Chapter Text
Once upon a time, in a northern city gripped by winter, a young girl named Annette Fantine Dominic sang her heart’s desire. Upstairs in her family’s modest manse - well, modest for nobility - her mother lay abed, ailing. She’d spied the blood on the handkerchief earlier for all her mother tried to hide it in her fist, and she knew from the frowns on the faces of all manner of physicians and priests that trudged through the entryway with her father trailing after them that she was not improving.
Where most young girls in Fhirdiad would’ve turned to the small shrine to the goddess they kept in the manse, Annette sang. To anyone who overheard, it was the nonsense of a child, but to her it spoke of the plaintive devotion of a prayer.
“Mother be well, mother be fine, mother to see me tucked into bed tonight.”
It didn’t rhyme, to her frustration, but that only made her more determined for her mother to improve so that one day she might serenade her with only the best lyrics.
Eventually her father stopped letting her into the bedchamber to sit beside her mother, even when she protested that she would want her Annette to read to her, and eventually while she sulked in her own bedroom voices drifted up the stairs.
She opened her door a hair and peeked out through the gap. A maid and the cook stood at the top of the stairs looking down, but their whispers couldn’t cover up the conversation below.
“I’m sorry, Sir Gustave,” said an unfamiliar male voice, “but I’m afraid your wife is not long for this world.”
“Surely there is something else you can do,” Annette’s father said, and his tone made something in her heart crack.
“There’s nothing,” said the other man, sighing. “She’s fought the illness as bravely as any knight, but no spell or tonic will cure her of it.”
“But…” Their voices grew distant, their footsteps fading with them, but Annette no longer listened.
A lump stuck in her throat as she knelt in her doorway and sniffed, but she forced herself to her feet and, with no father to command her otherwise, trudged down the hall on trembling legs to her parents’ bedchamber door.
Mother always slept these days, so Annette didn’t knock to avoid waking her. She nudged the door open, wincing when the hinges creaked, but passed through with nary a touch of guilt. Shadows engulfed the room with no candle lit and curtains drawn tight over the window, so she stepped carefully so she wouldn’t trip.
When she reached Mother’s bedside, her hand found hers where it lay over the covers. Cold and clammy and smaller than Annette ever realized. Her feeble, unsteady breathing filled the room, and as she stood there, she held her own breath, waiting…
She didn’t hear the door opening behind her.
“Annette,” her father’s low, somber voice said, “I told you not to come in here.”
“But Mother…”
“Your mother needs her rest,” he insisted. His hand rested against her back, as much a dismissal as his words, but still she held on.
She choked back a sob trying to force its way up her throat. “B-but Mother’s been resting,” she retorted. “Mother never—”
“Annette.” The warning in her name cut through anything she could ever hope to say.
Annette pressed her trembling lips together as she let her mother’s hand slip through her fingers and turned towards the door.
But not before she thought Mother’s eyes, as deep a blue as hers, cracked open.
The next morning when the priest came, it was not to heal but to deliver final rites.
Annette rarely saw Father after Mother’s funeral. His work as a knight sworn to the king kept him busy, and though she tried to stay up most nights until he returned home - like Mother used to - she almost always fell asleep in the parlor, using a book as a pillow.
Sometimes she woke the next morning in her bed, carried either by a footman or Father himself, but as she grew older - and a bit bigger - one servant or another would wake her and guide her upstairs to bed.
Her uncle, the Baron of Dominic, visited before Annette’s tenth birthday, and for that week Father actually lingered at home. He looked wearier than she remembered before Mother’s death, his hair grayer than ever. He’d never been the sort to smile for any reason, but his sternness would always soften for them.
But not anymore.
When Mother left them, she took something of Father with her, and Annette didn’t know how she could ever get it back.
Her uncle, usually almost as dour as Father, brightened the household. He paid for her birthday cake from her favorite bakery, the one she hadn’t gone to since…before, he listened to her pluck a tune of her own composition on her harp, he asked after her lessons, how she liked her governess, if she wanted to be a mage like her mother or a knight like her father when she grew up.
And Annette smiled and wondered why she couldn’t be both.
For some reason that made Baron Dominic laugh, but she hadn’t heard any of her family laugh in so long she didn’t really mind.
And at the end of the week, on the day after her birthday, she overheard him speaking with Father in the study behind the closed door.
“That girl needs a mother, Gustave,” her uncle said.
“She has her governess,” her father protested.
“A governess is a poor substitute,” argued Baron Dominic. “Will she give her everything a mother would?”
“She has a mother.”
“Not in this life, not anymore.” Baron Dominic sighed, and Annette could imagine him pressing a hand to his face. “I know you miss her, but if you marry again you wouldn’t be replacing her, Gustave.”
“I…know,” Father agreed, “but I haven’t the time to court anyone, and who would agree to marry an old widower with a daughter like me?”
“Any number of ladies might have you,” Baron Dominic offered. “You are a noble knight of the Kingdom, and a descendant of the Elite Dominic. You needn’t wed a young lady, so perhaps find a widow or another woman closer to your age if you prefer.”
“You suggest it like it’s easy.”
“Because it is!” exclaimed her uncle, his voice tinged with enough exasperation Annette flinched as if he’d directed it at her. “For the goddess’ sake, you live in Fhirdiad! You’re in the king’s circle!”
“I don’t know, brother…”
“Then how’s this, Gustave?” said Baron Dominic. “Either you remarry by Annette’s next birthday and give the poor girl a new mother, or when next I travel to Fhirdiad I return to Dominic with my niece.”
Annette’s breath caught, and she clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a gasp.
“You wouldn’t,” said Father.
“I would,” he said. “I hate to play this card, but I am the head of your house, so in this you will obey.”
Her father would bow his head, weighed down by her uncle’s expectations, as he said, “I…will.”
And Annette, with her heart racing for the fear of being caught eavesdropping - or from the promise she heard exchanged - fled.
Father kept his promise and wed Lady Cornelia. At first Annette had been glad for their union, for her new stepmother was a court mage, the famous sorceress who rescued the Kingdom from the plague that gripped Fhirdiad and the northern territories in the first year of her own life. A great mage, someone she could look up to!
But Lady Cornelia proved cold, and snide, and during her father’s long absences when he would leave Fhirdiad to shield the king on his travels, any praise she had for Annette’s studies withered into disdain.
She eyed her latest proof before her lips curved into an unkind smile. “I’m sorry, darling,” she said, her tone cloying in its sweetness, “but this just won’t do.”
“But my governess—”
“—is surely not a sorceress of my caliber,” her stepmother reminded her. “If you wish to rival me one day, you will have to do better.”
And rather than returning the paper with her proof on it to Annette, she gripped both sides of it and tore it in half.
The rending of the paper was nothing to that of her heart.
Cornelia relinquished the scraps to her before disappearing into the study - once shared by her father and mother, now with few signs of either of them left - and Annette fled upstairs to her bedroom where no one could see her cry.
When next Father spent longer than an evening at home, Annette dared to approach him. He glanced up from the letter he was reading, his frown deepening when he spotted her in the parlor doorway, spinning with her hands clasped behind her back and her stomach flipping.
For all she knew, Annette was about to tell him his wife - her stepmother - hurt her feelings, and for all she knew her father wouldn’t believe it of the kind, benevolent woman he married.
And he married Cornelia for Annette’s sake. What could she do if she…ruined that?
“What is it, Annette?” he wondered when she drew no closer.
Annette swallowed and ducked her head. “N-nothing,” she said before asking, “Are you leaving again soon?”
Father sighed. “His Majesty is traveling to Duscur next week,” he told her. “This is one journey I will not be taking with him.”
Her heart leapt with hope. At last, time to spend with him! “Why not?” she asked, though what she really wanted to know was what will we do together?
He smiled very faintly, and Annette couldn’t help returning it. “He will be well-protected,” he said. “My most talented squire was knighted not so long ago. Sir Glenn and the rest will do well enough.”
Sometimes, when Father was at his most…generous, he spoke of teaching the crown prince and a handful of others, but he’d never named them before. “Is he as sweet as His Highness?” Annette wondered before she could stop herself. She so loved these little peeks into his life when he wasn’t home, that same life that consumed him.
To her surprise her father’s smile slipped. “He is…not,” he confessed, “though he is strong.”
“And if he’s going with the king,” Annette said, “then you’ll be at home?”
“I will be,” said her father. “Perhaps I spend too little time with you.”
