The Queen's Mage

The girl placed her picture book on the floor and stood in the center of the rug, arms folded, chin tipped up in a gesture so familiar it almost dislocated Serali’s jaw. Four years old, maybe five, she had the coin-bright hair and glass-cut cheekbones of the royal line, but her eyes were the hard, perfect green of a winter leaf, and her mouth was set with the kind of certainty only children or conquerors ever managed. She wore a linen pinafore, clean except for the blue smudge of pigment across one pocket, and the shine of her skin made her look fevered by sunlight.

The girl said, with the slow clarity of the court-trained, “You’re not one of my tutors.”

Serali had no response ready. She stared. The bells outside were getting louder, but the room, somehow, was silent. She tried to measure the threat, failed, then did what she always did when cornered: swore.

“Fuck,” she said, in sharp Naeric.

The child repeated it, exact pronunciation. “Fuck.”

Serali bit the inside of her cheek. “That’s not my name.”

The child blinked, then said, “I thought you were supposed to say your name when you met someone.” She considered this for a moment, then added, “I’m Everly. Who are you?”

Serali was already searching the room: the door she’d come through, another (locked, or she’d have run), a servant’s hatch in the far wall, but too small, and barred. The windows, two stories up, looked down into a stone courtyard crawling with palace guards.

The child, Everly, watched with interest. “You’re not a maid. And you’re not a soldier. They don’t let the new ones up here because Mama says they smell like soup and horses.” She wrinkled her nose. “You smell like burnt wood.”

Serali, desperate, scanned the floor for a weapon. Toys, no blades; only the iron at her wrists, heavy enough to bruise but not to kill. The chain dragged behind her as she crossed to the window, tugged the edge of the frame, felt the drop in her stomach as she realized there was no escape.

She turned back to find Everly less than an arm’s length away, eyes fixed on the bruises and gashes that ringed Serali’s wrists.

“You’re hurt,” Everly observed. She didn’t ask, didn’t offer comfort. Just the statement of fact.

Serali took a step back. “It’s nothing.” Her voice was raw, every word coming out half chewed. “I need you to move away from the door.”

Everly planted herself, both feet square. “No.”

A headache throbbed behind Serali’s left eye. She did not have time for this. The bells had gone from background to foreground, three in sequence, then a pause, then three more, the old city code for ‘danger inside the walls.’ Her legs were starting to go numb, and her hands were trembling in a way that made her furious.

“Listen,” Serali said, keeping her voice flat, “in about two minutes, there will be men with swords trying to kill me, and if you’re standing there, you’ll get in the way.”

The girl considered this, then said, “Are you a bad person?”

Serali closed her eyes, pictured for a moment the cold stone of the cell, the flash of Sun Fae fire, the taste of her own blood on the back of her tongue. “No,” she said, “but your mother thinks I am.”

Everly regarded her, head cocked, lips pursed with the focus of a child parsing an unfamiliar word. “Why do you look like that?” she demanded, as if it was the most natural next question in the world.

Serali blinked, caught off guard. She followed the girl’s gaze down her own body: the ragged shift, the sweat-stained cuffs, the raw scabbed ring circling each wrist. Blood caked the back of her right hand, and dirt lined every cracked nail. She looked feral. Worse, she looked weak.

She forced a shrug. “I haven’t had time for a bath.”

Everly’s mouth twisted, unconvinced. “No, not that. Your hair.”

Serali tried and failed to tuck a strand behind her ear. The gesture felt ridiculous, but it gave her a second to recover. “It’s just how it grows,” she said, voice flat.

Everly’s eyes narrowed, and Serali saw the queen’s intelligence there, sharp and cold as a fresh knife. Everly reached up and touched a lock of Serali’s hair, pinching it between her thumb and forefinger as if to determine whether it was a trick, some strange animal pelt stitched to the scalp. “Night Fae have black hair,” she said, a phrase from lesson-texts and nursemaid tales. “Mama says that’s how you know. But in the pictures they always look scary. You don’t look scary.”

Serali recoiled, but Everly didn’t withdraw her hand. The child’s gaze was unblinking, more clinical than cruel. “You look like you’re going to cry,” she concluded, and the judgment landed with the finality of a gavel.

Serali pressed her back to the window, chain scraping the radiator beneath the sill. “I’m not,” she said, but the words caught on the edge of something unfinished.

The child sat, folding her legs under her, as if content to wait for the story to resolve itself.

A noise started outside, a rush of boots, not yet coordinated but coming closer. Serali looked at the door, at the lock, and then, without thinking, grabbed the nearest object heavy enough to serve: a wooden toy chest, half-filled with blocks and a rocking horse. She dragged it across the rug and jammed it under the handle.

Taken from NovelFire, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Everly did not move. Instead, she said, “You’re going to be caught.”

Serali dropped to one knee, level with the girl. “Maybe. But I’d rather die in here than go back to that cell.”

Everly stared, green eyes wide but dry. “Will you hurt me?”

Serali blinked. The question was so direct it knocked every lie out of her head. “No,” she said. “Not ever.”

“Then you can stay,” Everly said. She marched to the back of the room, fetched a small table, and helped push it against the chest. When it wouldn’t budge, she kicked the leg, once, and made a face at Serali as if to say, Your move.

Serali almost laughed. Instead, she slumped against the back wall, cradling her manacled wrists against her chest.

Everly crawled up next to her, cross-legged, knees knobby and bare. “You don’t look like a monster.”

Serali shrugged. “Neither do you.”

Everly studied her face, then said, “Uncle Hagen said Night Fae eat babies.”

Serali rolled her eyes. “Sun Fae eat the world.”

Everly seemed to consider this. “That sounds harder.”

