Page 1 of Of Brides Of Queens
Chapter One
For twelve hundred years,
Kings pondered purpose.
Istood before the door of my hotel room, staring at the cracked, red paint. In truth, the cracked paint barely registered past the curtains veiling the square windows on either side of the door. When had that lace appeared, so delicate and fragile and fresh? The last I’d looked, yellowed and torn lace covered the dusty glass there.
Mother must have been busy with renovations. She spent far more time on them in death than she had in life.
I heaved a weary sigh that rattled the door on its hinges. Tonight, I much preferred the memory of yellowed and torn things.
Delicate and fragile and new curtains felt too much like I felt inside.
A monster strode out of my wardrobe. “You forgot something. Again.”
I glanced back to spot the garments closest to her reaching out their empty sleeves as if to pull the woman back into theroom. Everything in that wardrobe loved her, all the hundreds of garments and buttons and embroidered details… the hundreds of garments that were all for me.
I stared at the door again.
Lace curtains were not the only difference to the hotel. This room was a far cry from the run-down hotel studio I used to clean. Now, this space was much more like a chamber. And Hotel Vitale, once the only hotel in this city, was more like a gated garden villa.
And I was less like a barely surviving nineteen-year-old carer of her invalid mother and more like a…
Valetise set the tarnished copper crown on my head. “There. You must be seen in this.”
She rounded my right side and studied me with an expert eye. “Hold still, please.”
She plucked a black hair from her head, and I watched it flood with the same white as my dress. She had dressed me in a gauzy garment for floating summers and picnic evenings—as if such things could exist after The End. I’d worn a great deal of white in the last week, and perhaps Valetise viewed this color as my queenly uniform. I didn’t care to ask.
The haberdashery monster drew the end of a tape measure out from her waist, quickly measured, and then let it snap back to coil inside her body. The newest dusk creature in Vitale was excellently and beautifully crafted for her purpose.
Ruffled lace around her neck bounced gently as Valetise assessed her handiwork. Clearly satisfied, she slipped the needle into the thick layers of calloused skin on one of her forearms.
I’d discovered how incredible and capable my own monster body was in recent times, but I couldn’t help but envy the completeness and surety of my valet extraordinaire.
I pushed the copper crown up as it slipped down my forehead. “For how long will I need to wear this?”
“Only you can know that, my queen.”
I inhaled and held my breath, then—oof—released it in a rush. “I am only quite ancient and newly a queen, and a queen without purpose at that.”
Perhaps I should have asked how long the crown would wearme.
“You are an exquisite creature, Queen Perantiqua, and there is no one in the world like you. There will never be another like you again,” Valetise murmured, and she had a way of murmuring unlike any other being. There was nothing demure or soft about it. Her murmur held steel somehow. How wondrous.
I accepted the wisdom of her words, yet tonight they didn’t resonate in my heart and mind as I wished them to. “Exquisite and unique and without a reason for being.”
“Is not being enough?”
“One week ago, it was,” I answered. “Tonight, this crown is a weight on my head and in my mind.”
Valetise lingered behind, and as sure and complete as she was, the newest monster in Vitale could not understand matters of kings and a queen.
I would sooner expect a prince to fathom them.
Or perhaps a pawn.
I wrenched opened the door and strode across the copper landing to the gold balustrade. The raised heels of my strappy shoes echoed on the landing, and this noise felt very confronting to my feelings as well. If only my hotel didn’t embody me so.