Close your eyes. Clear your mind of all distractions.”
Zeriah sat on a pile of cushions opposite Esdras, eyes shut and her fat, fluffy tabby who wouldn’t still in her lap. The princess had lost track of how many times they’d sat like this, Esdras droning on in his low, easy tone telling her to close her eyes and clear her mind. Closing her eyes was the easy part, but it only helped her notice what she hadn’t before: the birdsong coming from the eastern window; her cat, Renana, trying to wiggle herself loose; the soft chatter of the kitchen servants making the day’s bread at the far end of the hall.
“My princess.” Esdras’s voice snapped her back to the present, and she mumbled an apology. He just closed his eyes and resumed his posture. “Clear your mind,” he repeated. “Let it settle into a void, like a still pond on a moonless night.”
Zeriah took a deep breath and tried to fish the distractions out of her mind pool. She was still searching for calm when he spoke again.
“And when you have done that, I want you to search for your happiest thoughts. The thoughts that make you feel most loved, most safe. Most happy. This is a happiness larger than a new toy or a fancy party. This is the largest happiness you can summon. Don’t reach. Simply let the thoughts rise to the surface of your mind.”
Zeriah’s mind was still a cluttered puddle. Birdsong, cat, chatter—happy. The happiest thing she could remember.
There was the time Momma played hide-and-seek with her in the sand gardens. No, she’d tried that last week.
The time the kitchen surprised her with a batch of her favorite sweet rolls. No, she needed Big Happy.
Of course, her last birthday party! The one with the magician in the solarium who pulled miles of colored scarves out of his sleeves while he sang. She’d worn a brand-new purple gown with pink-chested bluebirds embroidered all along the hem. Just thinking about it made her feel warm. They’d had a tall cake with sea-glass colored frosting and shells adorning the top. She’d loved all of her gifts, and when it came time to blow out the candles, she did it all by herself—all eight of them! It was the first year she’d done it without needing Papa’s help.
A shadow passed over the memory. Papa.
The thought slipped from her grip like a river stone and tumbled back into darkness. Renana made a low wail and kicked until Zeriah let her go. All the distractions came flooding back at once.
“My princess. Where are you now?”
Zeriah couldn’t tell if she was imagining the disappointment in Esdras’s voice. She wasn’t sure she understood the question. “I’m … here?”
Esdras let out a great sigh. “That’s what I was afraid of. Open your eyes, my princess.”
Zeriah winced as she did, but any worry was quickly snuffed out by Esdras’s easy smile.
“It has been a long week, my princess. Perhaps we should take a break from your studies—”
“No!” The echo that came back to Zeriah sounded like the whining of a baby. She squared her jaw and did her best to sound grown-up. “No. I want to try. I want to help—”
“It is not helpful to strain yourself like this,” Esdras told her. “And it will not serve to draw your magic out—”
Zeriah shook her head. “I can try harder. I can be quieter! I can make my mind a pool—”
“These are not lessons one beats into oneself like punishment. The more you try to close your hand on your magic, the more it will elude you.”
That didn’t make any sense, and Zeriah said so in the loud, distinct tone of a princess.
Esdras laughed. “Sense only applies to what we understand, my princess. And there are none living who truly understand magic.” He rose from the cushions, robes of ocher and violet shaking loose to his ankles. “Go. Keep yourself busy. And stay out of trouble.” His eyes narrowed, but the smile didn’t leave his face. “I’ve heard stories of how you pester the kitchen.”
Zeriah shook her head again. “I didn’t steal those oranges.”
The corner of Esdras’s mouth quirked. “Funny, my princess. I don’t recall mentioning any oranges.” He brushed her shoulder when she stayed staring up at him. “Go. And do try to think happy thoughts, my princess. Big happy thoughts.”
Zeriah watched him vanish down a hall before she turned and trotted obediently out of the room. At least this time he’d given her an order she could follow. For the last four months, it felt like every day was the same lesson: think bigger, remember happier things.
