Морган Райс - A Dirge for Princes

Instead, she seemed to be in a shadowy place, filled with mist that shifted and billowed, fractured light filtering through it so that it seemed more like the ghost of a sun than its reality. In the mist, Sophia had no idea which way was forward, or which way she was supposed to go.

Then she heard the cry of a child, cutting through the fog more clearly than the sunlight. Somehow, some instinct told her that the child was hers, and that she needed to go to it. Without hesitating, Sophia set off through the mist, running toward it.

“I’m coming,” she assured her child. “I’ll find you.”

It continued to cry, but now the mist twisted the sound, making it seem to come from every direction at once. Sophia picked a direction, plunging forward again, but it seemed that every direction she picked was the wrong one, and she got no closer.

The mist shimmered, and scenes seemed to form around her, set out as perfectly as performances on a stage. Sophia saw herself screaming in childbirth, her sister holding her hand as she brought a life into the world. She saw herself holding that child in her arms. She saw herself dead, with a physiker standing beside her.

“She wasn’t strong enough, after the attack,” he said to Kate.

That couldn’t be right though. It couldn’t be true if the other scenes were true. It could happen.

“Maybe none of it is true. Maybe it’s just imagination. Or maybe they’re possibilities, and nothing is decided.”

Sophia recognized Angelica’s voice instantly. She spun, seeing the other woman standing there, a bloody knife in her hand.

“You’re not here,” she said. “You can’t be.”

“But your child can?” she countered.

She stepped forward and stabbed Sophia then, the agony of it lancing through her like fire. Sophia screamed… and she was alone, standing in the mist.

She heard a child crying somewhere in the distance, setting off toward it because she knew instinctively that it was her child, her daughter. She ran, trying to catch up, even as she had the sense that she’d done this before…

She found scenes from a girl’s life around her. A toddler playing, happy and safe, Kate laughing along with her because they’d both found a good hiding place under the stairs and Sophia couldn’t find them. A toddler pulled from a castle just in time, Kate fighting against a dozen men, ignoring the spear in her side so that Sophia could run with her. The same child alone in an empty room, no parent there.

“What is this?” Sophia demanded.

“Only you would demand meaning from something like this,” Angelica said, stepping from the mist again. “You can’t just have a dream, it has to be filled with portents and signs.”

She stepped forward, and Sophia raised a hand to try to stop her, but that just meant that the knife thrust into her under the armpit, rather than cleanly up through the chest.

She was standing in the mist, a child’s cries sounding around her…

“No,” Sophia said, shaking her head. “I won’t keep going around and around this. It’s not real.”

“It’s real enough for you to be here,” Angelica said, her voice echoing from the mist. “What does it feel like, being a dead thing?”

“I’m not dead,” Sophia insisted. “I can’t be.”

Angelica’s laugh echoed the way her child’s cries had before. “You can’t be dead? Because you’re that special, Sophia? Because the world needs you so much? Let me remind you.”

She stepped from the mist, and now they weren’t standing in mist, but in the cabin of the boat. Angelica stepped forward, the hatred on her face obvious as she thrust the blade into Sophia once more. Sophia gasped with it, then fell, collapsing into darkness as she heard Sienne attack Angelica.

She was back in the mist then, standing there while it shimmered around her.

“Is this death then?” she demanded, knowing that Angelica would be listening. “If so, what are you doing here?”

“Maybe I died too,” Angelica said. She stepped back into view. “Maybe I hate you so much that I followed you. Or maybe I’m just everything you hate in the world.”

“I don’t hate you,” Sophia insisted.

She heard Angelica laugh then. “Don’t you? You don’t hate that I got to grow up in safety while you were in the House of the Unclaimed? That everyone accepts me at court while you had to run? That I could have married Sebastian without any problems, while you had to run away?”

She stepped forward again, but this time she didn’t stab Sophia. She stepped past her, walking off into the mist. The mist seemed to reshape itself as Angelica passed, and Sophia knew that this couldn’t be the real her now, because the real Angelica wouldn’t have tired of murdering her quite so quickly.

Sophia followed in her wake, trying to make sense of it all.

“Let’s show you a few more possibilities,” Angelica said. “I think you’ll like these.”

Just the way Angelica said it told Sophia how little she would like it. Even so, she followed her into the mist, not knowing what else to do. Angelica quickly disappeared out of sight, but Sophia kept walking.

Now she was standing in the middle of a room where Sebastian sat, obviously trying to hold back the tears that fell from his eyes. Angelica was there with him, reaching out for him.

“You don’t have to hold your emotions back,” Angelica said in a tone of perfect sympathy. She put her arms around Sebastian, holding him. “It’s all right to grieve for the dead, but just remember that the living are here for you.”

She looked straight at Sophia while she held Sebastian, and Sophia could see the look of triumph there. Sophia started forward in anger, wanting to pull Angelica away from him, but her hand couldn’t even touch them. It passed through without making contact, leaving her staring at them, no more than a ghost.

“No,” Sophia said. “No, this isn’t real.”

They didn’t react. She might as well not have been there. The image shifted, and now Sophia was standing in the middle of the kind of wedding that she could never have dared to imagine for herself. It was in a hall whose roof seemed to reach to the sky, nobles gathered in such numbers that they made even that seem small.

Sebastian was waiting by an altar along with a priestess of the Masked Goddess whose robes proclaimed her rank above the others of her order. The Dowager was there, seated on a throne of gold as she watched her son. The bride came forward, veiled and dressed in pure white. When the priestess threw back the veil to reveal Angelica’s face, Sophia screamed…

She found herself in chambers she knew from memory, the layout of Sebastian’s things unchanged from the nights she’d spent there with him, the fall of moonlight on the sheets straight from her memories of their time together. There were bodies tangled in those sheets, and in one another. Sophia could hear their laughter and their joy.

She saw moonlight fall on Sebastian’s face, caught in an expression of pure need, and Angelica’s, which held nothing but triumph.

Sophia turned and ran. She ran through the mist blindly, not wanting to see any more. She didn’t want to stay in this place. She had to escape it, but she couldn’t find a way out. Worse, it seemed that every direction she turned led back in the direction of more images, and even the images of her daughter hurt, because Sophia had no way of knowing which ones might be real and which were just there to hurt her.

She had to find a way out, but couldn’t see well enough to find one. Sophia stood there, feeling the panic building in her. Somehow, she knew that Angelica would be following her again, stalking her through the mist, ready to thrust her blade home in her once more.