She grinned, eagerness overtaking her. Not only would Father be around, but perhaps if he was here, he might witness Cornelia’s cruelty for himself!
But her hope shattered quickly, thanks to Cornelia herself, for within moments she swept into the parlor to greet Father with a brief kiss to his cheek. “Gustave, dear,” she said, “you are home early this evening!”
“I felt it necessary for now,” he said simply. “I regret that His Majesty does not require my service on his journey, but I will not begrudge the time spent here.”
Cornelia smiled, though to Annette it looked insincere. “I am so very pleased,” she said. “It has been a long time since we three ate dinner together, as a family.” Her eyes slid towards her, where she still stood in the doorway. “Young Annette has missed your company so, and I’m afraid I’m a poor substitute for her father while I act as her mother.”
Because of course, while Father was home, Cornelia acted the part of a loving wife and doting mother.
But Annette knew the truth.
If only she knew why Cornelia hated her so.
The king her father so faithfully served perished in Duscur, massacred with so many of his knights, including this Sir Glenn that once squired for Father. The king died dreadfully to hear Cornelia tell it, a horrible, violent death brought about by Duscur itself, dissatisfied with the peace he tried to offer them.
Only Prince Dimitri survived, made an orphan, and too young to be crowned.
And one day after the news reached Fhirdiad, a mere day before the king’s funeral, Father left for the castle.
He never returned.
Annette sang again, mourning the family she once had, and always where Cornelia couldn’t hear her. She sang to dry her own tears when her stepmother dismissed her governess, when she threw sheafs of her sorcery notes into the hearth, when she flipped through her journal and tossed it aside as “drivel”, when she expelled her from her bedroom and banished her to the attic because the study wouldn’t suffice for her own studies.
Somehow the harp escaped her notice, or Annette smuggled it and some of her mother’s old belongings into the attic early enough with the help of a maid.
She didn’t like it in the attic. With only thin slats for windows, it smelled musty and moldy, and every step she took kicked up a cloud of dust that tickled her nose and throat. The ceiling sloped so sharply even Annette at her stature couldn’t walk the length of it without the top of her head brushing it, and vermin scratched in every shadowy corner.
A household’s worth of clutter filled the room, everything from old furniture draped with frayed sheets and crates brimming with unfamiliar memorabilia. Annette spent hours sorting through these, wiping dust off old miniature portraits of family members she didn’t recognize and flipping through books with yellowed pages.
She choked back tears when she recognized her mother’s handwriting in the margins of a few, old sorcery textbooks from her studies at the Royal School.
But steadily she learned the boundaries of her new home, including how to behave around Cornelia to avoid the worst of her ire. Stay out of her path when in the midst of an experiment, when the door to the study or Annette’s old, repurposed bedroom was closed. Say nothing of the strange men in long robes that passed through the entryway, the ones that spoke with her stepmother in hushed, urgent tones. Do not study magic, or anything, and learn instead that she might one day be worthy of wedding a nobleman to “better” her station.
“Your father was a wretch,” she complained to her once, and Annette hated how she spoke of him, as if he’d died like Mother, like the king, too. “But for all I despise him for abandoning you to me, I am loathe to deny the tools at my disposal.”
And Annette couldn’t deny hers either.
Cornelia steadily gutted the household of its paltry staff so all the housework fell on Annette lest they live in refuse. She avoided setting foot in her…laboratories, stifling her own curiosity of what a court mage might be up to here when surely she had better facilities in the royal castle, and eventually the work consumed her.
But on her worst days, when her defiance fell on Cornelia’s deaf ears, when all it earned her was a slap across her face, Annette thought about writing to her uncle.
Until Cornelia, with her uncannily accurate suspicion, demanded she turn out her pockets and found her half-penned letter.
Her latest avenue of escape denied her, Annette retreated to her attic, the only place where she could be alone with her thoughts and her disappointment.
It threatened to crush her each time. Every day she desperately held onto the hope Father would return, or her uncle might visit, it slipped further and further away.
Annette threw herself at the foot of her bed - barely a bed, little more than an old, lumpy mattress that sat on the floor - and buried her face in her hands. She shook with painful sobs, gasping for breath, always seeking for air while her stepmother sought to suffocate her.
She blamed Father for leaving her to her, only for guilt that she would to seize her. Father couldn’t possibly have known. If he had, he never would’ve left, surely…
Her crying stilled eventually. She hiccuped and rubbed her eyes, sniffling, before finding the wherewithal to stand and—
Oh. She didn’t even have a small mirror to hang from the wall.
For some reason that only made her scowl. To be denied something so—so simple as a mirror, the ability to make herself look presentable for more than just the occasional dinners that Cornelia forced her to sit through, frustrated her.
On some impulse Annette sifted through the old, blanketed furniture that littered the opposite end of the attic. She tore aside threadbare linens, unearthing chairs, a sofa she didn’t trust to be free of vermin and worse, a faded desk that might still be serviceable…
A long mirror.
Her breath caught, and she leaned towards it, taken aback by its shine and—
Her face, puffy red eyes and tear-stained cheeks, didn’t look back at her.
She touched the mirror and found the silver - perfect silver without a hint of tarnish - smooth and cool under her fingertips. A wooden frame carved with an intricate pattern of roses bordered it, and Annette might’ve considered it beautiful if not for the way it just didn’t…reflect.
This time when she touched it her eyes slipped shut. She concentrated, unsure what she searched for, but the instant she felt it she knew.
The mirror carried a spell, but Annette couldn’t tell its function or origin, not with how unpracticed she was. She opened her eyes and rested her hands on her hips, scowling at the mirror with no reflection, and declared, “I need to study more.”
She turned around with a sigh - if only she could figure out how - but a motion at the corner of her eye made her freeze.
Annette faced the mirror again…and looked into an unfamiliar room.
A boy stared back.
She jumped away, heart leaping into her throat, at the same instant the boy’s jaw dropped. He looked over his shoulder, into the room behind him, as if he expected her to be standing there, but when he turned back to her his eyes narrowed suspiciously.
Red-rimmed eyes, just like hers must be.
Annette’s breath stuck in her throat as she leaned towards the mirror, at the boy. He had dark hair swept up into a knot and thin piercing eyes, gangling limbs that seemed too long for his slim body…her age, she thought, though she rarely had cause to speak to any boys at all.
Perhaps most curiously the boy wore a sword dangling from his hip, as if he expected to fight at a moment’s notice.
Perhaps he did, though he couldn’t fight her.
…could he?
Annette bit her lip before resting a hand against the mirror’s cool surface.
The boy flinched but didn’t shrink away. He just stared at her hand then raised his and—
Her lips parted with surprise when he braced his hand against hers. She still only felt the mirror under, but she could see the contours of his palm and how he spread his fingers, longer and thicker than hers, wide.
The boy pulled his hand away first.
Annette swallowed her disappointment and withdrew hers. She tried smiling at the boy and offering a wave before saying, “H-hello! My name is Annette! What’s—what’s yours?”
The boy blinked at her, then shrugged and pointed to his ear.
“I…what do you—”
His lips shaped words, and Annette understood.
He couldn’t hear her, and she wouldn’t be able to hear him.
“Oh, of course…” she trailed off, and this time her heart sank, disappointment biting deep. But she bolted to her feet and raced to her bed, rooting through her meager belongings for a notepad, inkwell, and quill.
Her heart beat against her ribs with a mounting excitement, and to her relief the boy was still in the mirror - was he literally inside the mirror? - when she returned.
Her cheeks warmed under his intent gaze as she uncapped the inkwell and dipped her quill. She scrawled on the notepad before turning it around to show him what she’d tried to tell him.
The boy’s eyes narrowed at it. For a long heartbeat she worried he would ignore her, but then he raised a finger - wait? - and disappeared from her view.
Annette tapped her fingers against her notepad, nervous for a reason she couldn’t explain. What was she doing, communicating with this boy, and how was she doing it?
He slipped back into view with a notebook, and after setting up his own inkwell on the floor beside him he scratched something on his notebook and showed it to her.
His handwriting had a slanting quality she might’ve found pretty if she didn’t have to squint to read it.
“F…Felix?” she read. He nodded when she glanced back up at him - maybe he could read her lips, somewhat - so she grinned before writing on her notepad again, It’s nice to meet you, Felix.
His eyebrow quirked when he looked over what she showed him. He seemed to mull over his reply too, and then he showed her, Where are you? What is this?
I’m in Fhirdiad, she told him simply. I don’t know. Where are you?
