“Your highness,” the trio of mages said simultaneously in bass, baritone, and tenor voices—for they always spoke in unison. “Only the deepest twilight shadows will do, as they hold the night’s turning point. And there is the lack of stars . . . without stardust to stabilize the shadows and weigh them down, they will simply escape.”
For the next five years, Lyra had to be satisfied looking out from beneath her hood. Even with her body wrapped in heavy fabrics from neck to toe, the sun penetrated and burned. She could only see the beauty of her sparkling kingdom in muted shades from the safety of her home. Thus, her favorite time became that singular moment she could remove the hood to look out a clear window, unprotected, after the day’s westward diurnal course. When that blink of dusk softened the light to a purple-blue haze, she was free for twenty full breaths before the sun brightened again to begin its eastern reversal across the sky for the cessation course.
Lyra loved the light with such fervor this was enough, until the tragic moment she saw herself within a mirror.
Avaricette, Griselda’s daughter of fifteen, stood in the sunny kitchen with her two sisters. Twelve-year-old Lyra had followed, lured by the aroma of fresh-baked treats. Covered neck-to-toe-to-finger in heavy cloth, she placed teacups at the table in hopes her cousins might join her for a tea party.
“Lyra, perhaps we’re too old to play such childish games.” The most studious and brightest of Griselda’s daughters, Lustacia, adjusted the glossy, auburn curls draping her shoulders and blinked her deep-blue, thick-lashed eyes. She had always been kinder than the others, being only a year older than Lyra, so her gentle scolding failed to discourage the princess. She continued to fold napkins and place them on saucers, her hood of shadows surging and swimming around her head.
“How could she know of anything that’s normal?” Avaricette said before shoving a plum confectionery into her mouth. “She’s too solitary.” Avaricette narrowed her brown eyes and talked around the food squashed between her teeth. “She cannot even walk beside opened windows without wearing mittens and wrapping up like a mummy. Mother says she’s a stain on our royal bloodline.”
“Yes, a stain.” Wrathalyne puckered her brow in disgust as she adjusted the satiny bows on her dress—the same rusty-brown as her freckles. “That explains why she can’t speak. Stains don’t have tongues. She inveritably belongs with the spiders and centipedes in the dungeon, amongst her own sodiforous kind.” Wrathalyne considered herself very well-spoken for someone of fourteen, often making up words in an effort to prove it.
Lyra stopped playing then. She backed into a corner and dropped a spoon with a clang beside her feet—ashamed, though not quite sure why.
“Hush.” Matilde entered, her ruddy, wrinkled face glowering. She covered Lyra’s ears. Those work-roughened fingers were sweet and soothing compared to the sharp-toothed words her cousins had spoken. As if sensing Lyra’s affection for the cook, the nightsky fabric enveloped the elderly woman’s hands, allowing the contact, then closed again over Lyra’s head as she pulled free. Matilde lifted a wooden spoon and shook it in Avaricette’s direction. “I ever hear you speak such ugliness about the princess again, I’ll lose the recipe for your favorite honeyed confits. Could be I’ll forget how to make desserts altogether.”
Wrathalyne narrowed her licorice-dark eyes, prepared to unleash a retort from her “corpulent vocabulary,” but Avaricette took both her sisters’ hands and dragged them from the room. Having an abundance of sweets at the ready was of utmost importance to her.
In their absence, insecurity swarmed in Lyra’s head: Was she a stain? As hideous as the hairy spiders rumored to live in the dungeon?
She’d never looked upon her image . . . had only seen painted portraits of herself, her complexion altered to some normalcy by the artists. Blurred reflections in copper pans and bathwater weren’t enough. Her father kept the mirrors in the castle put away for fear the glass might catch a ray of light and magnify it upon her skin.
Determined to know, Lyra climbed to one of the highest towers where her mother’s childhood items were stored. There in the dimness, she found an antique mirror gilded with coppery accents. She perched on a pile of books, nose tingling from dust, and slipped off her hood, slippers, and bindings so only her chemise and bloomers remained. After wiping a powdery haze off the glass, she saw her ghostly reflection. Her eyes glowed amber in the darkness and illuminated fanlike lashes. They resembled the silvery metallic strands of tinsel people strung upon lampposts and gates to honor Eldoria’s victory over ice and snow during the sun solstice (a three-month-long celebration that took place in what once served as the winter season centuries earlier).
Lyra stared. How startling her differences were: such a far cry from the portraits of her mother, her father, cousins, or aunt. Even the castle’s servants and citizens of Eldoria—varying shades of ivory, rose, gold, copper and ebony—didn’t match her anemic pallor.
Other than her lips which were shaped like her mother’s, “bee-stung” her father often teased, she looked like no one and nothing she’d ever seen, except the sugary cookie dough Matilde tinged with one drop of blue cornflower syrup before baking. If only she could bake to golden perfection so she might stand in the sun, barefaced and sturdy, and at last embrace the light she loved. If only she were a cookie.
Stain, she repeated in her mind, though didn’t dare try to speak it aloud. Wishing she could somehow trap her grotesque image within the glass, Lyra stretched her hood over the mirror’s frame. She yanked at the seams, pulling so hard the mirror toppled off balance. The glass broke, renting the astral fabric in half. As shadows are prone to do when loosed, they escaped into the farthest corners of the room, leaving nothing but a pile of golden stardust on the floor.
Lyra regretted the mishap immediately. Warm trickles wet her face and she peered at the broken mirror. Tears of inky violet trailed her cheeks. She had seen other people cry—streams clear as water.
Even her tears were stained.
It was too much. Sobbing, she sprang barefoot into the dust and glass. The shards jabbed into her tender skin, and small footprints smeared with blood trailed her as she ran down winding stairs through the castle.
“Lyra!” As she rounded a corner, the king caught her in his strong embrace. He held her, bleeding and weeping. The dark purple of her tears seemed more unsettling and terrible to him than the cuts on her feet, and she wondered if a bruise was seeping from her soul. He carried her to the kitchen, where even her favorite sugar cookies failed to console her.
Had King Kiran’s precious child not been heartbroken, and had the nightsky hood not been ruined, perhaps he wouldn’t have started another war. But as often happens in fairy tales—as in life itself—the ripple of one small tragedy can be far and widespread.
The king sent his best horses and men to uproot the thorny vines at Mount Astra’s base which marked the iron stairway to the dark kingdom of Nerezeth, the selfsame rosebush that had tainted the queen’s health and caused her to die. He intended to take back the nights by force—along with their midnight shadows and stars—so he could at last secure his daughter’s happiness and welfare.
The night-folk defended their borders with a vigorous determination that matched the king’s desperation. There appeared to be no victor in sight. Griselda saw her opportunity and took it.
“You must go to the battlefields yourself,” she said to her brother while he paced the floor after speaking to his field marshal one day. “Call for a temporary truce so you might descend Nerezeth’s iron stairway. King Orion has been ill, but you can negotiate with his queen. Make her understand your daughter’s plight. Their son is only a few years older than Lyra; Prince Vesper . . . the evening star, they call him. It’s rumored he has caused some sort of upheaval himself. Perhaps that commonality can breed compassion, if not an alliance.” She laughed in her black heart, knowing that peace would not be so easily won. Her brother’s life would be in danger, and if by some dire chance he died, Griselda would be regent to the kingdom until Lyra was of age. All she would have to do was rid herself of her niece, and one day her daughters would reign.
The king hesitated, fearing something might go wrong and his little Lyra be left an orphan.