The Doll with the broken smile

Chapter 2

The Doll with the Broken Smile

I was five the first time I understood that cruelty could wear a pretty face.

It was the eve of Seraphine’s tenth birthday. Wynnehold glittered like a jewel box: chandeliers blazing, musicians in the gallery, every noble in Aurenfall crammed into our great hall to worship at the altar of my eldest sister’s beauty.

Seraphine floated through the crowd in a gown of moonlight silk, golden curls crowned with pearls the size of quail eggs. Lords twice her age knelt to kiss her hand. Ladies sighed over her dimples. Even the king’s envoy (a duke with a face like a bored vulture) declared her “the living dawn of Aurenfall.”

I watched from the servants’ gallery above the hall, hidden behind a stone balustrade. My nursemaid had fallen asleep in the nursery again, snoring off last night’s gin. No one noticed I was gone.

Below me, Seraphine laughed (high, tinkling, perfect). She spun in a circle so her skirts flared like wings. The guests applauded as though she had invented joy itself.

Then she saw me.

Her smile did not falter. She simply tilted her head, the way a cat tilts its head before it pounces.

“Elara,” she called, sweet as poisoned honey. “Come down and wish your sister happy birthday.”

Every head turned. Three hundred pairs of eyes found the little ghost in the gray dress (too short at the wrists, too long at the hem, handed down from a cousin who had died of fever).

I should have run.

Instead I descended the servants’ stairs because I had already learned that refusal was worse than obedience.

The crowd parted for me the way it parts for a leper. Whispers followed:

“Is that the middle one?”

“Poor thing, those eyes.”

“Born under the eclipse, they say.”

“Looks half-feral.”

Seraphine waited at the foot of the grand staircase, hands clasped like an angel. When I reached her, she took my chin between thumb and forefinger, nails painted rose-gold.

“Closer, little mouse,” she murmured, loud enough for the nearest circle of courtiers to hear. “Let everyone see how generously Father dresses even his mistakes.”

Laughter rippled outward.

I remember the smell: beeswax candles, hothouse roses, cloying perfume, and beneath it all the copper tang of my own fear.

Seraphine released my chin and held out a gift wrapped in silver paper.

“For me?” I asked, stupid with hope.

“Of course,” she said. “Open it.”

I tore the paper with trembling fingers.

Inside was a porcelain doll (exquisite, expensive, the kind of doll princesses in storybooks carried). Golden ringlets, sapphire eyes, a smile stitched in crimson thread. She wore a tiny version of Seraphine’s own gown.

I had never owned anything so beautiful.

I hugged the doll to my chest and whispered, “Thank you, Sera.”

Seraphine’s smile sharpened.

“Let me see her,” she cooed. “I want to be sure she looks just like me.”

I held the doll out.

She took it gently (too gently).

Then, with the same grace she used to curtsy to dukes, she smashed the doll’s head-first against the marble balustrade.

Porcelain exploded. The head shattered into a hundred smiling shards. One sapphire eye rolled across the floor and came to rest against a nobleman’s boot.

Silence fell, thick as grave dirt.

Seraphine’s lower lip trembled (perfectly rehearsed).

“Oh no,” said my ten-year-old sister, voice wobbling like a violin string. “My clumsy little sister broke my gift. How dreadfully unlucky.”

The laughter that followed was thunderous.

Someone started clapping. Others joined in. Soon the entire hall applauded my clumsiness.

I stood frozen, arms still curved around a body that was no longer there.

Seraphine leaned close, breath warm against my ear.

“Next time,” she whispered, “stay invisible. The world doesn’t like looking at broken things.”

She walked away. The crowd swallowed her again, cooing over her generosity, her poise, how tragic it must be to have such an unfortunate sibling.

I dropped to my knees amid the shards.

A single porcelain hand remained intact (tiny, perfect fingers curled as though waving goodbye). I picked it up. The edges cut my palm. Blood welled, bright and shocking against the white marble.

No one noticed.

No one ever noticed when I bled.

I hid the porcelain hand in my pocket and crept back to the servants’ stairs. Halfway up, I passed my mother.

Lady Amalia Wynne stood on the landing in sapphire velvet, wineglass in hand, watching the festivities below with the serene expression of a woman who had birthed perfection twice and one mistake.

She did not see me at first.

When she did, her gaze slid over me like water over glass.

“Clean your hand before you stain the rug,” she said without moving her lips. “And stay out of sight for the rest of the evening. You’re embarrassing the family.”