Felix tapped his quill - a fine one, Annette couldn’t help noticing, couldn’t help a brief surge of envy - against his chin before writing his response: Fraldarius.
Disappointment tugged at her chest and soured her smile. That’s so far, she wrote.
Not really, he wrote back. I used to go to Fhirdiad all the time.
Oh? Used to? What changed?
Felix’s face contorted with a deep frown. He stared down into his lap, not writing anything, but before Annette could so much as wonder if she needed to apologize for prying, a voice called up the stairs:
“Annette! Put on a pot of tea for my guests!”
She stiffened, remembering Cornelia, remembering that she took everything else Annette found precious away. Her heartbeat in her throat as she scribbled one last question into her notepad before brandishing it:
Can we talk again same time tomorrow?
Felix’s gaze met hers for the briefest instant before it slipped away.
He nodded, and Annette smiled before standing and draping the mirror with the sheet again.
When she tripped over a table leg and spilled tea on one of Cornelia’s strange guests, even her stepmother’s scolding couldn’t dampen her spirits because for once, she had something to look forward to.
It didn’t take long for the boy in the mirror to become one of Annette’s only bright spots.
With Cornelia pulling her in every direction by day, Annette stayed awake late into the night, finishing her chores by the light of the last embers burning in the hearth. Then she would steal a candle - they had enough, her stepmother wouldn’t miss one - and climb into the attic and light it before tugging the sheet from the mirror.
Sometimes Felix already waited for her with a notebook and ink at the ready, but sometimes Annette waited for him with tense shoulders and fingers that shook too much to hold a quill steady. The room behind him - it looked like a bedchamber too, though one grander than her attic - was always better lit than her surroundings, and the mirror’s surface gave off a faint glow. It hummed with magic, with potential, and when she needed to wait she ran her hands along the carved wooden frame, fingertips trailing the delicate woodwork of the flowers and vines, searching for something that might hint at its origin.
And then Felix would step into view, and she would beam at him, and though he rarely smiled she learned to watch for the way the corner of his mouth lifted, or his eyebrow twitched, or he would toy with his quill between writing to her.
He didn’t speak easily at the start. She first worried he might not like her, that he only indulged her out of some misplaced kindness, but it didn’t take long for her to realize he might just be shy, or reluctant to say too much to a stranger in a mirror.
But slowly she drew the words out of him, like she used to draw music from her harp before she hid it in the depths of the attic lest Cornelia take it away from her like she took everything else.
Well, almost everything.
She told Felix about her magic, and a little about her music (though she refused to say anything about her own compositions). His gaze sharpened the one time she found the courage to pull out her harp, and he wrote to her, I want to listen.
But you can’t hear, she argued.
Play anyway.
Annette hesitated. Her fingers itched to pluck at the strings, to fill the attic with an easy tune. She’d lost track of how long it had been since she had played - surely not since Father…left her to Cornelia - and she didn’t doubt she’d sound horrible and unpracticed, and the harp itself would be terribly out of tune.
And though darkness enveloped the manse, though Cornelia would be abed as she should be, fear gripped her chest, so she shook her head and wrote to Felix, I can’t.
Why not? he wondered, his eyebrows drawn together.
Annette dipped her quill into ink and touched the nub to her notepad but…paused. Could she…tell him about Cornelia and her cruelty? Could she? Would it matter, or would it only tempt fate, somehow?
It’s late, she ended up writing instead. I’ll wake my stepmother. She won’t like that.
Another time? Felix wrote.
Her eyes flicked up to his face, curious what she might find there, and why he was almost…eager. Her stomach flipped, still uncertain, and she wrote, Maybe one day you can listen too.
She crossed it out without showing it to him, bemoaning the wasted ink, but for his benefit left, Maybe.
Felix frowned but to her relief didn’t press.
Annette, eager to change the subject, wrote to him, You were wearing a sword that first time even though you’re my age. Do you want to be a knight?
His lips twisted into a scowl as he shook his head more violently than she thought the question warranted. He scribbled something on his notebook before showing her, I don’t want to die for someone else.
She blinked, confusion filling her, and responded, But you don’t have to.
Do you know many knights?
Annette streaked ink across her page in her haste to reply, My father is one. He hasn’t died.
