The Honey-Gold Girl

Chapter 3

The Honey-Gold Girl

I was nine the year Isla Wynne learned how to make the world love her by accident.

She was four, all sunlight and sticky fingers, the kind of child strangers stopped in the street to coo over. Golden curls that never tangled. Eyes the color of summer sky. A laugh like wind chimes in a garden you wanted to live inside forever.

Everyone said she was Seraphine reborn, but softer. Sweeter. Without the razor beneath the silk.

They were wrong.

Isla’s cruelty was never sharp.

It was warm.

It clung.

And that made it worse.

It began the spring the cherry trees bloomed early.

Wynnehold’s gardens were famous (hedges clipped into serpents, fountains carved with the family crest, roses bred so dark red they looked black in certain lights). Father had ordered the gardeners to prepare for the king’s midsummer progress. Every petal had to be perfect.

I had discovered a corner behind the old glasshouse where no one went. The wall was cracked, ivy thick as rope. A single wild cherry tree had seeded itself there years ago, half-strangled by the ivy but still blooming defiant pink every spring. Its roots had broken through the flagstones, making a secret hollow beneath.

I called it my fortress.

I was the only place in the entire estate where no one looked at me and saw a mistake.

That morning I carried my treasures there: the porcelain doll’s hand, the black scale (now wrapped in silk and hidden inside a tin box), and a book I had stolen from the library (The Chronicles of Eldoria, Volume III, the one with the torn page that showed a serpent prince with eyes of living fire).

I was tracing the outline of his face with a finger when I heard humming.

Soft. Sweet. Like warm honey dripping off a spoon.

Isla toddled around the corner, dragging a stuffed rabbit twice her size. She wore a white dress embroidered with tiny roses, grass stains already on the hem. Her curls were tied with blue ribbons.

She stopped when she saw me.

For a moment we stared.

Then her face lit up like sunrise.

“’Lara!” she squealed, the way only she was allowed to shorten my name. “Found you!”

She ran straight into my fortress and flung herself at my legs, hugging tight. The rabbit flopped against my knee.

I stiffened. No one touched me willingly. Not ever.

Isla didn’t notice. She pulled back, beaming.

“I looked everywhere! Mama said you were hiding again, but I knew you be here. You always here when the pink tree blooms.”

She plopped down in the dirt, heedless of the dress, and began picking fallen blossoms, piling them in her lap.

I watched, wary.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said. “You’ll get dirty. Mother will be angry.”

Isla giggled. “Sera says angry is just loud love.”

She held out a handful of bruised petals.

“For you.”

I didn’t take them.

She tilted her head. “Don’t you like flowers?”

I thought of the moonflowers I had tried to grow in my bedroom window (how Mother had them ripped out and the pots smashed because “weeds belong outside”). I thought of the way Seraphine once pressed a rose into my palm so hard the thorns went through.

“I like them better when no one gives them to me,” I said.

Isla considered this with grave four-year-old seriousness. Then she dumped the petals over my head.

Pink snow rained down my hair, my shoulders, into my lap.

“Now no one gave them,” she declared. “The tree did.”

Something in my chest cracked (small, but audible only to me).

I let her stay.

We spent the morning there. She talked (endless, bubbling chatter about rabbits and cake and how the sky tasted blue). I read to her from the stolen book. She didn’t understand half the words, but she leaned against my side and traced the serpent prince’s picture with sticky fingers.

“He pretty,” she said. “Like a prince. Will he marry you?”

I laughed. It hurt my throat.

“No one marries the middle sister,” I told her. “Middle sisters disappear.”

Isla frowned. “I won’t let you.”

She took my hand (small, warm, certain) and pressed it over her heart.

“Promise,” she said. “We be your knight. I protect you from disappearing.”

I wanted to believe her.

Gods help me, I did.

That was the first time Isla broke my heart.

The second time came three hours later.

We were discovered by Seraphine.

She appeared like a storm cloud in pale green silk, flanked by two ladies-in-waiting and a gardener carrying pruning shears.

“There you are,” she said, voice honey over broken glass. “Mother is looking for you, Isla. You’re late for your dancing lesson.”

Isla jumped up, petals fluttering. “I playing with Elara!”

Seraphine’s gaze slid to me. Something flickered there (surprise, maybe, that anyone would choose my company).

Then it smoothed into a smile.

“How sweet,” she said. “But Elara knows little girls shouldn’t play in the dirt. Look at your dress, Isla. Ruined.”

Isla looked down, lower lip wobbling.

