“Cursed just like him?”
My head snapped toward her. “What did you say?”
“Cursed like your father. You don’t have to worry about that. Even if it is a family curse, you aren’t in the bloodline so it probably wouldn’t affect you.”
“How do you know about my father’s curse? Who told you?”
“I’ve always known.” She laced her fingers together in front of her, concentrating on her hands as a deep ‘v’ dug in between her eyes. “But I didn’t know it would happen again.”
I grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled, hoping this would be a dream and I’d suddenly wake up in my own bed with Griswold knocking on the door, but I didn’t. She knew about the curse. She knew it had happened before. Until just a few days ago, I didn’t even know that.
“And what do you mean I’m not in the bloodline. I’m the only child of the king and queen, of course, I’m in the bloodline.”
She shook her head, pink bursting into deep crimson in her cheeks. “You really have no idea, do you?"
She grabbed my hand. The jolt from when her skin connected with mine ripped up my arm and I swore I saw it spark in the last drops of darkness before the sunrise. "Come on. I have something to show you."
She led me back into the house and dropped me by the faded worn couch then walked over to the bookcase. She stood on her tiptoes and reached toward the highest shelf, the hem of her dress inching up the back of her thigh. I forced my eyes to look away and stood to help, but she'd already grabbed a well-worn journal from the shelf and had started unwinding the narrow leather cord wrapped around the pages to keep them closed. She flipped the journal open. "I think you should see this."
"Is it your writing?"
She shook her head her full lips pursed tight. "No, it's my father's."
"I don't see…"
She thrust the open journal in front of me, a detailed hand-drawn image of a feral beast splashed across the page. The beast so terrifying, even the drawing made me shudder, or maybe because I'd seen that beast before. Hiding in the west wing. It was my dad.
My blood bubbled, the room heating up around me. “Where did you get this?"
"I told you, it was my father's. Everyone else may have forgotten about the curse, but my father wrote down everything that happened so he could remember." She jiggled the journal closer to me. "Read it."
I lay the loosely bound pages across my lap and read the impeccably neat scroll beneath the drawing of the beast. Veda crossed her arms, popping her hip to the side as she watched my finger traced over the indentations on the page as I read. Each word collected in my brain as I struggled to make sense of them. Bright and sharp puzzle pieces but with no full picture to follow.
"It says he kidnapped my mother. Held her prisoner. But that can't be true? They love each other. I've seen it, this is a mistake."
She shrugged. "Maybe you're right, but it seems like there are a lot of things your parents have kept from you. Do you think it's possible that it really happened this way? Maybe they love each other now, but do you really know how they met?”
I slammed the journal shut, dust moats erupting from the pages.
"I don't believe it. This is a book of lies."
"Fine. But what about the rest of the story? The part about the baby boy with golden rings in his eyes left on the doorstep of the castle?"
I jumped up and Veda retreated a step giving me more space for my anger to grow. "Enough. Why are you telling this to me?”
“Don't you think someone should? You've lived your whole life in the dark, Fallon. If these people truly loved you, why wouldn't they just tell you the truth?"
She pulled the book from my hands and flipped quickly through the pages, the spine opening on her perfect page like she'd read this a thousand times before. Maybe she had. Maybe my life was the story her father told her before bed, instead of the tales of dragons and far away lands like everyone else. But from the deep scowl carved across her face, I'd clearly been painted as the villain in this story.
"Right here." She stabbed her finger into the middle of the page. "And in the twilight on the fortnight, after the curse had been broken, the babe arrived wrapped in a golden cloak, his eyes the color of the sun. And the king and queen claimed the boy as their own and raised a bastard prince to one day claim the throne he did not deserve."
The world began to spin. The dim lantern light swirled into the night and back again, as my stomach contracted and this morning's breakfast teased a return.
I grabbed the arm of the ratty couch trying to make the world stay still for even just a second. This couldn't be true. Could it? There was no way. My parents loved me. They never said anything or even hinted that I wasn't theirs. I even looked like my parents. My wavy chestnut hair was just like my mother's, and the angle of my jaw and build were unmistakably my dad. I even had my mother's lone dimple on my left cheek. If I were someone else's child how could I ever look like them? Like they could change me to match the family portraits that hung in the grand ballroom.
"So you really didn't know?" Veda placed her palm on my shoulder and I blinked but cringed, the warmth of her hand bleeding through my shirt.
"No. But I don't how any of it could be true. My father is a good man. A noble king. He would never…would never hurt my mother. I can't be adopted. There's no