But where was he? Perhaps he might as well be dead for his absence, but then she’d be an orphan in truth with no hope of escaping Cornelia.
Then Felix wrote, He probably wishes he could die for someone.
Annette’s breath caught, horror gripping her. The venom on his face startled her, but worse still was how her chest tightened and her hand shook as she scrawled, You don’t know what you’re talking about.
His eyes widened, yet still he wrote to her, Yes I do. My father is glad my brother died.
How could he be? she demanded. That doesn’t make sense!
He said so, Felix told her, and when her gaze darted to his face she saw his jaw set stubbornly.
Annette’s heart raced in her chest, from the quarrel, from the hot tears pricking at her eyes again. The impulse to agree, just so she wouldn’t push her only friend away, rose in her, but she swallowed it, because he just had to be wrong about—about everything!
Knights only care about obeying their liege, Felix wrote when she couldn’t bring herself to say anything. They don’t care about other people.
That’s not true! Annette insisted. She rubbed at her eyes, as if that would keep back the tears, but hissed when cool ink wet her cheek too. My father cares about more than that, she added.
Does he? Good for him.
Annette heard a sarcastic bite in his words, though he didn’t speak aloud. Maybe it was his…viciousness, how her once-shy companion in the mirror held a bitter flame in his hands he sought to pass to her.
Doubt wormed into her heart, doubt that Sir Gustave might one day return, might see what her stepmother did and whisk her away to her uncle’s home, or help her enroll at the Royal School of Sorcery when she was the right age, or—
But he hadn’t sent a single word to her, never.
Shame writhed in her abdomen, and before Felix could see her tears as they fell she jumped to her feet and threw the sheet over the mirror.
Annette was late to trudging downstairs in the morning. Her head ached with her poor sleep, when she tossed and turned on her lumpy mattress until slipping into dreams she forgot when she woke. She thought Father might’ve been there, his broad back to her while she reached out before he ignored her and walked away.
She didn’t wake till Cornelia’s voice shouted up the stairs, “Girl, get down here! Where’s my breakfast?”
She’d rolled over and groaned before sliding out of bed. Setting foot in the dining room - because Cornelia refused to dine in the kitchen even for breakfast - with lumpy oatmeal and unpeeled fruit earned her a scolding for everything from how she barely looked presentable - she hadn’t had the time to brush her hair - to the dust on the cabinet of her mother’s old fancy dinnerware.
Annette, too groggy and with her chest tight after her quarrel with Felix, barely heard her.
Only later, after Cornelia explained her long list of chores for the day, when a dish she’d been cleaning slipped through her fingers and shattered against the kitchen floor, did she stare at the shards and burst into tears again.
She didn’t know when Father would return - or if he would at all - and realized she couldn’t rely on him to rescue her from her stepmother’s whims. Maybe if she even knew where he had gone, she could’ve written him, but she didn’t doubt Cornelia would, somehow, thwart her in that too.
Somehow, Annette understood as she swallowed the rest of her sobs and grabbed a broom, she would have to free herself.
Annette began to study late into the night, deciphering her mother’s old Reason textbooks by candlelight. She drew upon fond memories learning the basics from her governess before Cornelia dismissed her, only to discover her foundation was lacking.
Years behind, she didn’t doubt, and she would have to work hard to catch up to her peers if she wanted to enroll at the Royal School.
And she could only work while her stepmother slept after finishing her mountain of chores, or while she was at court.
Eventually Annette found solace in her studies, but though she spoke aloud (in a low voice) so she might hear someone else, as if her governess still tutored her, it couldn’t replace having a friend.
Annette’s heart raced when next she faced the enchanted mirror.
The same room still stared back at her. She released a breath, trying to ease the tension in her shoulders as she settled in front of the mirror with a notepad, inkwell, and quill.
The tallow candle in the holder beside her burned dim and low while she waited. She wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her cheek against her knees, watching the unreflective surface of the mirror.
Her eyes burned with exhaustion after another long day. Cornelia had returned in a rage, raving to an associate about the Duke of Fraldarius insulting her, about how he influenced the orphaned crown prince against her after everything she’d done for the Kingdom.
“I freed this damn Kingdom of the plague that killed his own mother!” she’d ranted. “How dare he suggest I have too much power?”
“He’s not king yet, my lady,” her companion had reminded her. “You have time to show him his error.”