The bells had stopped now. Serali knew what that meant: the guards had surrounded the floor, maybe even the room. She closed her eyes, let the warmth of the sun on the rug seep into her bones. The room smelled like paper and honey, and the little girl, sitting next to her, radiated the same clean heat as her mother.

For Serali, the next moments played out with a lucidity that was almost obscene. She was, of course, doomed; there would be no clemency for the Night Fae who had barricaded herself in a room with the Sun Fae princess, not even if her intent was nothing more than to bleed out in peace. She watched herself from outside, saw her fingers clench and unclench in her lap, saw the new deep red stain spreading under the skin at her wrists. The child beside her radiated a calm so complete it seemed less innocence than some inherited arrogance, as if her existence was proof against any violence the world could muster. Serali envied it, a little.

She ran through the scenarios: how many guards would storm the door; whether they would use fire, or magic, or just the brute force of iron and numbers; whether the queen herself would appear, to look her in the eye before ordering the sword. The worst of it was the certainty of a thing even as it collapsed, so she let herself imagine that, if only for a breath, she might choose how it ended.

She looked at the child, her clean and oblivious profile, and found herself envying a life so perfectly shielded by expectation and inheritance. The enormity of her failure, of all the choices that had delivered her to this spot, pressed down with such force that it blanked out every survival instinct she had left.

Now, as she crouched in the blind heat of the sun, the certainty of death congealed into something slow and suffocating. She felt her breath stutter and then collapse.

She clamped her hands between her knees, as if that might hold the rest in. The sound that came out of her was not a sob, not at first, but a kind of wretched gasp; a betrayal of every lesson in stoicism the Xuiven ever beat into her. She wanted to dig her nails into her own thigh, to bite her tongue bloody, to do anything but let it happen. But the next exhale was ragged, and then the next, and then the next, until her throat closed and her eyes blurred and she was crying in earnest, the tears hot and humiliating on her cheeks.

Everly watched her the way children watched storms through windows: fascinated, uncertain, not yet afraid enough to look away. When the crying did not stop, when it became a silent, shuddering convulsion that made Serali curl in on herself, Everly did something unexpected. She scooted closer, the rug making a soft, animal noise under her, and, with studied nonchalance, draped a thin, warm arm around Serali’s hunched shoulders. It was not graceful comfort. It was comfort learned from being comforted: arm first, then patting, then a solemn lean of her whole small body.

Everly’s hand, absurdly soft, hovered between pats before finally committing to a tentative, rhythmic thump. When this failed to arrest the tide, she leaned her weight harder against Serali and announced, with the composure of a royal clerk, “It’s okay if you need to cry. Sometimes I do it when everything is unfair.” She added, after a pause, “Mama says the world is always unfair. That’s how you know it’s real.”

The touch startled Serali, and in the suddenness of it, of comfort offered by a Sun Fae child in a palace that had always promised her only death, she started to laugh. It was a cracked, unsteady sound, but it was laughter all the same, and the absurdity of it, the complete perversity, transformed humiliation into something fierce and angry and alive.

She let the cry-laughter rise, let it tear through her chest and up her throat. When it finished, she wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, leaving a streak of tears and dirt across her cheek. The child was still there, resting her head against Serali’s shoulder, as if this was a perfectly ordinary way to spend an afternoon.

Everly was the first to recover her composure. She extracted herself from the lean, set her palms on her knees, and declared with a sudden, courtly formality, “Are you ready to answer my questions now?”

Serali wiped her face again. The impulse to lie, to misdirect, to parry question with sharper question, was so deeply ingrained it almost happened by reflex. Instead, she said, “I suppose so.”

“Who are you?”

The air in the room felt suddenly thin. Serali stared at the child, at the spill of sunlight on her hair, and said, “I’m Serali.”

Everly seemed to think this over. “Just Serali?”

“That’s all there is of me,” she said, and surprised herself with the answer.

Everly nodded as if she’d already known, or, more likely, as if the answer had always been irrelevant. “Serali,” she repeated, satisfied. “Now that we know each other’s names, we can be friends.” She announced it with the certainty of a royal decree.

Serali’s mind jammed. She looked at the child, then at her own shaking hands, then at the barricaded door, then back to the child, as if some adult might be hiding in the wings to correct the statement, wait, no, this is not how it’s supposed to go. There was no correction. There was only Everly, expectant, the corners of her mouth hinting at future mischief.

“I…” Serali fumbled the word. “I don’t think that’s allowed.”

Everly shrugged, unconcerned. “It doesn’t matter. Friends don’t need permission. Only enemies do.” She said this as if it were a common fact, a rule of nature.

Everly reached for the nearest object, a wooden horse, its repaired leg still bearing the faint scar of breakage, and set it with ceremonial gravity between them on the rug. “Since we are friends, you can play now,” she said. Serali found herself unable to reply. The word “play” had not applied to her since she was thirteen. The expectation was so alien it robbed her of speech. She looked at the toy, then at the girl, then at the barricaded door, and back to her own ravaged hands, as if any of these might instruct her in the etiquette of play.

Everly interpreted the silence as consent. She placed a second horse beside the first, then a little corked bottle of blue glass, then a carved boar, until she had an assembly lined up between them like an honor guard awaiting review. Satisfied, she gestured at Serali’s bound wrists. “You can use your hands if you want. The rules don’t mind. Mama says some rules don’t care about what people can’t help.”

Serali stared at the impromptu parade, fighting the urge to correct the arrangement, to impose some internal logic on it. Instead, she nudged the wooden horse forward with the tips of her bruised fingers, sending it lurching into the blue-glass bottle. The collision made a soft, hollow clack. Everly grinned.

“You’ve never done this before,” the girl said, matter-of-fact. “That’s okay. I can teach you.”

In the hallway beyond, the bells kept ringing.