![]() ![]() Her mother had gone somewhere better and now so would she. “You are too beautiful for this world, Sophie,” she said with her last breaths. Her father couldn’t see she was special, but her mother had. Even the glow of her creamy peach skin had dulled. Her jade-green eyes looked faded, her luscious red lips a touch dry. ![]() Her waist-long hair, the color of spun gold, didn’t have its usual sheen. “Like you said, it’s all hogwash.” She swept out of bed and slammed the bathroom door. And if Belle had anything to do with it, then she wasn’t good at all, but the worst kind of evil. As for the poor hag in the square, that old crone, despite claiming hunger day after day, was fat. He hadn’t ballooned into a blimp like Belle’s father, precisely because she hadn’t brought him home-cooked lamb fricassees and cheese soufflés at the mill. Instead, she offered him her own favorite foods: mashed beets, broccoli stew, boiled asparagus, steamed spinach. This didn’t mean her father had gone hungry. Naturally she had good reason (the oil and smoke would clog her pores) but she knew it was a sore point. She had never once cooked a full meal for him, even after her mother died. Sophie heard the edge in her father’s voice. Gives the leftovers to the poor hag in the square.” “Brings her father home-cooked lunches at the mill. “If it’s goodness that School Master fellow wants, he’ll take Gunilda’s daughter.” ![]() “I don’t know why they all think it’s you,” he said, silver hair slicked with sweat. Sophie rubbed her ears and frowned at her once lovely window, now something you’d see in a witch’s den. That’s for sure.” He pounded a deafening crack as exclamation. “They tell me to shear your hair, muddy up your face, as if I believe all this fairy-tale hogwash. “Everyone’s prattling on that you’re to be taken this year,” her father said, nailing a misshapen bar over her bedroom window, now completely obscured by locks, spikes, and screws. “Father, if I don’t sleep nine hours, my eyes look swollen.” a hammer broke through the walls of the room and smashed the princes to shards. But just as she came to one who seemed better than the rest, with brilliant blue eyes and ghostly white hair, the one who felt like Happily Ever After. Hair shiny and thick, muscles taut through shirts, skin smooth and tan, beautiful and attentive like princes should be. Here for the first time were boys who deserved her, she thought as she walked the line. She had arrived at a castle ball thrown in her honor, only to find the hall filled with a hundred suitors and no other girls in sight. Tonight these children dreamt of a red-eyed thief with the body of a beast, come to rip them from their sheets and stifle their screams. If the School Master took them, they’d never return. But tonight, all the other children of Gavaldon writhed in their beds. Sophie had waited all her life to be kidnapped. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |