Vayu had spent years of her becoming prepared for death. She knew that her life, for years, was Queen Raval’s mercy. In the years after she had been sent to the monastery, she knew she was just a loose string in Raval’s plan to cement Eshal’s reign. So she had distanced herself from desire. A monastery was an excellent place to do it, too.

  Over the years, she had become the ideal novice. She did not dream of family, of love, of freedom, and especially, she did not dream of having an iota of power. She wanted nothing, but perhaps access to knowledge and books. The farthest that her desire extended was to not die midway through an interesting book.

  Now though, she desperately wanted to live. Her new life had thing she could look forward to. She wanted to fall in love with Cheran completely. Bit by bit she was growing to love him each day, and she wanted that journey to continue. She wanted to have the hope of children, not because they would be heirs to a kingdom, but because she wanted children. She wanted to love something hopelessly and completely, the way she had been loved by her mother, to share that love with someone. That idyllic, fairytale love… she wanted it so badly she could have killed for it.

  She was staring to have trouble breathing. She felt herself being carried by Cheran to the carriage. All pretense of them just being travelers and merchants were gone. Some of the guards remained behind to try to identify the poison and the poisoners. She felt like if she focused she might have been able to follow everything that was happening, but her mind felt like mush, her eyes wanted to close, and she just wanted to rest. The urge to let go of life and rest was almost as strong as her desire to live. Each breath was a struggle.

  Her body felt like it was her enemy, disobeying her every command. She wanted water and she wanted warmth. She was starting to shiver. Eventually, after seconds or minutes or hours, she was lowered into a warm bed, blankets wrapped around her. She was cold, her skin damp with sweat. She wanted to open her eyes, and tell Cheran that it would be alright.

  Her stomach recoiled, and for a brief moment she summoned the energy to rise slightly and vomit onto the ground next to her. It would be alright even if she died. Perhaps her destiny was to have happiness only for brief moments. Half a childhood of bliss had been followed by years of penance. Now mere moments of a good marriage were followed by poisoning.

  Someone came and started to examine her. They prodded at her skin, felt her pulse. Fingers forced her eyes open, and something dark and bitter was forced down her throat.

  “She’ll need a few days to recover,” an old, female voice said. Vayu didn’t have the energy for curiosity. The dark liquid down her throat was half solid. It rolled down her throat like sludge, bit by bit reaching deeper parts of her throat. As it seeped in, she felt her lungs expand. She could take easier, shallower breaths. For the moment at least, death had been waylaid.

  “Will she be alright?” Cheran asked, standing above her. She felt a hand reach out and grab her own, a thumb rubbing circles into her palm. He was trying to comfort her, and comfort himself.

  “She got the antidote quickly,” the old woman said, her voice more gruff than before. “She’ll be fine. She’d be better if…”

  Vayu thought she walked away then, as her voice grew fainter and she couldn’t catch what the woman had said. Cheran paused, his grip on her hand getting a little bit lighter. Perhaps it wasn’t that his grip got lighter, but that her consciousness was fading. The exhaustion of evading death had left her exhausted, and she wanted to sleep. Her brain, much like her eyes, refused to follow her commands.

  She fell into sleep. Normally, her sleep was dreamless. This sleep was different. She didn’t know if it was the poison or the antidote, but something ushered in endless dreams. She dreamed of Raval, standing at the bottom of the ocean with her hands outstretched towards something only she could see. She saw Noumin’s cliffs, falling away from earthquakes. She heard voices telling her she did not deserve the life she had, that she didn’t deserve any life at all. She heard her father’s voice, like an echo from a distance. She couldn’t discern where her father’s voice was coming from, or when it had sounded so threatening. Her father had been loving towards her in life, but perhaps that had only been her memories. She remembered the best parts of her father and forgot the worst parts. His weaknesses became sweet eccentricities in her memories, and perhaps she had completely erased deficiencies of his character.

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  He could have formally announced that she was his heir was he was alive. He had chosen not to, and the lack of her formally being crown princess had given Raval a way to oust her from her life, to strip her of all the power she had by birth.

  “You should’ve fought!” her dream father hissed at her. “You should’ve fought for your legacy. Your weakness will be the reason for Noumin’s destruction.”

  Like dreams often were, there was no sense in whatever happened. Her father shifted from his younger self to his later years to how he was shortly before his death, his muscles growing and wasting in front of her, his hair graying and regaining color.

  “It was my foolishness, thinking you would amount to something. A weak mother, and a weak daughter.”

  Vayu woke with a start. It was the middle of the night, her forehead was wet, and there was an unfamiliar weight on her stomach. Someone had opened the windows to let the winter air in, and the cold had woken her up. She was too tired, and she hadn’t yet accepted that she was still alive. Half of her fever dreams felt like precursors to death. Her father’s voice had been so real, and there were others too, other dreams that were quickly fading from her memory. She didn’t think she wanted to remember them either.

  Instead of moving or sitting up, she settled for moving her arm to the heaviness on her waist and feeling around to determine what it was. It was someone’s arm, and it wasn’t long until she knew it was Cheran. Because there now was no one else. There was no mother with unconditional love, no father whose love came with a few conditions, no family who did not support her or shelter her in her time of need, and no friends from the monastery.

  There was only the boy who showed her kindness when he didn’t need to, and Vayu rested her arm on top of his and turned to her side. He was asleep on top of her blankets, and it looked like his sleep was just as restless as hers had been. There was a bowl of water next to the bed, along with vials of medicine.

  “Hi,” she said, her voice nearly a croak.

  He didn’t wake up, and she ran her hand through his hair. Whenever she saw him, his hair was usually already combed and perfect, each strand kept in place with pomade. Everyone at court dressed like their sense of fashion was a social armor, like the most perfect tailoring or stunning accessories gave them a leg up. It sometimes worked.

  Now though, he looked so innocent. There was a bit of stubble along his jaw, wrinkles in his night shirt, and sometimes in his dreams, his eyes fluttered. Vayu didn’t make any more attempts to wake him up. The moment was perfect, as it was. She didn’t want him to wake up and again become the caring crown prince, always on his best behavior, always so accommodating to the poor abandoned princess.

  Asleep, she could pretend that they were normal. They were just a normal wife and husband, next to one another, unguarded in front of each other. She could pretend that him taking care of her was something more than responsibility, that his fear of her dying was because Cheran didn’t want to lose her, not because it would be a geopolitical nightmare.

  She moved closer to him, ignoring the pain in her stiff body. She leaned her head against his chest and wrapped her arms around him. Vayu suspected she had been ill and asleep for days. It felt like she’d slept enough for a year. She didn’t want to sleep anymore, but she didn’t want to leave Cheran’s side. She closed her eyes, letting herself feel his breath on her hair, slowing down her own breathing to match.

  It took her hours to fall back asleep, even then. There was contentment in being so close to him, but there was also the fear that he would wake up and move away from her. There was the fear that when she woke in the morning, she would wake up to more bad news. She sighed, not looking forward to whatever would come. Cheran’s grip around her waist got a fraction tighter, and she smiled into his chest.

  The morning would come after she was rested. For now, she had more than she ever dreamed of. She was still alive, she was in Cheran’s arms, and when the world came at her, he would be by her side.