BETROTHED TO THE DEVIL

THE LETTER

Her mother gave her the letter on the fourth day.

Seraphine was in the middle of deciding between two wool cloaks one heavier, one longer when her mother came in and sat on the edge of the chest at the foot of the bed and held out a folded piece of paper sealed with plain wax.

"Open it when you are most afraid," her mother said. "Not before."

Seraphine took it. The paper was thick and good, the kind her mother used for important correspondence. She could feel that there were several pages inside. "What does it say?"

"Things I should have said out loud but couldn't find the right time for." Her mother looked at the two cloaks laid out on the bed. She pointed to the heavier one. "That one. The north doesn't care about elegance."

Seraphine set the letter on her desk and put the longer cloak back in the wardrobe.

They packed together, mostly in silence. It was a comfortable silence, which was its own kind of grief, because comfortable silences were built over years and Seraphine was about to go somewhere where she would have to start from nothing. No silences yet. No shorthand. No one who knew that she took her tea without sugar and that she could not sleep if there was a sound she couldn't identify and that when she was upset she got very calm and very precise in a way that sometimes frightened people.

She would have to be a stranger.

She had been a stranger in her own palace for nineteen years. She supposed she was practiced at it.

"Take the books," her mother said, looking at the shelf.

"I can't take all forty."

"Take as many as fit. Books are familiar. When everything else is new, familiar things matter more than you think they will."

Seraphine looked at the shelf and chose twelve. She chose them the way a person chose things they might not be able to replace: the history of the southern kingdoms her first tutor had given her, the plant guide she had used to identify everything in the palace garden, the three novels she had read so many times she could recite passages, the mathematics text that most people found dull and she found calming, and a handful of others that had been with her long enough to feel like company.

She packed them in the bottom of the second trunk.

On the fifth day her father called her to his study.

She went in, sat in the chair across from his desk, and folded her hands in her lap. He did not look up from his papers immediately. This was a thing he did. She had never decided if it was a power exercise or simply that he was always genuinely busy. Either way she had learned not to fill the silence.

"You've been asking questions," he said, still reading.

"I like to be informed."

"About Vorreth. About the king."

"He is to be my husband. It seemed reasonable to learn what I could."

He looked up then. Her father was not a cruel man. She had decided this a long time ago, though it had taken a long time to decide. He was simply a man for whom power was the primary language and everything else warmth, sentiment, his daughter was secondary. He looked at her now with something that was not quite approval but was close to it.

"Good," he said. "You'll need to be informed. Vorreth is not a forgiving court."

"In what way?"

He set down his papers. "The king does not tolerate weakness. Not in his kingdom, not in his court, and I would assume not in a wife." He said this the way he said most things, as simple fact, with no particular concern for how it landed. "You are not a weak girl. You are going to have to make that visible quickly."

Seraphine thought about a room getting smaller. "I understand."

"The alliance is important. More important than your comfort, which I suspect you already know." He picked up his papers again. "Don't embarrass us."

She stood. "Is that all?"

"Yes."

She walked to the door.

"Seraphine."

She stopped but didn't turn.

"Ashvorn agreed to this marriage quickly. More quickly than I expected." A pause. The sound of papers. "I don't know what that means. I thought you should know I don't know what it means."

She turned then, because that was not the kind of thing her father said. He was telling her something he had not planned to tell her, and on the short list of things her father did unexpectedly, honesty about his own uncertainty ranked near the top.

"Thank you," she said.

He had already looked back at his papers.

On the seventh day she said goodbye to the palace.

She did it quietly and early, before the household was fully awake, walking the corridors she had walked every day for nineteen years. The east gallery with its portraits of people she would never meet. The kitchens that smelled of woodsmoke and bread at every hour. The small courtyard off the library where she used to sit in the summers as a child before she was old enough to understand that she was not supposed to sit in courtyards unaccompanied.

She stood in the doorway of the courtyard for a long time.

She was not going to cry. She had made this decision on the first night when she ate the cold soup, and she was keeping it.

She went to the garden with her escort of two guards, which was the regulation for the princess, and she walked the whole length of it and she looked at everything very carefully the way you look at something you are putting into memory. The white roses her mother had planted along the south wall. The old oak at the center that had been there since before the palace was built. The bench under it where she had spent more hours than she could count reading books from the shelf she had stripped of twelve.

She thought: I will not see this again for a long time. Maybe ever.

She thought: That is a true thing and I am going to put it somewhere inside me and close the door on it because the alternative is falling apart and I do not have the time.

She walked back inside.

The trunks were loaded that afternoon.

That evening her mother came to her room and they sat together for two hours and talked about nothing important. Recipes. A book her mother was reading. A bird that had been nesting in the window of the blue sitting room. Small ordinary things.

When her mother hugged her goodnight it lasted longer than usual.

Seraphine held on.

"The letter," she said into her mother's shoulder.

"When you are most afraid. You'll know when."

She lay awake for a long time that night looking at the ceiling she had looked at for nineteen years. Counting the small c***k that ran from the east corner to just past the center. She had counted it a thousand times. She was not going to count it again.

She closed her eyes.

In the morning she left.