Esdras once asked what she was thinking about, and she told him: Momma in the sand gardens, the day that other kingdom visited and they decorated the palace in brightly colored scarves and colored lanterns to greet them, the time Papa came home after being gone for two moons and brought her back a doll with blue stones for eyes. Esdras’s smile went tight, and he asked if she couldn’t think of anything happier. They sat for a full minute in silence until Esdras sighed and told her classes were over for the day.
Zeriah didn’t understand how she could be any happier. Some days, with Momma sick and Papa sleeping, she didn’t know how to be happy at all.
She traced her hand along the mosaic on the outer wall as she shuffled off in the direction she suspected Renana had gone. From this high up in the palace, she could see the top of the briar thicket, a wide gash of thorns and brambles and dense trunks. It stretched on like a spill of ink from the palace proper to the distant gates where the city began. She wondered if the city people knew the palace people were still alive. She wondered if any of the city people had tried to get through the brambles.
The grown-ups had all turned mean since the briar thicket had appeared—since Papa had fallen asleep. Zeriah was sad, but she hadn’t turned mean. Not even when they ran out of strawberries. Not even after Emaron and the funeral fire.
Emaron had been her favorite of all the kitchen staff, and the only boy in the entire palace her age. He’d been out climbing, the same walls they’d always climbed together. She never thought he’d fall. Not ever. He’d struck his head so badly he didn’t wake up. And with the newly grown brambles, there were no doctors to send for, no alchemists to come administer medicines.
For two days, Emaron lay in a bed. On the third day, he died. And on the fourth, the priests sang a chant and burned him on the funeral fire. Esdras had corrected her—a funeral pyre—and he’d tried to explain it was as much to honor Emaron as it was a necessity. Dead bodies carried disease. To keep them long was to invite ruin on one’s house. Everyone who came to the funeral fire cried, but no one more than Zeriah.
It was the first death that was hers. She remembered her grandfather’s funeral and the little memorial they had when their other cat, Theom, had died, but those had not prepared her for this. She’d grown up with Emaron. She always thought they’d grow tall together.
It had been months since the funeral fire. She hadn’t noticed death before then; the way people talked or didn’t talk about it, like it was a secret they needed to keep from her, or something children weren’t allowed to know about. It was the same way they only talked about Momma and the baby when they didn’t think she was around. The way they talked about the day the man cursed Father, like they knew best, like Zeriah hadn’t been in the room, too.
To hear the servants tell it, Papa had been cursed by an evil magician with a great and terrible staff. They said Papa fought him in battle and he cursed him as he fell. But Zeriah had seen it all from her seat on Momma’s lap. The man who had cursed Papa hadn’t looked evil. He’d looked sad; he’d looked hungry. He’d come to the palace to talk to Papa about his problems. Zeriah hadn’t followed his story—something about a fire long ago from when Grandfather was king?
She’d never really known Grandfather. But she knew Papa was a very nice Papa, the kind whose eyes got wet when you scratched your knee and cried, the kind who tried his very best to be good to everyone. Sometimes the servants whispered that Papa was so good because his papa was so mean. Grandfather started fires. Grandfather hurt people. But when Papa heard the man’s story, he cried. He wanted to help, to fix things, but the man only cared about what had already been broken.
Zeriah didn’t know anything about curses. She didn’t know they could come in jars like the one the man held up over his head. She remembered Momma’s arms closing over her and her belly like a shield. Zeriah watched the jar tumble out of the man’s hand and shatter on the tile like a spark of flint. There was a great black wave that knocked the vision from her, and when she woke, the sad man was a smear of ash on the floor. There were brambles arching out from where he was not that wound up the canopies and walls and swarmed the outer gardens. By that night, they had filled the gap between the palace and the city beyond.
And worst of all, Papa wouldn’t wake up.
