For a brief moment, Regina had hope that she would wake from this terrible, realistic nightmare.
Regina realized very, very quickly that life liked to make sure she knew she was being tormented. Therefore, when Regina saw the light again, she did not see the canopy of her bed or feel her sheets twisting around her form.
Instead, she found herself in a large, smoky room filled with all the trappings of luxury – crystal chandeliers, decadent glasses full of amber scotch, and a scattering of magical artifacts that Regina could not even begin to identify.
More importantly, the room also contained a man that Regina recognized when she moved towards him.
…A man that she had seen in the ballroom that she had just escaped after witnessing Not-Regina’s arrest.
However, the very pretty and very shiny blond man she had seen just a few moments ago no longer seemed to be in a dancing mood. Instead, he had a grave, even melancholy look on his beautiful face as he slumped into an upholstered chair, staring at the newspaper in front of him.
After realizing he was going to say nothing, Regina circled around him to read the headline upside down, a skill she had mastered to anticipate her mother’s moods every time her mother gambled far too much on a horse-race…
…and saw a headline that nearly stopped her somehow-still-beating heart.
“Lady Regina Sheridan Killed in a Carriage Accident After Being Accused of Treacherous Mistreatment of Productive Citizens!”
Head spinning, Regina staggered back and almost fell through the newspaper before she began looking around her for something that would make this… this insane news make sense.
Then, as if they had previously been hidden, Regina heard the voices of all the other noblemen from the ballroom discussing her recent death.
With slow dread, she turned around to see them all seated around a table, glasses of liquor in hand as they calmly discussed her death.
“I cannot say I saw that coming,” said Lord Grass Hair, looking almost as sad as the pretty blond man. “Who could predict that poor Lady Regina would meet such a pitiful end?”
“Then you do not have enough of an imagination,” snapped Lord Red Hair. “I knew the Alpins would kill her off after they discovered her betrayal and publicly made an example of her!”
“Was it the Alpins though,” speculated Lord Ocean Waves, “or Lady Regina’s own parents? After all, what use does a noble Carcosan family have for its failures? No more use than a fisherman has for a net with holes.”
“Do you truly have to relate literally everything to fishing?” Lord Red Haid said, sounding aggrieved.
“Yes,” Lord Ocean Waves stated, sounding baffled that it was even a question.
Lord Red Hair just sighed before Lord Leaf Brooch spoke, breaking his previous silence.
“The Sheridans are a… mysterious family,” Lord Leaf Brooch said, “but surely even they would not destroy their own kin. To be so callous where your own child is involved is… is monstrous beyond telling.”
“You are giving my family too much credit,” Regina sourly replied, though she knew he would not hear her. “Did my parents look as though they were about to intervene on my behalf when you saw those guards come for not-me?”
Even so, Regina felt a little better when Lord Grass Hair supported Lord Leaf Brooch by saying, “Yes, as Duke Neville said, we must not leap to hasty conclusions. Perhaps this is all just a tragic carriage accident…?”
For the first time, Lord Feet Fish spoke and said, “How many tragic accidents do you think young ladies get into after they have just been arrested for being a villainess that humiliated Alpin royalty?”
Lord Grass Hair sighed before asking, “We cannot have at least one, Duke Kuzey?”
Lord Feet Fish – no, Duke Kuzey – sighed as well and said, “The only ‘accidents’ that arise after someone crosses the Alpin royal family are those that benefit the Alpins. So how ‘accidental’ could Lady Regina’s final carriage ride be?”
Lord Ocean Waves had an oddly shrewd look in his eye when he spoke. “That would all make sense… if the Alpins had not already made an example of Lady Regina. Why would they risk further infuriating the Sheridans after they had already won? If you catch a shark in a crab pot, either it is not really a shark… or you are not really using a crab pot.”
Regina had never previously wondered if it was possible to hear a fish metaphor so bad that it made her want to give up eating seafood, but she was discovering all sorts of new and exciting information in this endless dream.
“I know you said something about fish that I am going to ignore,” Lord Red Hair said, sounding almost excited, “but this still means that someone must have killed Lady Regina… someone who wanted her secrets to die with her. The only question is… who would be willing to take that risk?”
