Kieran

“Kieran, Kieran,” Eli taps on my arm incessantly. Whoever allowed him to be seated next to the head of the table should be fined. “Watch this.”

He pops a slice of fruit into his mouth, chews for a bit and then bares the peel in a grin, as if his teeth have been replaced. I wrinkle my nose.

“Disgusting,” I tell him, which only makes him happier.

“Lady Isabelle, dear, will you put that dagger away?” Imogen chides across the frowning girl. “Weapons should be kept out of the dining room and the kitchens. You know the rules.”

Isabelle pouts and tucks the knife back into the strap against her thigh. Lately, she’s grown quite attached to the thing. Whenever she disappears into her thoughts, she takes it out to fiddle with it absently.

“As I was saying,” Imogen carries on with a conversation to which I hadn’t bothered to pay attention before, “So this other world of yours – it is like the stars? Up in the sky?”

“No, no,” Isabelle stabs at her boiled carrots and waves her fork in the air when she speaks. “I mean, yes, sort of. It’s like...like the universe keeps expanding, you see, so eventually it kind of creates more...universes?”

The rest of them frown.

Isabelle chuckles and palms her temple. “I’m not making any sense, am I? Sorry. I’m not smart enough to explain this properly.”

She says that, while she is the one trying to explain quantum physics to inhabitants of another reality.

“Anyway, I’m thinking the mirror’s got some properties that can somehow cause a breach in space and time. It’s likely the only explanation for this.” She looks to me. “Right?”

I have no idea. “Sure.”

“Or,” another voice sounds before we all see Astrid step into the open doorway. “It could simply be just what it appears to be. Magic.”

She tugs at the edges of her knit sweater as she comes to join us for the first time since the funeral days ago. As soon as she sits down right across me at the table, a placemat sets itself for her and the ladles scoop a generous helping of food onto her plate.

If anybody notices the gradual shift in her somber mood, nobody makes any comment.

“Science can be used to explain the way magic works, too, you know,” Isabelle says as if Astrid has been in the dining room all along.

“Not everything.”

Her eyes flicker to meet mine for a brief second. She averts her gaze just as quickly.

“Oh, my head is starting to strain,” Imogen rubs at her forehead. “Could we talk about other things, please?”

“Sure,” Eli chimes in. “Does anybody want to see my new trick?”

He demonstrates his neat little five-second show. Bayorn is the first to crack up.

“I can do you one better,” Isabelle says proudly. She picks a clean spoon off the table and exhales on the surface. Then, she sticks it to her nose and releases it.

The boy claps with delight. “I want to try. I want to try!”

Even Imogen makes an attempt. Soon, Bayorn and I are looking at four different people giggling away as they attempt to stick spoons onto their noses.

“I did it.” The corners of Astrid’s lips lift. She tries to turn her head slowly without letting it slip. When she succeeds, she grins triumphantly, though it is void of much humor. “Look, it’s not falling off!”

“Yes,” I nod seriously, unable to help myself. “Bayorn, doesn’t she look a lot like someone in the castle? Was it the court’s fool?”

The spoon slides off Astrid’s face. She scowls.

“Pardon me,” a hand springs to her chest. “I thought you were a prince. Did you hold another profession?”

Bayorn snickers despite himself. I shoot him a glare, but he pretends to study the food on his plate.

We barely stay on a specific topic for long throughout dinner. It’s as if everybody has some story to share about their lives: the day Isabelle threw up in her teacher’s purse as a child and pretended it never happened, the time Imogen accidentally set her matron’s bonnet on fire, when Bayorn was first appointed as a guard, when Astrid nearly destroyed her father’s first attempt at fashioning one of his inventions all those years ago.

At some point, Isabelle remembers to whip her phone out to take what is called a ‘selfie’ of us. I make bunny ears behind Eli’s head, who doesn’t notice it until after he studies the photo. He scowls at me but then insists on taking more pictures. Even Bayorn is fascinated by the contraption.

The endless chatter ceases to be insufferable. The silence and isolation I used to crave all those years ago are no longer needed.

Now, I crave for this. Warmth. Assurance. A reminder of the things that have made my past eternity worthwhile.

Will they mourn for me, I wonder? Will they send my remains off on a boat and acknowledge that we had this very moment here, that this makes everything that has happened – and all that will happen – almost worthwhile?

After hours, when the muscles in my chest starts to ache and contract, Imogen is the first to stand. She takes her son, whose eyelids grow heavier by the minute, into her arms.

“Time to put this little character to sleep,” she says, patting his back.

Bayorn, too, stands. Sometimes I envy the emotion in his eyes that is reserved only for her and the boy.

I have a family, he once said.

“I will walk you upstairs,” he offers.

When they leave, the mirth in the atmosphere dwindles to a slow silence.