That first week was the hardest. The briar thicket was too thick for the guards to cut through, and no one seemed to be coming to help them. The kitchen began rationing, and the meals since had been bland and gamey. Papa would not wake for all that his councilors and alchemists tried, and Momma was sick with the coming baby, and they made her stay in bed. She couldn’t go to Papa’s old meetings, or even play with Zeriah. But at least she wasn’t asleep.
It was the second week when Esdras found the curse in one of his books. He explained to Zeriah that this was a very old curse, something made of hate and sorrow. He said the man must have been in great pain to have made it so powerful. Zeriah liked it when Esdras told her things. He never tried to make his words smaller for her.
The curse was a simple enough thing to break: a touch of magic would unsnare the briars and wake any sleepers. But there was the trouble. Papa was the only magician in the palace—in the city, in the land. All they required was the simple touch their king could not wake to give, and Esdras—for all his arcane knowledge—had no actual magical ability. There was only one person in the whole palace who might possess a hint of magical ability.
Zeriah was elated when Esdras told her. Magic had been her father’s realm, a distant land she was allowed to view on occasion but never visit. If Esdras was right, she could travel to that land and end the curse—or at least wake Papa to help end it.
Her first lesson was that very evening. Papa had been sleeping for long enough the moon had turned dark and was returning in a milky sliver in the sky. The room was filled with people eager to see what might happen, nobles and servants alike who had been trapped with them in the palace. Some had long strands of brightly colored prayer beads wrapped around their hands. Others were crying and murmuring prayers. Momma was the only steady thing she could see, and even she looked like the softest breeze would scatter her.
Zeriah didn’t like this room. Papa and Momma’s room had always been bright and full of hanging planters that spilled over with ferns and vibrant buds. The room they’d moved Papa to was as dark as a tomb. Momma said the low-burning lanterns were meant to invoke reverence, but the only thing they made Zeriah feel was afraid. In the half-light Papa looked like something carved from wax. Not really alive. His lips looked dry and were flecked with dead skin. The only movement was the soft rise and fall of his chest and the flickering of his eyes under his lids. He barely looked like Papa anymore.
She didn’t want to hold his hand, but she was good and did as Esdras asked her. They started the same exercise: happy thoughts.
“Happy enough to provide proper inspiration”—that’s what he’d said the first time.
Zeriah’s head started aching ten minutes in. She couldn’t think any bigger. By the time thirty minutes had passed, she could hear people starting to whisper.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Why isn’t it working?”
“Are we sure she’s an arcane?”
A pair of servants near the door giggled, and the sound rattled around Zeriah’s head until she was convinced they were laughing at her. Because she couldn’t do it. Because it was silly to think she could do it. Because she could never do it and Papa would stay asleep and Momma would be sick when the baby came—
Zeriah braced a hand on the mosaic wall as she suddenly realized she was struggling to catch her breath. She hadn’t even been running. She slumped on the floor, back pressed against the cool stone. Her head prickled for a bright, dizzy second as she fought to breathe. They still had time. Time for her to learn, time for them to fix all this. Esdras had told her so, and Esdras knew almost everything.
She was still sitting and breathing when a happy trill interrupted her thoughts. She looked up in time to see Renana’s fluffy tail vanish around the corner of the next hallway down. And like that, the wave of sick passed by her. She pushed off the wall, ignoring the flood of gray at the corners of her vision as she raced off after the cat.
Renana gave a bright mew at Zeriah’s footsteps before darting up the rack of dried beans and lentils stored in tall glass jars in the hall outside the kitchen. She climbed all the way to the top of the rack, to where the shelves ended and a long row of window gaps traced the wall just below the ceiling.
The cat gave one last flick of her tail before she vanished through one of them.
Zeriah set her jaw and scaled the rack, only bumping one glass jar, which she managed to steady before it could smash on the ground and alert the kitchen staff to her troublemaking. The gaps near the ceiling were narrow enough she had to flatten herself like a salamander to fit through. They were meant to let out the heat of the kitchen, not for princesses to sneak through, and she could feel the hot air blast on her face as she wiggled onto the row of cabinets that lined the kitchen’s upper walls.
