Page 2 of The Shadow of Polaris

He gave me a sad smile, tears pooling on his lower lashes. A knock on the door announced it was my time to go. I let my hand slip away from the newly crowned king and prepared to take my leave.

Tucking a stray strand of hair behind my ear, I wiped the few tears I had allowed myself to shed and tipped my chin up, mimicking my sister’s portrait. If she taught me anything, it was to never let my enemies see weakness. I stopped in front of the tall wooden doors, not ready to face whatever awaited me. Placing my hand on the cold cast iron handles, I exhaled and glanced back at Vikar, trying to ingrain his likeness into my memories.

“The people of Ursae will thrive under your reign if you promise me one thing.” My eyes sharpened, and a tinge of disgust hit my tongue. “Promise me you’ll destroy every single remnant of that bitch from this realm.”

The new king’s mouth dropped to the floor. Not once had anyone spoken a word against Queen Adria. His gaping mouth curled slightly upward and a faint sparkle blinked from his eye.

“I promise.”

With that, I swung the oak doors open and stepped into the fate decided for me.

Chapter 2

Habitually, for the last five years, I’d wake up and scan about the room. It seems like only yesterday that I had wiped the tears from my nephew’s eyes and left my home for the last time. The circular room was bare and a terrible draft snuck through the hairline cracks of its dull grey stone. When I first arrived, only a large canopy bed with carved teak posters and matching armoire occupied the room. To lessen the severity of my perpetual isolation, I did all I could to create a home in the uninviting space.

Next to the neglected mantle sat an ornate wooden rocking chair with cushions that had lost their fluff years ago. Black velvet curtains draped over a window whose exterior glass was coated in a thick film of dust. Faded oriental rugs with pale grey and green hues provided some shield against the gritty stone flooring, but the frigid air still numbed my toes.

A large bookshelf, housing books with marbled front covers and faded leather bindings, leaned against the wall opposite the window. When I arrived at the tower, the shelves were bare. After my first night, however, when the existential dread of my confinement forced me to my knees in a melting heap, I awoke on the dusty, dark floor to find the case packed.

So many texts squeezed on each shelf that the knotted, varnished wood buckled slightly in the center. It was as if I had willed the books into existence simply from my tears. I never spoke of how the books miraculously appeared, and neither the guards nor my chambermaid seemed to notice.

A small knock on my door announced Hela’s arrival. I groaned and slammed my pillow over my face. Another knock came, this time more forceful. Gods, she was relentless. She’d continue knocking until sheer annoyance and frustration alone drew me from the warmth of my bed.

“I’m awake.” I tossed the thick down comforter aside and stepped on to the icy floor.

Brow wrinkled with irritation, I swung open the door to greet the small, bulbous woman in the corridor. I learned quite early in our acquaintance that Hela was an insufferable woman. Her small beady eyes drowned beneath swollen, crimson cheekbones. She possessed a beaklike nose, constantly running and red, and permanently puckered, chapped lips. She always wore her mousy hair in neat plaits coiled above her head. She wore a large grey shift and matching overcoat that buckled just above the waist. A wide leather belt was strapped around her midriff with such constraint that her broad belly looked as if it were about to burst through the iron buckle.

“Ah, Lady Elpis. It’s a chilly one this morning. Best you bundle up, dear. How’d you sleep?” Her shrill voice resonated throughout the room with a sickening sweetness. Its tone never lowered from that high, piercing octave. She spat with each consonant she spoke, requiring her audience to take a handkerchief or tissue to their slightly damp face.

Every morning she’d enter as if a bright, gleaming smile could melt the snow from the entire realm. She stepped to the window and threw the heavy black drapery open with a forceful whip of her thick arms, the skin sagging low and gelatinous beneath her biceps. Light bounced off scattered dust particles in radiant beams. Blinking, I forced my eyes to adjust to the winter morning sun and wiped the crusted sleep from between my lashes.

“Fine thanks, Hela.”

She glanced over her shoulder and beamed a toothy, rotting grin my way.

Upon my arrival at the tower, Hela was the first and only person I’d seen. She had placed my hand in her sticky palms and relayed to me the strict rules and regulations of my sentencing. I remember vividly her crooked yellowing teeth as she recounted the number of lashings I’d earn myself if she caught me breaking even the slightest of rules.

