“He wants me to what?”
The room is spinning around me, and my chest feels too tight to breathe. This can’t be happening. This is not possible.
I sink slowly into a chair as my mother pulls the windows closed. It’s a beautiful day, a windows-open sort of day, so that must mean she doesn’t want anyone to overhear what she’s about to say.
What she’s about to repeat.
“I can only imagine how you must feel,” she says. Her voice is low and soft, like I’m a child who’d just awakened from a nightmare.
“No,” I sputter. “No, you can’t.”
She meets my eyes. There’s a hard edge to her gaze that reminds me she is still the Queen of the Kingdom of the Summer. But there’s also a fresh bruise spread across her left cheek, one she’s barely tried to disguise with powder and cream. And there’s only one person in this kingdom who would dare to lay hands on the queen. Her father. The king.
I turn away from her. My grandfather has never hit me, but then again, I’ve never given him reason to. Mother has made sure of that. My grandmother, the first queen, perished in the bloody war between the Kingdom of the Fall and the Kingdom of the Summer just a year before I was born. Mother has been the queen ever since.
Until it’s my turn to take the throne. That’s what I’ve spent my entire life doing, training for the time when Mother would step aside and I would become Queen of the Summer. When I would do what’s best for the people of our kingdom.
And I know what’s best. I’ve studied it for years, alongside Mother when I could, by myself when she felt it was too dangerous for us to work together. I’ve finally uncovered the source of the problems plaguing our kingdom, from our ailing Spirit Wood to our failing crops to the constant, worsening dust storms that blow in off the plains. All of my research, all of my measurements and calculations, point to one cause. One problem that we can fix.
The barrier has to come down.
“Mother—” I begin, trying to keep my voice level.
“The Kingdom of Stone and Sea is lovely,” Mother says. She’s staring at the closed window with a hazy look in her eyes, almost as though she’s picturing it. “And this will formalize our agreement with their king.”
I shake my head. Yes, of course, the Kingdom of Stone and Sea is lovely. And yes, sending me off like a wrapped and ribboned package for their first-born prince would formalize our claim to the ancestral lands of the Kingdom of the Summer that have been slowly, diplomatically swallowed by the painstakingly polite King of Stone and Sea.
All of which is completely beside the point.
“I’m not marrying some prince I’ve only ever met once,” I say.
Mother pulls the curtains closed and turns to me. In the half-shadow of my bedroom’s silken curtains, her bruise looks especially glaring. I wonder what they were fighting about, then realize it’s obvious. And it’s equally obvious Mother lost. No one ever wins when they go up against King Grathgore. Not even the Kingdom of the Fall.
“You will be safe,” she says, like that’s the end of it.
“Safe?” I try to laugh; it comes out strangled and harsh, like a bark. “I’m the princess! I’m supposed to serve my people, not run for cover the moment things get hard!”
Mother walks over to stand beside me. Her eyes shimmer in the thin half-light. “You’re my daughter,” she says.
I shake my head again. “But I’m so close. We’re so close. With the barrier—”
“Hush!” she hisses, with another glance at my closed and curtained windows.
Anger flares to life in my chest. I push out of the chair to look Mother in her eyes.
“No,” I snap. “We’ve kept quiet about this for long enough. It’s too important!”
“Elanerill,” she scolds, in the same tone she used to warn me that I was pushing my limits as a child.
It’s a tone I’ve heard a thousand times. It’s very rarely stopped me.
“Mother,” I reply, mimicking her tone. “The barrier is killing us. All of us. It’s killing the entire kingdom.”
“That’s enough!” she cries.
“It’s true!” I push. “You’ve seen the data. The dust storms, the crop failures. They all started when the war ended and the barrier went up. The barrier was meant to keep us safe, but it’s destroying our kingdom!”
Mother grabs my arm and squeezes so hard it hurts.
“I don’t care,” she whispers.
Shock pours through me like ice water. I yank out of her grasp and back away, blinking.
“But—” I stammer.
But she’s the one who started all this. She took me to the cursed canyon as a child, she asked if I could feel the barrier. She taught me that I must care for my kingdom at all costs, that I was born with both a burden and a responsibility. We’ve spent years researching the barrier together, in secret.
She’s been leading me to this conclusion for my entire life. How can she claim she doesn’t care?
“Elanerill.” She wraps her fingers around my wrist, and her tone shifts to something pleading. “This kingdom only exists because of the barrier. Other rulers pay us tribute because they believe we’re holding the keys that keep the wicked Kingdom of the Fall locked underground forever.”
I try to tug away. Mother’s grip on my wrist is like iron.
“You told me the Kingdom of the Fall wasn’t wicked,” I whisper.
