Gwynn woke from her dreamless sleep to movement in the room. She blinked, disoriented for a moment before she realized that the warmth had left the bed beside her. Rather, now he was standing by the bed, rummaging for something.
“Versailles?”
“Oh, you’re awake.” He turned. “You should get some boots. I want to take you somewhere.”
A part of Gwynn knew that she should be asking questions, that she shouldn’t go anywhere with the man who had taken her from the Artoria Palace. But the last night had changed everything. Even she could not deny that. Besides, she was realizing for all that they had done to each other, Versailles would not betray her now.
She rose from the bed, her hand at the locket and the crystals dangling from the golden chain around her wrist. Sorrel wouldn’t approve of this, of anything she had done. Her sister felt so far from her now. Something about Gwynn herself had fundamentally changed in their adventure across the stars, and she wondered if her sister would someday understand.
“Wait for me.” She wasn’t just talking about finding her boots.
He looked at her, and comprehension was clear in those indigo eyes. “I will.”
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The sun was only just rising as Gwynn followed Versailles up the steep mountain trail, through the piney forest. He held her hand tightly, but it wasn’t the same as it was when he abducted her. It wasn’t so much a fear that she would run away, but a fear of letting go. A small difference—but it was there nonetheless.
“Almost there.” He glanced back at her, his indigo eyes otherwise unreadable.
He helped pull her up the last great steps, and they were over the top of the mountain, into a little clearing on the top of the peak. It overlooked the valley where the Alabaster Palace stood at the very center, and at its heart was the rising sun, painting the sky all shades of pink, violet, and gold.
“Oh.” Gwynn stopped in her very tracks while Versailles let go of her hand and continued into a patch of blood-red lilies. “It’s so beautiful up here.”
“Her Majesty doesn’t like it up here, even her gaze avoids this place.” Versailles looked back at her with a more serene expression than she thought the dark champion was capable of making. “I like to come here to be by myself. . . but I thought we could talk up here.”
“Right.” Gwynn tucked a curl that had come loose from her coronet braids behind her ear. There’s so much to discuss, after what happened last night.
Versailles extended a hand to her, and with it, there was something soft and warm about his indigo eyes. She stepped forward to accept it, and followed him down into the grass at the edge of the mountain’s peak.
They sat there for a moment, looking out at the valley, glancing at each other, and then hastily returning their gazes back of the valley. Not one wanted to break the quiet. If they did, they could no longer pretend that they were just any pair of lovers, basking in the beauty only a morning could bring. Instead, they would have to face the consequences that would come with the dawn.
Eventually, Gwynn knew she had to be the responsible one—wasn’t that always who she had to be?
“I’m not going to apologize for what happened.” She did not look at him as she spoke, she did not need to. “I don’t understand how or why you ended up with her in the first place—but no matter what you’ve done, you don’t deserve that.”
“That’s what I wanted to tell you.” She could feel his eyes upon her, and so she turned her head.
He sighed deeply, a motion that shook his shoulders. He twisted the golden ring on his finger, the amethyst glowing softly. “I would not ask you to apologize. I—I want to tell you where I came from. Why I joined her.”
He looked out to the mountains. “I’m not telling you so you’ll feel sorry for me. I’ve done too much for that.”
Gwynn shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now. I meant what I said. I want to protect you now.”
He turned back to her, clearly startled. “I—I know I don’t deserve that.”
“And it’s like I keep saying, it doesn’t matter.” Gwynn reached for his hand. “Maybe this isn’t the way the story was meant to go. Maybe this isn’t the ending most would write for the wolf. But maybe even wolves deserve kinder endings.”
He stared at her for a long time.
“You’re beautiful,” he finally said.
Gwynn knew he wasn’t speaking about her appearance, the way the young men in Hoffman had.
He entwined his fingers with her and tugged at the scarf around his shoulders, and began his story.
“My mother was a princess of the Ondrina dynasty and my father was a space pirate, an outlaw who ran from everything.” The disdain and bitterness dripped from his voice as he looked over at the mountains and the valley of glittering diamond-like cities. “They couldn’t have been more different—so naturally, they fell in love. Even more naturally, the Heavenly Dynasty didn’t approve.”
“They didn’t?” Gwynn tilted her head. It didn’t match the old stories of the demigods walking the planets, the benevolent rulers who granted wishes and defended their star-system from threats beyond their single star.
“Of course they didn’t.” His laugh was humorless. “Do you think the people who could create an entire race to serve their every whim—ones who made the Annwynese to be pretty, obedient servants—were the kind who were tolerant? Especially of an outlaw who defied their will?”
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“I suppose not.” Gwynn thought of the tome she’d found in the attic, of the phantoms in Castle Fantasma. “So they ran away, then?”
“Yes, she ran away with him and married him.” He tugged on the edge of his cloak. “She gave up everything, her title, her fortune, even that little spark of divinity to live one mortal life with him in the middle of nowhere. Malcif.”
“Oh, you’re from Malcif?” Gwynn blinked. “I think I know a regular at the Bed and Breakfast who stops at Dulcinea for agricultural trade.”
“Really?” Versailles turned his head. “What a small galaxy.”
So you grew up there, then?” Gwynn recalled the pictures she’d seen on screens of prairies like seas of green and white, with twilight forests and pines. “I hadn’t imagined you as a farm boy.”
He smiled and shook his head. “I was, once. A stupid, reckless farm boy with his head and the clouds and eyes to the stars. One who had no idea what he was really wishing for.”
His expression turned more sober, sorrowful even. “I was restless—I wanted nothing more than to leave it all behind. Some part of me knew I belonged in the stars, that I was meant for greater things than to live and die on that small world. The Dynasty had fallen and the Society of Worlds had yet to rise, in those days.”
