The Bride of The Enemy King

Ten years since Princess Lyra Elowen disappeared. As far as anyone in Edevane knew, she'd died with the rest of her family. She hadn't… She stood in front of the cracked mirror in the room she now called home, home, what a stretch of a word and looked at the woman staring back at her. Nothing about that reflection matched the girl people used to whisper about at court. Hair still dark brown, still long, but her eyes had gone sharp in a way that used to belong to soldiers, not princesses. A scar cut across her left shoulder, hidden under her dress where nobody would ever see it. She didn't need to see it either. She could feel it most nights, a tightness under the skin that never fully let go. She picked up the broken seal off the table. Half of it, really the rest had melted into the stone floor of the throne room the night everything burned. "This is all that's left," she said out loud, to nobody, because there was nobody left to say it to. "No crown. No palace." Her fingers closed around the metal until the edge bit into her palm. "No family." She looked at herself again. *Only me.* For ten years she'd been in Lyra Vale. Quiet. Unremarkable. The kind of woman in a room forgot the second she left it. That had been the whole point, become nobody, so nobody would come looking. She crossed to the table where a folded piece of parchment sat waiting, the way it always did. She'd read it so many times the creases had gone soft. Notes on one man. King Darius Valerian. Where he took his mornings. When he met his council. How many guards stood outside his rooms, and which ones drank too much to notice a woman slipping past. The roads he took out of the capital. What he ate. What he didn't eat, and why, small things, the kind only someone watching for years would bother to learn. She said his name out loud, quiet at first. "Darius." Then, colder, "*King* Darius." Her hand tightened around the paper enough to wrinkle it. "You destroyed Edevane." A pause. Her jaw worked. "You destroyed my family." The memory came whether she wanted it or not, it always did, uninvited, at the worst times. Smoke thick enough to taste. Her mother's face, white with fear, mouthing something Lyra could never quite remember. Her father's hands on her shoulders, shoving her toward the servant's passage, his voice cracking on the word *run.* She shut her eyes. *No. Not tonight. Not again.* She opened them. "I won't remember you as a king," she said, and her voice had gone somewhere flatter, somewhere further away from her. "I'll remember you as the man who took everything." She dragged the small chest out from under the bed. Inside: her mother's necklace, gone slightly tarnished from years without polish. A family portrait, edges soft from handling. The broken seal's other half, no, wait, she still had that one in her hand. She set it down next to its twin. She stared at the portrait for a long moment. Her mother's painted face. Her father's. And between them, a girl who still believed a family could protect her forever, because nothing bad had happened to her yet. Lyra almost smiled at that girl. *Almost.* "You wouldn't recognize me now," she told the portrait, and shut the lid before she could think about it any longer. She reached under the bed again and pulled out a dagger, the grip worn smooth from her own hand, months and months of practice sunk into that leather. "I learned," she said. Turned the blade so it caught what little light came through the window. "Because I had to." She lowered it to the table, next to Darius's name. "For years I've prepared." Her voice shook on that one, just slightly, just enough that she noticed it herself and didn't like it. "I've waited." She looked toward the window. Outside, an ordinary little world went on not knowing what slept inside this house. "One year." She let that sit. "One year is all I have left." She set the dagger down beside the parchment like she was laying two pieces of the same puzzle side by side. "I have one year to finish this." Her eyes went back to his name. "And I will." --- Night came down over the house and Lyra didn't sleep. She sat at the table with Darius's name in front of her, the only light in the room a thin strip from the window, moonlight or streetlamp, she never could tell which anymore. For ten years, whenever fear tried to talk her out of this, she'd said the same four words back at it. "He took everything." She said them again now, quieter. Older-sounding somehow, though she was only three years older than the girl in that portrait. She leaned back in the chair, wood creaking under her. She really should fix that chair, some distant practical part of her thought, and almost laughed at herself for thinking about furniture in the middle of all this. "What happens," she asked the empty room, "when I'm finally standing in front of you?" She pictured it. Darius, the king, the man she'd built ten years of hatred around like scaffolding. Would he look at her and see anything at all? A princess three years dead, standing in his own hall? No. He couldn't. That was the entire design. That was why she'd buried Lyra Elowen so deep that even she sometimes had to go looking for her. "They think I'm dead," she said, and swallowed. "Let them." Her eyes hardened. "If Darius believes the princess died that night, then Princess Lyra can stay dead. But Lyra Vale", she picked the dagger back up, turned it slowly in her hand, "Lyra Vale can walk right into his kingdom." "She can stand beside him." Her voice dropped low enough it barely counted as speaking anymore. "She can earn his trust." A pause. Her thumb ran along the flat of the blade. "And when the moment comes" her fingers closed tight around the handle, "she can kill him." That should have felt good. She'd waited ten years for that sentence to feel good. It didn't. Something heavy dropped into her chest instead, sudden, uninvited, and she hated it immediately. "Why does that feel different now?" she asked, and hated that too, hated that there was a *now* different from before, hated that some part of her was asking questions she hadn't given herself permission to ask. "No." She shook her head like she could physically knock the feeling loose. "This is what I wanted." She stood up fast enough the chair scraped the floor. "I wanted justice." Her voice cracked slightly on the word, and she pushed through it. "I wanted my family avenged." She caught her own reflection faintly in the dark window glass, not the mirror, just a ghost of herself laid over the night outside. "You don't get to feel sorry for him," she told that ghost. "You don't even know him." Her jaw tightened. "And you don't need to." She turned away from the window before the reflection could argue back. Back at the table, she folded the parchment with hands that weren't quite steady, she noticed the small shake in her fingers, and pressed them flat against the wood until it stopped. Every hour of training. Every detail she'd bled information out of servants and merchants and drunk guards to get. Every night she'd lain awake running the plan over and over until it wore smooth like the dagger's grip. All of it had brought her here. To this table. To this name. She tucked the parchment into the chest and lifted her mother's necklace out instead, just to hold it. Just for a second. The metal had gone cold sitting in that chest for so long, and she pressed it into her palm like she could warm it back to life. "I promise," she said, and her voice came out smaller than she meant it to, smaller than a woman about to kill a king should sound. "I won't let you die for nothing." Her fingers closed around it. "I will avenge you." She lifted her eyes. "And I will make Darius pay." She set the necklace back and closed the lid, a little too hard, like she needed the sound of it shutting to convince herself the moment was over. Ten years she'd survived on nothing but this. Ten years of letting hatred do the work love should have been doing instead of keeping her upright, keeping her breathing, keeping her moving forward one gray morning at a time. Now, finally, she had more than hatred. She had a plan. Get close. Get inside his world. Make him believe, completely, that she belonged there. And then, when he least expected it. She picked the parchment back up one last time before bed. Let her eyes settle on the name at the top. *King Darius Valerian.* She said it once, barely a whisper. Then again, quieter still. "Darius." Her face went still, not angry now, not exactly. Just still, the way water goes still right before something breaks the surface of it. "I am coming for you." And for the first time in ten years, lying down in the dark with the dagger still on the table beside her, Lyra didn't lie awake wondering if she had the courage to finish this. She wondered, instead, what finishing it would actually cost her, and she didn't have an answer for that one yet.