Curses and Will Chapter 12: Chapter 6: The Smiling Mask

Read chapter 12 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Three weeks passed. The palace had stopped feeling like a dream somewhere in that stretch of time, though it never quite became ordinary either. Still too large, too quiet in the wrong places, too perfect in ways that made it feel less like a home and more like something built to be admired from a careful distance. But the fear that had lived in my chest the first few days had thinned out, replaced by something steadier. Silver mornings. Whispered wind through the corridors. The particular hush of a place where everyone has learned to move quietly around something they don't fully understand. I had a place now. Small. Likely forgettable to anyone who wasn't me. I was the boy who mended dresses. Who fetched thread when the sewing room ran low. Who lingered in hallways just far enough from the center of things to avoid notice, close enough to occasionally catch the sound of her singing alone, when she thought no one could hear. Princess Annya rarely spoke unless spoken to first. But when she smiled, something in the air around her shifted, like sunlight finally breaking through a frost that had sat over a field for longer than anyone could remember. No one else seemed to notice that part of her. They saw the curse. They saw it floating behind her like death's own twin, a chained thing that everyone treated as more real than the girl carrying it. They feared her. The maids bowed correctly and kept their eyes down a half second too long. The soldiers stood at proper attention and shifted their weight when she passed. Even Jonathan, who loved her in whatever quiet way he was capable of, flinched sometimes when the shadow stirred too visibly. And sometimes, if I was honest with myself, so did I. It happened on the fourth full moon since I'd arrived. A banquet was held in Annya's honor, the Dawnlight Ceremony, a ritual that marked her formal right to inherit, passed down through generations of careful tradition by a court that didn't particularly want her as their future ruler but couldn't find a clean enough reason to deny her the title. Servants like me weren't meant to attend events like this. That was the rule, plainly understood by everyone in the palace. But Annya had requested it. "I want the boy who sews my dresses to be present," she'd said simply, to a room of advisors who clearly hadn't expected to be argued with. The court murmured. Several openly disapproved. But no one said no to her, not directly, not when she made a request in that particular flat, certain tone. So I stood against a marble pillar near the back of the hall, dressed in borrowed silk that fit oddly across the shoulders, my heart going harder than the orchestra playing somewhere off to my left. I watched the room and understood, almost immediately, that I was looking at something rotten dressed up carefully enough to pass for elegant. Nobles. Lords. Generals. Dignitaries from kingdoms whose names I couldn't have pronounced if my life depended on it. All of them smiling. All of it fake. Gold paint over something hollow underneath. Annya stood at the center of the hall, radiant in a way that looked exhausting to maintain, elegant and composed and entirely untouchable from where most of them stood. But I was close enough, and had spent enough hours studying the particular details of her, to see what they didn't. The way her hand trembled faintly inside the long sleeve of her gown. The flicker behind her eyes every time someone's smile stretched a fraction too wide to be sincere. The way the shadow above her darkened, almost imperceptibly, every time a lie slid past someone's lips along with their wine. Because that was its food, wasn't it. I understood that now, after Jonathan's story. Lies. Fear. Rejection dressed up as celebration. And this room was thick with all three. Then came the moment that broke it open. A noble near the front, tall, draped in red silk, a voice like something sweetened just enough to disguise the poison underneath it, raised his gla