“Coffee.” Hela placed a cracked china saucer on the side table tucked between the rocking chair and the window. The bitter aromatics spread through the room in tendrils of steam as warm liquid poured from Hela’s cracked carafe into the saucer. The scent of freshly brewed coffee was the only thing that made my sentence somewhat bearable.

She motioned for me to sit. I draped a thick woolen throw over my shoulders as I headed for the chair, clicking my tongue in irritation. Hela stepped behind me and began brushing through my hair. The pulls of the comb were rough and impatient. I sipped my coffee, trying not to shake the saucer with every wince as the wooden teeth of her comb snagged in my unkempt hair. Hela’s sausage-like fingers scratched against my scalp and I hissed as she pulled the roots tightly into a plait mirroring her own.

When she finished, my eyelids stretched unnaturally high on my brow. She tucked the final loose hair behind my ear and asked, “Have you forgotten what today is, ma’am?”

The spray of verbiage was a warm, slimy mist against the nape of my neck. I jerked away from her breath and pushed myself up from the chair. Forcing a small smile, I shook my head and stepped into the bathing chamber to wash the film of sleep from my skin.

I, in fact, did not forget what day it was, having already started counting down the minutes until the final chime of midnight. Today marked my twenty-third year of existence. How I had managed to survive twenty-three years, I couldn’t begin to know.

When I first arrived at the tower, I vowed I wouldn’t see eighteen. I did everything in my power to assure that I fulfilled that promise: squeezing through the rusted metal bars mounted to the window to leap from the hundred story tower, scraping paint particles off the walls to brew into a deadly tonic, even shattering the small mirror into shards to slit my skin.

Each attempt was fruitless because of the enchantment bubbled around the tower. The wounds I inflicted healed immediately, the bars shrank around my abdomen, and the paint particles simply fizzled away in my brew. I received lashings from Hela’s thick leather belt after every failed attempt. My sentence was forever. I’d remain in this tower until my hair turned white, my skin wrinkled into grey, and my soul eventually faded into nothing.

When I turned nineteen, I had given up on my promise, falling into a hopeless, never-ending cycle of mindless fury and inhibiting sadness. Sometimes fits of rage burned through me so fiercely, I smashed furniture and slammed my fists into the stone walls until my knuckles bled. At the sight of red splattered against stone, I’d begin pounding even harder until the mangled mess of bone and flesh no longer resembled my hands. As soon as the skin broke around white bone, the wounds miraculously closed and I’d begin again until my muscles cramped with exhaustion. I’d slide down the wall and rock myself to sleep in a cold puddle of my blood.

Sometimes I’d feel sadness so deeply and become so paralyzed I had to look down at my limbs to reassure myself I hadn’t turned to stone. Hours in bed turned into days that turned into weeks. Self loathing and pitiful grief consumed every part of me. Nausea washed over me at the thought of food, and my throat closed at the thought of drink. Just as I reached the point of withering into nothing, my sternum almost skeletal and my lips dried shut, the atrophied muscles would swell back to normal. The hollows around my eyes would grow shallower and shallower until they disappeared all together. When I finally willed my legs to move, I sat up and moved about the room as if I had just awoken from a restful sleep.

When I turned twenty, acceptance hit me so abruptly it felt as if a knife had plunged directly into my chest. My lungs contracted and pushed my breath out with a whoosh, refusing to expand again. The already too small chamber seemed to shrink around me until I crumpled. I folded myself into a tight ball, pulling my legs up to my chest and gripping my knees with white knuckles. Heaving and gulping for air, I begged my lungs to expand, pleading with the organs inside a body that had become so alien; the fleshy feel of it encasing my soul was unrecognizable.

Everything broke into pieces. Sheer panic took hold and didn’t let go until everything that defined who I was fell away and I simply ceased to exist. My emotions froze over like the winter night air, leaving me a lifeless shell of my former self. Floating around the chamber like a spirit stuck in an endless haunting, with no peace in sight, I never did quite recover from the shock that had shoved itself down my throat.

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