being a princess means, I suppose. Being kept apart, protected and cherished like a crown jewel. I used to love it, soak in the attention, send the servants to bring me my favorite snacks, my favorite flowers.
Not only a princess but one of the youngest in the palace, used to my cousins coddling me as I grew up. Playing with me.
Though, now I’m all grown up and the games have become reality.
See, flowers are my weakness. I have pots on my window sill, I ask for bouquets to be brought to me every day to arrange in vases.
But flowers are what got me in trouble in the first place, and that’s the least of it… because everything has changed.
Here is my confession. I did something really bad. A few weeks ago, I was in the haunted woods with my cousin Milhelmina. Our cousin Lily dared us to pick flowers there and I of course was all for it. I had heard say that rare flowers grow in the haunted woods—Fae flowers and goblin roses and though the tales say you’re not supposed to pick any, I wanted at least to see them.
Nothing wrong with looking, right?
That’s what I thought, too, but Milhelmina—Mina for friends… She was struck by a Fae disease. She started coughing blood and fading away. It happened almost instantly. By the time we were back from the woods, she was bed-ridden, and all the physicians the Crown called to examine her said the same.
There is no cure from Fae-shot.
I wasn’t struck down and I still don’t know why. After all, I was the one who picked that one flower, while Mina had only looked around. Had she picked flowers while I wasn’t looking? It’s possible.
Point is, I haven’t seen Mina in months. I’ve looked for her in the palace but can’t find her. Nobody seems to know her whereabouts. Someone told me she was taken away in the hopes of finding a cure. Others told me they think she died. I’ve mourned her. I’ve cried.
And as for me… I don’t feel like a crown jewel anymore. I don’t feel like the child princess I used to be. Something has shifted in me. Something has broken. Is this what it feels like, being an adult, facing the results of your actions and swallowing bitterness?
But that’s not all. Apart from the guilt I feel for surviving unscathed, I left something behind in the woods and I need it back. Urgently. My honor depends on it.
It’s something a suitor gave me as a token of his affections.
A prince.
A token I dropped in my hurry to leave that day. I must have dropped it. I’ve looked everywhere else I’ve been, and I sort of remember it snagging on a branch.
I should have made sure I had it as we ran back to the palace.
I should have stayed in the palace and not gone traipsing through the haunted woods.
I should havebeena jewel in the crown of Kyrene—quietly shining, modestly clad, encased in gold and silver, pretty and inoffensive, ready for any suitor to pluck and marry.
Instead, I’m going back to the woods where I messed up in the first place.
Being an adult means that when you act without thinking, you pay for the consequences…
The haunted woods are not located far from the capital. Once you exit the city gates and cross the stone bridge over the river Everos, you can see the wooded expanse on your left, a dark patch on the land, hiding a lake and the ruins of an old manor.
Beyond the river, the streets are made mostly of dirt and the houses are more sparse and humble, made of mudbricks and wood rather than stone. Fields and woods extend in every direction, and hills fringe the horizon, dark against the distant snow-capped peaks of blue mountains.
Haunted woods cover big parts of the kingdom. The Fae battlefields where the last battles of the Great War were fought are only a day or two away, if you ride your horse hard. Some say that no other kingdom has as many gates to the land of Faerie as Kyrene.
The land of Faerie sank under when the War ended, becoming another world parallel to our own, in the event we call the Sundering. Some say Kyrene is the kingdom closer to the center of the world, where the world pillar juts up, piercing the sky, the hinge around which the world turns.