It’s a secret, something horrible and traitorous that Mother made me swear up and down I’d never tell another soul. It was all she would tell me of the war between the two kingdoms. The war that ended when the black dragon Rensivar banished the Kingdom of the Fall to the Lands Below and then built the magical barrier to seal them away forever. The barrier that’s been slowly strangling our kingdom for my entire life.
Mother sighs, and her shoulders curl in. I don’t know what I expected in response to my dangerous words. Perhaps a flash of her incandescent temper. Not this. Not a sigh.
“Let’s try a thought experiment,” Mother says. She waves her hand at my closed windows and the obscured view of our dying kingdom. “Let’s imagine you do call a royal audience, you gather our people before the balcony, and then you tell them you’re bringing down the barrier that’s keeping the Kingdom of the Fall locked away. How do you think they would react?”
Her voice is level, expressionless, but her eyes look like the entirety of the war is playing out before her. And not feast day reenactments with puppets and rhyming couplets, but the actual fires and swords. Women screaming the loss of their children. Crows eating the eyes of the fallen, sometimes before they were dead. I shiver.
“Well, I couldn’t just say that,” I say. “I’d have to explain what the barrier is doing to our kingdom, amass the evidence, show them the numbers—”
My voice fades. The data I’ve collected is absolutely incontrovertible, but the thought of presenting a chart filled with numbers to people who’ve been raised on blood-curdling stories of the monsters trapped in the Lands Below seems naive. Hopelessly so.
Still. I would have to find some way to convince them. This was my kingdom, they were my people, and the barrier was killing us all.
“I— I’ll think of something,” I stammer.
Mother’s upper lip twitches into something almost resembling a smile. “Perhaps you could. But, Elanerill, trust me when I say there is nothing beneath the sun and stars that could ever convince the king.”
She releases my wrist, and her fingers brush the fresh bruise on her cheek. She always calls him king. Never father. She turns back to me, and her smile is gone.
“I made mistakes with you,” she says. “If I could turn back the clocks, take a second chance.” She pauses, then pulls in breath in a low, soft hiss. “I never should have told you about the Kingdom of the Fall, or encouraged this research into the barrier.”
“But—”
“Hush,” she whispers. “It’s too dangerous.”
“I know it’s dangerous,” I whisper back to her. “We’ve always been careful.”
She’s still shaking her head, trying to contradict me, but I push on.
“It would have been worse not to know,” I insist. “To spend my life wondering why the Spirit Wood is dying, why the crops fail, why we’re losing ground to the Kingdom of Stone and Sea, why our people have to move away to the Silver City or Cairncliff or the stars know where else. At least now we know what’s happening to us. At least now we can do something about it!”
“No!”
Her voice is as loud and sudden as a slap. I stare at her, stunned, as she turns her face toward the veiled windows. She’s only ever yelled at me like that for asking questions about my father, whoever he’d been. Her expression hardens like a wax seal.
“Do not mention the barrier again.” She’s whispering, but her voice carries all the urgency and authority of her crown. “The king will kill you for it.”
Blood rushes to my head; the room spins again. King Grathgore has never been warm or friendly, and I know he’s dangerous, but I never thought he was a threat to me. I’m the only child of his only child, after all. I’m the heir to his throne.
“You leave tomorrow for the Kingdom of Stone and Sea,” Mother says like she’s listing off the errands we need to accomplish before the solstice celebration on Mount Victory. Then she turns back to me, and I can see she’s crying in that soft, silent way she has.
“Prince Nylian seems like a good man,” she continues. “I hope you will be happy with him.” She takes a deep breath, then pulls her back straight. “I know you will be safe.”
With that, she pulls back the curtains and throws the windows open. Thunderclouds swell in the air above the granite slopes of Mount Victory. That’s where the battle ended, according to legend. That’s where the black dragon Rensivar drove every last elf from the Kingdom of the Fall, every man, woman, and child, into the Lands Below, and that’s where he built the magical barrier to keep them sealed away forever.
Mother’s footsteps click against the stone floor as she swings open the door and leaves my room. There’s a rush of softer footfalls as one of the human servants enters, and I hear murmured instructions to begin packing my things.
I ignore the exchange. I’m still fixed on the steep granite slopes of Mount Victory. It’s not, of course, where the battle actually ended. That’s just a convenient fiction we tell every year, a nice place to focus the drama, a landmark to our own enduring significance.
No, the war actually ended in a little canyon branching off the Dragon Pass that winds around the shoulders of Mount Victory. It’s where Mother used to take me as a child, where she taught me what that prickling sensation on my skin meant. That’s where the Kingdom of the Fall was banished, and that’s where the barrier was sealed.
I let my gaze drift from the slopes of Mount Victory to the narrow cleft between the foothills that marks the Dragon Pass, and I feel like something cold has just settled between my shoulder blades.
I know where the barrier is. I know it needs to come down.
And now, I know that I only have tonight.