She was high enough up the staff working below would not notice her, high enough they’d never managed to catch her sneaking oranges and bits of candied ginger from their pantries.
She spotted her cat sitting on one of the cabinets at the far end of the room. Renana gave her a long, slow blink as she crawled in her direction, paying no mind to the glassware rattling in the cabinets below. Renana gave a mew of protest when Zeriah sat down beside her and pulled her into her lap, but she didn’t make any move to resist beyond the noise. The moment Zeriah began scratching under her chin, Renana started to purr and went puddle-shaped in the girl’s lap.
And for a few moments, it was just the pair of them and the sunbeam buried under Renana’s wide purr. Zeriah didn’t even realize she was listening to anyone speak until she heard someone mention the queen. She shook off the last of the daydream and peered over the edge of the cabinet to the kitchen below.
An older woman with her hair done up in a scarf snapped orders at the younger girls, who were all busy filling pots with water and stoking the open flames to boil them. Below her, a pair of girls folded fresh-laundered towels and placed them in large baskets.
One of them whispered to the other. “S’early, isn’t it? Earlier than usual—”
“Not so early. My cousin Abidan was born this far out. He’s a bit shorter than his brothers, but other than that, nothing odd about him.”
“Yeah,” the first girl said, dabbing sweat from her brow with her wrist, “but she’s had such a rough go of it, with the bleeding and having to be in bed like that. And the doulas were supposed to be here, and we’ve missed the last three months’ delivery from the alchemist, and we don’t have enough, and it’s just us—oh, sun and stars, Dalida, I don’t think I can—”
The scarf-haired house matron clapped her hands loud enough to snap the room into silence. Her sharp gaze turned on the girl who had been speaking. “Helpha, I’m not going to repeat myself. I want less talking and more folding. That goes for all of you.” Her eyes narrowed as she swept the room. To Zeriah, she seemed more a general than a house matron.
“Now, this isn’t the first child I’ve seen brought into this world, and I suspect there are others here who can say the same. And if I am speaking of you, I need you to accompany me. Immediately. Your queen needs competent hands who won’t faint on the first push. Now, who will be coming with me?”
Two girls’ hands shot up the moment she stopped speaking. A third in the corner only put her hand as high as her chest, looking much less certain than the first two. The house matron didn’t seem to care and rounded them up and marched them out of the room, leaving the ongoing bustle to continue without her.
All at once Zeriah realized Renana was gone from her lap and nowhere to be found. The sun had disappeared behind a cloud, and the warmth she’d been sitting in had turned cold as stone.
Zeriah shimmied back through the window gap and took off running the moment her feet found the floor, past the fountained gardens, past the ballroom with the open ceiling and the canopies of fine sheer scarves, and up, up, up the stairs to the grand halls above.
Outside Momma’s bedroom there were servants gathered in clusters. One of the girls tried to stop her, but Zeriah was too quick for her. But not for the one inside the room. That girl caught Zeriah while she was steps from Momma’s bed.
“It’s all right.” Momma’s soft voice calmed the scene. “Let her through.”
Zeriah tugged her hand loose, glaring at the servant before hurrying to her mother’s side. Momma was pale. There were drops of sweat collecting on her forehead, and her smile couldn’t seem to stay in place.
“Hello, petal,” she beamed, tugging Zeriah to sit on the bed beside her. “I’m very glad to see you. I have a surprise. Your sibling is going to be joining us a little earlier than we planned.”
“But it’s supposed to be another month,” Zeriah said dimly. “W-we had another month. We had time.” All at once her vision went glassy. “I’ve been trying, Momma, I’ve been trying so hard—”
Her mother pulled her into her arms. “I know, petal. And I’m so proud of you. I need you to be brave, all right? Just for a little while. You’re going to be a sister soon. But until then, I need you to be brave.”