“I see.” In spite of everything, in all her travels with Coppelius and those other descendants of the stars, it was easy to forget how unfathomably ancient the people around her were. “Did you know who you were, then?”
“No.” He closed his eyes. “My mother never wanted us to know who her family was, where she’d come from. As far as she was concerned, Princess Lumia never existed, only. Lumia Isengrim who had followed my father home from space, a mysterious bride with no true history.”
“Isengrim.” Gwynn repeated the word, tasting the name. It was like the taste of a single snowflake on her tongue, a little bittersweet and unbearably cold. “Versailles Isengrim—was that your name then?”
He smiled bitterly again. “For a woman who never wanted to be a princess, and never wanted her sons to be princes, she certainly named us like ones. Some things about her and the things she said, I understand. Others—I’m starting to believe I never will.”
Gwynn thought of her mother, and that last goodbye in the spaceport. She thought of her father, and all of the mysteries he’d left unanswered in his death. Would she ever be able to piece them all together again?
Or, like the mysteries of Lumia Isengrim, would they also remain unsolved, unanswerable by the void between the stars?
“When I was around fourteen, that was when I started to have the dreams,” Versailles continued, bringing Gwynn back to the field of flowers. “That’s when we began to fight, horribly. I’d sometimes storm out of ht house for hours after, find a place in the fields where I could look to the stars and promise myself that someday I’d leave that dustball behind.”
“You were only a child, you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t see it that way.” He picked a scarlet flower from the dirt. As the sun continued higher, the color only looked more and more like blood, Gwynn realized with a lurching stomach. “I thought I knew everything, and I couldn’t understand why my parents were so against me going out into space. After all, my old man had done the exact same thing, once upon a time before returning to my grandmother and her farm.”
“Her Highness came to me also in the dreams, around that time.” He twirled the flower between his fingers, faster and faster. “She showed me visions of my mother, as she’d once known her, and the space outlaw who had stolen her away from bejeweled palaces and divine splendor. She whispered of a power inside of me, of secrets my mother had stolen from me, of a family who would truly understand me who was just waiting for me among the stars.”
He stopped, and examined the flower more closely, as if he were truly seeing it for the first time. “On my sixteenth birthday, she made an offer to me—that she would help me awaken the spark if I came to her and aided her. A part of me, some small part of me was still awake even in that dream and I told her no, in spite of everything. That’s when the threats started.”
“Oh no.” It was like a final piece had fallen into place. A mechanical part that made the whole ship work, but one that recontexualized the problem before. And with it, a kinship. She reached for his hand. “She threatened your family, didn’t she?”
“She did.” He finally looked back to her. “I had no choice, Gwynn. Or at least, I thought I didn’t. I didn’t know then, that she wasn’t truly that powerful, not yet, and that I would be the one who gave her power, like a fool.”
Gwynn shook her head. “You don’t know that. What if she sent the armies of Annwyn after you? Or she figured out more ways to hurt you with magic?”
“She was far weaker then, nothing like what she is now.” He sighed. “I loosened several her enchantments, helped her assert herself over Annwyn and strengthened her power. I made her what she is. I can’t run from that.”
Gwynn blinked, unsure of what to say. But she could see it as clearly as she saw the Versailles of now sitting before her—a young boy with a terrible choice, with no idea of how terrible that choice would become. She could see him and Coppelius, two parts of a whole. Both had spent their lives in fear of the Spider Queen.
“What happened then?” She gently squeezed his hand, urging him forward.
He looked away. “I wanted to give my mother one more chance to come clean, to tell me everything. I knew I was leaving, whether she liked it or not.”
He shuddered. “We had one last, terrible fight. Even my old man tried to break it up, but of course he took her side, he always did when push came to shove, even when he’d been telling her the same things all along, about how we deserved to know. . . “
He looked back to Gwynn, and she felt as if she were truly seeing him for the first time. “That was the last time I spoke to either of them. They never saw me again.”
So much was left unsaid in those words. They didn’t need to be. Regret hung in the morning haze, and even the trees and the birds went silent.
“I never knew how to tell her that I was sorry, that she was right.” Versailles was the one who finally broke the silence. “I visited the farm so many times, before they died. But they never saw me, because I was a coward who couldn’t face them, even though they now had my protection from Her Majesty.”
“I’m sorry,” Gwynn murmured.
He turned back to her, startled. “You shouldn’t be the one saying that. You’re not the one who made these choices.”
“It’s not that sort of sorry.” She shook her head. “I feel sorry for you.”
“You shouldn’t.” He curled into himself, pulling away from her touch. “This doesn’t change anything, or it shouldn’t. There’s no fighting against Her Majesty.”
“But I did.” Her fingers brushed against his shoulder and he recoiled. “Versailles, she ran away last night. Don’t you understand what that means?”
He looked back at her as blankly as one’s own reflection would and said nothing.
“She isn’t invincible or all-powerful, even with how you’ve helped her grow stronger.” As she spoke, Gwynn could feel a candle sparking in her heart. It brought a smile to her face, and with it a feeling that had been so foreign since her father’s diagnosis and death—hope. “The Spider-Queen can be defeated. I can defeat her. If we joined forces with my sister and your family, who knows what we could do?”
Versailles looked at her for a long time, a shadow crossing over his face.”I don’t know.”
He then stood up, and looked off into the distance. “The Queen wants you at the Alabaster Palace, to keep a better eye on you.”
He glanced back her. “Don’t worry, I’m coming with you. I don’t think I could bear to leave you.”
Gwynn accepted his hand, helping her up. She nodded, not trusting her voice. Not that she knew what she would say.
What could she say?
Her head was spinning.
She allowed him to lead her away from the meadow, but found herself looking to the blood-red flowers one last time.