That was how Tristan found himself once again in the royal ballroom, dressed in a gaudy orange gown and weighed down with as many jewels and ostrich feathers as his little frame could support. The ballroom had been redecorated again, painted with delicate cherubs set in heavenly scenes. It felt as gloomy and confining as ever.
There were an unusually large number of women attending this party and the swarm of over-applied perfume was making his head swim. His father had promised that the king himself would introduce him, but so far he’d been left to wallow in the corner and suffer the headache.
“Are you alright?” A jet-black hand with fingers longer than he’d ever seen brushed gently against his forehead before he could answer. “Good – your temperature is fine.”
He snapped his gaze up before he could think better of it. She was as beautiful as a full moon in a clear black sky. Her tall and slender body forced even him to crane to look her in the face. Eyes, white down to the pupil, stared patiently out from a sharp face, and her long, wild hair was as white and reflective as snow.
She was mesmerising, but unsettling. He felt a chill creep into him from being watched by her.
She broke the spell by curling her lips into a casual smile. “Don’t be afraid. I’ve come to help.”
It was then that he spotted the king hurrying towards them. His furious gaze scolded Tristan from behind her back.
“My apologies, Your Majesty.” He tried to dip his head without grimacing. Taking a small breath to help him concentrate on keeping his back straight, he lifted his skirts, crossed his right leg back, and began a slow descent to the floor for a court curtsy. “I didn’t know it was you.”
The king took his cue to step forward and join the conversation. “Ah, I see you’ve encountered the Honourable Miss Muirgen Belleforte, daughter of the Prime Minister.” Tristan could at last rise – fighting hard not to wobble. He didn’t miss the flash of interest in her eyes. “Miss Belleforte, this is our great ally, Queen Zecadus Whitewound of the Dark Elves. She was attracted to Golsennur by our recent technological advancements – led, of course, by your father.”
“Charmed,” said the queen. He didn’t like the way that his stomach flipped at her tone.
“I am the most charmed, Your Majesty.”
He saw the king wince. Reluctantly, he pretended to be called away by another noble, as he had promised Loki. Queen Zecadus relaxed again.
“Are you feeling unwell? It would be my honour to help you feel a little more comfortable.”
“Someone as great as you shouldn’t concern yourself with the likes of me, Your Majesty.” He tried for a tone of humble elegance. He ended up with “clumsily trying to chase you off”.
Surprisingly, she smiled. “Come with me to the garden? I need some air.”
He hesitated. Following one of the Others alone into the darkness sounded like a dangerous idea, even if the stories of them abducting women and eating children turned out to be false. She offered her hand to him patiently, and he squirmed to see that her fingers had four joints. He risked another glance at her face. Her smile reached her eyes and seemed sincere.
He let her guide him into the palace grounds in a trance. The roses were in full bloom and filling the warm night air with their subtle scent. The queen shot another eager smile at him as she took him into further the darkness. For a split second, he had the strongest feeling of déjà vu.
She stopped at the distant fountain. “There. Now we can talk without anyone overhearing us.” She let his hand go and turned to face him fully. “I know your people think I’m a savage, so you don’t have to force yourself to put on graces for me. I want to talk openly so that we can overcome the myths.”
He held his breath, thinking of the many ways that could go wrong. He would have to obey her to please her like his father expected him to, though. He tried giving one last, smaller, curtsy. “I wasn’t thinking that you’re a savage, Your Majesty. My head hurts and I don’t like parties.”
She laughed. “I thought so…”
She lifted her long fingers to her lips and said a few quick words in a language he didn’t recognise. When she placed them on his forehead, he felt a strange buzz run through his brain and a flash went off like an old-style camera, blinding him in an instant. The headache was gone when she took them away. He didn’t feel nauseous or tired either.
“How does that feel?”
“Completely healed…” he said, stunned.
The queen nodded triumphantly. “Good. This is my first time using that spell on a human.”
He decided not to ask what could have happened if she’d performed it wrong. “Thank you, Your Majesty. Magic is truly amazing…”
A long and awkward silence fell between them. The queen looked keen to speak, but at a loss for what to say. The thunderous music from the ballroom stretched across the garden to them as a distant, dreamlike noise.
“I like your parties, but it’s a shame that I can’t really take part,” said Queen Zecadus at last. “Your dances are beautiful, but I don’t know the steps.”
He had to agree on that part, at least. “They spend years teaching us to get every step perfect. It’s not much fun when putting your foot in the wrong place leads to being mocked…”
Still, she glanced back longingly at the ball. He observed her for a moment.
“I can teach you a little here?” he offered. “Nobody will know if we get it wrong unless we fall over.”
Her eyes snapped to him in surprise and wonder – and, he saw, badly concealed hope and excitement. She seemed to weigh up whether or not his offer was genuine. He curtsied and offered his hand to reconfirm it.
So they danced there in the garden, shielded by the darkness and the roses. He taught her the group dances first, so that she would only have to hold his hand at a distance. Then she insisted that she wanted to know the paired the ones too, and he had to strain to hold the correct posture with a partner several feet taller than him; but it was the most fun he had had dancing in his whole life.
The queen invented their reasons for why they only returned at dawn, covered in mud and bruises.
Tristan came into his workshop a week later to find Rhea’s house gone. All the others were untouched. He even searched through the ones in storage, in case somebody had decided to move it out of the way for some reason.
He was left with no other choice but to ask his father about it.
“Oh, that house!” Loki said without a hint of surprise. “I sent it on your behalf as a present to Queen Zecadus.”
He felt his stomach drop. “Why would you do that?”