“Yes, dear Rufus will buy us time,” Cornelia had said, her tone level though she still scowled. “We still have two years until the boy’s coronation, and then—what in the name of Nemesis’ ghost are you doing, child?” Her glare had fallen on Annette where she stood frozen with a feather duster in hand. “Were you eavesdropping on me? Did your imbecile of a father never teach you manners?”
“He’s not—” Annette had tried to protest before Cornelia scoffed.
“He left you, you foolish child,” she’d reminded her while wagging a finger. “Now get out of my sight!”
She hadn’t needed to be told twice.
The fleeing almost galled her, when her stepmother was in a mood it was for the best to stay out of her path. And what pride did Annette have left to her anyway, with ink staining her hands and soot smearing her cheeks? She was no longer the daughter of a knight sworn to the king but a servant to her own stepmother, the most wretched, grasping lady of the duke regent’s court.
The grim, awful reminder of it and her own loneliness drove her to the mirror, desperate to, somehow, make amends with Felix. She hadn’t sought him in weeks, too frustrated with his words, too tangled up in her secret studying, too tired and weary of heart to reach out for someone who might not reach back.
Her eyes started to slip shut, and Annette might’ve let them if something in the mirror hadn’t moved.
Her breath caught when Felix stepped into view, when his gaze found her crouched there, when his jaw dropped as he scanned her and—
Had he gotten taller? Had it been long enough since they met at the mirror for him to grow?
He glanced over his shoulder as Annette unwound her limbs, a grimace crossing his face before he held a finger up to her. Her heart skipped a beat as she waited again, when he slipped away from view and returned with a notebook.
Felix sat in front of her, and she held her breath as he uncapped his inkwell and wrote. He turned his notebook around, and Annette read, I didn’t think I would see you again.
Her chest tightened, but she admitted on her own notepad, I’m still a little mad, but I missed you. After a heartbeat’s hesitation, she added, I don’t have many friends.
Or any, but she didn’t want to confess that.
Are we friends? Felix wrote.
I want us to be, Annette told him. You said some cruel things, but I still missed you.
Even in the low lighting on his side of the mirror, his cheeks darkened, and he avoided her gaze as he wrote into his notebook, I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made assumptions about your father.
You shouldn’t have, Annette wrote, frowning, but— She broke off, lips pressing together, unsure all over again, if she should hold back or if she could tell him…anything.
Felix sensed her reticence, for then he showed her, What?
She scribbled down before she could regret it, My father left me to my stepmother after the king died, so you were a little right. A little!
She half-expected him to be smug, to smirk like he sometimes did when bragging about mastering a new sword maneuver, but his eyebrows drew together. That was awful of him, he wrote to her.
For some reason, despite the emotion still thick in her throat, Annette’s lips curled into a smile, and she felt just a little better. She wrote, How have you been?
Felix’s expression slackened, though he did not smile, and after a little awkwardness they slipped back into their old patterns. He wrote about his training, about avoiding his other lessons, and asked her about if she practiced on her harp lately.
Annette confessed she hadn’t, and she smiled a little wider as she explained about teaching herself more complex magic and that she would escape one day into the Royal School.
That made a little furrow appear on his forehead, and he noted, I’d think someone would want to escape from a school, not into it.
She covered her mouth to muffle a laugh, but that couldn’t stifle the warmth unraveling in her chest. But it did dampen it as she told him, I have to. It’s my only chance.
What do you mean?
Annette licked her lips, thinking carefully while her heart pounded. Her quill pressed into the paper, leaving an indentation even before she began writing, My stepmother, I want to escape h—
The clock in the tallest tower of Castle Fhirdiad tolled the midnight hour.
She scratched away what she almost wrote and instead showed Felix, I should go to sleep.
His face fell but he nodded and replied, Sleep well, Annette.
A peculiar heat filled her, and despite their looming parting she couldn’t help smiling as she wrote, Tomorrow again?
The barest hint of a smile crossed his face when he nodded again.
Annette grinned even as she stood and draped the sheet over the mirror, hiding him away like a secret, something Cornelia couldn’t take away. Giddiness gripped her, alerted her so much she worried she might not fall asleep easily, and as she slid under her scratchy quilt her smile didn’t even falter.
