Bewitched

Once, she had been called a princess. The word had been spoken with formality, with a trace of duty in her father’s voice, but never with the warmth she had imagined belonged to it. The title had not been something she wore like a crown, but rather something placed upon her as one might set a veil over a face—there, visible, but not felt. She had told herself it was enough, that simply to be acknowledged as such was better than nothing. Now even that was gone. The word had slipped away the moment her father’s heart had stopped beating.

She did not think of herself as cruel, but she could not deny the thought that had haunted her since: she had not wept for him. Not truly. She had sat in silence, listening to the mutter of voices in the corridors, the shuffling of servants, the hollow sound of footsteps moving through halls where silence had fallen like a heavy cloak. Yet no tears came. The grief she felt was not for his death, but for what it left her with. She hated herself for it, hated that she could not summon the daughterly anguish she believed she ought to feel, but honesty pricked at her like a thorn—she was afraid not of losing him, but of what remained in his absence.

For now she was left in the care of the woman he had chosen after her mother’s passing. A woman who smiled with lips but never with eyes. A woman whose voice was wrapped always in the tones of instruction, correction, judgment. To live beneath her roof was to be subject to her daily teachings, long sermons about obedience, about duty, about proper conduct and silence and modesty. These words were dressed as virtue, yet each carried the weight of chains, and with every passing day they pressed heavier against her shoulders.

The daughters of that woman were worse still. They laughed too easily, though the laughter was never warm—it was sharp, cutting, always at her expense. They mocked her in whispers, in sneers, in long exaggerated sighs when she spoke. They trampled on her presence as though she were dust on the floor. In time she learned not to answer them, not to look at them, to let their jeers pass over her like cold wind, but their scorn lingered in her ears long after the voices had gone.

The house itself no longer felt like hers. It had been her father’s before, and though he had not loved her deeply, there had been a sense of order, of belonging by right of blood. Now, she moved through the rooms like a trespasser. She cleaned, she served, she obeyed, as if she were nothing more than a guest overstaying her welcome. She had no voice here, no claim. The servants, who once had addressed her with deference, now looked past her, waiting for the orders of another. She told herself she was still who she had been, but the walls seemed to disagree, as if they too had forgotten her place.

It would have been easier, perhaps, if the woman had only been cruel in the way most are cruel—with sharp words, with punishments, with favoritism. That she could have borne with silent endurance. But there was something else about her, something more troubling. Her composure was too precise, her words too carefully measured, her steps too deliberate. She was always watching, though she disguised it beneath smiles that never reached her eyes. There was a wrongness that clung to her presence, a sense that behind her quiet control lay something darker, something concealed.

The unease grew worse in the nights. Sometimes, wandering the halls, she would see doors locked that had never been locked before. She would catch glimpses of shadows beneath doorframes, the flicker of candlelight where there ought to have been none. Once, she thought she heard voices, low and hushed, speaking in a tongue she did not know. By the time she pressed her ear closer, there had been silence. Always silence. The sort of silence that feels less like absence and more like someone has heard you listening.

She told herself it was imagination. She told herself it was the bitterness of grief, the weariness of servitude, the sting of mockery that made her see ill where there was none. But the thought would not leave her. The woman was not what she seemed. The woman carried secrets.

And secrets do not stay buried forever.

She did not yet know what she would find. Only that it would change everything. It would unmake the careful balance that held this house together. It would reach further still, beyond the walls, beyond the household, into the fragile order of the realm itself. What she would uncover would not only destroy the woman she despised, but unravel far more than she ever intended.

And though she did not yet understand it, she already stood at the edge of a truth too heavy to bear.