Bring Me Their Hearts
Sara Wolf
For those who have lost their own hearts,
and who struggle with their own hunger.
“Darkness is only in the mortal eye,
that thinks it sees, but sees not.”
—Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
1
The Starving
Wolf and
the Black Rose
King Sref of Cavanos watches me with the deadened eyes of a raven circling a corpse—patient, waiting to devour me the second I let my guard down. I briefly debate telling him humans don’t taste all that good, until I remember normal girls don’t eat people. Or fake their way into royal courts.
Normal, I think to myself. Completely and utterly normal. Bat your eyelashes. Laugh like you’ve got nothing in your head. Old God’s teeth, what in the flaming afterlife do normal girls do again?
The other girls would know. There are three of us, three girls in cake-pink dresses, kneeling before King Sref’s throne. We wear veils to hide our faces. I’d ask them, but we’re currently busy drowning in expensive lace and the silent stares of every gilded noble in the room. Well, the other two girls are. I’m doing more of a laughing internally at the way they carefully tilt their gorgeous heads and purse their pouts thing. Look More Attractive Than the Girl Next to You is the name of the game their mothers have been teaching them from birth.
Mine taught me how to die, and not much else.
“You are all as lovely as rose blooms,” the king says finally. His face is weathered with a handsome age. Dignity carves lines around his steel-colored eyes. The smile in them doesn’t reach those eyes, though, a sure sign it’s only half sincere. He is old, he is powerful, and he is bored—the most dangerous combination I can think of.
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” the two girls echo, and I quickly mimic them. I’ve nicknamed them in my head—Charm and Grace. Charm and Grace don’t dare look at anything but the marble floor, while my eyes dart about, thirsty for the rich silks of the nobles’ clothes and the gold serpents carved into the majestic stone columns. Three years stuck in the woods serving a witch makes your eyes hungry for anything that isn’t a tree or deer droppings. I can’t raise my head for fear I’ll be singled out, but I can look just high enough to see the feet of Queen Kolissa and her son. Crown Prince Lucien d’Malvane, Archduke of Tollmount-Kilstead, Fireborn, the Black Eagle—he has a dozen names, all of them eye-roll worthy. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my single day at the royal court, it’s that the more names someone has, the less he actually does.
I haven’t seen more than the prince’s booted toes, and I already know he’s useless.
And soon, if I have my way, he’ll be heartless.
“I welcome you, the newest additions to our illustrious court,” King Sref says. His voice booms, but out of decorum, not of passion.
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Charm and Grace say, and I echo. I’m starting to get the hang of this—thank everyone a lot and look pretty. Infiltrating the palace might not be so hard after all.
Queen Kolissa’s saccharine voice rings out after the king’s. “I hope you will bring honor to your families and uphold the ideals of this great nation,” she says.
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” we respond.
I hear the queen murmur something. A deep voice softly says something back, and then her voice gets an inch louder—but still so quiet only the three of us, kneeling at the foot of the throne, can hear it.
“Say something, please, Lucien.”
“That would be pointless, Mother, and I tend to avoid doing pointless things.”
“Lucien—”
“You know I hate this outdated ceremony. Look at them—they’re here only for their families. No girl in her right mind would subject herself to this humiliating display.” The prince’s voice is laced with dark venom, and I flinch. It’s nothing like his father’s carefully emotionless tone or his mother’s sickly sweet one. Unlike the rest of these restrained nobles, his emotions burn hot just beneath the surface. He hasn’t learned how to hide them completely, not yet.
“It’s a tradition,” the queen insists. “Now say something to them, or so help me—”
The screech of a chair across marble resounds, and the prince demands of us: “Rise.”
The two girls, graceful as swans, lift their skirts and stand. I bite back a swear as I do the same and nearly trip over my ornate shoes. Note to past self: four days of training isn’t nearly enough time to teach someone to walk in a pair of ribboned death traps. How Charm and Grace do it so effortlessly is beyond me, but the blushes on their faces aren’t.
I look up to the prince now standing on the top step before us. Even without the advantage of elevation, I can see he’s tall—a warrior’s height, his silver-vested torso lean and his velvet-caped shoulders broad. A year? No, he’s maybe two years or so older than my ageless teenage form of sixteen; the corded muscles tell me that much. Why they call him the Black Eagle is obvious now: his hair is blacker than a raven’s, windswept about his face and long in the back, kept in a single braid that traces his spine. His face is his father’s in its prime: a proud, hawkish nose, cheekbones so high and dignified they border arrogance. His skin is his father’s, too, sun-kissed oakwood, and yet his eyes are his mother’s—piercing dark iron sharpened to a fine, angry blade point. He is all pride and sable darkness, and every part of me hates it—hates the fact that someone who’s to inherit so much power and wealth is striking as well. I want him hunched and covered in warts. I want him weak-chinned and watery-eyed. But the world is unfair, always. I learned that the day my parents were killed.