Unable to bear the looks of speculation, which ranged from merely curious to cold and calculating, Regina spun around…
…only to find herself staring at the pretty, shiny dandelion man’s face as he abruptly rose from his seat, shaking his head as though he were saying a prayer.
“Poor Lady Regina,” he whispered, his voice so soft she had to strain to catch his words. “One day you are a plucked blossom offered to the royal family and the next…”
Regina found herself staring at the only existing portrait of herself obviously reprinted in the upside-down newspaper, her false face smiling with a carefree innocence she had never had in life… or death.
“May she suffer less in her next life,” he murmured.
As Regina tried to process the strange pain in his voice, the world dissolved into darkness and the after-image of a blond man clutching a faded flower in his hand.
***
Lady Regina Sheridan, still alive potential-villainess, sat bolt upright in her bed.
"What," she said, staring hard at the sheets she had twisted in her hand, "in the name of the blood was that?"
She had to take several deep breaths before she could calm her racing heart and make sense out of what she had just experienced.
“What just happened to me?” Regina said, still numb with shock. “How did I have such a ridiculous dream? Unless…”
Her eyes widened as she tried to recall the previous night.
“Did someone try to slip something into my food?!”
She frowned as she continued musing.
“No, that cannot be right… After I saw what happened to poor cousin Ronald last year, I only eat after everyone else has taken a bite and nobody at the table has started foaming at the mouth. So the elders could not have poisoned me without poisoning my parents and eight other cousins. Even for the elders, that would be unseemly.”
She buried her face in her trembling hands, trying to calm herself once more.
“So that strange… vision was probably not the result of poison. Therefore, the only logical conclusion is…”
Slowly, Regina’s hands slipped from her face as she straightened her back and then began readying herself for the day ahead.
“That I need to stop eating cheese before bed and not worry about that ridiculous dream. Did Henrietta not warn me about the effects of indigestion on nightmares? I have enough problems in my waking life without borrowing problems from my imagination. I need to do with this dream what I do with every other horror in my life.”
Nodding, Regina made her way out of bed before looking at her pale but resolute face in a nearby vanity mirror.
“I need to push anything that terrifies me into the depths of my mind and act as though nothing could possibly go wrong in my life while making sure nobody has cause to murder me.”
Thus fortified with her normal mixture of steely determination and paranoid fear, Regina prepared to spend her day being one with the Sheridan manor’s wallpaper.
It took some skill for the only Sheridan of her age left alive to be overlooked, unseen, and too far beneath any powerful person’s notice to be worth harming… but Regina had spent years communing with wallpaper, porridge, and the color beige. She knew how to take bland to new heights of mundanity!
Her camouflage skills had kept her alive for the last one-and-twenty years of life and she fervently hoped it would keep her intact a few years longer.
After all, Regina just needed to survive until the age of twenty five when her family elders finally would be forced to agree she had inherited none of the Sheridan magic and should be wed off to another noble family.
The only other alternative lay in her manifesting her family’s magic, a magic so rare and secret that neither she nor any of her young cousins even knew what it was.
Yet if Regina manifested her family’s magic, whatever it might be (personally, Regina suspected it had something to do with earning money by glaring at people), she would either be married to one of her male cousins or (even worse) uncles to breed more Sheridans.
That was assuming that her magic was found useful.
If Regina manifested magic and her magic was found to be useless, she would be killed off for being a disgrace to the Sheridan blood.
Given the options, Regina was desperately hoping that some widower with twelve plump children would suddenly decide they wanted a Sheridan connection before Regina developed any skill more advanced than keeping the elders from remembering her name.
As it was, Regina also desperately hoped that when she arrived at the breakfast table, she could have a calm and peaceful day with no fatal ‘accidents’ in her future.
Surely a civilized murderer would wait until after she had a cup of tea?
Yet when Regina arrived at the breakfast table, she was shocked to see both her mother and father together.
For as long as Regina could remember, her parents acted as though spending time with one another was as pleasant as amputating a body part. Of all the problems with her parents, this one Regina could at least understand given that they were cousins who had been forcibly married. So while Regina’s parents had managed some pretense of family togetherness before Regina’s older sister had been killed for having ‘useless’ magic, Regina’s parents had outright avoided each other’s company afterwards.
