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If love is a war, her birth was a battle that left a field soaked in blood—barren for too long.
One day, the day of her birthday when she turns eight years old, she looks at the presents in her foyer and feels… weightless. She picks up a small trinket that she could sell for an exorbitant price, worth the years of stolen pieces in her castle.
She looks at the ghosts. She’s not sure why, but she feels like she needs their guidance. It’s too foreign to her, this pomp and circumstance. This attention from a man who is a figure to her at best.
The eldest, regal and beheaded, shrugs inelegantly, as if to say “I wouldn’t know.” The second eldest, wearing worse than a standard issue prison uniform makes a single gesture to her state, as if to say “you’re joking if you think I’d ever received that.” But it’s the youngest who looks at her and shakes her head. She opens her mouth, blood trickling past her lips, and mouths one word: “run.”
And… well.
It’s not like she hadn’t considered it. Played with the idea off and on. Studied magic and a million other things that she might be able to make a job out of. It’s not like she wants to stay here.
Whatever led Claude to kill her before will probably lead him to kill her again. No matter how much he does or doesn’t pay attention to her. Evident by the material state of the three girls.
She puts the ornament down, and paces through the halls. Looking around them and realizing that one of these days she’s going to look at them and know it’s the last time.
Her breath catches in her lungs, and she laughs, hysterical. She wants to try, doesn’t she? Isn’t that just awful?
The maids liked to steal things they could pass off as heirlooms. Like the candlesticks or silver spoons.
So really, it’s only fair that the person who purportedly owns them gets to do it too.
Athanasia starts slipping teaspoons in her pocket. Then she takes a candelabra. Then she gets her hands on a thin gold necklace of poor quality. They would not sell well to nobility, and Athanasia would be mocked for wearing it to anything important. But for most of her childhood she had never met the jewelers or fancy tailors. She got what the maids made for her, and was lucky there was no bad material for them to work with.
Only now does she own dresses with tiny crystals woven into the fabric. Only now has she had the chance to run fingers over fine satins silks and velvets. The quality like the dress her youngest ghost wears.
She doesn’t wear them. She doesn’t touch the trinkets. She doesn’t want to eat the fruits and trap herself.
She’s tired of being trapped.
Her dresses, ones made by Hannah and Ces and approximating the fashion of highborn ladies but without the meticulous skill, start to disappear because those are the ones she still chooses to wear. That’s when Athanasia takes the care to hide one in the dusty corner of the library that the maids still don’t bother to visit too much. Even now that Claude visits more and more and they’re starting to attending to the less-often cared for corners of the palace, this one has remained mostly untouched. The days for that may be ticking as her father has started visiting at least daily.
She takes the most plain and unassuming of her dresses, barely recognizable as something a noble would wear until someone touched the fabric, and the stolen silver in a sack behind a bookshelf.
The items sit there like the nauseous anxiety in the pit of her stomach when she thinks of them. It means something, to have a piece of a plan. She looks at the ghosts and wonders if she can hope.
The biggest hurdle, Athanasia realizes during one afternoon of staring blankly across a tea-table at the Emperor, is that she has his eyes. She knows enough enough them, magical and mysterious and very easy to identify. She looks over her shoulder, a small movement and she can feel too many eyes trace it—trace her—as she glances at the ghosts. The smallest one opens her mouth, spewing blood, and repeats herself.
Athanasia smiles.
Hope begins to flicker in, embers that had not, it seems, been suffocated completely.
She ends up asking one of the maids for it. She doesn’t say why, but she thinks the maid knows.
“Where do you think I can get a ring that hides my eyes?”
“Are you sure?” She looks at her. “You are still so young.”
“Exactly,” Athanasia says. The maid purses her lips. The maids of the castle had wondered if she’d do this. Athanaisa has heard them discuss it before. It helps that they look at her like she’s a ghost most days. It helps that they forget the age of the body she’s in most days. The maid looks at her, and quietly admits it more to herself than to her.
“We can’t stop you, can we?”
“No,” Athanasia says. “Please don’t.”
“You… it’s a dangerous world out there. People are horrible to each other.”
“I’m in bigger danger here,” she says.
