Nan woke up to the sound of the two oak doors hitting the ground. They were splintered, and in the light of the lanterns of the corridor she saw the queen’s silhouette. It was the moment that all of them dreaded, the moment that the queen chose them as her next meal. But the queen didn’t even look in her direction. Nan saw her fisted hands, her feral look focused onto the little princess. She could see the queen struggling to walk back, but Nan knew that when the beast part of her took over there was nothing her human part could do but watch.

Sim stirred, her eyes still groggy. Nan stepped between the queen and the girl. The cold, hard body hitting her had never been her plan. She thought the sight of another person would shock the queen back to her usual control. Blood spurted from her neck before the wound was covered by an eager mouth. Draining her blood, draining her of life. Nan’s body slumped down onto the marble of the floor, surrounded by the fallen splatters of her own blood.

The princess had seen everything. The last person in the kingdom ignorant of the queen’s identity had been brought into the open secret. Her nursemaid lay dead at her feet. Blood dripped from the queen’s jaw, sticky and dark. Her dress was an ugly mess of reddish brown on green velvet. She grimaced in disgust at her own appearance before turning on her heels, pausing by the doorway.

“You shall have a new nursemaid by the morning, princess,” she stated before going back to her quarters.

Sim crawled out of the bed. Her Nan was sprawled over the floor, her soft skin a pale white, the light brown eyes blank and staring up at the ceiling. Sim stepped closer, afraid to touch. There was something in her that made her want to look. Made her want to see the gory truth of it all. The queen was a beast, a monster. She had heard it before, but never before had she seen how literally people said the truth. She was a murderer.

Two soldiers walked into the room, one holding Nan by the shoulders and the other by the legs. They walked towards the door, carrying her as if she was worth nothing more than a sack of dirt. She had been a person. She had been the person in Sim’s life.

“Stop. Lay her down on my bed. Her family will take her in the morning,” she ordered. To her surprise, the soldiers obeyed. She sat on Nan’s old stool the entire night, recounting the stories the old nursemaid had taught her. The rose was wilted, and the tiny drop of her blood was caked over on the little thorn. Without doubt she knew that her blood had caused the attack. She knew the old stories of vampires and their thirsts. To think that she had been stupid enough to only think them stories, concoctions of her nursemaid to frighten her into being a dutiful princess.

Nan had saved her life. It was something that weighed down on her. And Nan hadn’t given up her life after thought, or after consideration. She had been a victim, not a volunteer. The stricken look on her frozen face confirmed that. Her cotton gown was soaked to a deep brick color. Sim grabbed a washcloth and proceeded to clean her face and neck. The tears were dripping down her cheeks, the sorrow blocking the sobs in her throat. But she didn’t know what to do. She had spent her entire life living in darkness, ignorant and innocent. To have that ripped away from her in so violent a manner… There was nowhere she could go, no one she could turn to.

She knew now that the walls of the castle had never been to keep anyone out. No one would dare venture into the queen’s domain. It was to keep her in. She was a prisoner of the luxury that surrounded her. Sim wondered how much her life was really hers. Did she really have a father that was going to come home one day? Had her mother died of illness as everyone claimed? None of her questions would get answers. Not within her current confines definitely.

She knew what she had to do. Her classes of needlepoint and etiquette would never serve her well. She had no desire to be a princess. Her need was to be a warrior. She would be a warrior, she promised to Nan’s eyes. Then she closed the old woman’s eyes and left the room.

* * *

The queen wiped off the last of the blood from her face and slipped off the gown. It would be thrown out, burnt. She had left the little girl alone with the corpse. Not her best decision, on hindsight. But it had never been her plan to kill the old woman. She always killed mechanically, painlessly. The bout of uncontrolled hunger was a horrible exception. She knew the old woman was loyal, the little princess’s only true friend in the castle.

In one step she had managed to transform herself from being the girl’s distant guardian to a monster. She decided it was bound to happen eventually, just not in such a straightforward way. She stepped out of the white cotton underdress and let the transformation overtake her. Gold flecks appeared in her green eyes as they went wide. Her bones snapped and creaked with the effort of the transformation, the sound of tearing flesh and muscle filling the halls just a second before the sound of her muffled screams. The queen was gone, and in her place was a creature born of the night.

The snout was long and straight, yet revealing the two razor points of sharp white fangs. The long black fur-covered body grappled onto the floor with its claws and smelled the air. This time she was the beast only on the outside. The cool mind of the queen still held control from within. The arms spread wide as the giant bat plunged out of the window and into the garden. The girl sat there, warm salty tears dripping down her cheeks.

She wondered what the little princess was feeling. Anger, confusion, sorrow. A plethora of emotions, all too enormous for an eleven-year old girl. The queen landed on one of the branches of the weeping willow, more silent than the wind. The girl sat at one of the wooden benches, leaning back with her eyes closed. She seemed determined to ignore the tears, ignore her own sobs.

