In hindsight, Regina should probably have realized that what she considered a surprise and what Artem considered a surprise were two very different types of “surprises”.

Standing in the front yard of the orphanage in the middle of the same orphans Regina had rescued over and over again was less a “surprise” and more “Tuesday”.

‘Maybe,’ Regina thought, ‘I should have asked if Artem could arrange a surprise outing that was less… noisy.’

Indeed, while Regina enjoyed children – at least when she did not have to save them from falling chandeliers or willful waters – she was less than delighted to be besieged by their questions.

“Princess!” Ayla – the pretty little girl with glowing brown skin and purple braids that Regina had first met during the attempted chandelier assassination – cried, “did you really smother a fire at a bakery using just your skirts?”

“I want to know if you actually fought off a plant going mad in the florist shop!” shouted Ekim, a skinny brown boy with purple eyes and black hair.

“If the princess could do that,” said Zey – a slim girl with hopeful violet eyes, tan skin, and beautiful white-gold hair, “maybe she can also fight off the – the people who took us? Maybe she could fight with her ducks?”

“Yes, tell us more about the ducks,” ordered Azim, another young boy with dark blue hair and sparkling lavender eyes. “I like reading about ducks when we get the newspaper people leave on the street!”

Unfortunately, Azim’s innocent words made Regina’s mind suddenly relive all the strangely duck-related assassination attempts that she had had to dodge over the last few weeks.

“Ducks,” Regina muttered, eyes wide but somehow not staring at any of the now worried-looking children surrounding her. “The ducks… the ducks… the ducks…”

“Darling?” Artem asked from across the room, his head snapping up from where he had been occupied in making pretty metal dolls and balls for the younger children. “Are you well?”

Thankfully, the soothing sound of Artem’s voice snapped Regina out of her duck-based stupor, though she realized that to stop her nightmares of feathery death, she needed to change the conversation.

So Regina clapped her hands and, with manic cheer, told the children, “Enough about my life - you can read about it in the newspaper all the time! Why do you not share some of your memories with me?”

Unfortunately, if the sudden way the children before her froze meant anything, that had been the wrong request to make.

“Children…?” Regina slowly asked, as she looked from Ayla to Ekim to the others, all of whom seemed strangely silent when they had previously been eager to speak. “Are you… all right?”

Belatedly, Regina realized that even if she would have been just fine with being a bereaved orphan – Henrietta aside, she loved nobody in her family and she knew the feeling was mutual – these orphans might feel otherwise.

“You need not share anything, of course!” Regina then hastily added, wanting to hit herself for her incredible thoughtlessness. “If you want, I can even tell you about the… the ducks and how wonderful they sound when they try to dive right into my skull –”

“I remember,” pretty little Ayla quietly said, “my mommy. She was crying when the carcass eaters took me from her.”

For a moment, Regina felt frozen by Ayla’s soft words, which felt both horrible yet familiar all at once.

“Who are the carcass eaters?” Regina softly questioned, trying to sound soothing even as she fought a sudden jolt of dread. “How did they take you from your mother?”

“The carcass eaters are everyone,” interrupted Ekim, suddenly looking furious, “in this stupid Capital!”

“But not the princess!” Zey snapped back. “She and Prince Artem are not carcass eaters like the others! They help us all the time and I know they wouldn’t have brought us here!”

Regina felt a tug on her skirt and looked down at Zey, who wore a terribly hopeful smile on her face.

“Maybe,” Zey whispered, “you can even bring us back home? I think…”

Zey tugged at her skirt – which Regina suddenly realized looked old and ragged and far too large for her.

“I think my mommy and daddy probably miss me.”

“Where is your home?” Regina asked, as a horrifying truth started to become obvious to her

“In the north,” Ayla replied, looking so hopeful that Regina’s heart hurt. “Very far north. We are all from different towns but I am from the capital – the good capital.”

“Not this awful one,” Ekim grumbled, “where they never give you enough food and it never has any spice!”

That prompted the rest of Regina’s children to bombard her with complaints about the terrible conditions of the orphanage. The problems seemed to range from the lack of food, the lack of clean clothing, the terrible confinement and boredom to being brought to random places to be lectured at by some noble or another, even as they were constantly interrogated.

Zey whispered, “They keep wanting to know what I can do in the shadows but I won’t tell them. When Burak told them, they took him away.”

That was when Regina realized Zey was akin to commoner children that were forcefully “adopted” by noble families when they showed signs of magic that supposedly belonged to the nobles alone –

Only Regina had never heard of children being taken away from their families en-masse like this.

Feeling the last threads of her patience for these children’s kidnappers snapped, Regina let a smile slowly stretch across her face.

“Children,” Regina said as pleasantly as possible, “can you please help Prince Artem make more toys? We will take you all out to a nice supper with plenty of spices at my family’s townhouse soon. But first, I need to speak to your matron.”

Perhaps it was her smile or her promise or maybe just the flicker of murder in her eyes but with slightly worried expressions, the children left to play with Artem instead.

Regina took one last look at Artem before she left. She felt an odd sense of pride emerging in her heart as she saw him make clever metal toys for the children around him.

‘Artem will support me when I tell him I want the children relocated to my family’s townhouse,’ Regina realized. ‘He wants these children to be as happy as I do – and when I tell him how they were kidnapped away from their families in the north for their magic and who-only-knows what other reasons, he will also be incensed.’

So though Regina’s heart hurt to know that these children had suffered greatly, it also swelled with pride to know that she could count on Artem to give them the comfort that they deserved.

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‘Maybe,’ Regina thought, ‘we can even understand why these poor children were taken away from their families in the first place once we are wed and I am truly a princess. Though first…’

Regina’s wide, wide smile spread across her face once more as she turned on her heel and began to walk through the main door of the orphanage and down the first of many halls, determined to find whoever was in charge of this rotting house of pestilence.