Seraphine knelt (graceful even in the mud) and brushed a petal from Isla’s curls.

“It’s all right, darling. Elara didn’t mean to make you dirty. She just doesn’t know better.”

I stood. “I didn’t—”

Seraphine’s eyes flicked to me, sharp as winter.

“Run along, Isla,” she said softly. “Nurse is waiting.”

Isla hesitated. Looked at me.

I nodded.

She ran.

The moment she was gone, Seraphine straightened.

“You will stay away from her,” she said. “She’s four. She doesn’t understand you’re… contagious.”

I laughed. Couldn’t help it.

“Contagious?” I repeated. “What exactly do you think I have, Sera?”

She stepped closer. The ladies-in-waiting tittered behind their fans.

“Misfortune,” she said. “Bad luck. Ruin. Whatever the midwives saw in your eyes the night you were born. It clings to you like a stench. And I will not let it touch her.”

The gardener shifted uncomfortably. Seraphine noticed.

“Burn this tree,” she ordered without looking away from me. “All of it. Roots and all. I want nothing left but ash.”

“No,” I whispered.

Seraphine smiled.

“Yes.”

They started that afternoon.

I watched from the glasshouse window as men with axes hacked at my cherry tree. Pink petals fell like blood. The hollow beneath (my fortress) was filled with oil and set alight. The tin box with the scale and the porcelain hand was inside. I hadn’t had time to retrieve it.

I didn’t cry.

I stood there until the smoke stung my eyes and the heat cracked the glass panes.

When it was done, Seraphine found me again.

She held out the charred remains of the tin box.

“I saved this for you,” she said. “So you remember.”

Inside lay the black scale (miraculously unburned) and the porcelain hand, now blackened and cracked, fingers fused together like a claw.

Seraphine closed my fingers around it.

“There,” she said gently. “Now you have something that matches you perfectly.”

She walked away.

That night Isla came to my room.

She crawled into my narrow bed without asking, burrowing under the covers like a small warm animal.

“I sorry,” she whispered against my neck. “Sera said if I play with you again, she tell Mama I been naughty and I won’t get cake for a year.”

I stroked her curls.

“It’s all right,” I lied.

She was asleep in minutes, thumb in mouth, rabbit clutched tight.

I stared at the ceiling until dawn.

At some point I realized I was tracing the shape of a serpent eating its tail on the bedsheet with my finger, over and over, until the fabric wore thin.

Isla stayed away after that.

Not because she wanted to.

Because every time she tried to find me, Seraphine was there first, smiling, offering sweets, promising stories, dressing her like a doll.

Within a month Isla called Seraphine “Sera-mine” and flinched when I entered a room.

Within a year she copied Seraphine’s laugh.

Within two, she forgot my fortress had ever existed.

But she never forgot the promise.

Sometimes, in the years that followed, I would catch her watching me across the dinner table with those summer-sky eyes, lower lip caught between baby teeth.

She always looked away first.

Always.

Until the night she didn’t.

But that was still ten years away.

For now I was nine, and the cherry tree was ash, and the black scale lay hidden beneath a loose floorboard in my bedroom, warm as a heartbeat.

Sometimes, when the house slept, I took it out and pressed it to my cheek.

Sometimes it whispered.

Not in words.

In feelings.

Hunger.

Waiting.

A promise older than the stones of Wynnehold.

I whispered back.

I’m still here.

I’m still waiting too.

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The following winter, Isla caught lung fever.

The physicians bled her and burned foul-smelling herbs. Mother wept prettily in the corridors. Father sent for the king’s own healer. Seraphine sat by Isla’s bedside and read her stories in a voice like melting sugar.

I was not allowed in the sickroom.

“Bad air,” Mother said. “You might make it worse.”

I stood outside the door every night anyway.

On the seventh night the fever broke.

Isla lived.

The entire household celebrated. There were fireworks. Father opened the oldest wine. Seraphine was carried through the halls on a litter of white roses, the hero who had nursed her baby sister back from death’s door.

No one noticed that Isla’s first word when she woke was my name.

No one noticed that she cried for three days straight when they told her I hadn’t been allowed to visit.

No one noticed the tiny serpent burned into the headboard of her bed (small, perfect, still smoking when the maids found it the next morning).

I noticed.

I traced it with a finger that didn’t shake.

And I smiled the same small, sharp, patient smile I had smiled at five.

The house was learning.

So was I.

Outside, snow fell soft and silent.

Inside, something ancient turned over in its sleep and dreamed of a girl with mismatched eyes who had not yet learned how to scream.

But she would.

Soon.