The princess wondered what the girl was thinking looking up at the sky. Her blue eyes were made even the more striking because of the red surrounding them. There was an expression of resolve on her face that looked wrong on a child. It belonged on a person beaten, a person broken. The queen knew it was revenge. She had felt it herself. And for the first time in a century, for a reason she knew not, she felt fear.

* * *

Sim looked up at the sky, not looking at anything. The images playing in her mind were more than enough. Blood and gore, murder and monsters. It was more than enough. Her own uselessness became more and more apparent every second she thought about it. She was a doll, a living doll used to every luxury. She had been content with knowing nothing for all her life and accepting everything she was told without question. What a wonderful toy she had been for the queen.

Thoughts of escape still passed through her mind, but she was afraid just as much of what was outside the palace as what was in it. The queen hadn’t killed her for eleven years, but would people outside be so kind? Who would offer mercy to the ward of a monster? She knew how to enjoy, but not how to work. The thought sickened her. She was good for nothing but politeness and prettiness. Useless.

So she would learn. She would learn all she needed to live without someone’s mercy, someone’s shelter. When she escaped, she would go beyond the queen’s reach. It wasn’t enough for her to escape. It wasn’t right for her to leave and leave people behind to suffer. She would escape, and she would come back to free them. She saw the darkness on the willow branch, knew it was no normal bat.

Sim slept in a chaise in one of the sun rooms, and woke up just as the black of the sky was turning a soft coral pink. Sunrises were beautiful. The warmth touching her face, the thought of a new day. It was something that Nan had loved. Dawn was the happiest time of day, and it was a pity so few ever saw it. Sim remembered her old words and fought back the fresh round of tears. Crying would accomplish nothing for her and certainly nothing for Nan.

She slipped downstairs to her rooms. The soft sobbing stopped her at the door. She had no right to rob them of their mourning. It occurred to her that she knew so little about Nan. The old nurse had left the castle every week to visit the family Sim had never seen. She had children, grandchildren, sisters and brothers that would never see her again.

They would want her there, she decided. She was just as much a part of Nan’s life as they were. It didn’t matter that she had been paid to care and nurture, she had done more than that. Sim stepped into the room. Someone had lit incense and candles, and closed all the curtains in the room. The candles were almost melted, but the smoky incense darkened everything to shades of brown and grey. Their hollow eyes, their frail structures wrapped in rags that seemed too large and too heavy for their tired frames. Everything about them caused in her pity and a sick feeling she couldn’t describe. There was grime on their faces, just as much as there was hunger and desperation.

Nan had to force her to eat everything on her plate, had to coax her into drinking milk and eating a spoonful of honey first thing in the morning. All of these things she had done while her own family starved and toiled outside the walls of the castle. Nan had taken a basket of food with her every week, but it seemed it hadn’t made a dent in their starvation.

They all bowed before her, her heads bent until she commanded them to rise. The soldiers outside watched warily as she stood by Nan’s side. She ordered them all to rise and then said nothing. What could she say? It was all too apparent on their faces that they knew the circumstance of Nan’s death. Yet they could do nothing. They were too weak to avenge, too frightened to even think of it. Despite the misery of their daily lives, they still found their mortality a precious gift.

“I’m sorry,” she said at last, almost whispered.

She supposed some of them might have looked like Nan if it weren’t for their pitiful state of being. There was something in the lines of their faces, the shape of their eyes. But everything else, their sickness and their destitution was the queen’s fault. They shuffled out as soon as the wooden stretcher arrived, carrying her away to the burial grounds.

Her room was no longer hers, tainted with murder. She had her clothes shifted to a smaller suite overlooking the garden and ordered the new nurse to leave her alone. She was too old for a nurse. Wandering through the corridors, she heard the usual dull clacks of soldiers playing around with their wooden swords. But that was for another day. She would learn how to survive before she learned how to fight.

Sim walked into the one room that she had always avoided in the castle. The ceiling rose forty feet above her head, the walls all lined by rows and rows of books on every subject possible. There was the musty smell of a room with too much wood and paper, and not nearly enough open windows. She grabbed the nearest book she found and took a seat in a green armchair by a dirty window. The day outside was beautiful, but her focus needed to be off of it.

Beautiful days would come again, as long as she lived. Safety and opportunity, those were something else. Her hands were still chubby and short, but she had no trouble prying apart the old yellowed pages. It was a cooking book, complete with fine pen drawings of the dishes prepared.

She couldn’t have chosen a worse book for herself if she had tried. Sighing, she set the book down on her lap and began to read. Everything was difficult, blanched, braised, or broiled. She wasn’t really sure what any of them meant.

By the time she was done she was sure she didn’t remember more than ten pages of it. But it was ten pages more than she knew before. She slid the book back into the shelf and dragged out the next one. Herbs and Roots of Mirtlemeadow. She placed the volume on her lap and began.