Maybe one day, after she escaped her stepmother and enrolled at the Royal School, she would find Felix in the flesh even if she traveled all the way to Fraldarius for it, but until then she held onto the hope of seeing his face staring back at her from the mirror.
Cornelia only became more and more unpleasant as time wore on. Her demands lengthened in complexity, and she even sent Annette out on difficult and inane errands that took her hours to complete with warnings that she would know if she dawdled anywhere. Her shouting was unbearable, her visitors rude and unhelpful, and Annette—
Annette hated her more than she ever thought it possible to hate anyone at all. A part of her worried and fretted that somehow, she’d discovered her stolen evenings studying or sitting in front of the enchanted mirror to scribble notes to Felix, that making sure she retreated to her attic every night so exhausted she fell asleep with her face pressed to a book or ink staining her cheek when she woke was how she chose to deprive her of them.
But Annette refused to be deterred, no matter what, not when magic was her hope for her own future, and Felix was…Felix.
Something…changed over the course of the next two years. He grew a little taller, a little broader and his jaw a little sharper and his hands clutching at his notebook and quill bigger. He no longer looked awkward carrying a sword on those evenings she rolled her eyes through his demonstrations, not like he did before. He still wore his hair the same, tied into a bun at the back of his head, but something about how the loose flyaway strands framed his face drew her eye.
She wanted to tuck them away, though she doubted they were long enough to reach his ears, or even see how long his hair really was if he left it loose. Annette didn’t know where this new impulse came from, but for once she was grateful for their true distance keeping her from giving into it.
Somehow, Felix, almost a man, had grown handsome, and Annette began to feel…inadequate sitting in front of him.
Rubbing at her cheeks with a damp washcloth to wipe away the soot perpetually staining them was a poor substitute for a good scrubbing in a bath, yet she tried anyway. And Felix wore such fine clothes, betraying a careless wealth that Annette couldn’t help envying after her stepmother squandering for her bizarre experiments what little her father left them, and all she had for their evenings were stained, threadbare dresses that could never keep her warm enough in her drafty attic in the winter months.
But Felix’s lips always twitched into one of his small smiles when he first spotted her, and Annette always forgot her worries as she smiled back. A flutter always filled her chest, even superseding her indignation when he teased her, but this time—
Oh, this time—
Annette understood why.
Heat rose to her cheeks, and her quill nearly slipped through her fingers. Her heart beat against her ribs with the force of the realization and how it gripped her in a fist so tight she couldn’t imagine it ever letting her go.
She had…feelings for Felix.
In that instant she couldn’t bring herself to look at him. She would, and then he would read it on her face as surely as if she’d written it for him on her notepad. He would read it, and it would repulse him - he spoke of the chivalric romances his friend liked with such disdain - and all she would’ve accomplished with letting him see would be driving him away like she did her father.
Annette composed herself, wrote a new song for her expression, and swallowed the giddiness rising in her, exchanging it for trepidation. She lifted her face, prepared to offer Felix a greeting and nothing more, but—
He held his notebook up, a single sentence scrawled onto it in his slanting hand:
I ’ll be in Fhirdiad for the coronation.
Her breath caught in her lungs, and she forgot how to write. Her gaze drifted over the notebook to Felix’s face.
He wasn’t looking at her, instead glancing over his shoulder, as if he too was…nervous, uncertain, hesitant.
But he turned his head when Annette dipped her quill into the inkwell, when she wrote with a trembling hand, Do you want to meet?
His expression morphed into something…wild, something hopeful before he nodded with vigor. He wrote into his notebook, Will you be at the coronation?
Annette froze. Cornelia would surely go - she was a member of the court, even if one falling from grace - but she doubted that meant anything for her own attendance. I don’t know, she admitted. My stepmother might not want me there.
Damn your stepmother, Felix replied with a scowl.
I’ll sneak out, Annette promised, as surely as the resolve to make good on her words gripped her. Her jaw set, and when she glanced up from her notepad her eyes met his.
His lips curved into the faintest smirk, and he wrote, Bring your harp.
She scowled at him. Why? It’s too big!
You promised I could listen to you play, he reminded her.
Annette stiffened; that he remembered shocked her, and shook her, and sent heat rushing to her face all over again. Another time, she told him instead.
Fine, he agreed, to her relief.
And that evening when she bid him good night, she felt almost…content.