Prologue - "Wielder of All"

"Wielder of All"

The Fogline Trilogy: Book I

Prologue

Urbsor Castle, 1778

It was not Lena’s first time in the immense bedchamber. She had been there on countless occasions to sweep the floors, fill the water flagon, change the bedding, or complete any number of her thankless daily tasks. This was the first time she had entered the room as a member of the Camdetton family, someone who would never have been forced into servitude, someone who would never have held a broom.

   Henrietta’s words rang out and clattered against the inside of her head, but she pressed on unsteadily. The words repeated without her permission, as if they were trying to convince her of the long-buried truth beneath them.

     Go and see for yourself, cousin. She is my grandmother—and yours. 

    She stepped carefully across the impressive threshold of the chamber, through the elaborate doorway with its expertly crafted oak trees interlaced with intricately carved wildlife. 

     

    Cousin.

   This single word began to echo within her skull, and Lena struggled to accept it. How could the Little Queen share her blood? 

   She continued further into the handcrafted forest, touching a particular wooden squirrel that had given her comfort in the past, her finger lingering on his slightly chipped tooth as it had so many times throughout her girlhood. 

   She had often imagined the squirrel as a welcoming friend after her escape from the dreadful, haunted wood in which the wicked Queen Regent slept. But at present he gave her little solace. She breathed deeply and slipped through the antechamber, purposefully ignoring the large mirror she had kept spotless for so long. 

   After many deliberate, shaky steps, she approached the Queen Regent’s bed and pulled back the heavy velvet drape and the sheer underlayer that protected her from any chill in the room. The drape’s movement startled the elder woman, who had fallen back into the fitful sleep of the ill in the short time between the Little Queen’s departure and Lena’s arrival.

   “Oh. It’s you,” croaked the Queen Regent. “Get me some water and a fresh pillow.”

   Unmoved by the command, Lena instead sat on the fine chair—the same one the Regent would never have allowed her to touch except with a horsehair brush or a rag—and took a match from the bedside table, lighting two candles and illuminating their faces much more than the fireplace could on its own. She took a moment to enjoy the chair’s luxury, exhaling slowly and letting her body sink into the cushion.

   Incensed at her disobedience and violation of the noble chair, the Queen Regent managed her best attempt to shout. 

   “Do as I say, you wretched bastard girl! And stand up!” 

   But her words came out as a hoarse murmur audible to Lena alone. With her illness irritated by speaking, the Regent was seized by a coughing fit.

    “I am no bastard, and you’ve known it all along!” Lena declared, loud enough to be heard over the coughing. “I want you to see me when I speak to you. Honestly, see me. As you never have before, Grandmother.”

   The coughing fit passed. The Regent frowned and turned her face away.

   Lena exhaled sharply. She felt the heat hit her fingertips. She wrapped her fingers around the old woman’s chin and brought their faces close together more forcefully than she’d meant to.

   “You will hear me,” she demanded. 

   Henrietta, her Little Queen, had left the aged letter sitting open on the bedside table, its family secrets finally laid bare. Lena read picked it up with her free hand and read it aloud:

Mother,

            We have had many quarrels. I admit, we have had more quibbling arguments than most who share such a familial closeness as ours, but alas, such is our nature. I write to beg you to forgive our past bickering for the sake of my newly born daughter, your first grandchild. Forgive me for not seeking your permission to marry. Forgive me for not allowing you to approve of my husband. Forgive me for being a troublesome child. And please, forgive her for being a product of all the things in me which you cannot reconcile. She is innocent, and new, and a true Princess, the same as myself and my sisters. Let my sisters dote upon their niece, and let her come to know their future children as family. Let her be educated as befits royalty. Let her be happy. And please, treat her kindly.

I implore you to bring her up safely until my husband and I can return from his kingdom. We must go to his realm, and she is too young for the hard journey. I will write if I am able, but know that no matter how many or how few words you receive from me, I will come back for Magdalena. 

Your eldest daughter,

Simonetta 

   “You never even told me my full name,” Lena’s voice shook into a harsh whisper, but she calmed herself and crossed her hands in her lap. “My mother begged you to raise me as you would your other grandchildren, but you thought it more fitting to make me your servant and treat me cruelly. You let me raise my cousins, all the while letting me think my affection for them was improper.”

   The Queen Regent found the strength to respond. “It is improper! You are unworthy and ill-bred! You’re not fit to be anything more than a nursemaid to royal children.”

   “It is you who is no longer in our family. My cousins’ and mine,” Lena replied. “We are the Camdettons. You shall soon be only a specter in a forgettable time for all of us.”

   In her best show of conviction, the old woman tried feebly to push herself into a sitting position, but the copious fluff of her feather bed proved difficult to maneuver. “I am the Queen Regent. Consort of the late King and overseer of this realm and keeper of its peace. I am Gertrude, of House Cassaway by birth, Archduchess of Luxalba and…”

   “Shhhh,” Lena held a finger to her lips. The Queen Regent flustered, as she was accustomed to being shushed.

   Lena used the momentary silence to sit back in the comfy chair, pondering her next move. The Little Queen’s words shot to the forefront of her mind in a flash of epiphanic realization: You’re to replace her.

    “Grandmother, I shall not fetch you water,” she said dispassionately to the unwell Regent, leaning forward to face the bedridden woman. “I shall do as you command no longer.”

   The Queen Regent huffed and waved Lena away, but she pressed on: “I curse you for your maltreatment of me and your disregard of my mother’s pleas. I curse you for denying me a place among my own family. I curse you for every year of my life!”

   The candlelight flickered as a purple fog curled into the room. “I call upon the Minor Twins to enact my curse!” Her voice rose with the purplish swirls. Lena saw a snake slither up the Regent’s bedpost and slide beneath the old woman’s pillow. She could not stop the curse now. The twin gods had heard her, and she was emboldened by their response. 

   “I am Magdalena of the House of Camdetton,” she declared through gritted teeth, “daughter of the Princess Simonetta, eldest grandchild of the late King Arenouth VII, The Peacebringer, and I will serve as Regent for the remainder of the Queen’s minority. I replace you and condemn you.”

   In her state of heightened emotion, a brisk wind stirred the room, shuffling papers and tipping cups. The heat beneath her fingertips turned to flame, but she quickly composed herself before she set the room ablaze. 

   Flames abated, she took the letter and put it in her apron pocket. With one last flick of her wrist, she emitted a breeze that extinguished the bedside candles. She didn’t care if the Queen Regent knew about her wielding powers now. 

   Lena stood to leave. She touched the bed drape, intending to set it back in its place and give the Regent a minor comfort in her last moments, but a wrinkled hand shot up and grabbed her wrist.

   “Foolish girl,” the old woman hissed. “You think to curse me? You think the gods will give you vengeance? Wait and see. I—”

    She began to cough, a horrible wracking cough between wheezy, gasping breaths. Lena snatched her arm from the elder woman’s grip and turned to go, leaving the drape pulled back and her grandmother exposed to the damp chill.

   As she left the commodious room, she paused in the antechamber and peered into the large mirror. She could still see a storm raging behind her eyes, and she was more unsettled when she saw the reflection of a scorpion scurrying across the floor. She turned around toward it, but the room was empty. 

   When she passed her old friend the wooden squirrel, she left a scorch mark in the hollow of his chipped tooth. Blinking and breathing slowly to cool herself from within, she paused in the doorway before emerging back into the hall where her younger cousins were waiting.