‘First,’ she grimly decided, ‘I am going to show whoever is in charge of this disgraceful place just why they should never have invited me.’

~♦♥♦~

Regina’s sense of righteous indignation propelled her through three different corridors before she started to become concerned.

‘Where are all the adults?’ Regina began to wonder as she trampled through the strangely silent halls of the decrepit orphanage. ‘A matron escorted the children to Artem and myself in the first place and should have stayed nearby so that the children did not reveal all of their dirty secrets. Instead…’

With more caution than before, Regina continued to walk the corridors, though the only noise she encountered was the sound of rats squeaking.

‘Instead, I see no adults around – not even the matrons who are supposed to keep the children alive. It is as though the adults melted into thin air. Surely they do not already know that I am angry!’

Yet no matter where Regina went or how loudly she called out for others, no one came out of any of the locked doors she tried to open. The whole building had a general air of neglect, but as Regina continued down the hall, she realized that the care was so bad it almost seemed as if plants had started to grow along the walls and ceiling.

Eyes narrowed, Regina realized just how little care the authorities who ran this place had for the children… and vowed that when she finally met those authorities, she would show them just why the name Sheridan was feared.

‘I know Artem is a kind and generous soul,’ Regina said, ‘but surely he can make just a handful of metal stakes for me to skewer the overseers of this orphanage. I could probably talk him into it if I tell him I want to be part of a fine Alpin family tradition!’

Thus, Regina kept her nerves at bay long enough for her to finally find a door that was not locked.

Still, she opened the door with more caution than she should have needed to, almost wondering if this was some kind of –

‘Of course not,’ Regina seethed, staring at the person seated before her with boiling contempt. ‘This is no trap. I am just looking at a lazy idiot slumped over his desk, taking a nap –’

Regina froze.

The man’s hands were in stiff claws, as if he had tried to grab the desk and failed. His eyes were open, frozen in a strange horror.

That man was not napping.

He was no longer breath–

Regina spun on her heel, out of the door, out of the room –

And began running as though all her nightmares were a handbreadth behind her.

She ran back down the hallway, faster than she had ever run before.

She could hear sounds slowly emerging behind her and she knew if she turned around or slowed down for even a second…

She would never hear anything else in what little remained of her life.

Slowly, so very slowly, Regina could hear a low, clinking groan gradually moving towards her-

Regina ran.

~♦♥♦~

The walls were falling.

Regina was running and the walls were falling.

No, Regina thought numbly, as she barely dodged the large wooden panel falling right in front of her. The walls are not falling. It is the wainscoting.

In the strange, almost floating feeling of detachment that Regina had reached as her body pushed its absolute limit, she coldly noted that the wood paneling – the wainscoting – was somehow coming loose from the walls and apparently being used to murder her.

Regina ran.

Her body ached, her legs ached, the last piece of wainscoting had clipped her head and Regina thought she might be seeing blood and she was nearly to the door and she could escape and she could live -

Then there was something even more horrifying as Regina ran as her lungs felt as if they would give out…

Regina could hear the sounds of children.

Regina could hear the sounds of children inside the orphanage.

Cursing her life, her dreams, and her not nearly pragmatic enough heart, Regina spun on her heels and ran back down a corridor, her escape collapsing behind her.

Regina ran and ran and she was so so tired and she ran up stairs and the stairs were collapsing and the wainscoting kept falling and she was not strong enough, she could not make it –

‘My beloved is the strongest and best Princess in the world.’

Regina’s head jerked in horror.

It was not just the children on the second floor.

If she did not reach them, Artem would die as well.

With a final burst of energy, Regina flung herself towards the only open door on the floor-

“This is what I call a writing ball,” Artem said as he displayed something that looked like a hedgehog crossed with a dictionary. “If you press the buttons –”

“Shut up and get in my skirts!” Regina screamed as she flared her skirt strategically and scooped up the frightened children along with a surprisingly compliant Artem. “Artem – shatter the windows and make a metal ramp going down! We need to escape this building!”

For a heart stopping moment, Regina feared Artem could not do what she had asked him to – that such powerful magic would be beyond his metal-wielding abilities. She herself was too battered and too bruised to be of any further help herself.

However, instead of freezing in shock or fainting from exertion –

Artem just closed his eyes and gave a dreamy sigh, as though he were… happy.

Then the windows shattered outwards, a metal ramp appeared before Regina’s eyes, and she sailed them all down to safety.

~♦♥♦~

‘I cannot believe,’ Regina realized as she stared up at the blue sky outside with bleary eyes, ‘that I almost got killed by wainscoting. Bloody wooden wall paneling of all things!’

Before she could continue contemplating the horrors of wainscoting peeling from orphanage walls, she heard someone exclaim, “I knew following this lady around would make my career! I will finally be able to write the lead article!”

As she heard what could only be a stampede of reporters mixed in with the cheerful cries of orphans who wanted her to do it “again, princess, let us go down the ramp again!” –

Regina twitched and turned her head to the side, only to see an exhausted looking Artem.

For a moment, she feared he had been hurt or even knocked out from the wild display of magic she had forced him to perform.

After all, even the strongest Alpin mage would feel depleted after they had to create a 30-foot-long metal ramp sturdy enough to bear the weight of two adults and a large group of children.

However, while Artem’s face was pale and streaked with sweat, his eyes were as brilliant as his brooches when he opened them.

“My love,” he sweetly whispered, though his smile quickly dimmed when he saw the pain and exertion on Regina’s face. “What happened?”

That was when Regina opened her mouth… and realized that she did not know.

For the first time since she had received her powers, Regina had experienced a murder attempt that came without a vision.