Zeriah didn’t feel like being brave at all, nose running and tears all down her cheeks. She nodded anyway. “I’ll try. I’m trying. I-I’m trying to do magic, b-but I don’t know how to do magic. I can’t think of my Big Happy—”
“Oh, petal.” Momma’s shaky smile held steady a moment as she cupped her cheek. “Yes, you do. I know you do. You just need to find the right inspiration. The right spark—”
Zeriah sniffled and tried her best to stop crying. “D-do you have one?”
Momma smiled. “You, petal. It’s always been you.” She pulled her close enough to press her lips to her forehead and squeeze her tightly.
There was a rumble of sound, and Zeriah looked up to see one of the servants rise from Momma’s bedding with a red towel. All at once the servants were pulling her away from Momma, pushing her out into the hall while others shouted and ran baskets of fresh towels into the room.
Zeriah stood still for a moment, not knowing what to do or where to go. Several servants nearly collided with her, until one finally shouted at her to go stand somewhere else. Zeriah moved like a dream to the next hall over, empty and closed up for the season, and stood there a very long while. She wanted to find Esdras. She wanted to make her magic work and fix everything so Momma didn’t have to be sick when the baby arrived.
She shivered and turned to face the darkened wing before her. She knew where she needed to go. She took off at a run, sandals clattering in the empty hallway and folding back on her until she was enveloped in her own odd rhythm. She stopped outside the same dimly lit room from her nightmares. The door was closed up and it took her a long moment to convince herself to reach for it. Momma needed her to be brave. She’d promised.
Zeriah took a deep breath and stepped into Papa’s room.
It was still strange to see him like this, shut up in a dark room with his arms folded across his chest. It reminded her of the way they’d folded Emaron’s arms for the funeral fire.
Not dead, asleep. She repeated it over and over as she approached the man in bed who looked like her father. It couldn’t be Papa. Papa’s cheeks were never so gray. His hair was never so well-oiled and combed. This was a stranger. But perhaps the stranger could help her find Papa. Perhaps they could find help for Momma. But she had to wake him first. She could help Momma, but only if she could wake him first.
She pulled one of his hands off his chest to hold it between her own. She never realized he’d be so heavy. It was only as she stood there, hand in hand with a ghost, that she realized she was crying. That she’d been crying since she left Momma’s room and she hadn’t stopped and couldn’t now.
She gasped for air as she tried to call any happiness to mind. Thoughts scattered like summer dragonflies, and she grabbed empty air as she reached to catch them.
Birthday. No.
The Solarium Fair. Nothing.
Holding Renana in the sun. Not so much as a single spark.
It should have been simple: a single spark of happiness. That was the only thing stopping Momma from being safe, stopping Papa from waking up. It was one happy thought and it was hers, and she couldn’t do that one thing for them. And now Momma was going to die. They’d put her up on a funeral fire like Emaron, fold her hands over her chest like Papa. And all because Zeriah didn’t know how to be happy right.
She sobbed so hard she began to cough.
And then someone was holding her, gently tugging her away from her father’s ever-still bed. She didn’t recognize Esdras until he set her down again on a couch in the hall. She cursed and shouted at him to take her back. He ignored the plea, pulling a long, blue handkerchief from the inner pocket of his robe. He dabbed at the tears on her cheeks.
She pushed him away. “Leave me alone! I can do it, let me do it—”
“My princess,” he said gently, holding her by the shoulders until she relented and went still. “This is not the way. This is no way for you to access your magic.”
“But I have to,” she gasped. “Momma is sick. The baby is coming, and no one will tell me anything, and if I don’t wake up Papa, she might …” She rubbed a wrist across one cheek and sniffed hard. “I have to.”
Esdras’s smile was tired. “You have done everything you are able to, my princess. That is all anyone can ask. And what will be will be with your mother.” When she looked confused, he gave a slow shake of his head. “Even if you were to wake your father and lower the brambles this moment, it is a day’s ride to town, and another back. There is nothing you can do for your mother now but be still and be brave.”
“I don’t want to be brave,” Zeriah shouted in a high-pitched rush. “I want to be sad. And angry.”
