She can't bear to look at the balcony where she saw him the night before. That very afternoon, as soon as she pulls herself together and stops crying, Anastasia draws the curtains and closes it off.
Cora helps her get dressed for the wedding and does her hair up in some ridiculously fancy style that she could never have hoped to accomplish on her own, and Anastasia puts on the very jewels she had tried stealing for her walk down the aisle.
The wedding is an enormous affair, with more food than she has ever seen in her life and finery that she could only have dreamed of. She flashes a fake smile at all of the nobility from the surrounding kingdoms who mill about the ballroom and offer congratulations to her and her new husband. She feels empty. Every flash of dark leather that she sees out of the corner of her eye has her whipping around to look. She knows it's not going to be him, but it still hurts when it's a stranger that enters her vision. She goes through almost an entire bottle of wine at the celebration but it doesn't even start to numb the pain.
Cora and the King help her make it through the day. The court is not pleased to see that the Red Queen will be some poor nobody who happened to get lucky and catch the King's eye, but no one dares say anything with two of the most powerful people in the realm backing her. Any time she starts to think about fleeing the room, Cora is there with a smile and a trifling conversation to distract her as if she knows what she is thinking. The King offers her small gifts throughout the evening – a flower he picked from one of the vases around the room, a new glass of wine, a small trinket or piece of jewelry – distractions, however temporary. More likely, she thinks, bribes to keep her from changing her mind.
Anastasia reminds herself that she has no one to run to outside the palace, and fidgets in her throne, feeling like the eyes of everyone in the room are on her.
The King is kind. He knows that she loves another, and he does not force her to consummate their marriage. They share a bed, however, and Ana takes the side closest to the door, so she can turn her back to the balcony, to the curtained view of the stars that are all named after her.
As time passes she warms up to her new life. She laughs and spends time with the King, explores the hedge maze with Cora, has the Tweedles help her into every outfit in her wardrobe just so she can see how they feel, but Will Scarlet is always in the back of her mind.
It is three weeks into her reign as the Red Queen that she hears rumors of the Forget-Me-Knot.
It's easy enough to find – a few orders to the guards and she has the location within the day. It was last seen with the Queen of Hearts, a part of her magic item collection.
She agrees to learn magic from Cora, and asks for the Knot on their second lesson. Cora is all too happy to hand it over to her new student. That night she retires to bed early and brings the Knot to the balcony. As she holds it up, her breath catches in her throat when she sees him – her Will – climbing over the balcony wall, calling her name. He moves out of view and she turns to follow him, almost sobbing when the vision through the loop of rope changes to her drawing the curtains the following day, tears still wet on her cheeks. When she focuses it back on the balcony, however, he is there again, this time with her.
"…have you forgotten all the good times we've had? Making wine out of wildflowers, naming the stars to fall asleep at night…"
"You named them all Anastasia."
"It's the most beautiful name I know. Come away with me. We can forget any of this ever happened."
The two in the loop look up, staring back at Anastasia, and she vaguely remembers the palace guards calling out.
"The wagon. Dawn. Meet me there. It's not too late to make things right."
And then he's gone.
Anastasia lowers the loop to the floor, tears streaming down her face. Seeing him again hurts.
"I'm sorry," she mumbles to the empty balcony, "I'm so, so sorry, Will…"
Anastasia hides the rope in the back of her wardrobe. She can't bear to see it. Can't bear to look at the balcony. It is days before the need to see his face overcomes the pain of knowing that she missed him at the wagon. She waits until the King is away on business and retrieves the Knot from her wardrobe, carelessly brushing aside all of the expensive red dresses that she had been fitted for. She spends all night re-watching her and Will's last meeting through the Forget-Me-Knot, falls asleep to the sound of his voice and the taste of her tears.
It isn't long until it becomes an obsession – her guilty pleasure is to retrace their first visit to the castle and see how many of the places she visited still hold a glimpse of him.
She has her favorites, of course, especially the one in the hedge maze, where she and Will are chatting excitedly while he zips up her "borrowed" dress and she straightens out his collar. They kiss briefly, then rest their foreheads together for a moment before heading off to the ball. But one day this vision is gone. In its place is a little girl in a blue dress, looking around wide-eyed with her mouth open in a little "o" of wonder. Anastasia watches the new vision three times through, wondering if she somehow took a wrong turn in the maze, before she hears a child laughing from a few hedges over and realizes that her vision has been replaced.