Therefore, seeing them together sent a chill down Regina’s spine… one not helped by the joyous looks on their faces.
“Mother,” Regina said, trying not to panic and flee, “and Father! What a… pleasant surprise to see the both of you here!”
Left unsaid were the words, ‘If you are here to hunt me down, can you at least give me a head start?’
Regina wondered if somehow she had accidentally worn something not in a particularly unobtrusive shade of beige, but a discreet glance down revealed that she was still as colorless and bland as a bowl of oatmeal.
Still unsure how her parents could even see her, Regina was jolted out of her half-formed plan to see if she could become one with the wallpaper by her father’s brisk tones.
“Come sit,” said Father, “and stop standing like a particularly stupid ruler.”
He sniffed. “Probably a metric ruler, at that.”
When her father started comparing her to a ruler, Regina knew she had to act swiftly, even if she was insulted by the comparison. After all, she was even more boring than a ruler! She did not even have exciting numerical markings on her!
Quickly taking her seat, Regina took a moment to examine her parents to try to determine what they might be doing.
‘Father only lets himself be so happy when he has plenty of money in hand,’ she noted, ‘and Mother only looks this pleased when she has won big on a horse race or attended the funeral of someone she hates. So they are obviously plotting something together…
‘...and I can only hope it does not mean anything terrible for me.’
Unfortunately, Regina’s concerns were all too quickly realized.
“Congratulations, Regina Edmund Sheridan,” her father said, pushing his glasses up his nose, even as her mother leaned back and began playing with one of her knives. “You are about to achieve something almost as remarkable as a well-balanced set of accounts.”
The only time Regina’s father ever used the middle name her parents had given her out of disappointment she was not the boy they had expected was if something truly terrible was about to happen.
Blinking hard, Regina forced a smile and said, “That is such… astounding news, father. I cannot wait to hear more of what you mean!”
“Your leaky quill of a sire,” Regina’s mother said even as her father shot a glare at her, “is trying to tell you that you are about to get married and remove yourself from this bloody family.”
Swallowing hard, Regina managed a slightly more natural smile, even as she wondered how something like this was even possible. Had her parents misunderstood some declaration of the elders?
“I am thrilled to hear of such wonderful news,” Regina said, “though I suppose this means that our elders have accepted that I will never develop our family’s magic?”
The idea that Regina would not have to wait until twenty-five, as was the way of the family, filled Regina with an entirely unfamiliar hope for her future.
“Of course not,” her father snapped. “You are already one-and-twenty and not special in the least. After all, you have not experienced anything… peculiar recently, right?
Regina shook her head so hard, it was a wonder it still remained attached to her neck.
“Of course not!” she said, resolutely trying not to think of her bizarre dreams. “I would not dream of being special! My very presence makes mediocrity look amazing! I make porridge, taxes, and the color beige seem exciting!”
“Taxes are exciting,” said her father, frowning, before her mother raised a hand and he closed his mouth with a snap.
“Good girl,” her mother said, giving Regina a terrifyingly penetrating look. “I did wonder where you were getting all that beige… I can help you find more, should you have a shortage of material for your outfits. Staying… uninteresting shall help you remain out of trouble where you are going, at least until everything is finalized.”
Smile faltering, Regina said, “...Where I am going?”
No Sheridan left the family house prior to marriage…
…unless the family they were marrying was of higher rank than the Sheridans. The Sheridans were a marquessate, so there were only four families in the land that were higher ranked than they were-
Mounting horror clawing at her heart, Regina said in a voice on the verge of utter panic, “Mother, Father… where are you sending me?”
“The palace in the Capital,” her father said, beaming even as Regina felt her entire body freeze as if she had been set in ice. “We are in talks with the royal family to arrange an engagement. If all goes well…”
For the first time in a very long time, Regina’s mother began to laugh.
It was the most terrifying sound Regina had ever heard.
“If all goes well, we will have a glorious party for your engagement!” her mother said joyously. “If the negotiations succeed, Crown Prince Aaron Alpin says that he would like to have the engagement ceremony within the month.”
~♦♥♦~
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