This story's old but it goes on and on until we disappear.
Calm me and let me taste the salt you breathed while you were underneath.
I am the one who haunts your dreams of mountains sunk below the sea.
I spoke the words but never gave a thought to what they all could mean.
I trust that your bonds are not too tight, my dear son, my Artem. Please don't struggle. You shouldn't bother. You're soft. That isn't your fault. All princes are soft, and these cells are built for hardened men, men with ribs like steel and bones like brick.
You are soft. That is my fault. My mistake.
It is a shame that you never met your mother, you know. You are very like with your tempers and your rages. I imagine she would have doted on you. Yes. She would have adored her son, I know. How ironic that that she was tried for being a poisoner. Right now, especially, Artem, I imagine irony is much on your mind. Please - don't speak. Not just yet. Let us enjoy one another's company a little longer.
It has been years since I thought of your mother. I didn't choose her, you see, although I thought I had. I should have seen it coming, but love makes you so very, very blind.
She was beautiful when she died.
The morning of her execution she had her attendants dress her all in red and braid her hair with fresh roses. Wine-colored stones cluttered her fingers. There are several paintings of it; she died opulently. It was drizzling - I remember that. I was to walk her to her tomb. It was something like a wedding processional as she took my arm and we went together, down the steep steps. The place was dark and it smelled of incense. My wife leaned close to me and whispered that I looked splendid in black. I remember not being able to say anything, only taking her hand and pressing it.
I wished, more than I ever had wished, and I was not answered.
Outside, the rain began to fall hard. We heard the shrieks of the assemblage; aristocrats don't like to be wet.
My wife smiled and said, "I bet they wish they were down here where it's dry."
I forced a smile and made myself kiss her cheek and bid her farewell. Her scent was as sweet as rot, but her skin was as waxy as the petal of a lily, as though she were dead already and merely playing at breathing and bleeding, for our amusement, for our amusement. And her eyes were as black as ink. The palace guards were waiting at the top of the stairs. They did not look at me.
Even then, she was still my wife. I was a dutiful husband. I loved her. I had commanded the cooks to put the very sharpest of my hunting knives beneath the food they had prepared for her. I wonder if you would do that for me, Artem. Perhaps you would. After all, it cost me nothing to be kind.
No. It cost me nothing.
Do you see this cup? A beautiful thing, solid gold, one of the few treasures of our family that remains. It was my father's. He had a cupbearer bring him his wine in it, even as his other guests drank from silver. He believed that the gold would neutralise any attempts at poisoning - would chase out the venom as mercury through the blood. Can you believe that? If only he had thought to treat his wife with the same suspicion, the same reverence, as he treated the golden cup.
I have it here beside me, just as you filled it—half with poison and half with cider. It will go down easy.
No, sit, sit. Calm your blood. We have a little time yet.
I have a story to tell you. You've always been restless, too busy to hear stories of people long dead and secrets that no longer matter. But now, Artem, bound and silenced as you are, you can hardly object to my telling you a tale:
What good is a fairytale without a princess? All the good fairytales have princesses, and all the best princesses have curses. That's the nature of it, isn't it? We cannot bear to be happy; we devour conflict - our hearts long for war.
There's all sort of curses, you know. The kind you wear like a shawl and discard when you outgrow them, the kind that holds you back like chains around your ankles lest you sprint head first into the world. And the kind that's stitched into your skin, intrinsically, inextricably yours, a part of the fabric of your being, woven into your sinews.
Lots of girls have curses, you know. Some of them can't speak a word lest they kill everyone in earshot, and some of them fade into thin, wispy things after midnight, as ephemeral as smoke. Some of them can't tell the truth, and some of them can't lie, not to save a life or take it. Some of them have blue mouths and pale skin, the walking dead, and some of them dig graves with their bare hands, every single night.
Your mother wasn't cursed. She poisoned with her wit and her words. But the one before her, the last Selected? She devoured poison and when she kissed, she killed.
That's why the Selection ended. Because she finished it with blood on her teeth and skin under her nails. Because my father died for it.
But you started it again, didn't you, Artem?
I wonder, sometimes. If you knew what you were doing, when you reopened the Selection.
How could you have known this would happen? I cannot blame you, any more than I could blame you for bleeding.
Let me tell you the story of your grandmother, who won the last Selection and killed the king.