She hides the Knot in her bag and goes after the child, her teeth grit together in frustration. The girl is easy enough to find, she is hopelessly lost in the maze and Anastasia knows the paths like the back of her hand. The girl introduces herself as Alice, and looks rather frightened when Anastasia demands an explanation for her being there. She replies that she followed a white rabbit to this place and asks where she is.
"Wonderland. You're in Wonderland," Anastasia growls, cursing the damned rabbit and this stupid little girl for costing her one of her most precious visions of Will. The girl is curious, and follows her back through the hedge maze, asking questions non-stop until Anastasia can't stand it anymore and magics the pair of them to the outside of the maze.
"Go," she snaps at the child, "don't let me catch you here again or I will be far less forgiving."
Young Alice takes the threat for what it is and runs. Anastasia returns to the hedge maze, searching with the Knot for any other glimpse of her and Will, but they have all been written over. It is almost dark by the time she gives up, taking comfort in the fact that she still has a number of places inside the palace where she can see her beloved. Over the next few weeks, however, she begins to lose them.
One by one, they are all marked over. Will smiling at her from a corner of the ballroom is replaced by a servant dusting. The two of them holding hands as they explore one of the side passages becomes a bickering peasant couple on their way to see the King. Her and Will ducking beneath the shrubs on the edge of the garden is written over with the gardener trimming the hedges. She cries each time she loses a vision of him, but is powerless to prevent the images from being erased. There is one vision that she can keep intact, however. The balcony, where Will comes to see her one last time, his eyes full of love and his voice full of hope, remains untouched. Her Tweedles are the only servants allowed in the room, and they know very well that they are not to look through her wardrobe or go out on the balcony. The King suspects that she is up to something, but he lets the balcony be hers, remain closed off, and she is grateful to him for that.
She is watching the balcony vision one day while the King is busy at court when a bird flutters up to the palace and almost lands on the railing. It is the first time she uses her magic to kill. She locates the small creature's body afterwards, buries it on the grounds with whispered apologies, but she doesn't regret her actions. She has one vision of Will left, and she will be damned if she is going to lose it because a bird decided to perch on her railing. She asks Cora how to put up magic wards at their next lesson, and the Queen of Hearts is only too happy to show her.
Anastasia uses her magic to protect the balcony. It is a simple spell, and relatively weak, but enough to keep the birds off. She finds that the weather does not affect what the Forget-Me-Knot sees, and it comes as a great relief when she wakes up one morning to find a chill in the air and three inches of snow on her balcony. Her hands had been shaking as she lifted the loop to check, and for a second her heart had stopped in her chest when the vision on the other side was blank, but then she had heard Will's voice call her name and she had all but collapsed to her knees in relief. It was still there. Her last vision of him was safe.
The King passes away a year and a half into their marriage, and she cries for the loss. She has never loved him, but he has been a father figure to her, a protector and a friend in this strange land where the court is determined to hate her and the peasants have no respect for someone who they see as a child on the throne. He had been nothing but kind to her, and she goes into proper mourning when he passes.
Cora spends more and more time with her at the Red Palace, teaching her how to rule the kingdom, how to command respect from her subjects. Under her guide, Anastasia steps up as Red Queen, with the Queen of Hearts at her back.
When Cora is not visiting she spends her days about the palace, wandering the halls and tying to forget old ghosts. The loneliness becomes too much for her, and she hangs the Forget-Me-Knot on permanent display in front of her balcony. She falls asleep every night to Will's voice, pretending that she had never made the horrible decision to marry the King, to go after the crown jewels, to even come to Wonderland at all. It's always the same when she wakes up, though, she is alone in her bed and the one person in this world who truly loved her is gone.
