The Fortune I Gave Was Never Mine

I woke to the smell of wet earth and the weight of satin pressing against my face. At first I thought I was dreaming of the garden at Winterhold, the one with the white roses my grandmother had planted before she died. Then the satin shifted and something hard knocked against my knee, and I understood that I was not dreaming. I was inside something closed. Airless. Small. I tried to lift my arms and my elbows struck wood on both sides. "No," I whispered, and the word came back to me flat and close, swallowed by the dark. I knew this feeling. I had felt it once before, when I was nine and my cousin Hollis dared me to hide inside an old cedar chest in the attic. I had stayed in there for three minutes and screamed until my throat was raw. That chest had slats. This one did not. This one was built to hold a body. I pressed my palms against the lid and pushed. The wood did not give. I pushed again, harder, until my wrists ached and my breath came in shallow pulls. The air was already thinning. My chest was already tight. If I had died once, I did not remember it. Maybe it had been quick. Maybe my heart had simply stopped the moment someone closed the lid, and whatever had been left of me had drifted up through the wood and the dirt and come back down now, into this same small space, for reasons I did not understand. But I was awake now. And I was alive. I stopped pushing and lay still, listening. Above me, muffled but unmistakable, I heard footsteps. Then voices. "She was always a strange child," someone said. A woman. Calm. Almost cheerful. I knew that voice the way I knew my own heartbeat. My mother. "Your Grace, we should return to the carriage. The bishop is waiting." "Let him wait." A pause. A soft laugh. "There is one more thing I want to say to her before she is properly gone." The footsteps came closer. They stopped directly above my face. "I know you can hear me, Olivia," my mother said. "You always did have sharp ears. That was the first thing I noticed about you, you know. The first time I held you in my arms, you turned your head toward my voice like you already knew I was lying." I held my breath. I did not move. "You were never mine," she said. "Not really. I took you from my sister's cradle the night her own baby came out blue and silent. She was so weak then, so easy to fool. I told her the child had died. I told her the midwife had taken it away. And I put you in her place and I put her out of the house before dawn." My fingers curled in the satin. "She never stopped looking for you," my mother said. "She wrote letters to every court in the country. She walked to the capital with no shoes. She died three winters ago in a poorhouse in Veilport, still asking for a daughter who was sleeping in silk two hundred miles away." A stone scraped against wood. She was kneeling. "When the astronomers told me your fortune was spent, I had the papers drawn up before they finished speaking. A disaster child. A curse on the realm. The king signed the order without reading it. He always did trust me." The stone scraped again. She was standing. "Your father's army broke at Harrowfield because of you, they say. Seven banners fell because a general held a baby in his arms. And when the old king lay dying, you sat by his bed for three days and he opened his eyes." She laughed, low and pleased. "Do you know what I did with those three days? I sat outside the door and counted the hours until he was well enough to name me regent. You were my ladder, Olivia. You were never my daughter." The footsteps moved away. Dirt began to fall. They were filling the grave. I opened my mouth and screamed. No one heard. The dirt kept falling, and I pressed my palms flat against the lid and screamed again, and then the weight stopped and everything was quiet, and I understood that I had been buried alive by my own mother and that the last thing she had wanted me to know was that she had never loved me, not once, not from the beginning. I lay in the dark and tried to breathe. Three days, I thought. Maybe less. I had read once about a girl who survived two days in a collapsed cellar. I had read about miners who lasted longer. I had a dress and no water and no light. I did not have much time. But I was alive, and my mother did not know it. That was enough to start. I used my fingernails on the underside of the lid, looking for the nails the carpenter had driven in. My hands were small. My ring was small too, a silver band my father had given me when I was twelve. I worked it off my finger and used the edge against the wood, scratching along the grain, searching for a seam. There was nothing. I worked for hours. At some point my fingers began to bleed and I stopped, and then I slept, or something like sleep, and when I woke the air was worse and I knew I was running out of time. I said my grandmother's name out loud. Then my father's. Then, quietly, the name of a woman I had never met, a woman who had walked to the capital with no shoes looking for a daughter who was never hers. "I will find them," I told the dark. "I will find whoever is still standing and I will make them hear me." And then I heard it. A scrape. Not above me. Beside me. I went very still. The scrape came again. Metal against wood, slow and careful. Then a splinter of light appeared at the edge of the lid, thin as a needle, and a voice whispered through it. "Olivia." I knew that voice too. "You are supposed to be dead," I whispered back. "I know," said Nolan, my mother's youngest brother, the one who had taught me to ride and had never once called me a curse. "Everyone thinks I am at the eastern garrison. I have been digging for six hours. Can you move your hands?" I lifted them. "Put your palms against the lid and push when I tell you," he said. "And Olivia?" "Yes." "Whatever she told you down here, she is wrong about one thing. Your father did read the order. He argued for an hour before he signed it." The light widened. "But he signed it," I said. "He signed it," Nolan said. "And when he finds out what she did with the proof, he is going to bring this whole kingdom down around her ears." The lid cracked open. Cold air poured in. I sucked it into my lungs and started to cry, and I did not have time to cry, so I stopped. "Take me to the records," I said. "The church where they kept the birth registers. She would have changed one thing, and I need to know what." Nolan pulled me up out of the dirt. The night sky was gray and enormous above me. Somewhere far off, a bell was ringing for my funeral. My funeral. "Olivia," Nolan said, and his face was pale and strange in the moonlight. "There is something else." "What?" "The astronomers who signed the report. Two of them are dead. The third is missing. She is cleaning up after herself." I looked back at the grave that was supposed to hold me, at the mound of fresh earth, and I felt something turn over in my chest, cold and clear. "Then we find the third one first," I said. "Before she does."