Esdras considered her for a long, quiet moment, then drew her closer to his side and gave a small nod. “Then be sad. And be angry. And I will sit here with you, my princess.”
Zeriah pressed both hands over her face and began to cry again. She slumped against Esdras with a defeated sound and didn’t shrug off the hand he set upon her back. He rubbed small circles between her shoulders until she stopped crying. The dusk-orange hall had gone dark. She felt like a sun-dried bone: brittle, dry, and overbright. One of the maidservants found them sitting like that in the hall and bundled Zeriah into her arms.
The next morning, Zeriah woke in her own bed, wearing a pair of pajamas she didn’t remember putting on.
Only one servant came to bathe her and braid her hair. It was the same girl who brought breakfast. Zeriah asked if it was because all the other servants were still with Momma. The girl tried to distract her by pointing at the vine that had started to flower outside her window.
The whole day was like that. She’d try to pry information out of the servants, and not one of them told her a thing. So it was on to distraction. She found Renana in the gardens, walking delicately along a high stone wall and joined her for the walk around. She tried not to think of Emaron or Papa or Momma or the baby.
She’d fallen asleep stretched out on the hot stones when she heard a servant shouting for her.
Zeriah’s whole body went fuzzy with hot-cold again. She jumped down from the wall and ran like a streak of light. Her heart beat so loud she could hear it in her ears.
But then she saw that the servant calling for her was smiling.
It was another few days before they finally let Esdras take her to see Momma. It had been a very long birthing, and she was still sick, but everyone said she would be herself again soon enough. She was still ash-pale when they finally allowed Zeriah to visit, but her smile was easy and bright and doubled when she saw her daughter.
“Hello, petal,” she said, shifting the bundle in her arms to let Zeriah see properly. “Say hello to your baby brother.”
Zeriah bent to look. Inside the bundle, there was a tiny face, and one hand curled tight around one of Momma’s fingers. His fingernails were smaller than the daintiest shells she’d ever seen, and when she touched the back of his hand, those tiny fingers wrapped around her own fingers. She drew a small, delighted breath.
“Hello,” she told the bundle, marveling at how hard he held onto her. “I’m Zeriah, your big sister.”
And the fingertip held tight in her brother’s grasp began to glow, dimly at first, then a radiant blue light flickered along her finger like a flameless fire.
Her brother blinked and made a soft, wondering noise, the blue glow reflecting back at Zeriah in his eyes. She looked up from the baby to see her mother, tears streaming down her cheeks, and Esdras staring with his mouth agape.
Zeriah smiled back at them, hiccoughing with tears and laughter. “Look, Momma,” she said, staring down at the tiny fist wrapped around her fingertip. “I found a Big Happy.”
Esdras and Zeriah kept practicing in the days that followed, ensuring she had some measure of control over the power. At least enough to administer the touch.
Once again the dark room was crowded. This time Zeriah didn’t mind. She knew what to do.
She walked to her father’s bedside and took his hand in hers. She felt Esdras’s hand on her back, steadying her, and she closed her eyes, drew a long, slow breath and imagined the still pool Esdras always told her to look for. When the waters were still, she whispered one request to them: happiness. Then she waited to see what came to the surface.
There were no birthday parties this time. Instead, there was the memory of falling asleep in Papa’s lap while he read to her. There was the memory of picnics with Momma and long afternoons talking and laying in the tall grass. And there was the memory of the day she met her brother. She let bright, glittery happiness fill her from toe to brow. By the time she opened her eyes, both her hands were flickering like the southern aurora.
“All right, Papa,” she whispered. “Time to wake up.”
About the Author
Kat Kellermeyer is a loudmouthed punk from Salt Lake City who likes good gin, local music, and art in every medium they can get their hands on. When they’re not writing (or consuming more art), you can find them drumming for Stop Karen, teaching young people music and life skills at Rock Camp SLC, or standing on a street corner shouting about social justice.