Even Cora leaves her, eventually. The Queen of Hearts comes to the palace wearing a relatively simple dress and wishes her the best of luck in ruling Wonderland. She has heard at last from her daughter, and needs to go pay her a visit, so Anastasia will be ruling this land alone. Cora gives her a hug, laughs lightly when Anastasia cries over her departure, and tells her that she will be all right. She entrusts some of her magic items to Anastasia, including an old spell book and a tome of monsters – "for those problems that you don't have time to deal with personally" – and then she is gone, like everyone else that has ever cared about Anastasia.
Weeks pass before she pulls herself together enough to hold court. The gentry is just as cool and aloof as always, but all it takes is her tossing a bit of magic around to ensure that they don't throw insults behind her back. The peasants are mouthy, but they also fear her magic and her guards, so words are the worst she gets from them. She does the bare minimum to ensure the Kingdom will run, but is unable to put much more effort into it when her heart is empty and aching. She gets along all right for a while, but as it always is with her luck, it isn't long before things go wrong again.
She is on her way back to her room after a long day. The peasants had been up to see her in force, each one claiming she was responsible for some monster's attack or weather phenomenon that cost them their crops, and demanding that she pay. She had dropped some subtle hints about Queens beheading rowdy peasants and dismissed them, one farmer's leather jacket having reminded her of Will, in favor of returning to her room and looking through the Knot.
She opens the door just in time to see a man standing on her balcony, taking the Forget-Me-Knot off the hook in the doorway. For a second she is too horrified to move, her heart shattering as she realizes that her vision of Will will be gone, and the man manages to flee back over the balcony before she can even call the guards or lift her hand to cast a spell.
Anastasia sinks to the floor, her dress poling around her, and stares blankly out over the balcony. It's gone. The Knot, her vision of Will, all gone.
One of her Tweedles – her favorite of the two - comes looking for her an hour later and she lets him pick her up off the floor, dust her off, help her to the bed and fuss over her. She doesn't respond to his questions, merely puts her hands out like an obedient child when he brings her a cup of tea and stares into the dark liquid. The Tweedle paces the room until it is nearly dark, casting worried looks at her every few steps until she manages to pull herself together enough to look around the room.
"Tweedle, get the carriage," she orders quietly, and the man all but runs out of the room to do her bidding. Locating the man who stole her Knot isn't difficult, a small spell and she has a path to his location. She is brusque with the guards as she follows a path through the woods, the horses running full-tilt in the moonlight along a trail lit by her magic.
They arrive at a home in the woods, windows warm with light, and she barely waits for her Tweedle to open the door before she is striding over to the house, rage burning agonizingly hot in her chest. A wave of her hand and the door slams open. She doesn't even break her stride as she storms into the small cottage. The man leaps from his seat at the table, and she doesn't even give him time to beg. Her emptions are pulsing through her head, and the fury and pain she feels in this moment fuels her dark magic better than the memories of anything that her mother could have ever said to her. The man screams as her magic envelopes him, falling to the ground and writhing in pain as it warps him, twists his features. When he at last looks up, he is hideous to behold – the embodiment of her agony.
"Let this be a lesson to you," she hisses, and her voice sounds foreign to her own ears, "don't ever think you can take anything from me."
She whirls around in a blaze of red fabric and retreats to her carriage. Her Tweedle is waiting for her, helps her into the carriage and leaves her guards to drive as he climbs in with her. As soon as the door closes and the horses take off at a gallop, however, she breaks. Tweedle holds her close and pats her back as she cries, but doesn't speak – he has no idea what to say to make her pain go away. It takes almost the whole ride back for her to pull herself together.
There is no reason to take the Knot back. Her vision is gone, overwritten the moment the thief climbed over the balcony and forced his way through her ward. The last link to the man she loves has been severed, and she has no hope of getting it back. She stands on the balcony that night and wonders belatedly if the fall is high enough to kill her, should she choose to jump.
It is only a few months until Jafar comes into her life. He is a powerful sorcerer from a far-off realm, and holds himself with the poise of royalty. His honeyed voice promises her power, wealth, anything her heart desires if she can help him obtain a genie, and she laughs in his face. What she wants cannot be bought with money or forced through power. Even magic could not help her, and she tells him as much. But Jafar's lips twist into a wicked smirk, and he steps close, fingers tracing her cheek as he leans to breathe into her ear:
"What if I told you that I could break the laws of magic?"