Does one choose the wild where beasts may wait or live inside the cage with the one you know will maul you? They both know that she’s here with a time bomb, and the more the emperor visits the more they can already smell acrid ash. He is getting impatient, they can tell. And they are all afraid for what that means.
So that night, a ring is stolen from one of the other palaces.
Ultimately, the escape itself isn’t elegant. Athanasia crawls into a pile of laundry, and from there into the bottom of a cart taken out. It’s dark and it smells but when she shimmies her way into a cart headed to pick up deliveries from the capital city. She hears the coachmen discussing it.
She hangs on to the edge of the wall as she is bumped around, blooming bruises on her legs.
Every time she’s rammed into the wall it feels like hope. The once-dead flames are getting stronger and louder. She wants to live. And see the world. She’s at the edge of her birdcage and the glee of them forgetting to close the door thrums in her chest. The coachman laughs loudly outside and Athanaisa is thrown bodily into the air by a bump in the road but she doesn’t care, breathless with joy.
She’s almost there.
There are cuts on the palms of her hands and the candelabra is a bit dented from the tumbling in the ride here. She looks around.
Athanasia has never seen this many people in her life . Tall and short, thin and wide and old and young. She’s never seen a child who isn’t her, or a baby, or a man and a woman walking together without hiding a clandestine meeting. Old men who aren’t the Gardner who barely visited. Young men with carts, a street painter. She can smell a dizzying array of good smells: baked treats and meats, spices piled high and trailing flowers. She can smell the bad smells that she’d never experienced: garbage and urine and sweat.
It’s so much that it’s a rush to the head, a thrill that kicks her heartbeat faster. Buildings unlike the castle she is accustomed to, small and efficient. Shiny uneven cobblestone that’s slippery under her feet. And it’s so loud! A rush of so many conversations a thousand different ways all fading into a blurry hum.
For a while she just stands there, soaking it in, overwhelmed. Then she remembers that she needs to get moving, because she can’t get caught here.
That’s when she spots it out of the corner of her eye: her first destination.
The creaky wooden door opens with a small jingle, like the maids had said it would when she asked about the world like she’d never see it. (She’s seeing it, a young, eager part of herself that she had thought to be dead crows. She’s seeing it!)
“This is a pawnshop, yes?”
“Uh. Yeah,” an older man, graying hair and a balding patch beginning to pool in the crown of his head answers. His clothes are simple, but the shop is full of trinkets the likes of which she has never seen. Funny shaped swords, books with titles in other languages, maps, and funny trinkets. This place looks like a treasure trove on its own. But now isn’t the time to get caught up when there are even bigger things to see.
“I have old heirlooms to sell,” she says bluntly. The man snickers, putting down a polishing-cloth (like a character in the novels the maids sometimes managed to get! This is amazing!) and leaning on the counter.
“Yeah, I’ll bet. Whatsa brat like you got? Steal some of mommy’s jewelry?”
“My mother is dead,” Athanaisa manages. The shopkeeper pales.
“Shit.”
Athanasia shrugs. Allows herself to wonder what her mother was like. If her mother would like her. If she’d mourn her. If she’d approve of what Athanasia had done.
She doesn’t know. She doesn’t even know her mother’s full name. She never got to know.
Another dignity they stripped of her in that prison-palace.
She also wonders if she’ll ever get used to talking to people. It’s still so foreign that it’s uncomfortable. Which is awful. How is she supposed to go into this world of talking to people makes her palms clammy?
But she’s done a lot of things despite being scared and this was not going to be the thing that sends her back.
“It’s dented but the silver’s decent. I can’t offer you more than this though,” the pawnshop owner pulls out a pile of coins. It’s underselling. Athanasia doesn’t have it in her to care. It’ll be enough.
She wraps the coins up in the muslin rag she had taken the spoons in.
“I know you’re underpaying, but I’ll take it,” she decides. She’ll tell him, because she’s tired of being taken for a fool. But she also doesn’t care. This is just to get her out of this city. She doesn’t even have a plan on where to go next.
The shopkeep blinks.
“Heh? Are you insulting me?”
“No,” she says mildly. She’s really not. She’s not saying much of anything for this man’s sake. Her primary audience (herself) is satisfied.