Loki scoffed. “Don’t make a fuss – you have so many dollhouses! I was thinking of your future.”
“My future…?”
He gave a self-satisfied nod of his head and finished the cup of tea he was drinking. “We might be able to get you a bright future after all, my girl. Just put a little faith in me.”
Tristan couldn’t bring himself to work on his dollhouses after that. It felt pointless and empty – like just another meaningless task that he was performing within his father’s master plan.
Instead, he spent his time going out on long rides, losing himself within Loki’s large estate or daring to creep onto the public forest paths and let the trees hide him. He was always warned that brigands would carry him off if he ever ventured beyond their land without an escort. Now he didn’t care if they killed him on the spot. Sadly, the only dangers he encountered were loose stones and fallen branches.
It felt like Rhea herself had been taken from him again and, with her, all hope.
Four months later, after radio silence from Loki, his father swept into his bedroom in the morning with a servant behind him. “Good news, darling! Queen Zecadus has decided to pick you as her wife.”
His lady’s maids were still twisting his hair into a bun. He shook them off quickly, not caring that his hair dropped free again. “What do you mean “she’s picked me”!?” He glared ferociously.
“She’s decided she’d like you to be the one she marries. It’s not a hard concept, is it?”
Without giving Tristan another chance to speak, Loki invited himself further into the room and motioned to the footman to open the box. He gestured for the maids to bring the contents out to show Tristan.
“Of course, we’ve graciously accepted. This is the dress that you’ll be wearing for your wedding – it’s a Dark Elf custom for the one who proposes to send one, apparently.” Loki gave it an appraising glance. “Not bad craftsmanship, really. You’ve been told to wear it without a corset.”
It was a pure black dress made of a single layer of silk. Zecadus had worn one similar to the ball. Silver embroidery stitched intricate scenes of forest birds flying and nesting in branches across the skirt, and the loose flowing sleeves were embellished with patterns he had never seen before. It was the mourning dress he’d always wanted.
He took a deep breath and apologised to Rhea in his heart, preparing for the lowest and most desperate blow. “How can I marry a woman? The church will never permit it.”
“The king already has the church’s word that they’ll keep their noses out of it,” he replied coolly. “It’s normal for Dark Elves to marry women. Rather, they won’t touch men at all.”
He rose from his chair to face his father head-on. “How can you agree to this!?”
“Steady on, girl,” he laughed. “Your marriage will cement the alliance between our peoples, so they’re not going to hurt you.”
“You think that’s all I care about!?”
He shrugged. “Why are you so upset? What else were you going to do with your life?”
Tristan hated that he couldn’t think of a response.
His wedding was to take place the moment he arrived at the forest. The journey would take six days, with the king’s guards to escort him to the border and the queen’s guards to escort him through the Otherlands.
It only took a month for it to be arranged. Tristan was left out of the negotiations, as usual.
On the morning that he was due to depart, his maids clothed him in the dress according to the queen’s instructions and pinned up his uncooperative hair for the final time. His family lined up to make a show of saying goodbye. Loki even clapped him on the shoulder with a fatherly smile.
Then he was abandoned to his fate. Nobody had thought to provide him with a female chaperone for safety or for company, although the guards were uncommonly well-behaved this time. There was no one to help him maintain his hair, and no other dress that he was permitted to change into. The silk was so light that he felt like he was wearing nothing at all. He kept a shawl pulled tightly around him to feel less vulnerable.
There was a new carriage waiting for him at the border, made of black onyx and pulled by a team of eight unicorns. A small army of Dark Elves accompanied it, strapped into black armour so heavy that they seemed like walking walls. All of them were female, all tall, and each with varying shades of true black skin and white hair. His human guards shied back, making him cross the final few feet over the border alone.
The travel through the Otherlands was even worse. These guards refused to speak to him except to relay orders, and they sneered at him to his face. Since the elves could see in the dark, they rarely stopped to camp, and he was forced to sleep curled up in the carriage regardless, because there were no inns to take refuge in.
All he had to pass the time was the passing scenery outside. The tidy fields and neat stone buildings that he was accustomed to seeing every day dropped away sharply, becoming wild grass and stretches of plants even taller than him. The birds grew larger, gaining teeth and third legs; at night, orbs of light danced in the distant darkness, whispering his name across the moors to him. Once, they passed a troupe of human-like moths at a distance. They herded a group of strange stag-bird hybrids in front of them, and Tristan was disturbed to see that each one cast the shadow of a man.
“A sign of innocence,” a guard roughly informed him when she met his shellshocked gaze.
But nothing that came before prepared him for the Shadowfell Forest. The trees were taller than any mountain he had ever known, and it filled the horizon for as far as his eyes could strain.
His guards roughly wrenched open the door and tidied him up with their magic before the border. They could restore his hair, dress and hygiene, but they couldn’t – or wouldn’t – make him less pale and nervous. It was almost a mercy.
He expected it to be cold when the real shadow of the forest fell over him and blotted out the sun, but the air was oddly tropical. The deep darkness was lit comfortably by gigantic light-emitting fruits that wound around each tree and strung across the space between them. It wasn’t silent either, but as full of birdsong and footsteps as the cheeriest little wood in summer.
They came to a stop again after only five minutes. This time, he was helped down from the carriage in a dignified manner.
His feet sank softly into the thick moss that layered itself over the ground. Queen Zecadus was there, just a few feet in front of him in a stark white dress. She was like a bright candle in a long, moonless night. An army’s worth of knights, soldiers, guards and ladies-in-waiting stood behind her, lined up for parade.
She smiled at him gently. “Welcome home, my queen.”
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