Forgotten Wife: Let the Traitors Kneel Down

The cold doesn't kill you right away.

That's what I learn over three years of winters inside a palace that stopped being a palace long before I arrived. The walls are stone, the kind that absorbs cold the way a starving body absorbs punishment,completely, without mercy, without a sound. I learn to sleep curled into myself, knees to my chest, arms wrapped around my own ribs like I'm the only thing holding myself together. Because I am.

I'm twelve years old when they lock me in here. Twelve, and already wise enough to understand that no one is coming.

The servant who brings my meals,if you can call a bowl of gray broth and half a loaf of stale bread a meal,never looks at me. She slides the tray through the gap at the bottom of the door and disappears. I listen to her footsteps fade down the corridor and I eat every single crumb. Every drop of broth. I lick the bowl clean. Not because I'm not a princess. But because I am a princess who intends to survive.

I don't want to die. That's the prayer. The only one I say anymore.

The gods don't answer, but hunger does. It speaks clearly. It tells me to get up when my body wants to stay down. It tells me to move my legs around the room in slow circles when the cold settles into my joints like gravel. It tells me to drink the water from the pitcher before it freezes, even when I don't feel thirsty.

One morning,I've stopped keeping track of months but I know it's deep winter because the draft coming through the cracked window glazes my breath white,the servant actually opens the door. She stands in the frame, wrapped in a wool cloak I'd trade my name for, and looks at me huddled in the corner under a single threadbare blanket.

"You're still alive," she says. Not with relief. More like she'd expected to find otherwise.

"Disappointed?" I ask.

She doesn't answer. But she leaves an extra blanket.

I turn thirteen. Then fourteen. Then, somewhere in the gray blur of another endless winter, fifteen.

And then spring arrives.

I know it's spring because the draft through the cracked window smells different,thawed earth and something green trying desperately to push through dead ground. I'm sitting on the floor with my back against the bed frame, watching a thin line of sunlight inch across the stone, when the door opens.

Not the bottom crack. The whole door.

The servant,a different one this time, younger, with cold eyes,walks in carrying something draped over her arms that doesn't belong anywhere near this room. Silk. Deep burgundy silk that catches the pale spring light and throws it back in ripples. Behind her, another girl carries a wooden box, and behind her, another with a hand mirror and small ceramic pots.

I stare.

"Get up," the first girl says. "The king has requested your presence."

'The king.' My father. The man who locked me in this room three years ago and apparently just remembered I existed.

"What's all that?" I ask, nodding at the dress.

"What you'll wear." She says it like it's obvious. Like the answer to every question I haven't asked yet should be obvious to me.

They dress me like they're dressing a mannequin,efficient, impersonal, not a word of explanation. The silk is beautiful and I hate that I notice. They paint my face with careful hands and brush my hair until the red of it shines, and I sit through all of it watching the servant with the cold eyes in the hand mirror, waiting.

It's when she reaches into the box a final time and produces a length of white gossamer,translucent, embroidered with silver thread, the kind of thing worn over a bride's hair,that I understand.

My stomach doesn't drop. My hands don't shake. I look at the veil and I think: so that's what this is.

"When?" I ask.

"Today," the girl says, and sets it on my head without ceremony.

The throne room hasn't changed. I'd been inside it twice before my imprisonment,once when I was small enough that the ceiling looked like another sky, once the day he told me I was no longer welcome in the main palace. The banners are the same. The guards are the same. The cold stone floor and the dais with its high-backed throne and the man sitting in it,all exactly as I left them.

King Kaelen Vorlag of Vesperia looks at me the way you look at livestock you've fattened for sale.

I walk the length of the room without rushing. Without bowing. I stop at a distance I choose and I hold his gaze and I wait.

He smiles. "You've grown."

"Three years will do that."

A muscle moves in his jaw. "Lovely. Your mother's coloring." He says your mother's the way other people say the disease's. "I trust your accommodations were adequate."

'Adequate.' I think about the frozen water pitcher. The licked-clean bowl. The extra blanket that saved my fingers.

"They were sufficient," I say.

He studies me for a long moment, and I watch him recalibrate,whatever he expected me to be after three years alone, I'm not it. His smile thins into something more honest. Something colder.

"You're to be married," he says. "Today. To the King of Argentum."

The King of Argentum. Our enemies. The nation whose soldiers burned three border villages two winters ago,I'd heard it even from my sealed room, the distant mourning sounds filtering through stone. Our enemies, who hate us, who have every reason to hate us.

"As a peace offering," I say.

"As a symbol of unity." His voice has the careful polish of a lie he's practiced. "You should be honored. Alaric Corvyn is a powerful king. You'll want for nothing."

I look at my father's face. The face of a man who let his daughter sleep on cold stone for three years. The face of a man who is selling her now the same way he might sell a horse,finding some use for her before the cost of keeping her becomes inconvenient.

I don't feel honored. I don't feel afraid. I feel nothing, which is its own kind of armor.

"Is there anything else?" I ask.

His eyes narrow. "That's all."

The Argentum soldiers wait in the courtyard,six of them, faces hard, armor polished to a gleam that hurts in the thin spring light. A carriage stands behind them, white and gilt and obscenely beautiful against the crumbling stone walls of the only palace I've known.

I walk out of the throne room door and cross the courtyard without stopping. Behind me, my father's voice carries across the cold air.

"May Malakor's light guide your path, daughter."

I know the phrase. Every child of Vesperia learns it. Malakor's light is not a blessing. Malakor is the god of endings,invoked only at death rites, at the graveside, at the burning. What my father is saying, wrapped in the formal language of farewell, is: I hope you don't come back.

My steps don't slow.

The carriage door is held open by a soldier whose face betrays exactly nothing. I climb inside. The cushioned seat beneath me is the softest surface I've touched in three years and my body registers it with something almost painful,relief so acute it lands like a blow.

The door closes.

Through the small window, I can see the palace,its abandoned wings, its cracked facade, the courtyard where no flowers grow. I reach up and draw the curtain shut.

I don't know what's waiting for me in Argentum. The thought sits in my chest, quiet and oddly calm. A king who hates me. A country that considers my people enemies. A life I didn't choose.

The carriage rolls forward.

But at least it's not here.