“Why are you sitting?” whispers the artist. I can feel his breath against the skin of my stomach, the whisper of his brush, painting downward. “Why are you just sitting there?”
It is because it never occurred to me to move—no. It is because I cannot move. The paint is like a corset, and then it is worse. It is a constriction and my ribs cannot move. I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe. I panic. I cannot even move my eyes. I am only a painting. And yet I need to breathe. And I cannot breathe.
The artist—and it is Elián, of course, Elián—the artist tilts up his head and smiles at me as he watches me die.
He is growing antlers, like a stag.
The last thing I feel is his hands on me, the roar of my skin— I wake, or I don’t.
It is— It was— Am I awake?
I was in the toolshed. My hands were locked around one of the crank wheels of the cider press. Xie and Elián were talking as if I weren’t there. I was angry with Elián. I was afraid. I could not remember why. I was a ghost—compelled to feel, but no longer remembering the roots of the feeling.
“. . . and you’ve been sneaking out for years,” Elián was saying. “So why . . .”
The wheel went click, click, clock as I pushed at it. Every notch was a little bit harder to move.
“. . . control her, control the Precepture,” came the fragment of Xie’s answer. I wasn’t really listening to her. I was thinking of how each notch of the press pushed the apples further. The raw juice dripped from the spile. Wasps swarmed at the pulp that came up around the edges of the press. “You’re just a loose cannon, Elián. It’s Greta we follow.”
The wasps were drunk; the pulp oozed up. Click, click, click.
And yet, the business of making cider did not turn into a torture sequence, and no one grew antlers, and slowly I decided it was real.
Of course, I decided this a moment too late, after we’d gone outside to feed the wrung-out apple pulp to some of the goat kids. A tawny little kid named Dipshit butted me in the back of the leg, knocked me down, and climbed on top of me. She stood on my back and stuck her head into the apple bucket.
It is important to note, at this point, that I did not swear. It is one of those things, like cutting one’s hair, that queens do not do. “Dipshit!” I shouted. “Get the expletive off me!” I reared up; the goat scrambled, making welts with her dainty little hooves as she slid off. My samue was streaked with greenish goat manure—they’d been eating too much food-fight melon—and one of my braids was swinging free. There was something smeared across my face that I refused even to consider.
“Hello, Greta,” said Xie. “Welcome back.” She reached over the fence and pulled me a hank of grass.
Elián’s face was paint-tight with the work of not smiling. “Shut up,” I warned him, wiping at my face with the clean grass.
His rigid muscles twitched in answer.
“I’m quite serious, Elián. I was just dreamlocked for you.”
Though, in fairness, it had not exactly been for him.
At the mention of dreamlock, Elián got his face under control. Then it cracked again. “Dipshit,” he mimicked, “get the expletive—”
“It is her name,” I said, coiling up the braid and pushing the pins into it. “The names of this particular batch of kids are Flopsy, Mopsy, Topsy, and Dipshit, and I assure you, that was not my idea.”
“You don’t say,” said Elián, with the world’s most contagious smile.
It was strange. We were from opposing nations that were at the brink of war. We were days away from dying for that war. And yet I would have done almost anything for Elián.
Except perhaps more dreamlock. Which was, of course, exactly what I feared I would be called on to do, when the moon rose. And so it proved.
I have never begged anyone for anything. I did not beg.
A queen does not beg.
Dreamlock: I stand in front of my portrait. My beautiful dress, my iced-over eyes. Huge behind me arch the white wings of a swan.
A Swan Rider. I’ve been painted with a Swan Rider looming behind me.
I tense.
The portrait tenses.
It’s not a painting, it’s a mirror. And the Swan Rider is behind me.
I whirl. But it’s Xie.
It is Li Da-Xia, arrayed for her throne, her headdress looped and weighted with turquoise and yellow jade, with red coral and silver and carved white bones. This is her royal. This is her when I never see her again. She is a goddess-queen in red and gold silk, and she looks past me, at something over my shoulder. “No,” she says to whatever is back there. “No. You cannot have her.”
The wings. It’s the Swan Rider. I can still feel the shadow of her wings.
I whirl around, but there’s only the mirror. There is no Rider.
It’s me, I am wearing them. The wings are on my back.
I am the Rider.