The shopkeep doesn’t have anything to say to that, so he just thanks her for her business when she turns and walks out the door.
She pokes around the capital, sticking to alleyways and invisibility spells, looking for a carriage rental. The sun is hot and the cobblestone slippery—she nearly twists her ankle twice.
The novelty of it all makes her breathless.
There’s a nearby group of people, men and women in clothing the likes of which she had never seen before. They’re packing up boxes while two of the women are talking to a man in front of a store, and another is talking to an imperial guard. Athanasia spies a picture painted on the side of the cart and frowns. She’s seen that crest before.
“Excuse me,” Athanasia asks one of the women directing younger men with boxes. She has kind, old eyes.
“Can I help you?”
“This a trading caravan?” She asks because she’s sure it is. She’s forced herself to memorize that much at least.
“Yes,” the woman answers cautiously. “Are you interested in that sort of thing, little girl?”
Nobody has called her that in so long. The words feel like both a rush and an ill-fit. But she wants it to fit. She wants it to fit so badly.
“Can I join you?”
The two men with the boxes and the lady stare at her.
“Pardon?”
“I’ve got nothing else here. Can I join it? I can read and do math to balance books or something,” she tries. Anxiety crawls in her chest, an uncomfortable but somewhat familiar sensation. One of the men points at her.
“Child. Where is your family?”
“I don’t have one,” she says simply. And she doesn’t. Not really. All she had was a nanny in this world and whatever the hell Claude de Alger Obelia was meant to be. And Athanasia wants Lily to be free, no longer shackled to the tombstone palace and forced to watch the wreck-in-motion that was what would happen if she stayed.
“I should not agree to this,” the woman sighs. She looks tired. “And you shouldn’t ask the first caravan you see to travel with them. It’s dangerous!”
“That’s not a “will not,”” Athanasia notes. “And I recognized your crest.”
It’s so cheeky of her. So baldly stated. But the woman bursts into creaky, wheezy laughter. Athanasia has never heard anything like it before, but she thinks she likes it.
“You remind me of someone I knew once,” the old woman decides, a wistful smile on her face. “I… don’t know where she is now. So okay. Come along, better you go with us than someone who’d take advantage of you.”
Athanasia smiles, a little breathless. She did it. She did it!
“But we’re going to have to train you,” one of the men with boxes warns. “It’s indentured labor.”
“Better than staying here,” Athanasia asserts. She holds out her hand. It’s a soft hand, mostly. Scratched up and a bit bloody, a thick writing-callus on her fingers that catches her eye all the time. The old woman shakes it with hands spotted with age and wrinkled with life (Athanasia sees it and feels something like desire: she wants to have this, to grow old and see the world. She wants it more than anything. She wants to see everything and meet everyone and she’s tired of a birdcage life with a birdcage death and now she has a chance and these hands feel like salvation.)
“Welcome aboard.”
The wheels of the caravan roll and thump over rocks while she sits in the traveling car and listens to them debate over her merits like a group of farmers discussing a cow. They decide that her ability to read and speak multiple languages and do math is valuable enough to warrant her stay. Which she knew would be the case. Neglected or not, imperial education had its value.
They give her a roll to sleep on and clothes to wear and food to eat. The ring that hides magic rests on her neck and her eyes are a petal pink like the strangled ghost’s but she’s alive.
When they stop to set up camp for the night, Athanasia is treated to yet another sight she had never before seen. She drinks in the tiniest details hungrily, like she is starved because she has been starved of this.
The sky is a bright blue with a haze of warm heat pressing down into the earth like a bath. The outside of the capital city is full of rocky paths and hills, sheaves of golden grasses lazily swaying in the air. She’s never seen anything like this, never breathed in air that felt so light in her chest.
Goosebumps prickle up the sides of her arms and the ground sways as the clarity hits her:
She’s free.
With a delighted laugh, Athanasia sprints down the path, dust caking up the sides of her shoes, undignified. But she whoops and hollers into the open air. The fellow caravan employees stop to laugh and whoop right back because they see her. They see her and hear her and she’s alive!
(The fear that crouches in the back of her mind reminds her that this doesn’t mean it’s over.)