Read Chapter 37: The First Page

Dawn came through the tall windows of the Great Hall in ribbons of pale gold, striking the dust that still hung in the air from the night’s destruction. The stained glass was gone, shattered across the marble floor in a thousand blue shards, but the morning light found its way in anyway. Anya stood at the center of the wreckage, her boots crunching on glass as she turned in a slow circle.

The court had gathered at the edges of the room, servants and nobles alike, their faces smeared with soot and exhaustion. Some still trembled. Others wept openly.

Anya did not weep. She remembered. Every moment of the past year burned in her mind with a clarity that made her chest ache—Kael’s face when he’d first sworn to guard her, the scratch of his quill as he wrote her life into being, his voice reading to her each morning when she woke with nothing. And last night. The blue light. The sorcerer dissolving into motes of dust beneath her hands.

She looked down at her own palms, still faintly warm.

Kael lay where he had fallen, propped against the base of the dais, his hand pressed to his ribs. His shirt was torn, his knuckles raw, but his eyes were open and fixed on her with an intensity that made the rest of the room fall away.

“Your Highness,” he said, and his voice cracked. He tried to rise.

“Stay,” she said, crossing to him. Her gown hissed over the glass. She knelt before him, taking his face in both hands. “Don’t move. You’re hurt.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. You were gutted and you still stood between me and a sorcerer.” She laughed, a sound that caught in her throat. “And now you’re arguing with me. That’s how I know you’re alive.”

His mouth curved into a tired smile. “You remember.”

“I remember everything.” Her voice broke on the word. “I remember you writing. I remember you holding the candle over the page so I could see. I remember the night you told me I didn’t have to be afraid of the dark because you would always be there when morning came.” She pressed her forehead to his. “I remember loving you.”

Somewhere in the hall, someone gasped. A murmur rippled through the gathered court.

Kael’s hands came up, trembling, to cover hers. “Anya—Your Majesty—everyone is watching.”

“Let them watch.” She pulled back just enough to meet his eyes. “I’ve spent a year hiding behind veils and locked doors, pretending to be sick so no one would see the gaps in my mind. I don’t want to hide anymore. Not from them, and not from you.”

She stood, and offered him her hand.

He took it, rising carefully, his breath catching as he straightened. She didn’t let go.

“Kael of the Western March,” she said, loud enough for the hall to hear. “You have guarded my life with your own. You have chronicled every day I could not remember. You have carried my story when I could not carry it myself.” She drew a breath. “I name you head of my personal guard. First amongst all who swear to protect the crown.”

The court stirred. Several nobles exchanged glances. But Anya did not look away from Kael.

He stood very still for a long moment. Then he shook his head.

“No,” he said quietly.

The hall went silent.

Anya blinked. “No?”

“No. I won’t take that post.”

Her heart seized. “Kael—”

“You don’t need a guard to chronicle you anymore,” he said. “You remember your own days now. You remember your own nights. The curse is gone, and with it, my purpose.” His jaw tightened. “I won’t pretend that the title is what I want. If I swear to you, I want it to mean something else.”

She stared at him. Her throat was dry. “What do you want it to mean?”

He stepped forward, closing the distance between them. His hand found hers—not the hand of a guard, but something softer. Slower. His thumb brushed over her knuckles.

“I want to stand beside you,” he said. “Not behind you. Not following. Beside you, as the sun sets and as it rises, for as long as you’ll have me.”

The hall was utterly still. Even the dust motes seemed to hang suspended in the golden light.

Anya felt something in her chest unclench—a knot she hadn’t even known was there, wound tight through every forgotten dawn, every ledger page read back to her in his low, patient voice. She had spent so long believing she was broken. That her mind was a sieve through which her own life drained away. But Kael had never treated her as broken. He had only ever written her true.

She reached up and touched his jaw, feeling the scrape of unshaven stubble beneath her palm.

“Then stand,” she whispered.

And she kissed him.

It was soft at first, tentative—the brush of lips that asked a question. And then his hand came up to cradle the back of her head, and he answered. The kiss deepened, and she felt the court’s collective breath catch, felt the weight of a year’s worth of mornings in the warmth of his mouth.

When they parted, she was smiling. She couldn’t remember the last time she had smiled. Truly smiled. Not for an audience, not for a portrait, not through the veil of fog that had settled over her life each midnight.

“You’re going to cause a scandal,” he murmured.

“Good.” She glanced at the assembled court, who stood frozen, some with mouths open, others with hands pressed to their cheeks. “Someone should tell the cooks to prepare a feast.”

There was a beat of silence. Then someone—one of the younger maids, her face streaked with tears—began to laugh. The laughter caught, spreading from the servants to the lesser nobles, until the hall rang with it. Even Lord Ashward, who had spent the past year muttering about Anya’s “fragility” in the corridors, was clapping.

Anya took Kael’s hand, and they walked together across the carpet of blue glass.

Her mother’s study had been sealed since the night she vanished. Anya had not set foot in it for fifteen years. But the door stood open now, unlocked by her own hand an hour ago, and she stepped inside with Kael close behind.

The room smelled of dust and dried roses. A single window overlooked the garden—the one with the white trellis where her mother had taught her to press flowers between pages. A small desk sat by the window, its surface clean save for a brass lamp and a book.

The book was leather-bound, dark green, with a gold clasp. Anya had placed it there herself, an hour ago, when the memory of everything had still been fresh and raw and singing in her blood.

She crossed the room and sat at the desk.

“Is that the ledger?” Kael asked softly.

She shook her head. “The ledger was yours. It kept me alive when I couldn’t keep myself.” She opened the clasp and turned to the first page, blank and cream-pale beneath her fingers. She picked up the quill—her mother’s quill, still sound in its stand—and dipped it in ink.

Kael came to stand at her shoulder.

“This is a new one,” she said. “Not for chronicling my lost days. For chronicling the ones I’ll keep.” She touched the nib to the page. “My first entry.”

She wrote, in a steady hand that took up the entire first page:

*This is the day I remember everything.*

She underlined it twice. Then she set the quill down, closed the book, and turned to face the hall.

The court had followed them, spilling through the doorway and into the corridor, craning to see. When Anya stepped out, they parted for her, and she walked—Kael beside her, her hand in his—to the top of the great staircase.

“My lords, my ladies,” she said, her voice carrying clear and strong down the length of the hall. A serving girl appeared at her elbow with a tray of goblets, already filled. Anya took one. “My people. I have been absent from you for a year. I have been locked away by a curse I did not choose and could not fight.” She raised her goblet. “Tonight, I am here. I am whole. And I am not sick, and I am not hiding, and I will not forget this day—not tomorrow, not ever.”

She lifted the goblet higher.

“To the princess’s recovery,” Kael said quietly at her side.

“To us,” she corrected, her eyes finding his.

The court raised their glasses in a shimmer of wine and light.

“To Princess Anya!”

The shout rose like a wave, crashing over the staircase, over the blue glass, over the open door of her mother’s study and the new book waiting inside it. Anya drank.

And for the first time in a year, she looked ahead to tomorrow without fear of waking as a stranger.