Isabelle looks from me to Astrid, who – though civil throughout dinner – now shifts her attention to anywhere but me. Isabelle inflates her own cheeks and then releases a puff of air from between puckered lips.

“Okay,” she taps her fingers on the table awkwardly. “I’m beat, so I’ll be hitting the hay.”

Astrid rises with her. “I shall retire as well,” she says. “Goodnight.”

I watch them leave. Just before Astrid disappears out the door, Isabelle twists around to glare meaningfully at me over her shoulder.

I sigh.

“Let me walk you to your rooms,” I call out, loud enough for the both of them to hear.

Isabelle acts as a buffer between the two of us. She loops her arms around ours and prattles on, filling the radio silence with her requests that we ride out to see more of the forest tomorrow. When she reaches her room first, I almost plant my feet outside her door and insist on seeing Astrid to her room across the corridor’s width.

“Goodnight,” Isabelle says to us. Before she closes the door, she wiggles her eyebrows at me in a barely conspicuous manner. I narrow my eyes in exasperation.

Astrid does not wait for me to walk her to her room, so I have to jog to keep up with her.

Her face lingers between the door’s gap. She glances at her feet, and then, finally, she meets my eyes.

“Thank you,” she clears her throat. “For the other day, when you stopped Captain Federer.”

“Ah,” I say. “Of course. I’m assuming that man is the one you promised to be promised to?”

She nods. The door starts to waver in its position, and for a moment I think she is going to close it in my face.

But she gives way to her room. “Would you like to come in for a moment?”

I do. Keeping my hands behind my back, I stroll in after her and follow her to our place: the alcove.

She kicks her shoes off and hugs her knees to her chest. Under the moonlight, Astrid’s face is paler than it usually is. There is something about the nightly hours that brings out the depth of the colour in her hair and the shadows under her cheekbones. Truly, here in her wrinkled cotton trousers and old sweater, the glowing full moon can’t hold a candle to her beauty. I add another memory to my brain and hope it will be returned to me when the first week of spring ends.

“I will miss you,” the words tumble out of my mouth before I even realize I am speaking.

One of her brows knits downwards slightly.

“When the curse is broken,” I correct myself quickly. “We shall part ways.”

“Maybe I want to follow you around. Just to punish you for the year you made me spend with you. Living here is not so nightmarish either.”

I smile wanly. “I suppose that wouldn’t be pure torture. But you mustn’t. The world is too wide, and you are too curious for your own good.”

She purses her lips and her eyes soften. I find myself staring, stumbling, wishing beyond all rationality that we could freeze time for a little longer.

But then she tears her gaze away from me, and the moment is gone.

“Lady Selaena mentioned that the price to pay for breaking the enchantment will be high,” she murmurs. “Will you pay it?”

“I am now.”

“I do not want you to. Whatever else is to come, I am afraid of it all.”

“Are you angry at me?” I ask, rather stupidly. It’s hard to phrase a question as difficult as the undecipherable one that has been plaguing my mind for so many days.

She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

The strain on my back is intensifying; the change is coming soon. I don’t want to go downstairs. Not again. Not tonight.

“I cannot place it,” she says all of a sudden.

“What’s that?”

“I cannot place the precise moment we became friends. I only know that when I realized you could be trusted, it must have been during one of the times we sat right here.” She pats the cushion beneath us. “Remember when you told me about the day your belt buckle came loose?”

Despite the increasing pain, I chuckle. Back when I was ten and self-important, I attempted to impress a few friends with how quickly I could climb a tree. I was hanging onto a branch when my belt undid itself and my trousers decided to display my royal bottom to the rest of the world.

“We were laughing and laughing until I couldn’t breathe,” her smile widens. “That night after you left, I lay on my pillow and thought I’d never felt closer to a friend than I do to you. I have always been completely safe when you are around.”

No, you’re not, I should tell her. Do not assume I will always be there to deter the beast from targeting you. Do not assume you are safe even now.

But I cannot say any of that. Instead, all my muscles direct me to do is to stand. When I bend down to her, she tips her head back.

Her lips part slightly. Those eyes are a pale gray in this light, wide and tentative. We share quickened breaths for a few heartbeats.

She is so, so close. So warm in this late winter.

My hand reaches up to touch the side of her head, careful to be gentle with her after all she has been through. She gravitates towards my touch ever so slightly.

I close the space between us.

My lips touch her forehead.

She keeps her eyes closed for a second longer than I do, a second longer after I release her and step back. A part of me wants to stay in this place forever if I have to; as long as we can go on a million adventures and dance ten thousand dances while I step on her feet.

But I can’t take her chance at happiness away from her. I can’t let her grieve again.

And so I turn around, bid her goodnight, and leave.