She glided down the stairs to join the applause for Seraphine’s next dance.

I fled.

The nursery was dark. The fire had gone out again. I crawled under the cradle (the same one from the night I was born, now too small for anything but hiding) and pressed the porcelain hand to my bleeding palm until the edges stopped cutting.

I did not cry.

I had learned already that tears only made them laugh harder.

Instead I whispered to the broken doll hand the way other children whispered to imaginary friends.

“I’ll remember,” I promised the darkness. “I’ll remember every single face that laughed.”

The storm outside had come back. Rain lashed the windows like it wanted inside. Thunder growled low and hungry.

Under the cradle, five years old and bleeding, I made my first vow.

One day, I would stop being invisible.

One day, they would look at me and be the ones who could not speak.

I did not know how.

I only knew that the thing inside me (the thing that had opened its eyes the night I was born) purred in agreement.

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Three nights later, Seraphine woke screaming.

She claimed a monster had come through her window (tall, made of shadow, with burning ember eyes). It had stroked her hair and whispered that beauty was fragile, so very fragile, and one day it would shatter just like porcelain.

The physicians blamed night terrors. Father ordered the windows nailed shut. Mother burned lavender and valerian until the whole east wing stank of calm.

Seraphine refused to sleep alone for a month.

No one connected the nightmares to the porcelain hand I kept beneath my pillow (now wrapped in a scrap of blue silk, edges still flecked with my dried blood).

No one saw the faint circle burned into the nursery floorboards the next morning: a serpent eating its own tail, exactly like the one the sage coal had left the night I was born.

I saw it.

I traced it with a finger and felt the wood still warm.

And I smiled for the first time in my life.

It was not a pretty smile.

It was small, sharp, and patient.

Like ruin.

Like the storm that never truly left.

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The next morning, Father summoned me to his study.

I had never been inside before. The room smelled of leather, steel oil, and old blood. Maps of Aurenfall covered the walls, borders inked in red where Eldorian raids had spilled over. A massive serpent crest hung above the fireplace (our family’s pride, though no one ever explained why a sunlit kingdom carried the sigil of a night creature).

Father did not look up from his correspondence when I entered.

“Seraphine is distraught,” he said to the parchment. “You will apologize. You will tell her it was an accident. You will beg her forgiveness on your knees in front of the entire household at dinner tonight.”

I waited.

He finally raised his eyes (cold, winter-blue, exactly like Seraphine’s).

“Do you understand?”

I thought of the porcelain hand under my pillow. Of the circle burned into the floor. Of the way the storm sounded like laughter sometimes.

“Yes, Father,” I said.

He returned to his letters.

I was dismissed.

That night at dinner I knelt in the great hall, exactly where the doll had broken. I pressed my forehead to the cold marble and begged my sister’s forgiveness in a voice that shook only a little.

Seraphine accepted with tears and a hug that smelled of roses and victory.

Everyone praised her kindness.

No one saw the way her hands trembled when they touched me.

No one saw the faint bruise blooming beneath her sleeve (shaped, if you looked closely, like five tiny fingers).

I saw.

And under the table, where no one could watch, I pressed the porcelain hand into my thigh until it cut again.

Just to remind myself the pain was real.

Just to remind myself I was still alive.

Still waiting.

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Years would pass before I understood what had answered me that night.

Before I learned that the monster in Seraphine’s window had not been imagination.

Before I stood in chains of gold in a throne room and heard a voice like velvet soaked in night say, “Kill me quickly,” and realized I had been speaking to my own future.

But that was still fourteen years away.

For now I was only five, small and silent and bleeding in places no one bothered to check.

The storm raged on outside, softer now, almost tender.

Lightning flickered once, twice.

In the flash I saw him again (just for a heartbeat) standing at the nursery window.

Tall, cloaked in living shadow, eyes burning like emberstone in a face too beautiful to be human.

He tilted his head the way Seraphine had.

Then the darkness took him.

But not before he smiled.

Not before he whispered a single word that the thunder carried straight into my bones:

“Soon.”

I blinked, and he was gone.

The window was still nailed shut.

The glass was unbroken.

And on the sill, where no rain had touched, lay a single black scale the size of my palm (warm, pulsing faintly, etched with a circle: a serpent devouring its own tail).

I hid it with the porcelain hand.

I did not sleep.

Outside, the storm finally moved on, leaving only the cold white star that had watched the night I was born.

It had come closer.

It was waiting too.